Tidbits on April 24, 2012
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Featured Photographs
Set 1 Photographs of Oceans in My Life
Including My Navy Days
 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Ocean/Set01/OceanSet01.htm

 

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

 

Tidbits on April 24, 2012
Bob Jensen

For earlier editions of Tidbits go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

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


Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations   


Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

Bob Jensen's Home Page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/




Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Video Tutorial on Creating Surveys Using Google Forms ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZEjmxTvR4k&feature=youtu.be
Thank you Richard Campbell for the heads up.

Los Angeles Plays Itself: Cinema History Demystifies the Film Capital of the World --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/los_angeles_plays_itself.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Critic: Hilarious Oscar-Winning Film Narrated by Mel Brooks (1963) --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/ithe_critici_hilarious_oscar-winning_film_narrated_by_mel_brooks_1963.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Richard Feynman Presents Quantum Electrodynamics for the NonScientist --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/richard_feynman_presents_quantum_electrodynamics_for_the_nonscientist.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Theo Wangemann's 1889-90 European Recordings (sound) ---
http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/theo-wangemann-1889-1890-european-recordings.htm 


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

The Sound of Miles Davis:  Classic 1959 Performance with John Coltrane --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/the_sound_of_miles_davis.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Joy in the Congo: The Inspiring Story of the Only Symphony Orchestra in Central Africa --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/joy_in_the_congo_the_inspiring_story_of_the_only_symphony_orchestra_in_central_africa.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29 '

Andre Rieu's Tribute to Frank Sinatra (My Way) --- https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/136b7b695ba8d8cb

Beethoven's String Quartet of Transcendence ---
 http://www.npr.org/event/music/150130090/beethovens-string-quartet-of-transcendence

Bach's St. Matthew Passion: Ritualized And Riveting ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/

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

USC Digital Library: Charlotta Bass/California Eagle Collection (African American Civil Rights) --- Click Here
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/search/controller/browse.htm?collectionList=scl&browseTitle=Charlotta+Bass+%2F+California+Eagle&type=Collections&panelId=tree1Panel&summary=COLLECTION&mode=search

Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/henri_matisse_illustrates_1935_edition_of_james_joyces_iulyssesi.html

Damien Hirst Takes Us Through His New Exhibition at Tate Modern --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/damien_hirst_takes_us_through_his_new_exhibition_at_tate_modern.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Town Greens --- http://www.towngreens.com/

British Museum: Explore: Time --- http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/themes/time/introduction.aspx

Michael T. "Nuf Ced" McGreevey (early sports bar in Boston) ---
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/collections/72157623971712149/

Robert Hughes, Famed Art Critic, Demystifies Modern Art: From Cézanne to Andy Warhol --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/robert_hughes_famed_art_critic_demystifies_modern_art_from_cezanne_to_andy_warhol.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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


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

Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/henri_matisse_illustrates_1935_edition_of_james_joyces_iulyssesi.html

AntiStudy is a search engine for free chapter summaries.--- http://www.antistudy.com/

British Women Romantic Poets (1789-1832) --- http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/

Pennsylvania State University Libraries: Streaming Video Content --- http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/digital/instmats.html

Old Wooden Church in Poland --- http://www.dsu.swidnica.pl/spacery_wirtualne/kpg/kps.html

Tax Poetry from The New York Times (yawn) ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/at-tax-time-no-accounting-for-poetry.html?_r=3&src=rechp

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 24, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations042412.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




If you've not done so, it pays to register with the Federal Government's "Do Not Call List" ---
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/pending/donotcall.asp
Most of us with landline phones have already done so, but this is not entirely successful when seeking to avoid nuisance telemarketing calls. One thing I noticed is that telemarketers are trying to get around the Do Not Call List by using telephone recordings instead of live phone operators who might not be able to avoid your questions that trouble them about phoning you when you're on the Do Not Call List.

According to Snopes, however, it's unnecessary to re-register to get on a Cell Phone Do Not Call List ---
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/cell411.asp


Biography of an Experiment --- http://www.haverford.edu/kinsc/boe/

Questions

  1. Apart from accountics science journals are there real science journals that refuse to publish replications?
  2. What are biased upward positive effects?
  3. What is the "decline" effect as research on a topic progresses?
  4. Why is scientific endeavor sonetimes a victim of its own success?
  5. What is “statistically significant but not clinically significant” problem.
    Jensen note: 
    I think this is a serious drawback of many accountics science published papers.

    In the past when invited to be a discussant, this is the first problem I look for in the paper assigned for me to discuss.
    This is a particular problem in capital markets events studies having very, very large sample sizes. Statistical significance is almost always assured when sample sizes are huge even when the clinical significance of small differences may be completely insignificant.

    An example:
    "Discussion of Foreign Currency Exposure of Multinational Firms: Accounting Measures and Market Valuation," by Robert E. Jensen,  Rutgers University at Camden, Camden, New Jersey, May 31, 1997. Research Conference on International Accounting and Related Issues,

 

"The Value of Replication," by Steven Novella, Science-Based Medicine, June 15, 2011 ---
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-value-of-replication/

Daryl Bem is a respected psychology researcher who decided to try his hand at parapsychology. Last year he published a series of studies in which he claimed evidence for precognition — for test subjects being influenced in their choices by future events. The studies were published in a peer-reviewed psychology journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This created somewhat of a controversy, and was deemed by some to be a failure of peer-review.

While the study designs were clever (he simply reversed the direction of some standard psychology experiments, putting the influencing factor after the effect it was supposed to have), and the studies looked fine on paper, the research raised many red flags — particularly in Bem’s conclusions.

The episode has created the opportunity to debate some important aspects of the scientific literature. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and others questioned the p-value approach to statistical analysis, arguing that it tends to over-call a positive result. They argue for a Bayesian analysis, and in their re-analysis of the Bem data they found the evidence for psi to be “weak to non-existent.” This is essentially the same approach to the data that we support as science-based medicine, and the Bem study is a good example of why. If the standard techniques are finding evidence for the impossible, then it is more likely that the techniques are flawed rather than the entire body of physical science is wrong.

Now another debate has been spawned by the same Bem research — that involving the role and value of exact replication. There have already been several attempts to replicate Bem’s research, with negative results: Galak and Nelson, Hadlaczky, and Circee, for example. Others, such as psychologist Richard Wiseman, have also replicated Bem’s research with negative results, but are running into trouble getting their studies published — and this is the crux of the new debate.

According to Wiseman, (as reported by The Psychologist, and discussed by Ben Goldacre) the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology turned down Wiseman’s submission on the grounds that they don’t publish replications, only “theory-advancing research.” In other words — strict replications are not of sufficient scientific value and interest to warrant space in their journal. Meanwhile other journals are reluctant to publish the replication because they feel the study should go in the journal that published the original research, which makes sense.

This episode illustrates potential problems with the  scientific literature. We often advocate at SBM that individual studies can never be that reliable — rather, we need to look at the pattern of research in the entire literature. That means, however, understanding how the scientific literature operates and how that may create spurious artifactual patterns.

For example, I recently wrote about the so-called “decline effect” — a tendency for effect sizes to shrink or “decline” as research on a phenomenon progresses. In fact, this was first observed in the psi research, as the effect is very dramatic there — so far, all psi effects have declined to non-existence. The decline effect is likely a result of artifacts in the literature. Journals are more inclined to publish dramatic positive studies (“theory-advancing research”), and are less interested in boring replications, or in initially negative research. A journal is unlikely to put out a press release that says, “We had this idea, and it turned out to be wrong, so never-mind.” Also, as research techniques and questions are honed, research results are likely to become closer to actual effect sizes, which means the effect of researcher bias will be diminished.

If the literature itself is biased toward positive studies, and dramatic studies, then this would further tend to exaggerate apparent phenomena — whether it is the effectiveness of a new drug or the existence of anomalous cognition. If journals are reluctant to publish replications, that might “hide the decline” (to borrow an inflammatory phrase) — meaning that perhaps there is even more of a decline effect if we consider unpublished negative replications. In medicine this would be critical to know — are we basing some treatments on a spurious signal in the noise of research.

There have already been proposals to create a registry of studies, before they are even conducted (specifically for human research), so that the totality of evidence will be transparent and known — not just the headline-grabbing positive studies, or the ones that meet the desires of the researchers or those funding the research. This proposal is primarily to deal with the issue of publication bias — the tendency not to publish negative studies.

Wiseman now makes the same call for a registry of trials before they even begin to avoid the bias of not publishing replications. In fact, he has taken it upon himself to create a registry of attempted replications of Bem’s research.

While this may be a specific fix for replications for Bem’s psi research — the bigger issues remain. Goldacre argues that there are systemic problems with how information filters down to professionals and the public. Reporting is highly biased toward dramatic positive studies, while retractions, corrections, and failed replications are quiet voices lost in the wilderness of information.

Most readers will already understand the critical value of replication to the process of science. Individual studies are plagued by flaws and biases. Most preliminary studies turn out to be wrong in the long run. We can really only arrive at a confident conclusion when a research paradigm produces reliable results in different labs with different researchers. Replication allows for biases and systematic errors to average out. Only if a phenomenon is real should it reliably replicate.

Further — the excuse by journals that they don’t have the space now seems quaint and obsolete, in the age of digital publishing. The scientific publishing industry needs a bit of an overhaul, to fully adapt to the possibilities of the digital age and to use this as an opportunity to fix some endemic problems. For example, journals can publish just abstracts of certain papers with the full articles available only online. Journals can use the extra space made available by online publishing (whether online only or partially in print) to make dedicated room for negative studies and for exact replications (replications that also expand the research are easier to publish). Databases and reviews of such studies can also make it as easy to find and access negative studies and replications as it is the more dramatic studies that tend to grab headlines.

Conclusion

The scientific endeavor is now a victim of its own success, in that research is producing a tsunami of information. The modern challenge is to sort through this information in a systematic way so that we can find the real patterns in the evidence and reach reliable conclusions on specific questions. The present system has not fully adapted to this volume of information, and there remain obsolete practices that produce spurious apparent patterns in the research. These fake patterns of evidence tend to be biased toward the false positive — falsely concluding that there is an effect when there really isn’t — or at least in exaggerating effects.

These artifactual problems with the literature as a whole combine with the statistical flaws in relying on the p-value, which tends to over-call positive results as well. This problem can be fixed by moving to a more Bayesian approach (considering prior probability).

All of this is happening at a time when prior probability (scientific plausibility) is being given less attention than it should, in that highly implausible notions are being seriously entertained in the peer-reviewed literature. Bem’s psi research is an excellent example, but we deal with many other examples frequently at SBM, such as homeopathy and acupuncture. Current statistical methods and publication biases are not equipped to deal with the results of research into highly implausible claims. The result is an excess of false-positive studies in the literature — a residue that is then used to justify still more research into highly implausible ideas. These ideas can never quite reach the critical mass of evidence to be generally accepted as real, but they do generate enough noise to confuse the public and regulators, and to create an endless treadmill of still more research.

The bright spot is that highly implausible research has helped to highlight some of these flaws in the literature. Now all we have to do is fix them.

Jensen Recommendation
Read all or at least some of the 58 comments following this article

daedalus2u comments:
Sorry if this sounds harsh, it is meant to be harsh. What this episode shows is that the journal JPSP is not a serious scientific journal. It is fluff, it is pseudoscience and entertainment, not a journal worth publishing in, and not a journal worth reading, not a journal that has scientific or intellectual integrity.

“Professor Eliot Smith, the editor of JPSP (Attitudes and Social Cognition section) told us that the journal has a long-standing policy of not publishing simple replications. ‘This policy is not new and is not unique to this journal,’ he said. ‘The policy applies whether the replication is successful or unsuccessful; indeed, I have rejected a paper reporting a successful replication of Bem’s work [as well as the negative replication by Ritchie et al].’ Smith added that it would be impractical to suspend the journal’s long-standing policy precisely because of the media attention that Bem’s work had attracted. ‘We would be flooded with such manuscripts and would not have page space for anything else,’ he said.”

Scientific journals have an obligation to the scientific community that sends papers to them to publish to be honest and fair brokers of science. Arbitrarily rejecting studies that directly bear on extremely controversial prior work they have published, simply because it is a “replication”, is an abdication of their responsibility to be a fair broker of science and an honest record of the scientific literature. It conveniently lets them publish crap with poor peer review and then never allow the crap work to be responded to.

If the editor consider it impractical to publish any work that is a replication because they would then have no space for anything else, then they are receiving too many manuscripts. If the editor needs to apply a mindless triage of “no replications”, then the editor is in over his head and is overwhelmed. The journal should either revise the policy and replace the overwhelmed editor, or real scientists should stop considering the journal a suitable place to publish.

. . .

Harriet Hall comments
A close relative of the “significant but trivial” problem is the “statistically significant but not clinically significant” problem. Vitamin B supplements lower blood homocysteine levels by a statistically significant amount, but they don’t decrease the incidence of heart attacks. We must ask if a statistically significant finding actually represents a clinical benefit for patient outcome, if it is POEMS – patient-oriented evidence that matters.

 

"Alternative Treatments for ADHD Alternative Treatments for ADHD: The Scientific Status," David Rabiner, Attention Deficit Disorder Resources, 1998 ---
http://www.addresources.org/?q=node/279 

Based on his review of the existing research literature, Dr. Arnold rated the alternative treatments presented on a 0-6 scale. It is important to understand this scale before presenting the treatments. (Note: this is one person's opinion based on the existing data; other experts could certainly disagree.) The scale he used is presented below:

Only one treatment reviewed received a rating of 5. Dr. Arnold concluded that there is convincing scientific evidence that some children who display

Continued in article

"If you can write it up and get it published you're not even thinking of reproducibility," said Ken Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. "You make an observation and move on. There is no incentive to find out it was wrong."
April 14, 2012 reply from Richard Sansing

Inability to replicate may be a problem in other fields as well.

http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=54180

Richard Sansing

 

Bob Jensen's threads on replication in accountics science ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm


Question
Could something like this happen to expensive accountics science research programs in major universities like the University of Florida?\

Hint:
This probably means losing some of the Department's most expensive faculty who prefer research and minimal teaching loads (like one or two courses a year).

"Protests Over Cuts to Computer Science at U. of Florida" Inside Higher Ed, April 20, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/20/protests-over-cuts-computer-science-u-florida

Students and others are protesting plans at the University of Florida to move research functions from the computer science department, allowing it to focus on teaching, The Gainesville Sun reported. Critics say that the plan will diminish the quality of the department, while university officials stress that they must save money to deal with erosion in budget support.
 

Jensen Comment
In many instances cutbacks have already taken place in the numbers of faculty devoted to accounting doctoral programs in the 21st Century compared with those doctoral programs decades ago. The largest accounting doctoral programs in the 1970s that graduated over 10 accounting PhDs per year have reduced their graduates to less than five a year and in some cases to one or two per year ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf

Accoutics science faculty are the most expensive accounting faculty on campus in many instances and may be the first to go if policies like those of the University of Florida become more common in times of shrinking budgets. The result may be for some doctoral programs to seriously reconsider expanding the scope of their accountancy doctoral programs beyond accountics science ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms


Replication Paranoia:  Can you imagine anything like this happening in accountics science?

"Is Psychology About to Come Undone?" by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to-come-undone/29045?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”

For decades, literally, there has been talk about whether what makes it into the pages of psychology journals—or the journals of other disciplines, for that matter—is actually, you know, true. Researchers anxious for novel, significant, career-making findings have an incentive to publish their successes while neglecting to mention their failures. It’s what the psychologist Robert Rosenthal named “the file drawer effect.” So if an experiment is run ten times but pans out only once you trumpet the exception rather than the rule. Or perhaps a researcher is unconsciously biasing a study somehow. Or maybe he or she is flat-out faking results, which is not unheard of. Diederik Stapel, we’re looking at you.

So why not check? Well, for a lot of reasons. It’s time-consuming and doesn’t do much for your career to replicate other researchers’ findings. Journal editors aren’t exactly jazzed about publishing replications. And potentially undermining someone else’s research is not a good way to make friends.

Brian Nosek knows all that and he’s doing it anyway. Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is one of the coordinators of the project. He’s careful not to make it sound as if he’s attacking his own field. “The project does not aim to single out anybody,” he says. He notes that being unable to replicate a finding is not the same as discovering that the finding is false. It’s not always possible to match research methods precisely, and researchers performing replications can make mistakes, too.

But still. If it turns out that a sizable percentage (a quarter? half?) of the results published in these three top psychology journals can’t be replicated, it’s not going to reflect well on the field or on the researchers whose papers didn’t pass the test. In the long run, coming to grips with the scope of the problem is almost certainly beneficial for everyone. In the short run, it might get ugly.

Nosek told Science that a senior colleague warned him not to take this on “because psychology is under threat and this could make us look bad.” In a Google discussion group, one of the researchers involved in the project wrote that it was important to stay “on message” and portray the effort to the news media as “protecting our science, not tearing it down.”

The researchers point out, fairly, that it’s not just social psychology that has to deal with this issue. Recently, a scientist named C. Glenn Begley attempted to replicate 53 cancer studies he deemed landmark publications. He could only replicate six. Six! Last December I interviewed Christopher Chabris about his paper titled “Most Reported Genetic Associations with General Intelligence Are Probably False Positives.” Most!

A related new endeavour called Psych File Drawer allows psychologists to upload their attempts to replicate studies. So far nine studies have been uploaded and only three of them were successes.

Both Psych File Drawer and the Reproducibility Project were started in part because it’s hard to get a replication published even when a study cries out for one. For instance, Daryl J. Bem’s 2011 study that seemed to prove that extra-sensory perception is real — that subjects could, in a limited sense, predict the future — got no shortage of attention and seemed to turn everything we know about the world upside-down.

Yet when Stuart Ritchie, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and two colleagues failed to replicate his findings, they had a heck of a time getting the results into print (they finally did, just recently, after months of trying). It may not be a coincidence that the journal that published Bem’s findings, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is one of the three selected for scrutiny.

Continued in article

April 21, 2012 message from Dan Stone

To clarify - the Replication Project includes data collection -- meaning that all chosen studies will be fully replicated. The procedures are very specific and well-written. On the surface, this appears to be very good science that takes advantage of a crowd-sourcing approach to creating "coauthors". Very innovative. Very interesting.

What I am amazed by in this project is: what is in it for the collaborators? I think the biggest risk of this project is that an insufficient number of collaborators will sign on to conduct replications. Perhaps schools that demand research "of a lesser God", meaning not in the top X journals will accept this work towards tenure.

And the reason this would never happen in accounting is quite simple: because whomever engaged in such replications would be turned down at their next tenure, promotion, raise, chair, professorship review for engaging in a "worthless activity". Very sad but such is the state of our profession that only publications in the mythical top X journals count toward tenure at many schools.

Dan Stone

 

Jensen Comment

Scale Risk
In accountics science such a "Reproducibility Project" would be much more problematic except in behavioral accounting research. This is because accountics scientists generally buy rather than generate their own data (Zoe-Vonna Palmrose is an exception). The problem with purchased data from such as CRSP data, Compustat data, and AuditAnalytics data is that it's virtually impossible to generate alternate data sets, and if there are hidden serious errors in the data it can unknowingly wipe out thousands of accountics science publications all at one --- what we might call a "scale risk."

Assumptions Risk
A second problem in accounting and finance research is that researchers tend to rely upon the same models over and over again. And when serious  flaws were discovered in a model like CAPM it not only raised doubts about thousands of past studies, it made accountics and finance researchers make choices about whether or not to change their CAPM habits in the future. Accountics researchers that generally look for an easy way out blindly continued to use CAPM in conspiracy with journal referees and editors who silently agreed to ignore CAPM problems and limitations of assumptions about efficiency in capital markets---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#EMH
We might call this an "assumptions risk."

Hence I do not anticipate that there will ever be a Reproducibility Project in accountics science. Horrors. Accountics scientists might not continue to be the highest paid faculty on their respected campuses and accounting doctoral programs would not know how to proceed if they had to start focusing on accounting rather than econometrics.

"How to Avoid the Big Data 'Gotcha's'," by Jill Dyche, Harvard Business Review Blog, April 17, 2012 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/how_to_avoid_the_big_data_gotc_1.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Bob Jensen's threads on replication and other forms of validity checking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm


"One Economist's Mission to Redeem the Field of Finance," by Dan Barrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Robert-Shillers-Mission-to/131456/

Bob Jensen's threads on the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#EMH 


John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-creativity-1991/

Jensen Comment
Note that creativity is not an end in itself, White collar criminals, hackers, and student cheaters are among the most creative people in the world. I'm also convinced that creativity sometimes ruins art and music. It can also lead to worse pedagogy when good teachers ruin a good thing by trying to be too creative.

I've mentioned this before, but I will repeat it once more. I spent two years in the Center for Advanced Behavioral Sciences located beside the campus of Stanford University (actually in a cow pasture that belongs to Stanford) --- http://www.casbs.org/

This is a think tank intended to make ideal conditions for creativity --- no telephones and a support staff and no assigned projects whatsoever. Fellows" are allowed to do anything they darn well please. I think a famous micro economist showed up only for two partial days during his entire year as a Fellow. His wife reported to my wife that he just felt he was more creative while doing research in bed and did not like interactions with people.

I lived in Stanford faculty housing and walked across the cow pasture to the Center every day. I worked long hours in my office and interacted with other Fellows at lunch and in our regular volleyball games. When we first arrived at the Center the staff warned us that Fellows often become depressed at their lack of creativity under ideal creativity settings.

I don't think my think tank years were the most creative periods of my life even though I wrote two monographs during my stay at the Center. I spend most of my time trying to invent high speed efficient algorithms for cluster analysis which, it turns out, is much like trying to find highly efficient algorithms for dynamic programming. Moral of story --- don't spend two years of your life trying to be creative solving impossible problems.

In truth the most creative times of my life were some of the most pressured periods of my life with teaching, travel, and research deadlines. I think creativity has a lot more to do with adrenalin than ideal think tank settings.


PAYING TAXES TO THE BOSS: HOW A GROWING NUMBER OF STATES SUBSIDIZE COMPANIES WITH THE WITHHOLDING TAXES OF WORKERS
By Philip Mattera, Kasia Tarczynska, Leigh McIlvaine, Thomas Cafcas and Greg LeRoy
http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/taxestotheboss.pdf
Thank you Paul Caron for the heads up

Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers – and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.

The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid. ...

Why do state governments do this? Public records show that large companies often pay little or no state income tax in states where they have large operations, as this column has documented. Some companies get discounts on property, sales and other taxes. So how to provide even more subsidies without writing a check? Simple. Let corporations keep the state income taxes deducted from their workers’ paychecks for up to 25 years. ...

The five most scandalous states are New Jersey, Indiana, Ohio, South Carolina, and Missouri. But 11 other states are allowing this terrible deed of making workers themselves pay to keep their jobs.

 


"The Business Side of World University Rankings," by Kris Olds, Inside Higher Ed, April 12, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/business-side-world-university-rankings

Bob Jensen's threads on university and college ranking controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings


"Do Price Controls Help Students?" by Nate Johnson, Inside Higher Ed, April 13, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/04/13/essay-defending-two-tier-tuition-pricing-community-colleges

Jensen Comment
This is a classic of where ignorance politics trumps scholarly economics.

Price Controls --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Controls

Zimbabwe

In 2007, Robert Mugabe's government imposed a price freeze in Zimbabwe because of hyperinflation. That policy led only to shortages.

 


Education Bubble --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_bubble

Question
What is dragging down the elite liberal arts colleges?

Clues
They're victims of more than just the economic recession.
They're victims of more than just the demise of law schools and law careers for liberal arts graduates.
They're victims of failing to meet rising costs with newer education technologies, but it's even more than that.
There will be implications for lowered tax breaks for high income earners for contributions to endowments and charities in general.
But it's more than all the above.
Think stagnation in these changing times!

 

"Everybody’s Worried Now," by Kevin Kiley,  Inside Higher Ed, April 11, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/11/lafayette-conference-shows-concern-about-liberal-arts-colleges-economic-future

A year ago, the notion that Smith College -- with a $1 billion endowment, high student demand, and frequently cited educational quality -- was raising existential questions, particularly about its economic model, seemed a fairly radical notion.

But an idea that seemed striking in the past  -- that elite liberal arts colleges might have to make significant changes in the next few years if they are to remain relevant (or present) in the current educational market -- is now the hottest topic in the sector.

A conference this week here at Lafayette College entitled “The Future of the Liberal Arts College in America and Its Leadership Role in Education Around the World,” drew more than 200 college administrators, including about 50 college presidents, out of an invite list of U.S. News and World Report’s list of top national liberal arts colleges. Judging by the turnout, the discussion, and the fact that several other conferences addressing these questions are scheduled over the next few months, it’s clear that the questions are on everybody’s mind.

But even among the fairly homogeneous group represented here, there was significant disagreement about how pressing the economic challenges are and the best ways to tackle them. And liberal arts college administrators still seem reluctant to adopt some major ways of cutting costs that other sectors of higher education have adopted.

And the solutions administrators did offer, many of which have high up-front capital costs, such as increased collaboration through technology, might not be options for the many less-wealthy liberal arts colleges (generally not represented here) that are facing some of the most immediate threats.

Paying the Professorate

In his opening talk Monday night, Lafayette President Daniel H. Weiss laid out four major challenges facing liberal arts colleges -- affordability, public skepticism about the value of a liberal arts degree and college in general, decline in the share of U.S population who fit the demographic patterns of students who traditionally attend liberal arts colleges, and questions about how to incorporate technology into the college and serve a generation of students that is increasingly networked -- most of which was addressed in various forms throughout the day Tuesday.

But talk about the cost of educating students at liberal arts colleges, and potential ways of decreasing those costs, dominated Tuesday’s presentations. And when it comes to the costs of educating students at liberal arts colleges and what costs get passed on to students and families in the form of higher tuition, nothing seems to weigh on presidents’ minds more than what they pay professors.

Several studies have shown that the cost of educating students has increased dramatically over the past few decades, primarily because the cost of highly educated labor has increased. Efficiency gains in other industries have tended to come from replacing employees with technology, or making those employees more efficient through technology. But those improvements haven’t dramatically affected liberal arts colleges, which pride themselves on student-faculty interaction. As a result, the amount that such institutions are charging has gone up over the years.

In one presentation, Suzanne P. Welsh, vice president for finance and treasurer at Swarthmore College, created a composite picture of 12 institutions with an administrator speaking at the conference. At that composite institution, faculty salaries increased 35 percent between 2000 and 2010, and 40 percent when benefits were included. Over that time period, educational costs, which includes faculty salaries, increased from 48 percent of the budget to 51 percent.

Unlike other sectors, particularly research universities and the for-profit sector, liberal arts colleges have not sought to use technology to increase productivity in instruction, principally by increasing the student to faculty ratio. Faculty members at research universities teach lectures of 500 students at a time, and online for-profit providers might have thousands of students assigned to each faculty member. But Welsh’s composite college had a student-faculty ratio of about 11 to 1.

At liberal arts colleges, the low student-professor ratio is part of their identity and a point of pride, and they are reluctant to abandon that, citing a potential decrease in quality. “We haven’t had any disruptive technology that changed the professor/student mix at our universities,” said Jill Tiefenthaler, president of Colorado College.

Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College, said liberal arts colleges exist at the nexus of “quality, distinctiveness, and social purpose.” If colleges are going to continue to attract students and survive, they are going to have to “deliver a better and better education.”

For that reason, the concern about a decrease in perceived quality looms large. Presenters pointed out that “quality” at such institutions has historically been measured by inputs, such as how much is spent on a program or faculty-student ratio. But liberal arts colleges and higher education institutions in general are bad at measuring outputs, specifically educational gain. Finding a way to show that instructional efficiency initiatives do not decrease quality will be a major challenge over the next few years if institutions want to drive down cost.

The concerns over decreasing quality also came up when conference participants talked about the possibility of increasing teaching loads for faculty members at liberal arts colleges. Among the institutions represented here, many require faculty members to teach only two classes a semester, compared to three or for at other types of institutions (or less privileged liberal arts college). While the topic came up a couple times in presentations, presidents did not press the idea, saying that shifting away from research and other responsibilities would decrease quality.

Catharine Bond Hill, president of Vassar College, noted that there might be room to make faculty more productive by making class time more valuable, such as by using new educational technology programs to teach lower-division programs and concentrating faculty time in high-touch seminars.

Collaborating for Cash

Technology is one area where presenters and attendees seemed genuinely divided about utility.  Kevin Guthrie, president of Ithaka, a research organization that encourages the use of technology to disseminate scholarship, presented on potential ways technology could transform liberal arts institutions over the next few years, such as using computer-guided programs to teach hybrid courses across institutions.

But immediately following Guthrie's presentation, Williams College President Adam F. Falk argued that the principal reason for adopting technological innovation should be for educational improvement, not just productivity gains. “College education isn’t simply about most efficient or innovative means of delivering content,” he said, arguing that the engagement component of what colleges like his do was over all more important. “It’s hard for even the best student s to learn on their own.” Falk’s presentation was warmly received by the crowd.

But not every institution has the luxury to not seek productivity gains in the next few years, particularly those liberal arts colleges who didn’t make the invite list.  Many of those institutions are facing greater scrutiny on costs, families who are less willing to pay high prices, and climbing discount rates that are eating into their budgets.

Eugene M. Tobin, program officer for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation noted in his talk Monday night that collaboration is one way that colleges could potentially use technology to cut or maintain costs without harming quality.

"College at Risk," by Andrew Delbanco, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/College-at-Risk/130893/

Education Bubble --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_bubble


"Paying Peter More Than Paul," by Mitch Smith, Inside Higher Ed, April 13, 2012 ---
 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/13/some-staff-upset-after-kenyon-gives-higher-raises-faculty

Jensen Comment
At the senior faculty level moving to a higher paying universities probably has more considerations than for younger faculty. One of those considerations is whether "higher paying" also means the possibility of pay raise caps in the future under what Professor Obama might call "fairness."

Consider the following scenario. Suppose all ten faculty in Department D are paid $10,000 per year. A philanthropist gratefully donates enough money to pay for Professor X to join the Department D faculty for $20,000 per year. After a year Department D is given 10% for pay raises. Suppose the ten faculty members receive $1,000 each whereas Professor X receives $2,000. Then in the following year, when Department D is given another 10% to allocate in pay raises, each of the ten faculty members receives a $1,100 bump in pay whereas Professor X receives a bump of $2,200. Continuing this pattern on year after year in the future leads to an increasing gap between what Professor X earns versus what her ten colleagues earn.

Under these circumstances it becomes tempting to eventually cap Professor X pay percentage raises in some manner to reduce the widening gap in pay within the university.

When I moved to Trinity University I was one of the two highest paid faculty members on campus. I was also given a five year summer research stipend of 20%  guaranteed for five years. However, even under those conditions I worried that my long-term future pay raises might be capped due to the possibility of widening the gap between my salary and what my colleagues were paid. Hence, it was also written into my contract that a cap would not be placed on my percentage of pay increases solely because of my salary level. To my satisfaction, Trinity more than honored its commitment to not cap my pay raise percentage over the next 24 years. Of course in those years, economic times were better and pay raises for all faculty were more substantial than they are in these troubled economic times. However, they were less than 10% each year except for a couple of very surprisingly good years.

The thing to remember about pay raises as opposed to bonuses and summer stipends is that they generally are permanent annuities rather than single-year cash flows. This makes administrators think more carefully about the size of a raise as opposed to the size of a one-shot bonus.

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


"Islamic finance - the social paradigm," Financial Times, April 16, 2012 --- Click Here
http://www.ftseglobalmarkets.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3243:islamic-finance-the-social-paradigm&Itemid=54
Thank you to a practitioner on the AECM for the heads up.

The genie out of a modern day bottle is the first home purchase plan approved by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for the mainstream UK market, rather than a specialised market. It demonstrates that the religious principles underlying Islamic products are relevant in the ethical and social finance marketplace; that Islamic principles can inspire and enhance the finance products being developed to meet these challenging times in the residential domestic market. Natalie Elphicke, head of structured housing finance, partner, international law firm Stephenson Harwood gives her take on the application of Shari’a principles to ethically-charged social housing and the investment opportunities that arise from it.

Risk sharing, not profiting unjustly or unfairly, not charging excessive charges; in a residential purchase context, allowing part rent, part purchase, sharing equity upside, sharing downside property risks. These characteristics apply equally to an approved Islamic home finance plan as they do to a new conventional purchase plan designed for a housing association in the north east of England.

What does this matter? For many years it has been felt that Western finance constructs have been squeezed and shaped to meet the requirements of the fatwa (approval) for Islamic finance. One result of this has been an understandable reluctance to provide an Islamic checklist to those structured financiers who specialise in dressing a product to fit a market, rather than perhaps understanding and applying the underlying intentions and principles. The desire to conform to those Islamic standards is being driven by a desire to access a rich seam of devout consumers prepared to pay a premium for compliance, and to harness rich Islamic investment funds, rather than shape and deliver products or investments which enhance and develop the lives of Muslims within their beliefs and philosophy.

The tide is turning. In ethical and social investment arenas there is significant interest in three areas of Islamic finance: Ijara, Musharaka and Mudaraba. Musharaka is the basis for property transactions which allow shared equity participation within a trust holding, providing much more flexibility to manage changes in lifestyle and more fairly share market rises and falls in residential property over a longer period of time. This can provide a much more transparent and fairer approach than Western style 100% mortgage finance or the more limited traditional shared ownership structures.

There are similarities between partnership finance structures of Mudaraba, and ljara leases. In the former, some people provide labour and others money, in a plethora of 'Big Society' style co-operatives and social enterprises, bringing together those who work, and give their 'sweat equity'. Then there are those who provide funding and those who share in a financial loss/gain Ijara- based lease-purchase contracts, which can offer a fairer sort of hire-and hire-purchase arrangement of equipment, such as washing machines and other household appliances.

If there is an interest from ethical and social residential property to engage with and be inspired by Islamic based principles, how interested are Islamic funds in residential property, especially student, affordable or social housing?

The evidence is mixed. There is also anecdotal evidence of a tightening of conditions for investment funding to reflect wider, purposive beliefs of Islamic funds. One such interesting example is the financing of student halls of residence. The usual student bar and pool table on the ground floor is being replaced by a coffee bar, with a restrictive covenant on the space becoming licensed, as a condition to access to that investment funding.

Housing associations have started dialogues with Islamic funds which have financed other UK core infrastructure and utilities, such as ports and airports, water and electricity. Social housing can offer a solid investment yield. Not racy but solid and responsible, reflecting the core values of a mature residential regulated housing industry worth around £100bn.

Continued in article

 


A Rose by Any Name
Islamic (Co-Ownership) Home Finance --- http://guidanceresidential.com/how-it-works


Derivative deals done using a unique Spot/Spot commodity trading mechanism, which is fully compliant with Islamic Sharia principles ---
http://www.ameinfo.com/100675.html


"Islamic Accounting: Challenges, Opportunities and Terror," AccountingWeb, October 5, 2006 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=102651

Recent events, from the start of Ramadan, to the Pope’s controversial remarks about Islam, to the discovery of a new tape by two of the September 11 attackers, to the release of Bob Woodward’s latest book, have once more made Islam a topic of conversation. Beyond the headlines, however, exists a complex religious and social system that affects far more people than just Muslims. Islamic finance, particularly Islamic banking, insurance and accounting, is playing a growing role around the globe, especially in the business world.

Islamic accounting is generally defined as an alternative accounting system which aims to provide users with information enabling them to operate businesses and organizations according to Shariah, or Islamic law. With little doubt, the greatest challenges to Islamic accounting and finance in the United States stem from a lack of knowledge and understanding of Islam and the intricacies of its financial laws and concerns regarding terrorism, combined with the U.S. regulatory framework and guiding principles of American business. The Muslim and Islamic financial markets within the U.S. and around the world, currently represent an enormous opportunity for those willing to overcome these challenges.

Islam & Islamic Financial Laws

“To professional accountants who have been brought-up on the idea of accounting as an ‘objective’, technical and value-free discipline, the idea of attaching a religious adjective to accounting may seem embarrassing, unprofessional and even dangerous,” Dr. Shahul Hameed bin Mohamed Ibrahim says in Islamic Accounting – A Primer.

Both conventional and Islamic accounting provide information and define how that information is measured, valued, recorded and communicated. Conventional accounting provides information about economic events and transactions, measuring resources in terms of assets and liabilities, and communicating that information through financial statements users, typically investors, rely on to make decisions regarding their investments. Islamic accounting, however, identifies socio-economic events and transactions measured in both financial and non-financial terms and the information is used to ensure Islamic organizations of all types adhere to Shariah and achieve the socio-economic objectives promoted by Islam. This is not to say, or imply, Islamic accounting is not concerned with money, rather it is not concerned only with money.

Islamic accounting, in many ways, is more holistic. Shariah prohibits interest-based income or usury and also gambling, so part of what Islamic accounting does is help ensure companies do not harm others while making money and achieve an equitable allocation and distribution of wealth, not just among shareholders of a specific corporation but also among society in general. Of course, as with conventional accounting, this is not always achieved in practice, as an examination of the wide variances in wealth among the populations of Arab nations, particularly those with majority Muslim populations shows.

In addition, because a significant part of operating within Shariah means delivering on Islam’s socio-economic objectives, Islamic organizations have far wider interests and engage in more diverse activities than their non-Islamic counterparts.

Concerns About Terrorism

The diverse activities and interests organizations pursue under Shariah is a cause for concern when applying conventional accounting to Islamic organizations. After all, conventional accounting can be used to disguise unethical and even illegal activities within the very organizations they were intended to provide information about. Imagine how easy it is to overlook or just not identify such information when employing an accounting system not designed for use with the type of organization it is being applied to.

In the past, the issues raised by this mismatch focused on the ability of users beyond the Muslim world to make appropriate decisions regarding investments. Since September 11, 2001, however, the concern has changed from the potential loss of investment to the possibility of supporting terrorism.

This concern is particularly significant for non-profit organizations involved in providing humanitarian relief outside the U.S.. Fortunately, the U.S. Department of the Treasury (DoT) has issued updated Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines: Voluntary Best Practices for U.S.-based Charities (Guidelines).

“The abuse of charities by terrorist organizations is a serious and urgent matter, and the Guidelines reinforce the need for the U.S. Government and the charitable sector alike, to keep this challenge at the forefront of our complementary efforts,” Pat O’Brien, Assistant Secretary for the Treasury’s Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crime, said in a statement announcing the updated guidelines. The Treasury Department is committed to protecting and enabling legitimate and vital charity worldwide, and will continue to work with the sector to advance our mutual goals.”

The Guidelines urge charities to take a proactive, risk-based approach to protecting against illicit abuse and are intended to be applied by those charities vulnerable to such abuse, in a manner commensurate with the risks they face and the resources with which they work. At the request of the charitable sector, the Guidelines contain extensive anti-terrorist financing guidance, as well as guidance on sound governance and financial practices that helps prevent the exploitation of charities.

Regulatory Issues

The regulatory environment Islamic individuals and organizations are most concerned with, considering the current political climate, are those relating to anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering. Yet the tensions arising from regulatory requirements within the U.S. related to American business practices often prove more difficult to resolve.

It is in trying to balance the expectations of distinct business cultures that the differences between conventional and Islamic accounting are most notable. For instance, depending upon the type of transactions the organizations are engaged in, the roles, responsibilities and rights assigned to each party can be contradictory and even in direct conflict. In some situations, such as transactions involving private equity, venture capital, profit sharing and liquidations, organizations and individuals employing conventional accounting may actually find they prefer Islamic accounting. Other issues, such as those related to taxation, require significant effort to resolve. The inherent flexibility of Shariah is a benefit under these circumstances, since the complexity of the American tax code is highly inflexible.

The number of Muslim consumers, investors and business owners has grown along with the Muslim American population which is currently estimated to be between six and seven million. Although demand for Islamic financial products and services has increased, both the supply and the number of providers remain insufficient. It should also be noted that Islamic orthodoxy, expressed as the desire to implement Shariah as the sole legal foundation of a nation, is actually associated with progressive economic principles, including increasing government for the poor, reducing income inequality and increasing government ownership of industries and industries, especially in the poorer nations of the Muslim world.

“While it is common to associate traditional religious beliefs with conservative political stances on a wide range of issues, this is only partly true,” said Robert V. Robinson, Chancellor’s Professor and chair of Indiana University’s Department of Sociology. “The Islamic orthodox are more conservative on issues having to do with gender, sexuality and the family, but more liberal or left on economic issues.

Islamic Accounting Web --- http://www.iiu.edu.my/iaw/

The Islamic Accounting Website is a project of the Department of Accounting, Kulliyah of Economics and Management Sciences, International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. This project is under the direction of Dr. Shahul Hameed bin Mohamed Ibrahim, Assistant Professor and the current Head of the Department. The philosophy of the University is to Islamize knowledge to solve the crisis in Muslim thinking brought about by the secularization of knowledge and furthermore contributing as a centre of educational excellence to revive the dynamism of the Muslim Ummah in knowledge, learning and the professions. The Department of Accounting is fully committed to this vision and strives to Islamicise Accounting.

"ISLAMIC ACCOUNTING STANDARDS," by Shadia Rahman --- http://islamic-finance.net/islamic-accounting/acctg5.html

Sharing site of Dr Shahul Hameed Bin Hj Mohamed Ibrahim --- http://islamic-finance.net/islamic-accounting/

articles by the author

 

articles by other scholars

 

"Islamic Accounting," IAS Plus, January 3, 2011  --- http://www.iasplus.com/islamicfinance/islamicaccounting.htm

Accounting Standards for financial reporting by Islamic financial institutions have to be developed because in some cases Islamic financial institutions encounter accounting problems because the existing accounting standards such as IFRSs or local GAAP were developed based on conventional institutions, conventional product structures or practices, and may be perceived to be insufficient to account for and report Islamic financial transactions. Shariah compliant transactions that observe the prohibition to charge interest may not have parallels in conventional financing and therefore, there may be significant accounting implications. Likewise, the Islamic finance industry is under considerable pressure to enhance practice and improve risk management systems and protect investors.

On this page, we maintain a history of recent developments in Islamic accounting requirements and practices.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on Islamic and Social Responsibility Accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#IslamicAccounting


"Why are so many Americans living by themselves?" by Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, April 16, 2012 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/04/16/120416crbo_books_heller?currentPage=all

Jensen Comment
Note that living with somebody else is not synonymous with marriage. Birth control led, in many instances, to a disconnect between having to get married to have sex.  This is the era of adult housemates and significant others from age 18 to 100+. Those living arrangements are usually less contractual and long-term than marriage, but society has made divorce much easier.

I have an good friend who has lived alone since he left home. He likes it better that way and shirks commitments that accompany house mates, significant others, and spouses.. Most of his human interactions are with married co-workers, many of whom say they envy his living alone.  At the same time he  mentions to me that he's becoming increasingly lonely as he grows older. But he also increasingly fears commitments. I think he's become a very confirmed bachelor.

Many of the single adults that I know these days were once married and are now divorced. Divorce has two types of impacts. Sometimes divorcees are in such a hurry to remarry that they too hurriedly made remarriage decisions that they later regret. The other type of impact is that divorce makes them truly afraid of a remarriage decision.

In San Antonio some of our older best friends in were older widows and widowers who lived together (only some of them remarried). Some had sexual relationships and others lived together happily in platonic unions. They'd lived together for so long with their former spouses that they just did not deal well with living alone as senior citizens.

One of my old college roommates, Sherman, lived alone for since graduation. After he retired early from teaching in Illinois he returned to live with his invalid mother in Manchester, NH. She died soon thereafter, and he lived alone in her house for about ten years. He committed suicide three years ago. I keep thinking that he might not have taken his own life if he did not live alone in his retirement years. Who knows?


"Meet Jeff Jonas, the Latest IBM Fellow With No College Degree," by David Strom, ReadWriteWeb, April 11, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/04/meet-jeff-jonas-the-latest-ibm.php

This week, IBM announced its next group of IBM Fellows, seven of its employees who share, according to the press release, "a commitment to tackling the world's biggest problems with ingenuity, invention and inspiration." The designation is a big deal for IBM, and over the years only 238 staff members have been so honored.

One of the more interesting choices this time is Jeff Jonas, a 47-year old chief scientist with the company who blogs here. Jonas never graduated from college with any degree but is clearly one of the smarter people you'll ever come across. He is also quite a character.

Unlike many of his fellow Fellows - who have resumes that you might have trouble parsing - Jonas has lived a very interesting life and worked on numerous problems that are easily understood by the rest of us.

Jonas came to IBM through a 2005 acquisition of Systems Research and Development, a company that he founded in 1985 to handle labor reporting, inventory management and other back-office systems consulting. One of his jobs was designing the casino security systems in Las Vegas, where he currently lives. He worked for the surveillance intelligence group of several casinos, and automated various manual processes, adding facial recognition software that was key to slowing down the MIT card counting group. "We built [another] system to immediately identify risk in real time so they could get these people out of the casino quickly." This software is still offered by IBM as its InfoSphere Identity Insight event processing and identity tracking technology.

Jonas is one of these people that look at the world with very careful thinking, always searching for actionable patterns. For example, he helped use his casino risk-management system to track down lost family members after the Katrina flooding of New Orleans. He and his team integrated data across 15 web sites - these web sites were being used by people who said they were seeking family members with those seeking them. I was impressed by how he structured his algorithm so it wasn't going to be used by bill collectors, for example.

He calls this perpetual analytics and sense-making to keep track of data changes and to help advise decision-makers in real time. "As information changes, you want to be able to reconsider earlier decisions. If you want to prevent really bad things from happening, you want to be able to monitor risks and trends while they are happening." You want to monitor the motion of the data, as it were.

His current internal IBM project is called G2. The idea is to "make sense of new observations as they happen, fast enough to do something about it, while the transaction is still happening." His work is looking at how to commingle diverse data and weave them together - especially when things are the same, such as people named Billy and William, who could be the same person. "If you can count things that are the same, you can analyze them better and understand how they are related. It is a bit of a breakthrough technology," he told me in an interview today. "I took what I developed for the casinos and made it more generalized and easier to use." He and IBM plan to offer G2 sometime soon for the paying business public.

Continued in article

Try learning on your own using the free courses, tutorials, lectures, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Khan Academy Home Page --- http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)


"Innovations in Higher Education? Hah! College leaders need to move beyond talking about transformation before it's too late," by Ann Kirschner, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Innovations-in-Higher/131424/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

. . .

(Conclusion)
Some of the most interesting work begins in the academy but grows beyond it. "Scale" is not an academic value—but it should be. Most measures of prestige in higher education are based on exclusivity; the more prestigious the college, the larger the percentage of applicants it turns away. Consider the nonprofit Khan Academy, with its library of more than 3,000 education videos and materials, where I finally learned just a little about calculus. In the last 18 months, Khan had 41 million visits in the United States alone. It is using the vast data from that audience to improve its platform and grow still larger. TED, the nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, just launched TED-Ed, which uses university faculty from around the world to create compelling videos on everything from "How Vast Is the Universe?" to "How Pandemics Spread." Call it Khan Academy for grown-ups. The Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun's free course in artificial intelligence drew 160,000 students in more than 190 countries. No surprise, the venture capitalists have come a-calling, and they are backing educational startups like Udemy and Udacity.

All of those are signposts to a future where competency-based credentials may someday compete with a degree.

At this point, if you are affiliated with an Ivy League institution, you'll be tempted to guffaw, harrumph, and otherwise dismiss the idea that anyone would ever abandon your institution for such ridiculous new pathways to learning. You're probably right. Most institutions are not so lucky. How long will it take for change to affect higher education in major ways? Just my crystal ball, but I would expect that institutions without significant endowments will be forced to change by 2020. By 2025, the places left untouched will be few and far between.

Here's the saddest fact of all: It is those leading private institutions that should be using their endowments and moral authority to invest in new solutions and to proselytize for experimentation and change, motivated not by survival but by the privilege of securing the future of American higher education.

The stakes are high. "So let me put colleges and universities on notice," President Obama said in his recent State of the Union address. "If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down." Because of the academy's inability to police itself and improve graduation rates, and because student debt is an expedient political issue, the Obama administration recently threatened to tie colleges' eligibility for campus-based aid programs to institutions' success in improving affordability and value for students.

Whether the president's threat is fair or not, it will not transform higher education. Change only happens on the ground. Despite all the reasons to be gloomy, however, there is room for optimism. The American university, the place where new ideas are born and lives are transformed, will eventually focus that lens of innovation upon itself. It's just a matter of time.

 

Jensen Comment
This a long and important article for all educators to carefully read. Onsite colleges have always served many purposes, but one purpose they never served is to be knowledge fueling stations where students go to fill their tanks. At best colleges put a shot glass of fuel in a tanks with unknown capacities.

Students go to an onsite college for many reasons other than to put fuel in their knowledge tanks. The go to live and work in relatively safe transitional environments between home and the mean streets. They go to mature, socialize, to mate, drink, laugh, leap over hurdles societies place in front of career paths, etc. The problem in the United States is that college onsite living and education have become relatively expensive luxuries. Students must now make more painful decisions as to how much to impoverish their parents and how deeply go into debt.

I have a granddaughter 22 years old majoring in pharmacy (six year program). She will pay off her student loans before she's 50 years old if she's lucky. Some older students who've not been able to pay off their loans are becoming worried that the Social Security Administration will garnish their retirement Social Security monthly payments for unpaid student loans.

We've always known that colleges are not necessary places for learning and scholarship. Until 43 years ago (when the Internet was born) private and public libraries were pretty darn necessary for scholarship. Now the Internet provides access to most known knowledge of the world.  But becoming a scholar on the Internet is relatively inefficient and overwhelming without the aid of distillers of knowledge, which is where onsite and online college courses can greatly add to efficiency of learning.

But college courses can be terribly disappointing as distillers of knowledge. For one thing, grade inflation disgracefully watered down the amount of real fuel in that shot glass of knowledge provided in a college course ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
Grades rather than learning became the tickets to careers and graduate schools, thereby, leading to street-smart cheating taking over for real learning perspiration ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

When 80% of Harvard's graduating class graduates cum laude, we no longer identify which graduates are were the best scholars in their class.

Soon those graduates from Harvard, Florida A&M University, Capella University, and those who learned on their own from free courses, video lectures, and course materials on the Web will all face some sort of common examinations (written and oral) of their competencies in specialties. Competency testing will be the great leveler much like licensure examinations such as the Bar Exam, the CPA exam, the CFA exam, etc. are graded on the basis of what you know rather than where you learned what you know. It won't really matter whether you paid a fortune to learn Bessel Functions onsite at MIT or for free from the MITx online certificate program ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

If you are an educator or are becoming an educator, please read:
"Innovations in Higher Education? Hah! College leaders need to move beyond talking about transformation before it's too late," by Ann Kirschner, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Innovations-in-Higher/131424/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

This is related to issues of "badges" in academe
"A Future Full of Badges," by Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Future-Full-of-Badges/131455/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"College at Risk," by Andrew Delbanco, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/College-at-Risk/130893/

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


Yale Introduces Another Six Free Online Courses, Bringing Total to 42 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/yale_introduces_six_new_free_online_courses.html

Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, lectures, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


"Online-Education Start-Up Teams With Top-Ranked Universities to Offer Free Courses," by Nick DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-education-start-up-teams-with-top-ranked-universities-to-offer-free-courses/36048?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

 

Bob Jensen's threads on free online courses, lectures, videos, tutorials, and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Why Canada's better ideas are often stopped at the border
The chorus arguing America should scrap the 1-cent coin has grown. Here's why it might never go away ---
http://paper.li/businessschools?utm_source=subscription&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=paper_sub


Just how big are porn sites in 2012?
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-05/online-porn-is-huge-dot-like-really-really-huge-dot-who-knew


More on the Rotten Apple

"Justice Dept. Sues Apple and Major Publishers in E-Book Price-Fixing Case," by Nick DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 11, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/justice-depart-sues-apple-and-major-publishers-in-e-book-price-fixing-case/36025?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The Rotten Apple iBooks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ebooks.htm#iBooks

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


"The Law School Crunch Is Here--Finances and Quality to Suffer," by Brian Tamanaha, Balkinization, April 10, 2012 ---
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2012/04/law-school-crunch-is-here-finances-and.html 

According to new numbers released by LSAC, 167 law schools are suffering a decline in applications for 2012 (H/T Caron). At nearly three-fourths of these down schools the decline ranges from large to potentially devastating: 76 schools with a decrease of 10% to 19%; 40 schools with a decrease of 20% to 29%; 17 schools with a decrease of 30% or greater. Keep in mind that this decrease follows on the heels of sizable decreases at many law schools in 2011.

The aggregate numbers show the seriousness of the crunch. Two years ago, first year enrollment at ABA accredited law schools was about 52,000. Last year it was around 47,000 to 48,000 (official numbers not out yet); if law schools reduce their enrollment by a comparable amount for the entering 2012 class, enrollment will fall to 43,000. Aggregate law school enrollment has not been this low since the late 1990s. There were 18 fewer law schools at the time, so now there are fewer available students per school. The reduction will not be distributed equally--some schools will take big hits (enrollment-revenue) and others will not.

The raw number of applicants this year will likely be between 66,000 and 67,000. Not since 1986-1987 have law schools seen total applicant numbers this low. Student quality will suffer as a result. For the purposes of quality, what matters is the excess of applicants over enrolled. This year law schools will enroll about 65% of the people who apply--a high percentage not seen since the mid-late 1980s. (Eight years ago only 50% of applicants were enrolled.) The decline in student quality will be even greater if the aggregate enrollment reduction does not go as low as 43,000. (It is quite possible that law schools collectively will not reduce enrollment in the same proportion as last year to match the current reduction in applications because the revenue loss will be too much for many individual schools to bar in two successive years.)

The fall in student quality will not just affect the lower ranked law schools--many of which will accept 65% to 75% or more of their applicants this year. There are large percentage drops in three of the four highest LSAT groups: the number of applicants with scores between 170-174 is down by 20.7%; 165-169 down by 18.5%; 160-164 down by 18.4%. With fewer high LSAT scores to go around, the LSAT profile at many top 100 law schools will decline.

The scary news: Many law schools will face severe financial difficulty this coming year, and if this decline continues some law schools will close.

The good news: Law students should get higher scholarship offers deeper into the class. After going up for decades, we may finally witness a decline in real tuition (the scholarship discounted rate).


The bad news: Law schools will still produce far more graduates than available jobs (BLS stats here). To get a closer match between supply and demand for new lawyers, law schools must enroll about 35,000 first years (still above openings, but attrition after 1st year will bring this down). The last time enrollment was that low was in the early 1970s, when there were 50 fewer accredited law schools.

Jensen Comment
This may explain why the Baylor University Law School did a data dump on each of its students.

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
http://abovethelaw.com/2012/04/the-baylor-law-data-dump-now-with-race-and-scholarships/2/

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.

Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools


Data Visualization and Music

April 10, 2012 message from Scott Bokaker

Right up Prof. Jensen's Alley. I bet he is an aficionado too.

Music is embedded with mathematical logic -- But it can be hard to hear the patterns beneath the sounds.

Which is where visualizations come in. While bar graphs call to mind business presentations and third grade science fair projects, YouTube user musanim has repurposed these little lines to help you out.

Using Music Animation Machine MIDI Player, classical favorites including Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune and more, appear as colored lines that scroll along as the music plays. Lines are different lengths depending on the time they're held in the song, and different colors depending on the note being played.

Read (and see) the rest at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/classical-music-bar-graph_n_1415766.html

 

Bob Jensen's threads onata visualization ---
Visualization of Multivariate Data (including faces) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm 

 


Styluses for the iPad

"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


Speed Reading, Dogged Reading, and Remembering

April 10, 2012 message from Len Steenkamp

Dear all

I wish to raise a slightly off-topic item, one which I am surprised to see from the AECM archives have not yet raised its head here.

Looking at the prolific number of posts on AECM, I strongly suspect that there are a number of contributors that are able to speed read. My question is whether you were taught a specific technique, which you are willing to share (link to source of course).

While I am able to read quite fast (self “taught” through regular reading), I am finding that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up to date. I am sitting with 400+ articles after the Easter break which I wish to read, but there is simply too little time for them all.

Thank you in advance

Len Steenkamp
Lurker extraordinaire

Hi Len,

The best way to improve volume of the words you read is to retire from  teaching and spend at least 10 hours a day reading and digitizing parts of what you read or think while reading. I'm not a particularly good speed reader, but I'm a dogged reader and have learned to search the Web quite well in search if items that particularly interest me. Here's how scholars search the Web ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#ScholarySearch

The modern fountain of knowledge, Widipedia, actually has a good module on speed reading ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading 

The challenge is not reading but remembering.
This is where a massive Web site or database on a LAN drive comes into play.  Our brains can store fantastic amounts of information, but our ability to find what is stored is very limited. My "trick" is to post thousands upon thousands of quotations divided among a relatively few enormous files on my two Web drives (for posts that I can share with the world), LAN drive (for posts that can be shared privately say with students and selected friends), and auxiliary storage (hard drives and DVD disks) for items such as massive original uncompressed Camtasia video files that are not efficient to store on a network drive..

There are various software packages for locating stored messages, but I find that it's easier for me to simply post information to enormous digital files and then conduct word searches.  Jagdish once asked why I don't split my huge files into smaller files. This would increase speed of downloading parts of my files on the Web, but it would make word searching much more inefficient.


For example, search for Contango at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133glosf.htm 


Or search for Groupon at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm 


Or search for Partnoy at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm 
 


I can't remember everything that I've written or quoted on over 100,000 topics, but I can find most anything I need in a matter of minutes.

I always feel story for my friends like Steve Zeff who has a highly organized academic library of accounting history in his office.  But not having an accompanying massive digitized version of over 100,000 modules from the millions of words he has in his hard copy stacks means that he's spent a goodly part of his life trying to physically find items while walking back and forth in his stacks. He spends hours searching for many things that I can find in minutes.

Of course I don't digitize every word and every picture from every book or long article. The trick here is to anticipate those items that are likely to be of most interest to me in the future.


It actually is quite efficient to search for most everything that's ever been posted to the AECM using the excellent search software provided on the AECM. This saves me a lot of time finding old postings ---
http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A0=AECM&X=0C008E5F9CBA4793F3&Y=rjensen%40trinity.edu
 

April 10, 2012 reply from Zane Swanson

I use Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics speed reading techniques.  My mother enrolled me in their program before I went to MIT.  My reading speed depends on the content, but is about 5 times the average for technical material and probably 10 times average for novels.  Here is a web link. http://www.ewrd.com/ewrd/index.asp

 I cannot say what their program is like now because I did it many years ago.  It has been good for me and I can say so because I have continued to use the techniques.  While my students don’t know it, I have them do one aspect on a regular basis as part of the learning process.

Zane


Video Tutorial on Creating Surveys Using Google Forms ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZEjmxTvR4k&feature=youtu.be
Thank you Richard Campbell for the heads up.

Mike Kearl has some great helpers for survey research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/methods.html#ms

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


Army Dogs
April 10, 2012 message from John Ensminger

Bob--Thanks as always for keeping me on your list.

I'm not sure this issue is something that interests you, but the Army has instituted a restrictive policy for active duty military personnel with regard to what service dogs they may have on base. While acknowledging that service dogs can be of great assistance to returning soldiers with PTSD, the Army insists that dogs be trained by organizations approved by a specific umbrella organization, Assistance Dogs International, Inc. There are only a few such organizations anywhere near most military bases, so the void has been filled largely by volunteers and sometimes by soldiers who have begun training dogs themselves. Some of the volunteers are former employees of ADI-organizations, and are following ADI protocols, but are not currently recognized by ADI, meaning that the dogs they train are not considered legitimate service dogs by the Army. Since various estimates put the number of returning soldiers with PTSD in the tens of thousands, the Army has chosen a system that will provide hundreds of dogs a year at best. Base commanders are responding differently to the overall military policy. Major General Pittard of Fort Bliss is allowing soldiers that have non-qualified dogs to get those dogs qualified, but this sort of grandfathering is not being allowed at other bases.

While the guide dog system has often depended on charitable organizations paying for guide dogs for people without the resources for a trained guide dog (now over $50,000), the system is breaking down as to Army personnel and veterans because there is so much demand and insufficient charitable resources. The VA has a similar restrictive policy so that even if a soldier leaves service, the problem of getting a dog trained to ameliorate the effects of PTSD continues. I attach links to two blogs I've written on the Army policy. -- John

CC: Amy--haven't seen you in a long time but this is what I'm doing these days. -- JE

http://doglawreporter.blogspot.com/2012/04/base-commanders-begin-implementing.html
http://doglawreporter.blogspot.com/2012/03/new-army-policy-stymies-efforts-of.html

 


Sometimes you just don't get what you wish for!
"Old Dominion U. Ends Writing Exam," Inside Higher Ed, April 9, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/09/old-dominion-u-ends-writing-exam

Old Dominion University has ended a policy adopted in 1977 that students had to pass a writing examination to graduate, The Virginian-Pilot reported. The university came to the conclusion that the test wasn't working. The percentage of students who failed the first time they took the test (they were allowed to retake it) stayed the same, at about 25 percent. And professors continued to complain about poor student writing skills. University officials said they were now focusing on embedding writing requirements within the curriculum, an approach they believe may have more impact that a single three-hour test.

"California Dumbs Down Tests," by Linda Chavez, Townhall, April 23, 2010 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/LindaChavez/2010/04/23/california_dumbs_down_tests

When it comes to education trends, as California goes, so goes the nation. Which is all the more reason to be concerned about the latest effort in California to dumb down standards. The University of California's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) has launched another salvo in its long-running war against the SAT, the test used by many colleges and universities to assess academic achievement among high school seniors. This is only the latest in a series of moves by BOARS against the SAT, but this one may be a stalking horse to eliminate standardized tests in general, especially if they conflict with the goal of promoting racial and ethnic diversity.

BOARS has already eliminated a requirement that University of California applicants take at least two subject-matter tests in addition to the SAT Reasoning Test. Now BOARS is taking aim at the SAT directly. What makes the action more suspicious is that BOARS' own report notes that the SAT-R was developed specifically in response to testing principles it promulgated and that the new test "adds significant gains in predictive power of first year grades at UC." Nonetheless, BOARS is now recommending that students forgo the SAT in favor of the less-popular ACT.

Both tests have been accepted for more than 30 years and do a good job of predicting first-year grades. So why is BOARS now signaling preference for one test over another? After reading the report, it's hard to come away without feeling that the real target is standardized testing in general.

As numerous studies and the raw data on test scores have shown, performance on standardized tests varies not just between individuals but also between different racial and ethnic groups. In general, black and Latino students perform less well as a group than do white and Asian students. Since BOARS is committed to boosting the number of black and Latino students admitted to the UC system, standardized tests that do not produce politically correct results are a problem. It's not too far-fetched to wonder whether BOARS' effort to discourage students from taking the SAT may be the first step in getting rid of standardized tests altogether.

But getting rid of standardized tests is not the way to solve the problem of underperforming black and Latino students. Standardized tests, whether they be the SAT or state tests taken to assess elementary and secondary school performance required by the No Child Left Behind Act, merely document the skills gap that exists between whites and Asians on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other. The answer isn't fixing the tests to produce more even results between racial groups but improving the skills of those students who lag behind.

In 1996, voters in California did away with racial preferences in college admissions to state schools by enacting Proposition 209. Since then, many administrators in the UC system have tried to figure out a backdoor way to boost admissions of blacks and Latinos to the university's flagship schools, UC Berkley and UCLA. What they've failed to notice is that black and Latino enrollment system-wide is up over the levels when racial preferences were common. The students now enrolled under more race-neutral standards are doing just fine, graduating in higher percentages than they were when racial preferences admitted many students to campuses where they couldn't compete with their peers because their grades and test scores were substantially lower.

Eliminating standardized tests or dumbing down their contents doesn't help anyone. It simply sweeps evidence of academic disparities under the rug, where they can't be dealt with. If California really wants to improve education for all its students, it will work to keep high standards in place and encourage students to test what they have learned. California students prefer the SAT to other standardized tests, judging by the numbers who take this test now. BOARS' job should be to encourage students to make their own choices about which test they prefer, not to pick one test over another -- but most of all not to discourage the use of standardized tests altogether in the hopes of promoting greater diversity.

Are the Canadian critics being too kind and gentle on themselves?
"Have Canadian Law Schools Become 'Psychotic Kindergartens'?" Inside Higher Ed, June 7, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/07/qt#229422

Canadian bloggers have been buzzing in the last week about a harsh critique of the country's law schools, which are compared to "psychotic kindergartens" in a journal article published by Robert Martin, a retired law professor at the University of Western Ontario. The article was published last year in the journal Interchange, but has only recently been the topic of debate. The article portrays law schools as politically correct and focused on obscure issues. Martin closes his piece by suggesting that Canada's law schools all be shut down and turned over to the homeless as a place to live -- thus in Martin's view solving multiple social problems at the same time. The article is available only to subscribers of the journal, and while its focus is law schools, it isn't much more kind to the rest of the country's universities. "Each fall, a horde of illiterate, ignorant cretins enters Canada's universities. A few years later, they all move on, just as illiterate, just as ignorant and rather more cretinous, but now armed with bits of paper, which most of them are probably not able to read, called degrees," he writes. The Canadian legal blog SLAW features a defense of legal education in the country and criticism of Martin's views.

Our Compassless Colleges:  What Are Students Really Not Learning" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation scandals ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor


LIBOR --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor

This is Crime, Not Capitalism
"Wall Street con trick," by Ellen Brown, Asia Times, March 24, 2012 ---
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NC24Dj05.html

"Far from reducing risk, derivatives increase risk, often with catastrophic results." -
Derivatives expert Satyajit Das, Extreme Money (2011)

*****************
Jensen Comment
Derivatives are great contracts to manage risk if their markets are efficient, fair, and transparent.
They don't reduce risk in most instances because it's impossible in hedging to reduce risk in most instances. Rather hedging entails shifting risk. For example, a company that has cash flow risk due to variable interest rate debt can hedge that cash flow risk. However, elimination of cash flow risk creates fair value risk. The issue is not one of reducing risk. Rather it is a shift in risk preferences.
******************

The "toxic culture of greed" on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, London Interbank Offered Rates (or LIBOR) - the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps - were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the International

Swaps and Derivatives Association was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a "default" requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.

Interest rate swaps are less often in the news than credit default swaps, but they are far more important in terms of revenue, composing fully 82% of the derivatives trade. In February, JP Morgan Chase revealed that it had cleared US$1.4 billion in revenue on trading interest rate swaps in 2011, making them one of the bank's biggest sources of profit. According to the Bank for International Settlements:
[I]nterest rate swaps are the largest component of the global OTC derivative market. The notional amount outstanding as of June 2009 in OTC [over-the-counter] interest rate swaps was $342 trillion, up from $310 trillion in Dec 2007. The gross market value was $13.9 trillion in June 2009, up from $6.2 trillion in Dec 2007.
For more than a decade, banks and insurance companies convinced local governments, hospitals, universities and other non-profits that interest rate swaps would lower interest rates on bonds sold for public projects such as roads, bridges and schools. The swaps were entered into to insure against a rise in interest rates; but instead, interest rates fell to historically low levels.

This was not a flood, earthquake, or other insurable risk due to environmental unknowns or "acts of God". It was a deliberate, manipulated move by the Federal Reserve, acting to save the banks from their own folly in precipitating the credit crisis of 2008. The banks got into trouble, and the Federal Reserve and federal government rushed in to bail them out, rewarding them for their misdeeds at the expense of the taxpayers.

How the swaps were supposed to work was explained by Michael McDonald in a November 2010 Bloomberg article titled "Wall Street Collects $4 Billion From Taxpayers as Swaps Backfire":
In an interest-rate swap, two parties exchange payments on an agreed-upon amount of principal. Most of the swaps Wall Street sold in the municipal market required borrowers to issue long-term securities with interest rates that changed every week or month. The borrowers would then exchange payments, leaving them paying a fixed-rate to a bank or insurance company and receiving a variable rate in return. Sometimes borrowers got lump sums for entering agreements.
Banks and borrowers were supposed to be paying equal rates: the fat years would balance out the lean. But the Fed artificially manipulated the rates to the save the banks.

After the credit crisis broke out, borrowers had to continue selling adjustable-rate securities at auction under the deals. Auction interest rates soared when bond insurers' ratings were downgraded because of subprime mortgage losses; but the periodic payments that banks made to borrowers as part of the swaps plunged because they were linked to benchmarks such as Federal Reserve lending rates, which were slashed to almost zero.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's fraud updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Look up salary data for your university ---
http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-data-2012/131431#id=144050

Jensen Comment
The data comparisons that bug me are male versus female comparisons. The implications are that this is primarily gender discrimination. For example, do female assistant accounting professors at your university really earn less than male assistant accounting professors? I seriously doubt it!

To find gender differences (but not discipline differences) in the above database, pass your mouse over the salary averages.

The reality of gender salary differences is that it is more a function discipline differences where in some disciplines like elementary education and English, a higher proportion of women have self-selected those disciplines. If a major university has a tenure track opening in English or Psychology there will be several hundred qualified applicants whereas in accounting there may be less than ten applicants. In most R1 universities supply and demand differences are recognized when making salary offers.

There are, of course, some universities, usually unionized universities, that ignore supply and demand differences by discipline and have virtually eliminated differences in salaries between disciplines by adopting egalitarian salary policies. This accordingly has made it very difficult for many of them to attract new leading PhDs in accounting and finance. In those latter disciplines sometimes side deals are made to attract hard-to-get PhD such as by granting generous summer research stipends out of private donations such as donations from accounting firms. I know of no gender bias in these side deals.

To my knowledge rigid egalitarian salary policies, however, has not hit most major R1 research universities. You can find indirect evidence of this in the above salary database by comparing R1 university gender salary differences (usually 90-93% for women) with South Dakota State University (98% for women), Skidmore College (97% for women),

There are some exceptions in R1 universities such as at MIT where female salaries are about on par with male salaries across the entire university.

Some like Morehouse College pay women 178% (for full professors) and 103% (for assistant professors) more than men. This, however, is not at all common.

Bob Jensen's threads on salary differences by gender in academe ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences

Faculty Salaries According to the AAUP ---
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/Z/ecstatereport11-12/
The averages across multiple colleges and universities are driven downward by outliers, especially low-paying small colleges.


Owning Up to False Accounting in the Academy
"Institute Accused of Falsely Reporting How It Spent State Dept. Funds Settles Lawsuit for $1-Million," by Ian Wilhelm, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 16, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Institute-Accused-of-Falsely/131563/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

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


The $3.5 Million Dollar Woman

"Bobby Petrino Is Fired as Football Coach at Arkansas," Inside Higher Education, April 11, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/bobby-petrino-fired-as-football-coach-at-arkansas/42272

Jensen Comment
Now all Bobby has are memories.
Sigh!

For comparison purposes, read in the University of Arkansas into the faculty salary interactive site at
http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-data-2012/131431#id=144050
The average male full professor earns $108,800 at Arkansas. I don't thing coaching salaries are factored into those averages.
Pass the mouse over the salary data to see a pop up on male versus female salary averages.


"Why an MBA Is Not Always the Right Choice," by Rose Martinelli , Bloomberg Business Week, April 4, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-04/why-an-mba-is-not-always-the-right-choice

A guest post from Rose Martinelli, formerly the longtime admissions director at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where she wrote a popular admissions blog, The Rose Report.

My last two posts focused on knowing yourself, making sense of all the pieces, and sharing what you learned with your circle of supporters. Now it’s time to focus on evaluating educational options by defining two of the most common academic pathways—subject-focused master’s degrees and MBA degree programs.

Subject-focused master’s degrees are typically one-year academic programs that focus on a single topic in great detail, with application of these concepts focused in functional areas. Programmatic features vary by school and program, so make sure to do your homework, especially if particular programs or career support are among your priorities.

MBA programs, on the other hand, are typically two-year programs, although they are now offered in one-year or accelerated formats. These “professional” programs focus on developing the fundamental tools of resource management (accounting, finance, operations, statistics, marketing, human resources, economics, and so forth).

The vast majority of MBA programs require core classes, with the opportunity to pursue majors or concentrations in specific areas of study. The value of MBA programs can be found through the breadth of exposure from academic options and co-curricular activities to professional outcomes. Offered in full-time, part-time, and executive formats, this degree can be taken at various stages in your professional development.

Which type of program is right for you? While there are no right or wrong answers here, I would recommend that your choice be based upon your undergraduate education, prior work experience, and future career goals.

If you do not have an undergraduate business degree, the MBA may be a good option because of its focus on the fundamentals of business and experiential opportunities, as well as the breadth of career support available. Even students who have pursued economics majors or who have done consulting can benefit from the MBA degree if one of the driving reasons for pursuing education is the chance to explore and experiment.

If you have an undergraduate business degree and want additional depth in a particular area, the subject-oriented masters degree may be ideal. Typically, these are smaller programs that provide focused instruction in that area of study. While another option for business undergraduates may be to pursue an MBA, selecting a school with a flexible core curriculum will be important if you do not want to repeat prior coursework. We’ll talk more about that in future posts.

If you are just completing your undergraduate degree and wish to pursue additional education in order to prepare you for your first career step, a subject-oriented masters degree may be just the right choice. Over the past several years, there has been an expansion in these programs, largely fueled by the lack of good employment opportunities for college graduates, as well as the limited number of MBA programs that admit students without work experience.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment

In 1982 when I joined the faculty at Trinity University I taught mostly in Trinity's small MBA program which was one of the three surviving masters programs that existed after 20+ masters programs had already been dropped. Interestingly Trinity dropped most of its masters programs after enormous gifts to its endowment made it possible to increase the competitive prestige of its undergraduate programs. Trinity now ranks extremely high in the nation in terms of endowment per student.

But in the 1980s our MBA program was very small and most of my classes had less than ten students, many of whom were military officers stationed at the six major army and air force bases in San Antonio. We did a market study and discovered what we already knew --- San Antonio was just not a good city for placements of MBA graduates since it had so little business sector industry. And our MBA program just did not have a reputation to compete with MBA graduates of the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and SMU.

And so we dropped the MBA program. Some years later when Texas adopted the 150-hour rule to take the CPA exam in Texas, we installed a new one-year masters program that mostly served our own graduating accounting students. We prospered with our small masters program in accounting mostly because the then Big Five in San Antonio took a goodly share of our graduating masters students in accounting. Houston and Dallas Big Five CPA firms picked up most of the other graduates.

In other words we could place a goodly share of our masters students in accounting locally or in nearby Dallas and Houston. This never was the case for our MBA program.


"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
 


Brown Center on Education Policy --- http://www.brookings.edu/brown.aspx
2012 Report on How Well American Students are Learning --- http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2012/0216_brown_education_loveless.aspx
Full Report --- http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2012/0216_brown_education_loveless/0216_brown_education_loveless.pdf

This edition of the Brown Center Report on American Education marks the first issue of volume three—and eleventh issue over all. The first installment was published in 2000, just as the Presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Al Gore were winding down. Education was an important issue in that campaign. It has not been thus far in the current campaign for the Republican nomination (as of February 2012). And it is unlikely to be a prominent issue in the fall general election. Despite that, the three studies in this Brown Center Report investigate questions that the victor in the 2012 campaign, and the team assembled to lead the U.S. Department of Education, will face in the years ahead. The first section is on the Common Core State Standards, a project that President Obama has backed enthusiastically. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the Common Core; detailed standards have been written in English language arts and mathematics; and assessments are being developed to be ready by the 2014–2015 school year. The first section attempts to predict the effect of the Common Core on student achievement. Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards—not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states—the study foresees little to no impact on student learning. That conclusion is based on analyzing states’ past experience with standards and examining several years of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

States have had curricular standards for schools within their own borders for many years. Data on the effects of those standards are analyzed to produce three findings. 1) The quality of state standards, as indicated by the well-known ratings from the Fordham Foundation, is not related to state achievement. 2) The rigor of state standards, as measured by how high states place the cut point for students to be deemed proficient, is also unrelated to achievement. Raising or lowering the cut point is related to achievement in fourth grade, but the effect is small, and the direction of causality (whether a change in cut point produces a change in test score or vice versa) is difficult to determine. 3) The ability of standards to reduce variation in achievement, in other words to reduce differences in achievement, is also weak. Common standards will only affect variation between and among states (analysts use the grammatically suspect “between-state” as shorthand for this kind of variation). Achievement variation existing within states is already influenced, to the extent that standards can exert influence, by the states standards under which schools currently operate. Within state variation is four to five times larger than the variation between states. Put another way, anyone who follows NAEP scores knows that the difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi is quite large. What is often overlooked is that every state has a mini-Massachusetts and Mississippi contrast within its own borders. Common state standards only target the differences between states, not within them, sharply limiting common state standards’ potential impact on achievement differences. The second section of the Report investigates achievement gaps on NAEP. The NAEP has two different tests: the Long-Term Trend NAEP, which began in 1969, and the Main NAEP, which began in 1990. The two tests differ in several respects, but they both carry the NAEP label and both are integral components of “The Nation’s Report Card.”

Achievement gaps are the test score differences between groups of students with different socioeconomic (SES) characteristics: for example, racial or ethnic background, family income, or language status. The second section poses the question: Do the two NAEP tests report similar achievement gaps? Researchers and policy makers are well aware that significant test score gaps exist between SES groups. Researchers try to study them, policy makers try to close them. What NAEP has to say about the magnitude of such gaps plays an important role in the policy arena. The analysis presented in section two indicates that the two NAEPs do in fact differ. The Main NAEP consistently reports larger SES gaps. This is only a preliminary study, a first cut at the data that reveals a general pattern, so the findings must be viewed cautiously. And explanations for the phenomenon are necessarily speculative. More work needs to be done on this topic. The third section of the report is on international assessments. Interpretations of international test scores are characterized by three common mistakes. The first occurs when a nation’s scores go up or down dramatically and analysts explain the test score change by pointing to a particular policy. The case of Poland’s gains in reading is offered as an excellent example of dubious causality attributed to a single policy. The second mistake stems from relying on rankings to gauge a country’s academic standing. National rankings have statistical properties that can mislead observers into thinking that large differences are small or small differences are large. They can also make growth appear larger or smaller than it really is. Several examples are provided of misinterpretations of rankings and suggestions on how to avoid them. The third mistake is pointing to a small group of highperforming nations, often called “A+ countries,” and recommending, with no additional analysis, that their policies should be adopted. The same policies may be embraced by the lowest performing nations or nations in the middle of the distribution. On any test, the entire distribution must be considered, not just scores at the top.

"Study Critiques Disproportionately High Grades for Education Students," Inside Higher Ed, August 23, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/23/qt#268520

Students in education courses are given consistently higher grades than are students in other college disciplines, according to a study published by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Monday. The study, by Cory Koedel, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Missouri at Columbia, cites that and other evidence to make the case that teachers are trained in "a larger culture of low standards for educators," in line with "the low evaluation standards by which teachers are judged in K-12 schools."

Wow:  97% of Elementary NYC Public Students Get A or B Grades --- There must be higher IQ in the water!
"City Schools May Get Fewer A’s," by Jennifer Medina, The New York Times, January 28, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/education/30grades.html?hpw

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, criticized the decision to reduce the number of schools that receive top grades.

Continued in article

"Culture of cheating breeding in schools across U.S. Poor test scores risk teachers’ jobs," by Ben Wolfgang, The Washington Times, July 14, 2011 ---
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/14/culture-of-cheating-breeding-in-schools-across-us/print/

Those sneaky students in the back of the classroom aren't the only cheaters.

Teachers and school leaders are getting in on the scams by boosting test scores not through better instruction, but by erasing wrong answers, replacing them with the right ones and hoodwinking parents in the process.

Nowhere was the corruption more widespread than in Atlanta, where a recent probe found that 44 schools and 178 teachers and principals had been falsifying student test scores for the past decade. Suspected cheating also is under review in the District, and the Department of Education's inspector general is assisting with the investigation.

In Pennsylvania, reports that surfaced this week show suspected cheating in at least three dozen school districts. State Education Secretary Ronald Tomalis on Thursday ordered those districts to investigate the suspicious scores and report back within 30 days. He also asked a data company to analyze 2010 scores, according to the Associated Press.

Similar charges of cheating have been discovered in Baltimore, Houston and elsewhere.

Although the details differ, education specialists think each scandal has a common denominator.

"There's a very simple cause: consequences," said Gregory Cizek, a professor of educational measurement and evaluation in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Any district where you've got kids who are at risk of not succeeding ... there are problems as big as Atlanta, as big as D.C., as big as Philadelphia. The more stakes there are involved, the more you're going to see it."

The Atlanta probe found that "cheating occurred as early as 2001," the year the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted. Mr. Cizek and others argue that the greater accountability schools face, the more likely that teachers and administrators are to, at best, turn a blind eye to cheating. At worst, they encourage it.

Former Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall was named superintendent of the year by the American Association of School Administrators in 2009. She retired last month and told USA Today on Wednesday that she "did not know about the cheating."

Under No Child Left Behind guidelines, schools can be labeled "failing" if student test scores don't meet state benchmarks. Poor results are embarrassing for teachers and often cost principals, superintendents and school board members their jobs. By contrast, high scores on reading and math tests equal praise for those in charge.

In the face of such pressure, teachers and administrators sometimes go with their "natural reaction," said Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.

"The teachers and principals who changed test scores did something unethical and probably illegal, [but they were] caught between a rock and a hard place," he said. "We've created a climate that corrupted the educational process. The sole goal of education ... became boosting scores by any means necessary."

The Education Department has estimated that more than 80 percent of schools could be labeled as "failing" this year under No Child Left Behind, and congressional leaders are working on overhauling the law.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has passed the first three pieces of its five-step reform process, and Rep. John Kline, Minnesota Republican and committee chairman, has said the final legislation will change the accountability process and free schools from the testing mandates.

"One of our primary goals is to put more control in the hands of state and local education officials who can properly monitor and address situations like this to ensure students are not being cheated out of a quality education," Mr. Kline said.

Investigations of suspected violations often move slowly.

Until recently, education officials in Pennsylvania apparently were unaware of a 2009 analysis of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment that identified "testing irregularities" at schools in Philadelphia, Hazleton, Lancaster and elsewhere. Former Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak, who served under Gov. Edward G. Rendell, has denied seeing the 44-page document, the Associated Press reported.

Continued in article

"Who Will Be Held Responsible in the Atlanta Public School Cheating Scandal?" by Lori Drummer, Townhall, July 19, 2011 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/loridrummer/2011/07/19/who_will_be_held_responsible_in_the_atlanta_public_school_cheating_scandal

"Georgia lawmaker wants cheating educators to return bonuses,"  WRDW TV, July 19, 2011 ---
http://www.wrdw.com/home/headlines/_Georgia_lawmaker_wants_cheating_educators_to_return_bonuses_125784933.html

Under the proposed legislation, any educator found guilty of cheating would forfeit all promised salary increases or bonuses and would have to repay any money handed out based on test results.

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

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

Bob Jensen's threads on professors who let students cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward

Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

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

 


Worries on the 40th Anniversary of the Internet

While nasty little kids are driving their "fat, ugly, and molesting" teachers to give up the ghost because of networked and often false insults, their older brothers, sisters, parents, and misfits (many of whom are foreign enemies) are bent on overthrowing government regimes. No regime is immune from the instabilities caused by technologies that have great benefits to societies along with emerging costs that we'd not anticipated.

Anarchists have never had it so good!

Is this something George Orwell failed to anticipate or is it something that will ultimately bring on the evils of Big Brother?

Twittering an evil dictator sounds like a great thing until we discover that a nation may forever be thrown into instability and hunger by these little "tweets." Twittering may bring wealth and prosperity to Egypt in this decade, but don't count on it doing so for all the world in the 21st Century.

"Stability's End:  Technologies with goofy names like Twitter and Facebook are replacing political stability with a state of permanent instability," by Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704358704576118754214049490.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t 

'Stability" has been the goal of civilized foreign policy since the dawn of the Cold War and arguably since the Congress of Vienna, which posited a framework for international relations in 1815. Stability, whose virtues are many, has had a worthy run. It's done.

Stability is done as we have known it, at least until political leadership evolves a better understanding than they have shown during the events in Egypt of the permanently unstable world they've tumbled into. The man who pitched the curators of national stability into their current shocked state—evident this week in the streets of Cairo and before that in the capital of Tunisia and before that in the U.S.'s November elections—is William Shockley.

Shockley, a physicist, co- invented the transistor. The transistor replaced the vacuum tube as the central component of all electronic devices. The transistor enabled Twitter, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, an ocean of apps and the unending storm of information that blows all of us, including politicians, here and there like leaves. Why would anyone think it possible in such a world for a Hosni Mubarak to maintain stability with the methods he's used since 1981?

The point here is not to argue again that information and communication technology (ICT) has caused another colorful "revolution." Nor is it to overstate the power of these technologies to enable democratic reform.

My point is merely to describe what is going on in front of our faces: This new, exponentially expanding world of information technologies is now creating permanent instability inside formerly stable political arrangements.

This stuff disrupts everything it touches. It overturned the entire music industry, and now it is doing the same to established political systems.

Here is how it works. In 2007, Egypt sentenced a blogger named Kareem Amer to four years in prison for insulting the president. Ten years ago, Mr. Amer would have simply disappeared, like all the others. So what if his family and 15 friends grumbled? Stability.

Not now. Instead, Mr. Amer became an icon of regime repression. What changed? Instead of 15 friends whispering over coffee in a café, 15,000 can talk to each other all day and every day via Internet cafés about who's getting tortured. According to the Open Net Initiative's helpful country profiles, some one million Egyptian households have broadband access, often sharing lines.

Think what this means at the crudest level: Huge swaths of any wired population exist in a state of engagement. Instability. Before, stifled populations were mostly sullen. Now, all the time, they're in mental motion.

Even if the Mubarak thugs somehow disperse the people in the street, they'll return some day because there is no effective way to cap their ability to share grievances on a massive scale. Egypt earlier pulled the plug on its entire Internet. So what? No nation will turn it off forever.

The Egyptian government itself has been responsible for expanding ICT, even making cheap computers available. Tunisia's autocrats wired their own nation, with some 1.7 million Internet users in a population of 10.2 million.

Continued in article

February 4, 2011 reply from David Fordham

Bob, what's old is apparently new again.

Either that, or author Henninger is completely ignorant of history.  I agree with Henninger in general.  But it's not new.  The same exact argument he makes about transistorized technology can be leveled against Gutenberg (and just as deservedly) hundreds of years ago.  Anyone who's been to Europe is aware of the instability which devastated that highly-civilized society after the invention of the printing press made it possible for radical new ideas to get into the hands of a wide (and generally unthinking, relatively uneducated, unenlightened, and catastrophically impatient) audience.  Instead of peaceful discussion, conferencing, give-and-take, diplomacy, and other less destructive avenues of change, which admittedly take time and are not as immediately effective, the widespread dispersal of "any man's" ideas -- happening without regard to the origin, merits, or value of those ideas-- resulted in the very instability Henninger is describing.

Riots, mob violence, millions of deaths, wanton destruction of wealth (ruination of the fruit of human labor) on an unprecedented scale, complete destruction of priceless antiquities, disappearance of what we today call "civil rights", nations appearing, nations disappearing, leaders rising and falling, polarization of the population... all of this and more can trace its origins to the widespread dissemination of ideas which upset the status quo -- new concepts being put to an unprepared populace.

Much has also been written about the impact of the printing press on the American independence movement, which the English still call "the uprising" or "the revolt".

I'm sure Shockley would be honored to have the results of his work compared with Gutenberg.  (Alas, Shockley is often demonized because "he called it as he saw it" after extensive research in genetics and human behavior.)    This is why I'm not a big fan of complete democracy in the presence of irresponsible "journalism", whether on paper or on a cell phone screen.  As Scar says in the movie the Lion King,.... (click here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfSea_Q4WXg  ... 15 seconds.)

So I disagree with the use of the word "new" when Henninger says his point is to "describe what is going on... the "new" exponentially-expanding world of information technologies is creating permanent instability ..."   No.  The exponentially expanding world of information technologies dates from the invention of writing, and political instability is not "created by" technology. (tip of the hat and wink to David Coy.)  It is created by people who utilize the technology in a particular way, usually a very ignorant, short-sighted, and often self-serving way, without realizing the long-term effect their action has on the human institutions.  Today's journalists, commentators, "pundits", and yes, even some of us old graybeard denizens of the academy (like yours truly) often spout off ideas which, simply due to the reach of the technology, like Gutenberg's, will cause others to reach conclusions, judgments, opinions, attitudes, etc. which the originator hadn't stopped to think about, and if the originator had, probably would not have promulgated in the first place.

The author of an old book called Ecclesiastes says there is a time (and place) for everything. This implies that there is an inappropriate time and place.  I believe it.

Read some articles about the iconoclasts, the resulting counter-reformation, the inquisitions, and other results of Gutenberg's invention to see what we're in for if our journalists (and social networkers) aren't careful.   Perhaps one might begin to appreciate some of my acidity, rancor, and contempt for so much of today's "news". I've been there and although I haven't "done that", I have seen its effects, and it isn't pretty.

Bottom line:  I agree entirely and completely with Henninger's take on instability, and the widespread dispersal of communication leading to instability.  But this is not new.

David Fordham
JMU

Video:  Scar's surrounded by idiots --- https://mail.google.com/a/trinity.edu/#inbox/12decc30470f9b36

 

We Live in Public 2009 Documentary Film --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public

The film details the experiences of "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of," Josh Harris. The dot.com millionaire founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous tech boom of the late '90s. After achieving prominence amongst the Silicon Valley set, Harris became interested in controversial human experiments which tested the effects of media and technology on the development of personal identity. Ondi Timoner documented the major business-related moments of Harris's life for more than a decade, setting the tone for her documentary of the virtual world and its supposed control of human lives.

Among Harris' experiments touched on in the film is the art project "Quiet: We Live in Public," an Orwellian, Big Brother concept developed in the late '90s which placed more than 100 artists in a human terrarium under New York City, with myriad webcams following and capturing every move the artists made. The pièce de résistance was a Japanese-style capsule hotel outfitted with cameras in every pod, and screens that allowed each occupant to monitor the other pods installed in the basement by artist Jeff Gompertz.

The film's website describes how, "With Quiet, Harris proved how, in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including another six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public."

"He climbs into the TV set and he becomes the rat in his own experiment at this point, and the results don't turn out very well for him," says Timoner of the six month period Harris broadcast his life in his NYC loft live online. "He really takes the only relationship that he's ever had that was close and intimate and beaches it on 30 motion-controlled surveillance cameras and 66 invasive microphones. I mean his girlfriend who signed on to it thinking it would be fun and cool, and that they were living a fast and crazy Internet life, she ended up leaving him. She just couldn't be intimate in public. And I think that's an important lesson; the Internet, as wonderful as it is, is not an intimate medium. It's just not. If you want to keep something intimate and if you want to keep something sacred, you probably shouldn't post it."

The film includes commentary from internet personalities Chris DeWolfe, Jason Calacanis, Douglas Rushkoff, and venture capitalist Fred Wilson as well as artists and producers involved in the "Quiet: We Live in Public" event V Owen Bush, Leo Fernekes, Feedbuck, Leo Koenig, Gabriella Latessa, Alex Arcadia, Zeroboy, Alfredo Martinez, and others.

 

We Live In Public - Official Trailer ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_XSTwfdFwIY

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm


"Supreme Court Will Hear Case Over Foreign Textbooks Imported and Resold in U.S.," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 16, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Supreme-Court-Will-Hear-Case/131568/

Jensen Comment
If the Supreme Court condones this practice it will become a much larger problem for financial accounting textbooks when the SEC finally sets a deadline for transitioning from US GAAP to IFRS. Pressures may mount for more uniform pricing worldwide.

There's still a huge difference between what most medications cost in the U.S. versus outside the U.S. for identical medications. Here in the White Mountains I only live 70 miles from the Quebec border. Many of our friends puchase their prescribed medicines in Canada. Just inside the Canadian border there are physicians that for a very nominal fee with launder U.S. prescriptions into Canadian prescriptions.

I doubt that there's a similar Quebec market for textbooks. This is due mainly to the fact that Quebec textbooks are written in French.


From The Scout Report on April 6, 2012

WebVideoFetcher --- http://webvideofetcher.com/ 

The WebVideoFetcher is an application designed to allow users to convert and download nearly any audio or video URL from a range of sources, such as YouTube, Google, or Facebook. Visitors can simply drop the URL for the item in question into the handy form here and the application will take care of the rest. This version is compatible with all operating systems.  


Noodzy --- http://www.noodzy.com/ 

The World Wide Web is a big place, and Noodzy can help interested parties get around it via their helpful service. After logging into their free account, visitors can use tags to execute what the folks at Noodzy call "quick actions." With these tags, users can navigate to sites quickly, and also perform a range of actions seamlessly. This version is compatible with all operating systems. Email: contact@noodzy.com


Canada says goodbye to the humble one cent coin
Canadian penny to join ranks of shinplasters, half-crowns
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/1154368--canadian-penny-to-join-ranks-of-shinplasters-half-crowns

Now the Canadian penny's days are numbered, is the nickel next?
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/03/29/now-the-canadian-pennys-days-are-numbered-is-the-nickel-next/

So long, Canadian penny. I won't miss you
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57407213-1/so-long-canadian-penny-i-wont-miss-you/

Coins and Canada
http://www.coinsandcanada.com/

On the Origins of Money
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/menger/money.txt

From the Scout Report on April 13, 2012

Google Politics & Elections --- http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results 

Google has developed this helpful web-based tool to help citizens, journalists, and others stay abreast of various political campaigns throughout the United States. Visitors can view and interact with a clickable map of the United States to find out information about each candidate and his (or potentially her) activities. Additionally, visitors can use the Issues area to track news items on topics like the economy, immigration, healthcare, and others. This version is compatible with all operating systems.

Miitla --- http://miitla.com/

Miitla is a convenient acronym for Mind It Later, and it allows users to save interesting websites or online items of note for future reference. Visitors need to just sign up for a free account and they will have the ability to create categories and make notes as a reminder of why each item was worthy of saving. It's a nice way to save online resources for future use and it is compatible with all operating systems.

 


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


Education Tutorials

The Nature of Science and the Scientific Method --- http://www.geosociety.org/educate/NatureOfScience.htm

Video Tutorial on Creating Surveys Using Google Forms ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZEjmxTvR4k&feature=youtu.be
Thank you Richard Campbell for the heads up.

Brown Center on Education Policy --- http://www.brookings.edu/brown.aspx
2012 Report on How Well American Students are Learning --- http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2012/0216_brown_education_loveless.aspx
Full Report --- http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2012/0216_brown_education_loveless/0216_brown_education_loveless.pdf

This edition of the Brown Center Report on American Education marks the first issue of volume three—and eleventh issue over all. The first installment was published in 2000, just as the Presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Al Gore were winding down. Education was an important issue in that campaign. It has not been thus far in the current campaign for the Republican nomination (as of February 2012). And it is unlikely to be a prominent issue in the fall general election. Despite that, the three studies in this Brown Center Report investigate questions that the victor in the 2012 campaign, and the team assembled to lead the U.S. Department of Education, will face in the years ahead. The first section is on the Common Core State Standards, a project that President Obama has backed enthusiastically. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the Common Core; detailed standards have been written in English language arts and mathematics; and assessments are being developed to be ready by the 2014–2015 school year. The first section attempts to predict the effect of the Common Core on student achievement. Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards—not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states—the study foresees little to no impact on student learning. That conclusion is based on analyzing states’ past experience with standards and examining several years of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

States have had curricular standards for schools within their own borders for many years. Data on the effects of those standards are analyzed to produce three findings. 1) The quality of state standards, as indicated by the well-known ratings from the Fordham Foundation, is not related to state achievement. 2) The rigor of state standards, as measured by how high states place the cut point for students to be deemed proficient, is also unrelated to achievement. Raising or lowering the cut point is related to achievement in fourth grade, but the effect is small, and the direction of causality (whether a change in cut point produces a change in test score or vice versa) is difficult to determine. 3) The ability of standards to reduce variation in achievement, in other words to reduce differences in achievement, is also weak. Common standards will only affect variation between and among states (analysts use the grammatically suspect “between-state” as shorthand for this kind of variation). Achievement variation existing within states is already influenced, to the extent that standards can exert influence, by the states standards under which schools currently operate. Within state variation is four to five times larger than the variation between states. Put another way, anyone who follows NAEP scores knows that the difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi is quite large. What is often overlooked is that every state has a mini-Massachusetts and Mississippi contrast within its own borders. Common state standards only target the differences between states, not within them, sharply limiting common state standards’ potential impact on achievement differences. The second section of the Report investigates achievement gaps on NAEP. The NAEP has two different tests: the Long-Term Trend NAEP, which began in 1969, and the Main NAEP, which began in 1990. The two tests differ in several respects, but they both carry the NAEP label and both are integral components of “The Nation’s Report Card.”

Achievement gaps are the test score differences between groups of students with different socioeconomic (SES) characteristics: for example, racial or ethnic background, family income, or language status. The second section poses the question: Do the two NAEP tests report similar achievement gaps? Researchers and policy makers are well aware that significant test score gaps exist between SES groups. Researchers try to study them, policy makers try to close them. What NAEP has to say about the magnitude of such gaps plays an important role in the policy arena. The analysis presented in section two indicates that the two NAEPs do in fact differ. The Main NAEP consistently reports larger SES gaps. This is only a preliminary study, a first cut at the data that reveals a general pattern, so the findings must be viewed cautiously. And explanations for the phenomenon are necessarily speculative. More work needs to be done on this topic. The third section of the report is on international assessments. Interpretations of international test scores are characterized by three common mistakes. The first occurs when a nation’s scores go up or down dramatically and analysts explain the test score change by pointing to a particular policy. The case of Poland’s gains in reading is offered as an excellent example of dubious causality attributed to a single policy. The second mistake stems from relying on rankings to gauge a country’s academic standing. National rankings have statistical properties that can mislead observers into thinking that large differences are small or small differences are large. They can also make growth appear larger or smaller than it really is. Several examples are provided of misinterpretations of rankings and suggestions on how to avoid them. The third mistake is pointing to a small group of highperforming nations, often called “A+ countries,” and recommending, with no additional analysis, that their policies should be adopted. The same policies may be embraced by the lowest performing nations or nations in the middle of the distribution. On any test, the entire distribution must be considered, not just scores at the top.

 

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

The Nature of Science and the Scientific Method --- http://www.geosociety.org/educate/NatureOfScience.htm

Science Oxford Live [iTunes] --- http://www.scienceoxfordlive.com/

Interactive Physics Simulations [Flash] --- http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/category/physics

The Science of Speed --- http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/sos/

Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century --- http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1103.html

Theo Wangemann's 1889-90 European Recordings
http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/theo-wangemann-1889-1890-european-recordings.htm 

The Sourcebook for Teaching Science: Employing Scientific Methods ---
http://www.csun.edu/science/books/sourcebook/

Life Sciences - FREE Teaching and Learning Resources ---
http://free.ed.gov/subjects.cfm?subject_id=54&toplvl=41

BioQUEST [open curricula for biology] --- http://bioquest.org/

Clinical Skills Online (medicine and dentistry and vet med) --- http://www.elu.sgul.ac.uk/cso/

PhysioBank (bioengineering) --- http://www.physionet.org/physiobank/

The Scientist --- Multimedia http://the-scientist.com/category/multimedia/

Richard Feynman Presents Quantum Electrodynamics for the NonScientist --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/richard_feynman_presents_quantum_electrodynamics_for_the_nonscientist.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Arctic Sea Ice --- http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

The A&P Professor (Anatomy & Physiology) --- http://www.theapprofessor.org/

Anatomy and Physiology Learning Module --- http://msjensen.cehd.umn.edu/Webanatomy/default.asp

The APS Archive of Teaching Resources (physiology) --- http://www.apsarchive.org

12 Mobile Learning Science Applications for the iPod Touch
http://www.teachscienceandmath.com/2010/08/20/12-mobile-learning-science-applications-for-the-ipod-touch/ 

Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (Botany) --- http://www.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/2169/en

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science Education News Index --- http://www.hhmi.org/news/sci_ed.html

Learn About Spinal Muscular Atrophy --- http://www.learnaboutsma.org/

Neuroscience for Kids (Science, Medicine, Children) ---  http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html 
Other resources for neuroscience can be found at http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ehc.html

Lecture Archives-Environmental Science Institute --- http://www.esi.utexas.edu/hot-science-cool-talks/lecture-archives

USGS Emergency Management (Geology) --- http://www.usgs.gov/emergency/

Cooperative Forestry Research Unit --- http://www.umaine.edu/cfru/

Michael T. "Nuf Ced" McGreevey (early sports bar in Boston) ---
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/collections/72157623971712149/

From the Scout Report on April 13, 2012

As the mayor of Detroit inks a deal with the state of Michigan, there is a new sense of hope in the Motor City Stalled in Motor City
http://www.economist.com/node/21552249?fsrc=scn%5Cu00252Ffb%5Cu00252Fwl%5Cu00252Far%5Cu00252Fstalledinmotorcity 

Deal Might Be The Key to Save Detroit
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/06/150129157/deal-might-be-the-key-to-save-detroit 

Blotting-Not Squatting-In Detroit Neighborhoods
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/05/142341520/blotting-not-squatting-in-detroit-neighborhoods 

Detroit right to accept agreement
http://www.thetimesherald.com/article/20120410/OPINION01/304100010 

DSO outlook upbeat, but funding worries persist
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120410/ENT01/204100358/DSO-outlook-upbeat--but-funding-worries-persist  

Detroit Can't Wait http://www.michigan.gov/detroitcantwait

 

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

Brown Center on Education Policy --- http://www.brookings.edu/brown.aspx
Brown Center on Education Policy --- http://www.brookings.edu/brown.aspx
2012 Report on How Well American Students are Learning  --- http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2012/0216_brown_education_loveless.aspx
Full Report --- http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2012/0216_brown_education_loveless/0216_brown_education_loveless.pdf

United Nations: Humanitarian Affairs --- http://www.un.org/en/humanitarian/

Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century --- http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1103.html

The Nuclear Vault: U.S. Nuclear Detection and Counterterrorism, 1998- 2009
 --- http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb270/index.htm

USC Shoah Foundation Institute [civil rights, bigotry] http://college.usc.edu/vhi/

Missouri Digital News --- http://www.mdn.org/

USC Digital Library: Charlotta Bass/California Eagle Collection (African American Civil Rights) --- Click Here
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/search/controller/browse.htm?collectionList=scl&browseTitle=Charlotta+Bass+%2F+California+Eagle&type=Collections&panelId=tree1Panel&summary=COLLECTION&mode=search

The Nature of Science and the Scientific Method --- http://www.geosociety.org/educate/NatureOfScience.htm

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

New Jersey Digital Legal Library --- http://njlegallib.rutgers.edu/

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


Math Tutorials

12 Mobile Learning Science Applications for the iPod Touch
http://www.teachscienceandmath.com/2010/08/20/12-mobile-learning-science-applications-for-the-ipod-touch/ 

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


History Tutorials

History of Computing
Internet Archive: Computers & Technology --- http://archive.org/details/computersandtechvideos

British Women Romantic Poets (1789-1832) --- http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/

International Museum of Women --- http://imow.org

Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/henri_matisse_illustrates_1935_edition_of_james_joyces_iulyssesi.html

Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Asian Cities --- http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/maps/asian-cities/

Theo Wangemann's 1889-90 European Recordings
http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/theo-wangemann-1889-1890-european-recordings.htm  

National Music Museum --- http://orgs.usd.edu/nmm/

Confederate Imprints Collection: Sheet Music (Civil War) --- Click Here
http://content.lib.ua.edu/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=exact&CISOFIELD1=CISOSEARCHALL&CISOROOT=all&CISOBOX1=Confederate+Imprints+Collection

Old Wooden Church in Poland --- http://www.dsu.swidnica.pl/spacery_wirtualne/kpg/kps.html

British Museum: Explore: Time --- http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/themes/time/introduction.aspx

Town Greens --- http://www.towngreens.com/

New Glarus and Green County Local History (Swiss Settlement in Wisconsin ---
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/WI/NewGlarusLocHist

Wisconsin County Histories --- http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wch/

Explore UK (University of Kentucky) --- http://exploreuk.uky.edu/exploreukhome.html

University of Massachusetts: Distinguished Visitors Program ---
http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/umarmot/?page_id=975

Pennsylvania State University Libraries: Streaming Video Content --- http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/digital/instmats.html

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


Language Tutorials

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


Music Tutorials

Confederate Imprints Collection: Sheet Music (Civil War) --- Click Here
http://content.lib.ua.edu/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=exact&CISOFIELD1=CISOSEARCHALL&CISOROOT=all&CISOBOX1=Confederate+Imprints+Collection

Theo Wangemann's 1889-90 European Recordings
http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/theo-wangemann-1889-1890-european-recordings.htm 

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

Data Visualization and Music
The Geometry of Sound Visualized --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/the_geometry_of_sound_visualized.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

April 10, 2012 message from Scott Bokaker

Right up Prof. Jensen's Alley. I bet he is an aficionado too.

Music is embedded with mathematical logic -- But it can be hard to hear the patterns beneath the sounds.

Which is where visualizations come in. While bar graphs call to mind business presentations and third grade science fair projects, YouTube user musanim has repurposed these little lines to help you out.

Using Music Animation Machine MIDI Player, classical favorites including Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune and more, appear as colored lines that scroll along as the music plays. Lines are different lengths depending on the time they're held in the song, and different colors depending on the note being played.

Read (and see) the rest at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/classical-music-bar-graph_n_1415766.html

 

Bob Jensen's threads on data visualization ---
Visualization of Multivariate Data (including faces) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm

 

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/

April 9, 2012

April 10, 2012

  • Incontinence Drugs: Benefits and Harms Compared
  • Summer Temperature Swings May Harm Elderly
  • Soy Supplements Can Cool Hot Flashes: Study
  • Dental X-rays Linked to Brain Tumors
  • Want to Lose Weight? Skip Trendy Diets
  • Teen Births Hit All-Time Low
  • Genes Pinpointed for Common Childhood Obesity
  • Mom's Health While Pregnant Linked to Autism Risk
  • Sex Ed Becoming Less Prevalent in Grades 6-12
  • April 11, 2012

    April 12, 2012

    April 13, 2012

    April 14, 2012

    April 16, 2012

    April 17, 2012

    April 18, 2012

    April 20, 2012

    April 23, 2012

     


    Learn About Spinal Muscular Atrophy --- http://www.learnaboutsma.org/

    Neuroscience for Kids (Science, Medicine, Children) ---  http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html 
    Other resources for neuroscience can be found at http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ehc.html


    Clinical Skills Online (medicine and dentistry and vet med) --- http://www.elu.sgul.ac.uk/cso/




    The Critic: Hilarious Oscar-Winning Film Narrated by Mel Brooks (1963) --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/ithe_critici_hilarious_oscar-winning_film_narrated_by_mel_brooks_1963.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Tax Poetry from The New York Times (yawn) ---
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/at-tax-time-no-accounting-for-poetry.html?_r=3&src=rechp


    Repeats forwarded by Auntie Bev

    1) NUDITY I was driving with my three young children one warm summer evening when a woman in the convertible ahead of us stood up and waved. She was stark naked! As I was reeling from the shock, I heard my 5-year-old shout from the back seat, 'Mom, that lady isn't wearing a seat belt!'

    2) OPINIONS On the first day of school, a first-grader handed his teacher a note from his mother. The note read, 'The opinions expressed by this child are not necessarily those of his parents.'

    3) KETCHUP A woman was trying hard to get the ketchup out of the jar. During her struggle the phone rang so she asked her 4-year-old daughter to answer the phone. 'Mommy can't come to the phone to talk to you right now. She's hitting the bottle.'

    4) MORE NUDITY

    A little boy got lost at the YMCA and found himself in the women's locker room. When he was spotted, the room burst into shrieks, with ladies grabbing towels and running for cover. The little boy watched in amazement and then asked, 'What's the matter, haven't you ever seen a little boy before?'

    5) POLICE # 1 While taking a routine vandalism report at an elementary school, I was interrupted by a little girl about 6 years old. Looking up and down at my uniform, she asked, 'Are you a cop? Yes,' I answered and continued writing the report. My mother said if I ever needed help I should ask the police. Is that right?' 'Yes, that's right,' I told her. 'Well, then,' she said as she extended her foot toward me, 'would you please tie my shoe?'

    6) POLICE # 2 It was the end of the day when I parked my police van in front of the station. As I gathered my equipment, my K-9 partner, Jake, was barking, and I saw a little boy staring in at me. 'Is that a dog you got back there?' he asked. 'It sure is,' I replied. Puzzled, the boy looked at me and then towards the back of the van. Finally he said, 'What'd he do?'

    7) ELDERLY While working for an organization that delivers lunches to elderly shut-ins, I used to take my 4-year-old daughter on my afternoon rounds. She was unfailingly intrigued by t he various appliances of old age, particularly the canes, walkers and wheelchairs... One day I found her staring at a pair of false teeth soaking in a glass. As I braced myself for the inevitable barrage of questions, she merely turned and whispered, 'The tooth fairy will never believe this!'

    8) DRESS-UP A little girl was watching her parents dress for a party. When she saw her dad donning his tuxedo, she warned, 'Daddy, you shouldn't wear that suit..' 'And why not, darling?' 'You know that it always gives you a headache the next morning.'

    9) DEATH While walking along the sidewalk in front of his church, our minister heard the intoning of a prayer that nearly made his collar wilt.. Apparently, his 5-year-old son and his playmates had found a dead robin.. Feeling that proper burial should be performed, they had secured a small box and cotton batting, then dug a hole and made ready for the disposal of the deceased. The minister's son was chosen to say the appropriate prayers and with sonorous dignity intoned his version of what he thought his father always said: 'Glory be unto the Faaather, and unto the Sonnn, and into the hole he goooes.' (I want this line used at my funeral!)

    10) SCHOOL A little girl had just finished her first week of school. 'I'm just wasting my time,' she said to her mother. 'I can't read, I can't write, and they won't let me talk!'

    11) BIBLE A little boy opened the big family Bible. He was fascinated as he fingered through the old pages. Suddenly, something fell out of the Bible. He picked up the object and looked at it. What he saw was an old leaf that had been pressed in between the pages. 'Mama, look what I found,' the boy called out.. 'What have you got there, dear?' With astonishment in the young boy's voice, he answered, 'I think it's Adam's underwear!'




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

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

    Accounting  and Taxation News Sites ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

     

    For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
    AECM (Educators) http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
    AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.

    Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing, doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics) research, publication, replication, and validity testing.

     

    CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/  (Closed Down)
    CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.
    Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
    This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.
    AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1 
    This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.
    Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com 
    This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM
    FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
    Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
    FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
    www.financialexecutives.org/blog

    Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board on this financial reporting blog from Financial Executives International. The site, updated daily, compiles regulatory news, rulings and statements, comment letters on standards, and hot topics from the Web’s largest business and accounting publications and organizations. Look for continuing coverage of SOX requirements, fair value reporting and the Alternative Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such as the subprime mortgage crisis, international convergence, and rules for tax return preparers.
    The CAlCPA Tax Listserv

    September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@bonackers.com]
    Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as well as a practicing CPA)

    I found another listserve that is exceptional -

    CalCPA maintains http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/  and they let almost anyone join it.
    Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.

    There are several highly capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and the answers are often in depth.

    Scott

    Scott forwarded the following message from Jim Counts

    Yes you may mention info on your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not have access to the files and other items posted.

    Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I will get the request to join.

    Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.

    We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in California.... ]

    Please encourage your members to join our listserve.

    If any questions let me know.

    Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
    Hemet, CA
    Moderator TaxTalk

     

     

     

     

    Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) --- http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm

     

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

    Some Accounting History Sites

    Bob Jensen's Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
     

    Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
    The above libraries include international accounting history.
    The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

    MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

    Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
    http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

    Sage Accounting History --- http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269

    A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
    "The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
    Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm 

    A nice timeline of accounting history --- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING

    From Texas A&M University
    Accounting History Outline --- http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html

    Bob Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds

    History of Fraud in America --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
    Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

    Bob Jensen's Threads ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

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

    All my online pictures --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/

     

    Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
    190 Sunset Hill Road
    Sugar Hill, NH 03586
    Phone:  603-823-8482 
    Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu