Tidbits on June 26, 2012
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

This week I feature Set 01 of Photographs of Fields Near Our Cottage
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Fields/Set01/FieldsSet01.htm

 

What is going on in the Franconia Notch region?
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/138111e306b7a964
This annual series for 2012 begins on Sunday, June 24. The readings take place in the Henry Holt Barn at The Frost Place, are free and open to the public. The June readings begin at 7:30 pm. J June 24. Thank you Dawn Potter.

White Mountain News --- http://www.whitemtnews.com/

 

Tidbits on June 26, 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/

The Cult of Statistical Significance: How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm

How Accountics Scientists Should Change: 
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm 

 




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

What Is a Flame?: The First Prize-Winner at Alan Alda’s Science Video Competition --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/iwhat_is_a_flamei_the_first_prize-winner_at_alan_aldas_science_video_competition.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Jensen Comment;  This site was disappointing since there's no explanation that allows me to understand my old flames.

The Transit of Venus in HD Video --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/the_transit_of_venus_in_hd_video.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

In Cuba it's called free housing plus a ration card whether you work or not
"The Karl Marx Credit Card – When You’re Short of Kapital" ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/the_karl_marx_credit_-_when_youre_short_of_kapital.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps – Peter Adamson’s Podcast Still Going Strong --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/the_history_of_philosophy_without_any_gaps_going_strong.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Never a First Human Being --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/richard_dawkins_explains_why_there_was_never_a_first_human_being.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Internet Buys Bus Monitor A Vacation After She's Viciously Abused By Kids ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet-buys-bus-monitor-a-vacation-after-shes-viciously-abused-by-kids.php#more

Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/ray_bradbury_on_how_to_write_and_why_literature_saves_civilization.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Magician Marco Tempest Dazzles a TED Audience with “The Electric Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/magician_marco_tempest_dazzles_a_ted_audience_with_the_electric_rise_and_fall_of_nikola_tesla.html

Worker At Lion Park Gets Hugs From Sweet Lion Cubs ---
http://www.slothster.com/3005-Worker-At-Lion-Park-Gets-Hugs-From-Sweet-Lion-Cubs.html

This ride will turn your life upside down in more ways than one (I'll pass) ---
http://www.wimp.com/russiaride/

Old Radio Shows --- http://www.oldradioshows.org/

Radio Lovers --- http://www.radiolovers.com/


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

The Symphony of Science --- http://symphonyofscience.com/

The Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Concert HD 2012 Full - Duration over 200 minutes ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkLk3gaLFAM

The Russian People Are More Westernized Than Their Leaders
Russian Flash Mob Puttin' on the Ritz ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/KgoapkOo4vg?rel=0

The Mix: The Songs Of The Summer, 1962-2012 ---
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155132353/the-mix-the-songs-of-the-summer-1962-2012?ps=mh_frhdl1

Carnegie Hall Live: Lang Lang Plays Bach, Schubert And Chopin ---
http://www.npr.org/event/music/153715008/carnegie-hall-live-lang-lang-plays-bach-schubert-and-chopin

June 14, 2012 message from David Fordham

Some of us are old enough to remember the names Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire.   Those who aren't might recognize the music of the BeeGees.  That two such separated generations could coordinate timing so well says a lot for, well,...  the video editors.  Richard Campbell can probably appreciate the frame-rate adjustments which might (or might not??) have been necessary to put this together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz3CPzdCDws

Gives "dancin' with the stars" some nostalgia to enjoy.

David Fordham

June 14, 2012 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

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

My two favorite (fantastic) dancing videos are as follows:

Elanor Powell Was Fred's All-Time Most Talented Partner
This video is slow loading but worth the wait
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/Astaire-Powell%20.wmv

 

My Favorite Boogie Woogie Dance (the best piano player you never heard of)
For Boogie Woogie Piano Dancers (GREAT!)
---
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=26579077
 

More free Boogie Woogie by Sylvan Zingg (on piano, Hit the Play All Songs Button) --- http://cdbaby.com/cd/zinggtrio
Other Boogie Woogie Sites (including free lesson sites) --- http://www.boogiewoogiepiano.net/piano-jukebox/other-web-sites/other-websites.html

 

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

Found: Lost Great Depression Photos Capturing Hard Times on Farms, and in Town --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/found_lost_great_depression_photos_capturing_hard_times.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Mathematics Made Visible: The Extraordinary Art of M.C. Escher --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/mathematics_made_visible_the_extraordinary_art_of_mc_escher.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Arizona Regional Image Archive --- http://aria.arizona.edu

Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina --- http://docsouth.unc.edu/blueridgeparkway/

Edward J. McCauley Photographs (North Carolina) --- http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mccauley/ 

North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online --- http://www.ncecho.org/

Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum Digital Library --- http://www.desertmuseumdigitallibrary.org/public/index.php

Jack Sheaffer Collection (Arizona) --- http://www.library.arizona.edu/contentdm/jsheaffer/

Leslie Jones Collection (Boston historical photographs) ---
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/collections/72157623971760983/

Digital Library of the Caribbean --- http://ufdc.ufl.edu/dloc1?n=dloc

Google Now Takes Us to Great Art Works and Art Museums Around the World ---
http://www.googleartproject.com/
Especially note the "Education" hot word near the bottom of the page.

Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Art --- http://www.tate.org.uk/ita/

Modern Masters: Watch BBC Series Featuring Warhol, Matisse, Picasso and Dali --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/imodern_mastersi_watch_bbc_series_featuring_warhol_matisse_picasso_and_dali.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Ten years of the Louvre online (art history)
Musee du Louvre ---
http://www.louvre.fr/

Tate Modern: Mark Rothko --- http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/markrothko/default.shtm

The Croatian Museum of Naive Art (art history) --- http://www.hmnu.org/en/default.asp

Princeton Art Museum: Video Archive
http://www.princetonartmuseum.org/resources/video-archive/

Tate Archive Journeys --- http://www.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/

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

The Croatian Museum of Naive Art (art history) --- http://www.hmnu.org/en/default.asp

Metropolitan Museum of Art --- http://www.metmuseum.org/home.asp

Guggenheim: Interact [Real Player, Flash Player] --- http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/interact

The Baltimore Museum of Art --- http://www.artbma.org/

The Walters Art Museum (Baltimore) --- http://thewalters.org/

Print by Print: The Baltimore Museum of Art [Flash Player] ---
http://www.artbma.org/PrintbyPrint-project/index.html

Explore Art (multimedia) --- http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/

Digital History - Multimedia --- http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/multimedia.cfm

William J. Meuer Photoart Collection --- http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UW/subcollections/MeuerAlbumsAbout.html

Museums and the Web --- http://conference.archimuse.com/

Finnish National Gallery: Art Collections --- http://kokoelmat.fng.fi/wandora/w?action=gen&lang=en

British Empire Exhibition 1938 --- http://www.empireexhibition1938.co.uk/

2020 Whitney Biennial --- http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial 

Cincinnati Art Museum: The Collection ---
http://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/absolutenm/templates/ArtTempCollection.aspx?articleid=124&zoneid=71

University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee Book Arts Collection --- http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/digilib/bookarts/index.cfm

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

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive --- http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/

The Vincent Van Gogh Gallery ---  http://www.vggallery.com/

Simon Schama Presents Van Gogh and the Beginning of Modern Art --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/simon_schama_presents_vincent_van_gogh_and_the_beginning_of_modern_art.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

NEA Arts Magazine --- http://www.nea.gov/about/NEARTS/2012_v1/index.html

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

Rare 1930s Audio: W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/rare_1930s_audio_wb_yeats_reads_four_of_his_poems.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Portland State University Digital Repository --- http://dr.archives.pdx.edu/xmlui/

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

"Celebrating Bloomsday: Stephen Fry Explains His Love for Joyce’s Ulysses --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/celebrating_bloomsday_stephen_fry_explains_his_love_for_joyces_iulyssesi.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Pacific Fisherman Journal, 1903-1911 --- http://content.lib.washington.edu/pacfishweb/index.html

Digital Library of the Caribbean --- http://ufdc.ufl.edu/dloc1?n=dloc

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 June 26, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations062612.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




Ending Up in Phony (or Worse) Sites With Ever-So-Slight Spelling Errors

The Wolfram Alpha site was amazing from the start and is continuing to do amazing things. Unfortunately, most of us forget to use it for many things other than to solve an equation and print the question and answer out in great mathematical formatting and symbols ---

But this site now does ever so much more ---
Some Things You Might Want to Know About the Wolfram Alpha (WA) Search Engine:  The Good and The Evil
 as Applied to Learning Curves (Cumulative Average vs. Incremental Unit)
 http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

By the way, here is something quite unethical in yet another for-profit university promotion site.

The real Wolfram Alpha site ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/ 

The phony Worlfram Alpha site ---
http://www.worlframalpha.com/ 

Can you detect the difference in this case?
Phony outfits constantly make very slight spelling differences to take users to phony sites??


"Microsoft Finally Has a Tablet Business Model with Surface," by Dan Frommer, ReadWriteWeb, June 19, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft-finally-has-a-tablet-business-model-with-surface.php

Microsoft Launches "Surface" Surface Tablet (two models)---
http://247wallst.com/2012/06/18/microsoft-launches-surface-super-tablet/

Runs on Windows RT or comes with an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro.

9.3 mm thin, with microSD, USB 2.0, Micro HD Video, 2×2 MIMO antennae

Also see
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tablets/3364729/microsoft-announce-new-tablet/

Microsoft's 2012 "Surface" Tablet --- http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx

"The Surface: Celebrate the Competition, Question the Premise," by David Pogue, The New York Times, June 19. 2012 --- 
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/the-surface-a-new-tablet-from-microsoft/?gwh=4B88722A8D6F93FC189B50FA50DE70B8

On Monday at a Los Angeles media event that had been veiled in secrecy, Microsoft announced that it was going to make a gorgeous touchscreen tablet like the iPad. It’s called the Surface tablet. Its main differentiators from the iPad: It has a kickstand, it has real PC ports and it will run Windows 8.

In some ways, the announcement was a departure for Microsoft, which, for decades, has carefully stayed out of the PC business. There’s never been a Microsoft-branded computer.

On the other hand, the opening scenes of this movie sure look familiar. Apple comes up with a hit product (iPod, iPhone). Microsoft comes up with a rival that’s nicely designed (Zune, Windows Phone). Unfortunately, it doesn’t add anything attractive enough to lure people away from the safe choice, and nobody buys it.

There will actually be multiple Surface tablets; this is Microsoft, after all. There are already two basic models: a lighter, superthin one, with an ARM processor, that runs a modified version of Windows 8 called Windows RT, and a Pro version with an Intel chip that runs the full-blown Windows 8.

There are lots of questions. Microsoft didn’t tell us the ship date, battery life or price. The Pro version, which Microsoft hints will cost about the same as an ultrabook ($1,000), will run regular Windows apps like Office and Photoshop; so what apps, exactly, will be available for the Windows 8 RT version?

Won’t it anger Microsoft’s traditional “hardware partners” that Microsoft is now making its own competitive tablet?

Will there be a cellular version? The company demonstrated a magnetic screen cover that, ingeniously, doubles as a keyboard with trackpad. Will that be included, or sold separately?

I think that Windows 8 represents some of Microsoft’s best work. Fluid, fast, useful, easily grasped — and different from the old iPhone/Android concept of icons-on-black. I’ve been using a prerelease Windows 8 version on a Samsung tablet, and it works beautifully.

But the iPad’s been around for two years; it’s awfully late for Microsoft to begin its pursuit now. (See also: H.P.’s tablet, BlackBerry tablet, Zune.) To me, the most compelling model is the Intel version; imagine a gorgeous, sleek, thin tablet that can actually run Windows software.

Continued in article

 


Khan Academy for Free Tutorials (now including accounting tutorials) Available to the Masses ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy

A Really Misleading Video
Do Khan Academy Videos Promote “Meaningful Learning”?   Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/expert_gently_asks_whether_khan_academy_videos_promote_meaningful_learning.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

If you ever wondered whether professional scientists are skeptical about some of the incredibly fun, attractive and brief online videos that purport to explain scientific principles in a few minutes, you’d be right.

Derek Muller completed his doctoral dissertation by researching the question of what makes for effective multimedia to teach physics. Muller curates the science blog Veritasium and received his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in 2008.

It’s no small irony that Muller’s argument, that online instructional videos don’t work, has reached its biggest audience in the form of an online video. He launches right in, lecture style, with a gentle attack on the Khan Academy, which has famously flooded the Internet with free instructional videos on every subject from arithmetic to finance.

While praising the academy’s founder, Salman Khan, for his teaching and speaking talent, Muller contends that students actually don’t learn anything from science videos in general.

In experiments, he asked subjects to describe the force acting upon a ball when a juggler tosses it into the air. Then he showed them a short video that explained gravitational force.

In tests taken after watching the video, subjects provided essentially the same description as before. Subjects said they didn’t pay attention to the video because they thought they already knew the answer. If anything, the video only made them more confident about their own ideas.

Science instructional videos, Muller argues, shouldn’t just explain correct information, but should tackle misconceptions as well. He practices this approach in his own work, like this film about weightlessness in the space station. Having to work harder to think through why an idea is wrong, he says, is just as important as being told what’s right.

 

Jensen Comment
In my viewpoint learning efficiency and effectiveness is so complicated in a multivariate sense that no studies, including Muller's experiments, can be extrapolated to the something as vast as the Khan Academy.

For example, the learning from a given tutorial depends immensely on the aptitude of the learner and the intensity of concentration and replay of the tutorial.

For example, learning varies over time such as when a student is really bad at math until a point is reached where that student suddenly blossoms in math.

For example, the learning from a given tutorial depends upon the ultimate testing expected.
What they learn depends upon how we test:

"How You Test Is How They Will Learn," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Financial Accounting Blog, January 31, 2010 ---
 http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-you-test-is-how-they-will-learn.html 

I consider Muller's video misleading and superficial.

Here are some documents on the multivariate complications of the learning process:

Salman Khan Returns to MIT, Gives Commencement Speech, Likens School to Hogwarts --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/sal_khan_returns_to_mit_gives_commencement_speech_likens_school_to_hogwarts.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


Internet Buys Bus Monitor A Vacation After She's Viciously Abused By Kids ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet-buys-bus-monitor-a-vacation-after-shes-viciously-abused-by-kids.php#more

Jensen Comment
This is one of the reasons we're going to become more Orwellian with more and more video cameras watching every move in public places and in some cases private places when police make arrests, firefighters arrive in a house, teachers with in classes, dorm lounges, playgrounds, campus trails, streets, libraries, parking lots, etc.


"Gates Grants for 'Breakthrough Learning Models'," Inside Higher Ed, June 20, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/06/20/gates-grants-breakthrough-learning-models

Jensen Comment
Note especially the grant to University of the People to help it get accredited.

University of the People --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_the_People


Mathematics Made Visible: The Extraordinary Art of M.C. Escher --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/mathematics_made_visible_the_extraordinary_art_of_mc_escher.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Binary Visions: 19th-Century Woven Coverlets from the Collection of Historic Huguenot Street ---
http://www.hrvh.org/exhibit/hhsbinary/

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization ---
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/

Bob Jensen's threads on visualization ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm 


"Students and Families Miss Out on Millions in Tax Breaks, Report Says," by Michael Stratford, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/StudentsFamilies-Miss-Out/132371/

About 1.5 million tax filers in 2009 did not take advantage of the higher-education tax benefits for which they appeared to be eligible, according to a government report released on Monday.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office, says students and their families missed out on average tax benefit of $466. The missed savings totaled $726-million.

Tax benefits for higher education—which include the American Opportunity Credit, the Lifetime Learning Credit, and deductions for tuition payments and interest paid on student loans—each year total about $30-billion. But about 14 percent of the people who were eligible for the benefits in the 2009 tax year did not use them, the GAO found.

And even among those who did take advantage of some higher-education tax benefit, the report says many did not use them effectively. For example, nearly 40 percent of the students and families who took the tuition deduction could have saved more money by claiming the Lifetime Learning Credit instead. Filers who didn't maximize their tax savings paid an average of $284 more than they had to, for a total of approximately $67.2-million.

The Government Accountability Office says that, since 2005, it has repeatedly found that millions of filers eligible for higher-education tax breaks have failed to claim them. In the report the GAO recommends that the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Education work together to develop a "coordinated, comprehensive strategy" aimed at better informing students about the benefits for which they are eligible.

Bob Jensen's tax helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation

 


"Exploring Accounting Doctoral Program Decline:  Variation and the Search for Antecedents," by Timothy J. Fogarty and Anthony D. Holder, Issues in Accounting Education, May 2012 ---
Not yet posted on June 18, 2012

ABSTRACT
The inadequate supply of new terminally qualified accounting faculty poses a great concern for many accounting faculty and administrators. Although the general downward trajectory has been well observed, more specific information would offer potential insights about causes and continuation. This paper examines change in accounting doctoral student production in the U.S. since 1989 through the use of five-year moving verges. Aggregated on this basis, the downward movement predominates, notwithstanding the schools that began new programs or increased doctoral student production during this time. The results show that larger declines occurred for middle prestige schools, for larger universities, and for public schools. Schools that periodically successfully compete in M.B.A.. program rankings also more likely have diminished in size. of their accounting Ph.D. programs. Despite a recent increase in graduations, data on the population of current doctoral students suggest the continuation of the problems associated with the supply and demand imbalance that exists in this sector of the U.S. academy.

Jensen Comment
This is a useful update on the doctoral program shortages relative to demand for new tenure-track faculty in North American universities. However, it does not suggest any reasons or remedies for this phenomenon.  The accounting doctoral program in many ways defies laws of supply and demand. Accounting faculty are the among the highest paid faculty in rank (except possibly in unionized colleges and universities that are not wage competitive). For suggested causes and remedies of this problem see ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

Accountancy Doctoral Program Information from Jim Hasselback ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoctInfo.html 

Especially note the table of the entire history of accounting doctoral graduates for all AACSB universities in the U.S. ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf
In that table you can note the rise or decline (almost all declines) for each university.

Links to 91 AACSB University Doctoral Programs ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/AtgDoctProg.html

October 8, 2008 message from Amelia Balwin

These are the slides from today's presentations. This is a work on progress. Your comments are welcome, particularly on the design of the surveys.

I am very grateful for the support of this research provided by an Ernst & Young Diversity Grant Award!

 

"So you want to get a Ph.D.?" by David Wood, BYU ---
http://www.byuaccounting.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=So_you_want_to_get_a_Ph.D.%3F

 

"The Accounting Doctoral Shortage: Time for a New Model," by Jerry E. Trapnell, Neal Mero, Jan R. Williams and George W. Krull, Issues in Accounting Education, November 2009 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/iace.2009.24.4.427

ABSTRACT:
The crisis in supply versus demand for doctorally qualified faculty members in accounting is well documented (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business [AACSB] 2003a, 2003b; Plumlee et al. 2005; Leslie 2008). Little progress has been made in addressing this serious challenge facing the accounting academic community and the accounting profession. Faculty time, institutional incentives, the doctoral model itself, and research diversity are noted as major challenges to making progress on this issue. The authors propose six recommendations, including a new, extramurally funded research program aimed at supporting doctoral students that functions similar to research programs supported by such organizations as the National Science Foundation and other science‐based funding sources. The goal is to create capacity, improve structures for doctoral programs, and provide incentives to enhance doctoral enrollments. This should lead to an increased supply of graduates while also enhancing and supporting broad‐based research outcomes across the accounting landscape, including auditing and tax.

 

Accounting Doctoral Programs

PQ = Professionally Qualified under AACSB standards (seldom in tenure tracks)
AQ = Academically Qualified under AACSB standards

May 3, 2011 message to Barry Rice from Bob Jensen

Hi Barry,

Faculty without doctoral degrees who meet the AACSB PQ standards are still pretty much second class citizens and will find the tenure track hurdles to eventual full professorship very difficult except in colleges that pay poorly at all levels.

There are a number of alternatives for a CPA/CMA looking into AACSB AQ alternatives in in accounting in North American universities:

The best alternative is to enter into a traditional accounting doctoral program at an AACSB university. Virtually all of these in North America are accountics doctoral programs requiring 4-6 years of full time onsite study and research beyond the masters degree. The good news is that these programs generally have free tuition, room, and board allowances. The bad news is that students who have little interest in becoming mathematicians and statisticians and social scientists need not apply --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms 

As a second alternative Central Florida University has an onsite doctoral program that is stronger in the accounting and lighter in the accountics. Kennesaw State University has a three-year executive DBA program that has quant-lite alternatives, but this is only available in accounting to older executives who enter with PQ-accounting qualifications. It also costs nearly $100,000 plus room and board even for Georgia residents. The DBA is also not likely to get the graduate into a R1 research university tenure track.

As a third alternative there are now some online accounting doctoral programs that are quant-lite and only take three years, but these diplomas aren't worth the paper they're written on --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm#CommercialPrograms  Cappella University is a very good online university, but its online accounting doctoral program is nothing more than a glorified online MBA degree that has, to my knowledge, no known accounting researchers teaching in the program. Capella will not reveal its doctoral program faculty to prospective students. I don't think the North American academic job market yet recognizes Capella-type and Nova-type doctorates except in universities that would probably accept the graduates as PQ faculty without a doctorate.

As a fourth alternative there are some of the executive accounting doctoral programs in Europe, especially England, that really don't count for much in the North American job market.

As a fifth alternative, a student can get a three-year non-accounting PhD degree from a quality doctoral program such as an economics or computer science PhD from any of the 100+ top flagship state/provincial universities in North America. Then if the student also has PQ credentials to teach in an accounting program, the PhD graduate can enroll in an accounting part-time "Bridge Program" anointed by the AACSB --- http://www.aacsb.edu/conferences_seminars/seminars/bp.asp 

As a sixth alternative, a student can get a three-year law degree in addition to getting PQ credentials in some areas where lawyers often get into accounting program tenure tracks. The most common specialty for lawyers is tax accounting. Some accounting departments also teach business law and ethics using lawyers.

Hope this helps.

Bob Jensen

PS
Case Western has a very respected accounting history track in its PhD program, but I'm not certain how many of the accountics hurdles are relaxed except at the dissertation stage.

Advice and Bibliography for Accounting Ph.D. Students and New Faculty by James Martin ---
http://maaw.info/AdviceforAccountingPhDstudentsMain.htm

The Sad State of North American Accountancy Doctoral Programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms


"Assess Carefully: Don’t Be Duped by Bogus Journals," by Brendan A. Rapple, Inside Higher Ed, June 17, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/world-view/assess-carefully-don%E2%80%99t-be-duped-bogus-journals 

This blog follows a previous post on a related theme by Maria Yudkevich, "Publications for Money: What Creates the Market for Paid Academic Journals."

Numerous evaluative criteria may be used in determining a journal’s scholarly worth. A common criterion is a journal’s Impact Factor (IF). However, among the many problems with IFs is that only journals indexed by ISI’s Journal Citation Report have them (over 8,000 in Science and 2,700 in the Social Sciences). SCImago Journal & Country Rank, a portal showing the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus® database from 1996, is also useful for assessing journals. Another tool, Google Scholar Metrics, facilitates gauging the visibility and influence of recent journal articles and by extension journals themselves. Yet another instrument, the Eigenfactor score and Article Influence score, utilizes citation data to evaluate the influence of a journal in relation to others. Of course, strong pointers about a journal’s quality are usually provided by the status of the body publishing it, the reputation of its editorial board members, the rigor of its peer-reviewing, its acceptance/rejection rates, and where it is indexed.

Another factor in assessing a journal’s worth may be author publication fees. Such fees do not necessarily constitute a red flag as numerous quality open access (OA) journals employ a system of “author pays". However, there’s the swiftly growing difficulty of sham journals whose sole rationale is to make a profit with little interest in disseminating scholarship. Such journals, often with credible scholarly names, publish most articles submitted and charge authors high publication fees. It’s a significant problem that more and more academics are being hoodwinked by these clearly fake journals. A useful resource for determining some of these phony publications is Jeffrey Beall's
List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers.

Though I’m a librarian I receive numerous solicitations to submit articles, together with hefty publication fees, to supposedly scholarly journals and/or to serve on their editorial boards. I suspect that faculty scholars receive far more of these invitations. It’s an epidemic. Indeed, it’s probable that the owners of these sham periodicals when spamming scholars pay little attention to whether the recipients’ academic interests are relevant to the journal’s disciplinary focus. Some scholars are even placed on editorial boards even though they have not given their consent. Generally these ersatz journals, with scientific and technological disciplines being particularly well represented, have abnormally high acceptance rates with minimal or no peer reviewing. Of course, this is a rational modus operandi for the journals’ sleazy operators as genuine peer review that weeds out poor scholarship would thwart their primary goal of making money. The more articles they publish, the more money they make with publication fees of $500 or more per article being common. Moreover, articles are often published with little or no proofreading and checking. Indeed, authors are often not asked for their final approval before publication. Little thought is given to digital preservation. Articles, journals and, indeed, the publishers themselves can disappear without trace. The result is a proliferation of essentially vanity press publishing that benefits the purveyors of these spurious journals and does damage to the academic reputation of the naïve or careless authors who are conned by these predators.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
We also have some bogus journals in accounting research and education, those journals of last resort when your paper has been rejected by three or more legitimate accounting research journals. Sometimes those journals publish proceedings of bogus conferences. Those are conferences held in very delightful tourist places in Europe, the tropics, Australia, New Zealand, etc. where your presentation session will be attended by three "scholars" only because they are presenters in the same session. These high registration fee conferences are attended mainly by professors ripping off their universities for a free tourist trip, and publishing the conference papers electronically is an added bonus of a line on a resume. Does anybody really read those "published" papers for which "refereeing" is a fraud?

 


"The European Atrocity You Never Heard About," by R.M. Douglas, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-European-Atrocity-You/132123/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
After World War II ended, my wife's family was forced off their Czechoslovakia farm at gun point. Being only five years old, Erika never knew why they were forced to be refuges walking on the road. She was told that the soldiers pointing guns at them were "communists." Erika with her mother, grandparents, and Tante Pepe headed for Germany, but the Germans were blocking Czech immigrants at border check points even if they were German speaking refuges seeking shelter. Erika was eventually smuggled across the border to the bombed out, dark, and cold Regensburg train depot on a Christmas eve.

The rest of the story ---
 

A Year 2000 message of love from my wife, Erika.  
She describes how a Munich street urchin became Cinderella filled with love and joy --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas00.htm 

 

·         A Year 2001 message of love from my wife, Erika 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas01.htm
 
 

 


"'Hall of Shame,' Year Two," by Elise Young and Libby A. Nelson, Inside Higher Ed, June 13, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/13/education-department-focuses-state-role-cost-increases-annual-lists


"The Education of Dasmine Cathey," by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Education-of-Dasmine/132065/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

"Dasmine Cathey Reflects on His Moment in the Spotlight," by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/dasmine-reaction/30411

Jensen Comment
This is an article that each of us will probably react differently to after reading it carefully. Some readers will see this as another case, in a long list of cases, where a NCAA Division 1 university makes a sham out of college education of a star, albeit learning disabled, athlete. By sham I mean where the main goal is to make that athlete able to read after four years --- whereas the goal for non-athletes in the university is much higher. As a non-athlete he probably would have flunked out of the university in the first year. The coaches helped pull him through courses while he was still eligible to play football only to leave him hanging out to dry in completing the requirements for a diploma.

Other readers will see this as a case where a learning disabled student was pushed beyond what he might have otherwise been without special treatment as an athlete in college. The tragedy is that his non-athlete counterparts receive no such special treatment from "coaches."

As a retired college professor I question the commitment of any student who does not care enough to try by attending class every day and by seeking help from the teachers.

Personally, I think if Dasmine Cathey gets his diploma it makes a sham out of that diploma. Dasmine deserves better in life, but why does it have to be at the expense of lowered academic standards in higher education?

"Big Sports Programs Step Up Hiring to Help Marginal Students," by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/the-fastest-growing-job-in-sports-helping-marginal-students/30171


"Pondering the Rest of the Apple Announcements," by David Pogue, The New York Times, June 14, 2012 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/pondering-the-rest-of-the-apple-announcements/

In its keynote on Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple took the wraps off enough new features and products to cover a mummy parade. I wrote about the highlights, and reviewed the new laptop — but that wasn’t the end of the food for thought. Herewith, some further reflections.

MacBook Air. Only last week, I wrote about my own personal electronics stash. I noted that I really don’t need the DVD drive in my current MacBook, and wouldn’t mind shedding the weight — but my alternative, the MacBook Air, doesn’t have enough storage for my photos and videos.

Well, surprise: Apple has updated its MacBook Airs. Now they have a faster chip, faster graphics, more memory, USB 3 jacks and — here’s the kicker — greater storage capacity, up to 512 gigabytes. And the price has dropped by $100. Hmmm.

Dictation. As soon as Apple mentioned that talk-to-type would become a standard Mac feature in the new Mountain Lion software, I thought of the MacSpeech folks. These poor guys have been trying for over a decade to bring speech recognition to the Mac; eventually, their product, now called Dragon Dictate for Mac, was bought by Nuance. And now that dictation will be baked into the Mac, who’d buy Dragon?

O.K., well, first of all, Dragon is still far more accurate, since it tunes to your particular voice. Second, it works even when you’re not online; the Mountain Lion dictation requires an Internet connection.

And finally, Nuance provides the dictation service for Apple’s gadgets — so Nuance is the beneficiary of this deal, too.

Still, the WWDC announcements reminded small software companies everywhere that their efforts could be duplicated by Apple at any time. Think of Growl (very similar to the new Notifications feature of Mountain Lion); the Classics app (whose bookshelf design was borrowed for iBooks); Instapaper (now made obsolete by a new feature in Mountain Lion’s version of Safari); and so on.

I guess that when you dance around the footsteps of an elephant, you live with the knowledge that you might get trampled.

FaceTime over cellular. In iOS 6, the new version of Apple’s mobile operating system, you’ll be able to make video calls wherever you are, even over 3G cellular networks; until now, it’s been Wi-Fi only.

Why did it take so long? Apple points out that unlike voice calls, data transmissions generally don’t require continuous, steady, uninterrupted connections to the cell networks. Your data consumption is usually in spurts: a Web page, an e-mail download and so on. When you use a cellphone, your phone generally hands off from tower to tower as you move — or even, sometimes, when you stay in one place; until data connections can be made continuous and uninterrupted, video calls won’t be satisfying.

In other words, it took the cellular companies a couple of years to fine-tune their networks to handle uninterrupted data transmissions. (And by the way, not all of the carriers have done so — it’s likely that not all carriers will support FaceTime.)

Mail. In iOS 6, on the iPhone and iPad, you’ll now be able to attach a photo or video to an e-mail message you’re writing.

Sounds pretty obvious, I know. But until now, you had to begin that process in the Photos app. You’d choose the photos first, tap Mail and then land in the Mail app with the photos attached to a blank outgoing message. A little backward, really.

The Mail app can now open password-protected Office documents, too.

Laptop backlash. There’s a lot of reaction to the new 15-inch MacBook Pro — the one without a DVD drive, hard drive, Ethernet or FireWire. A lot of people are complaining about what’s missing. (And no news of a new 17-inch laptop, either.)

A lot of people have noted, too, that you can’t upgrade or service the new laptop yourself. The memory and storage that come installed the day you purchase it are the memory and storage you’ll always have.

It’s a movie that we’ve all seen before. Over and over and over. Remember when Apple killed off the floppy drive? The dial-up modem? The removable battery?

Trust me — I’m among the complainers. I screeched when they killed off the dial-up modem; it was in a day when Wi-Fi was not ubiquitous by any means.

But we, too, are gnats on the elephant. We have alternatives to Apple stuff; if we don’t like the package deal Apple offers, we don’t have to buy Apple.

Continued in article


DNS Changer Malware

Forwarded by Jim Martin

These links are in the July 2012 issue of PC World

For a DNS Changer Check-Up see: www.dns-ok.us

That site provides a link to the FBI's site at
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911

For infected systems see http://www.dcwg.org/fix/

or Avir's repair tool at
http://www.avira.com/en/support-for-home-knowledgebase-detail/kbid/1199

Google warns hundreds of thousands may lose Internet in July (July 9 to be exact) ---
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/05/25/google-warns-hundreds-thousands-may-lose-internet-in-july/

Digital Forensics and Cyber Security Center at the University of Rhode Island ---
http://www.dfcsc.uri.edu/

Bob Jensen's threads on computer and networking security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection


“One skill that would be helpful for higher education employees today is the ability to think about the nonfinancial metrics. We need people who can think strategically about all the factors to consider in the decision to, for example, keep or cut a program. Finances are important, but so are the other metrics that can help to paint a more complete picture of value.”
"Measuring the ‘Unmeasurable’ June 10, 2012, by Dayna Catropa, Inside Higher Ed, June 10, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/stratedgy/measuring-%E2%80%98unmeasurable%E2%80%99

Jensen Comment
The main focus of this panel was on the corporatization of education.

When it comes to corporations in general, accountants are experts on financial measures and quite limited in terms of non-financial measures.

Triple Bottom Reporting --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#TripleBottom

Intangibles Reporting --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#TheoryDisputes

Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit universities operating in the gray zone of fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud


How to Lie With Statistics ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics

Bill Mahar --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Maher

How to lie with statistics
"Dunce Bill Maher: U.S. Is Fifth Worst in the World in Income Inequality," by Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters, June 9, 2012 ---
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/06/09/dunce-bill-maher-us-fifth-worst-world-income-inequality

In this week's "How Dumb Is Bill Maher" segment, the Obama-supporting comedian actually said on HBO's Real Time Friday that the United States ranks fifth worst in the world in income inequality.

Actually, we rank 43rd (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Shortly after the panel segment began Friday, Maher asked his guests, “How bad is income inequality going to get when unions disappear altogether?”

Michael Brendan Dougherty, the politics editor at Business Insider, replied, “It’s going to get much worse.”

“How could it get much worse?” asked Maher. “I mean, right now we’re fifth in the world, fifth worst in income inequality.”

Where did Maher get this figure?

Well, that's anybody's guess for according to the CIA's World Factbook, America currently ranks 43rd.

That puts us better at this statistic than over 30 percent of the nations ranked by the CIA.

Some notables with far worse income inequality include Thailand, Hong Kong, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, China, Peru, and Argentina.

So, once again, as he does virtually every time he's on television, Maher was not only wrong about something he arrogantly claimed as fact - he was dead wrong.

Keep up the bad work, Bill!

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/06/09/dunce-bill-maher-us-fifth-worst-world-income-inequality#ixzz1xOdEFnDN

Jensen Comment
I think a better title for this would be "Bill Mahar's Dreams of Gini." Actual Gini Coefficients vary by raters, but the U.S. is in nowhere near the worst third of 207 sovereign states  by anybody's dreams of Gini ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

When comparing nations as to inequality there's a huge problem with defining "unequal" in terms of what? For example, when Bulgaria and Norway both have similar Gini Coefficients, we have to question what this really tells us in terms of where the living is good. Similarly, when the United States and China have similar Gini Coefficients we have to ask the same question.

Measurement Problems of the Gini Coefficient ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#General_problems_of_measurement

Comparing income distributions among countries may be difficult because benefits systems may differ. For example, some countries give benefits in the form of money while others give food stamps, which might not be counted by some economists and researchers as income in the Lorenz curve and therefore not taken into account in the Gini coefficient. The Soviet Union was measured to have relatively high income inequality: by some estimates, in the late 1970s, Gini coefficient of its urban population was as high as 0.38,[19] which is higher than many Western countries today. This number would not reflect those benefits received by Soviet citizens that were not monetized for measurement, which may include child care for children as young as two months, elementary, secondary and higher education, cradle-to-grave medical care, and heavily subsidized or provided housing. In this example, a more accurate comparison between the 1970s Soviet Union and Western countries may require one to assign monetary values to all benefits – a difficult task in the absence of free markets. Similar problems arise whenever a comparison between more liberalized economies and partially socialist economies is attempted. Benefits may take various and unexpected forms: for example, major oil producers such as Venezuela and Iran provide indirect benefits to its citizens by subsidizing the retail price of gasoline. Similarly, in some societies people may have significant income in other forms than money, for example through subsistence farming or bartering. Like non-monetary benefits, the value of these incomes is difficult to quantify. Different quantifications of these incomes will yield different Gini coefficients. The measure will give different results when applied to individuals instead of households. When different populations are not measured with consistent definitions, comparison is not meaningful. As for all statistics, there may be systematic and random errors in the data. The meaning of the Gini coefficient decreases as the data become less accurate. Also, countries may collect data differently, making it difficult to compare statistics between countries.

 

As one result of this criticism, in addition to or in competition with the Gini coefficient entropy measures are frequently used (e.g. the Theil Index and the Atkinson index). These measures attempt to compare the distribution of resources by intelligent agents in the market with a maximum entropy random distribution, which would occur if these agents acted like non-intelligent particles in a closed system following the laws of statistical physics. Credit risk

 

The Gini coefficient is also commonly used for the measurement of the discriminatory power of rating systems in credit risk management.

 

The discriminatory power refers to a credit risk model's ability to differentiate between defaulting and non-defaulting clients. The above formula G_1 may be used for the final model and also at individual model factor level, to quantify the discriminatory power of individual factors. This is as a result of too many non defaulting clients falling into the lower points scale e.g. factor has a 10 point scale and 30% of non defaulting clients are being assigned the lowest points available e.g. 0 or negative points. This indicates that the factor is behaving in a counter-intuitive manner and would require further investigation at the model development stage.

How to Lie With Statistics ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics


The Unresolved Debate on Why Inequality of Income is Increasing in the United States

The Gini Coefficient for increasing inequality in the United States economy points to dramatic increases in inequality between the wealthy people and the non-wealthy citizens of the U.S. See the third graph at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
Note that there are huge limitations in interpreting the Gini Coefficient that over decades that has equated North Korea with Canada and Bulgaria with Norway in terms of income equality. The Gini Coefficient points to equality without giving regard to differences in the amount wealth/income being shared among citizens. Hence people in North Korea may be equal in their starvation existence to the same degree that Canadians may be equal in sharing a much more bounteous bag of goods and services.

There's a huge difference when comparing nations as to poverty versus comparing nations in terms of Gini Coefficients ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty    versus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
It is almost impossible to avoid poverty in the most lawless nations (like Somalia) , whereas some of the nations with the worst Gini Coefficients (like Brazil) have laws and tough law enforcement.

Thus is it virtually meaningless to compare the Gini Coefficients of different nations. It is, however, a different story when comparing the trend lines across time for any given nation. In doing so, huge problems in measurement must still be taken into account ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Two of the best known books on the subject of inequiality are as follows:
I find them lacking in making recommendations on how best to a increase bounteous bag of goods to be divided in a nation. These are not books on capitalism versus socialism. Rather they are books about unjust economic inequality.

 

Capitalism is given credit in the dramatic reduction of poverty in Chile ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_Chile
But capitalism is not given credit for the relatively high inequality in Chile.

Socialism is given credit for the dramatic increase in equality in Cuba. But it is not given credit for reducing poverty.

 

In the 21st Century Some Scholars (notably Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz) Blame the Wealthy for the Increased Inequality in the United States
This leads to various proposals of increasing the marginal tax rates on the wealthy (at a time when most other nations have reduced such rates)

"Morning Advantage: The Rich Are Making It Harder for the Rest to Get Ahead," by Paul Michelman, Harvard Review Blog, June 13, 2012 --- "
http://blogs.hbr.org/morning-advantage/2012/06/morning-advantage-the-rich-are.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

"The Price of Inequality," by Nobel Laureate George E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate ---
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-price-of-inequality

In the 21st Century Other Scholars Are Asserting That the Rise in Inequality is Much More Complicated Than Pinning the Blame of the Wealthy

Some blame the F grade of K-12 education for failing to prepare our young people for the demands of working and earning in the 21st Century ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#HomeworkDeclining
On television I watched a middle school teacher complaining that they raised her "full-time" working hours from three to six hours each school day. My own daughter gets 16 weeks away from teaching each year while earning more than she made from her previous medial lab technician job that only had two weeks per year vacation (and lab techs have lots of on-call time on nights and weekends).

Some like me claim the biggest disgrace in education is nearly universal grade inflation K-20 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Our graduates are given false hopes about their abilities to enter the working world. And many of them eventually become discouraged from even trying to get skills needed for prosperity in work and future study. Meanwhile we export jobs or import better educated graduates from outside the United States.

Some blame the curse of drug addiction and an explosion of crime infested buying and selling illegal drugs. Most certainly this has led to a rise in family instability, failing parental responsibility, mental disabilities, prostitution, and falling motivation to learn and work rather than join drug gangs. This has added greatly to inequality.

Some blame government interference with mortgage markets (such as forcing Fannie and Freddie to buy mortgages way in excess of property values) caused the housing bubble which in turn had ripple effects on destroying the poor and middle class savings in their homes, their job opportunities, and business opportunities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze

Some blame millions of local, state, and Federal government regulations, especially EPA, OSHA, ADA, and FDA regulations, for inhibiting business firms from investing and hiring.

Some blame business firms, local governments, state governments, and the federal government in good times for agreeing to long-term wage contracts (e.g., those union wages at GM in the 1980s) and underfunded pension and disability plans (e.g., unfunded Medicare benefits to disabled citizens) for creating and unsustainable economy in terms of wages and entitlements ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Most noteworthy here is the Social Security drug benefits championed by President Bush that added enormously to our trillion dollar deficits. This may seem like a huge move to greater equality except that many of those retirees like me receiving thousands of dollars of annual benefits can afford our own medications such that it made us more wealthy when many of us really did not need the benefits.

It's popular these days to blame our troubles on the sinking economies outside the United States --- notably those of the European Union

The list goes on and on in the blame game that mostly leads to nowhere and a gridlocked Congress.

It's clear that economists and politicians are mostly clueless about how to attack both the inequality, unfunded entitlements, and monumental spending deficits at all levels of government. It's also clear that just blaming the wealthy for our rising inequality is a cop out. Inequality will probably get worse even if we tax away all the wealth of the wealthy, because the fundamental problems in our society cannot be overcome with mere distribution of wealth.

Everybody claims we need one kind of tax reform or another, but the tax reform proposals themselves are superficial and may be dysfunctional in solving any of our inequality problems:
Case Studies in Gaming the Income Tax Laws ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm

Many claim we need to make a high equality nation like Denmark our ideal rather than cling to The American Dream. I disagree ---
The American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

The time has come for virtually all citizens of the United States from the richest to the poorest to be willing to make the sacrifices that our ancestors made while seeking The American Dream. We must take responsibility for our children and be willing to make huge sacrifices on their behalf, including working longer hours, learning more to improve knowledge and skills, starting our own ventures, paying more taxes, refusing to let criminals take over our streets, searching for innovations, etc. The good life will not come from the Denmark Dream. It will come from The American Dream.
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

 

"The endangered public company:  The rise and fall of a great invention, and why it matters," The Economist, May 19, 2012 ---
http://www.economist.com/node/21555562

AS THIS newspaper went to press, Facebook was about to become a public company. It will be one of the biggest stockmarket flotations ever: the social-networking giant expects investors to value it at $100 billion or so. The news raises several questions, from “Is it worth that much?” to “What will it do next?” But the most intriguing question is what Facebook’s flotation tells us about the state of the public company itself.

At first glance, all is well. The public company was invented in the mid-19th century to provide the giants of the industrial age with capital. That Facebook is joining Microsoft and Google on the stockmarket suggests that public listings are performing the same miracle for the internet age. Not every 19th-century invention has weathered so well.

But look closer and the picture changes (see article). Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s young founder, resisted going public for as long as he could, not least because so many heads of listed companies advised him to. He is taking the plunge only because American law requires any firm with more than a certain number of shareholders to publish quarterly accounts just as if it were listed. Like Google before it, Facebook has structured itself more like a private firm than a public one: Mr Zuckerberg will keep most of the voting rights, for example.

The number of public companies has fallen dramatically over the past decade—by 38% in America since 1997 and 48% in Britain. The number of initial public offerings (IPOs) in America has declined from an average of 311 a year in 1980-2000 to 99 a year in 2001-11. Small companies, those with annual sales of less than $50m before their IPOs—have been hardest hit. In 1980-2000 an average of 165 small companies undertook IPOs in America each year. In 2001-09 that number fell to 30. Facebook will probably give the IPO market a temporary boost—several other companies are queuing up to follow its lead—but they will do little to offset the long-term decline.

Companies are like jets; the elite go private

Mr Zuckerberg will be joining a troubled club. The burden of regulation has grown heavier for public companies since the collapse of Enron in 2001. Corporate chiefs complain that the combination of fussy regulators and demanding money managers makes it impossible to focus on long-term growth. Shareholders are also angry. Their interests seldom seem to be properly aligned at public companies with those of the managers, who often waste squillions on empire-building and sumptuous perks. Shareholders are typically too dispersed to monitor the men on the spot. Attempts to solve the problem by giving managers shares have largely failed.

At the same time, alternative corporate forms are flourishing. Once “going public” was every CEO’s dream; now it is perfectly respectable to “go private”, like Burger King, Boots and countless other famous names. State-run enterprises have recovered from the wreck of communism and now include the world’s biggest mobile-phone company (China Mobile), its most successful port operator (Dubai World), its fastest-growing big airline (Emirates) and its 13 biggest oil companies.

No doubt the sluggish public equity markets have played a role in this. But these alternative corporate forms have addressed some of the structural weaknesses that once held them back. Access to capital? Private-equity firms, helped by tax breaks, and venture capitalists both have cash to spare, and there are private markets such as SecondMarket (where $1 billion-worth of shares has changed hands since 2008). Limited liability? Partners need no longer be fully liable, and firms can have as many partners as they want. Professional managers? Family firms employ them by the HBS-load and state-owned ones are no longer just sinecures for the well-connected.

Make capitalism popular again

Does all this matter? The increase in the number of corporate forms is a good thing: a varied ecosystem is more robust. But there are reasons to worry about the decline of an organisation that has spread prosperity for 150 years.

First, public companies have been central to innovation and job creation. One reason why entrepreneurs work so hard, and why venture capitalists place so many risky bets, is because they hope to make a fortune by going public. IPOs provide young firms with cash to hire new hands and disrupt established markets. The alternative is to sell themselves to established firms—hardly a recipe for creative destruction. Imagine if the fledgling Apple and Google had been bought by IBM.

Second, public companies let in daylight. They have to publish quarterly reports, hold shareholder meetings (which have grown acrimonious of late), deal with analysts and generally conduct themselves in an open manner. By contrast, private companies and family firms operate in a fog of secrecy.

Third, public companies give ordinary people a chance to invest directly in capitalism’s most important wealth-creating machines. The 20th century saw shareholding broadened, as state firms were privatised and mutual funds proliferated. But today popular capitalism is in retreat. Fewer IPOs mean fewer chances for ordinary people to put their money into a future Google. The rise of private equity and the spread of private markets are returning power to a club of privileged investors.

All this argues for a change in thinking—especially among the politicians who have heaped regulations onto Western public companies, blithely assuming that businessfolk have no choice but to go public in the long run. Many firms now go (or stay) private to avoid red tape. The result is that ever more business is conducted in the dark, with rich insiders playing a more powerful role.

Public companies built the railroads of the 19th century. They filled the world with cars and televisions and computers. They brought transparency to business life and opportunities to small investors. Because public companies sell shares to the unsophisticated, policymakers are right to regulate them more tightly than other forms of corporate organisation. But not so tightly that entrepreneurs start to dread the prospect of a public listing. The public company has long been the locomotive of capitalism. Governments should not derail it.


TED Video by Richard Wilkinson:  The Situation of Inequality
Jensen Preliminary Comment
I'm always in favor in academic settings in trying to show all sides of an issue, the issue in this case being equality of income, opportunity, health care, diet, etc.

Firstly, I should state my biases. I'm rooted in The American Dream that people of all ages should have all-important opportunities for training and education, which is why I strongly favor tax supported schools, colleges, and free open sharing of knowledge. In the U.S. we've seen a decline in opportunity with great variations safety and education in schools say in South Chicago versus those in South Dakota. Inequality in opportunity in education is appalling to me.

Secondly, I'm in favor of universal health care (much like the Canadian Model and not at all like the Obamacare Model) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
I note, however, that America's vast investments in health have not all been wasted. The entire world has benefited from the U.S. advances in pharmacology, medical technology, and other discoveries. More people come to the U.S. for complicated medical treatments than vice versa. But there are gaps in terms of access where the poorest and the richest people have better access than some of the people caught in the middle who cannot afford good health insurance.

I could go on about my liberal (progressive) biases in many areas, but it may be better for you to watch the following very moving video about inequality around the world.

 

TED Video by Richard Wilkinson:  The Situation of Inequality ---
http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/the-situation-of-inequality-2/

 

Jensen Comment
Some might conclude that this video is just the opposite of what I've been urging about The American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm
I agree with much (actually most) of this video.

There are some comments in the video that I most certainly must register disagreement.
For example, Wilkinson at one point asserts:  "If you want The American Dream go to Denmark."
In the context of universal educational opportunity in the 21st Century this sadly correct.
However, in other contexts this is not correct. The Denmark Dream of free education, health care, retirement pensions, etc. has in retrospect had impacts that run counter to the American Dream. The American Dream inspires ambition, whereas the Denmark Dream destroys ambition --- Danes are provided for cradle-to-grave with equality no matter how hard you work. Studies show that Danes usually aren't interested in overtime work opportunities. They don't have to save for their children or their old age.

Danes have less incentive to invent and innovate since the tax structure takes most of the rewards for success to the government. They are less likely to do such things as go heavily into mortgage debt and invest their savings in a risky investment that takes 16 or more hours a day of hard labor to bring to long-term fruition when the mortgages are paid off ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

What is the most misleading to me in Wilconsin's video is that simply redistributing the wealth in America to make us more like Denmark would bring about dramatic improvements in all the problems of inequality that he addresses. However, he simply avoids more complicated questions. For example, Denmark does not have millions of very poor and uneducated people from other parts of the world sneaking into and squatting for the long-term in Denmark. Denmark does not have anywhere near the crime issues with drugs and gangs that are raising havoc in U.S. schools, medical clinics, families, neighborhoods, and prisons. For example, putting the highest paid and best teachers in urban schools in our largest schools is not going to solve the problem of neighborhood gangs, fear, intimidation, extortion, rape, prostitution, and murder that interferes with equal opportunity education in America. I think Wilkinson knows all these problems but selectively does not want to poison his conclusion that redistribution of wealth is the magic bullet of society.

The Scandinavian countries, Japan, and South Korea all are countries of low diversity and minimal immigration. They do not experience many of the problems (as well as benefits) that comes from diversity. Where they've experimented with slight amounts of immigration they've encountered huge problems such as a spike in rapes in Norway attributed to immigration. The "happiest nations" if the world have the least legal and illegal immigration ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm
 

The underlying theme of the Wilconson video is that increasing the top marginal tax rates to achieve inequality will have nothing but good outcomes for developed countries (he makes an exception for undeveloped countries). But this does not explain why even his most favored equality-bent countries like Scandinavia and Japan discovered that very high marginal tax rates were dysfunctional to their economies:

Data that Wilconson does not show is that nations benefitting (in his eyes) from high top marginal tax rates have actually been lowering this rates and creating greater inequality in their nations. Wilconson makes no attempt to explain why all these nations are lowering their top marginal tax rates ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm

Marginal Tax Rate Declines in the Rest of the World ---
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MarginalTaxRates.html

 


Table 1 Maximum Marginal Tax Rates on Individual Income
*. Hong Kong’s maximum tax (the “standard rate”) has normally been 15 percent, effectively capping the marginal rate at high income levels (in exchange for no personal exemptions).
**. The highest U.S. tax rate of 39.6 percent after 1993 was reduced to 38.6 percent in 2002 and to 35 percent in 2003.

  1979 1990 2002
Argentina 45 30 35
Australia 62 48 47
Austria 62 50 50
Belgium 76 55 52
Bolivia 48 10 13
Botswana 75 50 25
Brazil 55 25 28
Canada (Ontario) 58 47 46
Chile 60 50 43
Colombia 56 30 35
Denmark 73 68 59
Egypt 80 65 40
Finland 71 43 37
France 60 52 50
Germany 56 53 49
Greece 60 50 40
Guatemala 40 34 31
Hong Kong 25* 25 16
Hungary 60 50 40
India 60 50 30
Indonesia 50 35 35
Iran 90 75 35
Ireland 65 56 42
Israel 66 48 50
Italy 72 50 52
Jamaica 58 33 25
Japan 75 50 50
South Korea 89 50 36
Malaysia 60 45 28
Mauritius 50 35 25
Mexico 55 35 40
Netherlands 72 60 52
New Zealand 60 33 39
Norway 75 54 48
Pakistan 55 45 35
Philippines 70 35 32
Portugal 84 40 40
Puerto Rico 79 43 33
Russia NA 60 13
Singapore 55 33 26
Spain 66 56 48
Sweden 87 65 56
Thailand 60 55 37
Trinidad and Tobago 70 35 35
Turkey 75 50 45
United Kingdom 83 40 40
United States 70 33 39**

Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers; International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation.

 

 

My conclusion is that Wilconson's TED video is very thought provoking and has changed my thinking on a lot of things. But as a magic bullet for issues threatening sustainability of the United States his implied solutions are superficial and misleading. The U.S. is an immensely more complicated than Denmark. Denmark solutions in the U.S. might very well indeed spell complete disaster by destroying ambition, savings, risk taking (business loans), and innovations.

All the sophomores of the world will buy into Wilconson's TED video hook, line, and sinker. Hopefully, their teachers and professors have more good sense. We need more ambition and innovation in the world rather than the complacency of the Denmark Dream not suited for mass immigrations and cultural diversity conflicts. We need to face the reality that most of the people of the world are still greedy and tribal and conflicted with differing religions. For them the answers are so simple.


 


"CUNY biz school fixed Wall Streeters' GPAs to keep receiving tuition: sources," by Susan Edelman, Cynthia R. Fage, and Candice Glove, New York Post, June 17, 2012 ---
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/is_on_at_cuny_fvNDXnweTy7guoYG9K8hQP 
Thank you Marc Dupree for the heads up.

While teaching how corporations cook their books, a CUNY business school was fixing grades.

An administrator at Baruch College’s prestigious Zicklin School of Business forged professors’ names to raise the grade point averages of students seeking master’s degrees to become dealmakers and corporate leaders, The Post has learned.

An internal CUNY probe found the course grades of “approximately 15 students” were falsified to keep their GPAs high enough to stay in the programs, Baruch officials acknowledged.

The trickery prevented enrollees, including many mid-level Wall Streeters whose firms picked up their tabs, from flunking out — and kept their fat tuition checks flowing in.

The accelerated “executive programs” in business and finance allow students to earn a master’s degree in 10 to 22 months while working full-time.

The tuition: $45,000 to $75,000.

“It was done for money,” an insider said of the scam. “They get a lot more money from those students. They don’t want to lose these people, so they changed their grades.”

Baruch has referred the matter to law-enforcement agencies, the college said in a statement. Spokeswoman Christina Latouf would not say if students knew their grades were being changed or were complicit in the scheme.

But Baruch has started calling some recent graduates with disturbing news: Their sheepskins are invalid.

“What do you mean? My diploma’s on my wall. How can you tell me I don’t have a degree?” one grad said, according to a source.

Chris Koutsoutis, a top administrator of the executive programs, allegedly forged professors’ signatures on “change of grade” forms, CUNY sources confirmed.

“I won’t have a comment about that,” Koutsoutis said when confronted by The Post at his home in Flushing, Queens.

Professors submit students’ final grades electronically. Any change requires the submission of a “change of grade” form in which a professor gives a reason for the revision and signs his or her name. The form also requires the approval and signature of supervisors.

The CUNY probe also found “forged contracts,” officials said. Koutsoutis inked contracts with vendors who made travel and other arrangements for class trips to cities such as Milan, Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro.

Koutsoutis would not comment on the forged contracts except to deny he profited from them.

“All I will say is whatever allegations that I did it for financial gain, they are false,” he said. “No students, faculty or administrators gave me any money. I never took any freebies. I was offered trips but never took any.”

Continued in article

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

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


At the University of Wisconsin
"Online Degree Program Lets Students Test Out of What They Already Know," by Angela Chen, Chronicle of Higher Education,June 20, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-degree-program-lets-students-test-out-of-what-they-already-know/37097?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The University of Wisconsin plans to start a “flexible degree” program online focused on allowing undergraduates to test out of material they have mastered.

The new program, geared toward working adults with some college education, operates under a “competency based” model, said Raymond Cross, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin Colleges and University of Wisconsin-Extension. This model is similar to the Advanced Placement program, in which high-school students take AP tests to pass out of college-level courses.

In the university’s new program, college courses will be broken down into units. For example, a higher-level mathematics class could include units such as linear algebra and trigonometry. Students can then test out of certain units (instead of full courses) and spend time learning only material that is new to them. Eventually, the units will build into courses, and then a degree. The flexible-degree program and traditional-degree program will have identical course requirements, and since each flexible degree will be associated with a specific campus, the student will receive a diploma from the originating campus and not from the system.

“We’re trying to find ways to reduce the cost of education,” Mr. Cross said. “Implicit in the model is the idea that you can take lectures online from free sources—like Khan Academy and MITx—and prepare yourself for the competency test. Then take the remaining courses online at UW.”

The biggest challenge, he says, is determining how to best test competency. Some units will require tests, while others may require written papers or laboratory work. The difficulty of measuring “competency’” for any unit will affect the program’s pricing structure, which has not yet been determined.

The idea of competency-based credentials is common in technical and health fields, Mr. Cross said, but it is rare at traditional universities. The program is part of a push to encourage Wisconsin’s 700,000 college dropouts to go back to a university.

“With higher ed now, people often have a piece or two missing in their education, so we are responding to the changes in our culture and helping them pull all these pieces together,” Mr. Cross said. “Students already interface with a lot of different institutions and different classes and professors, and this will help that process. I don’t think this diminishes traditional higher ed at all. I think it’ll enhance it.”

The first courses in the flexible-degree program will be available starting in fall 2013. The university is still developing exact degree specifications, Mr. Cross said. Likely degrees include business management and information technology.

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

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment (including distance education assessment issues and competency-based testing) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm


Udacity to Launch 5 New Courses on June 25. Shooting for Largest Online Class Ever.--- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/udacity_to_launch_5_new_classes.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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


"3 Colleges' Different Approaches Shape Learning in Econ 101," by Dan Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Econ-101-From-College-to/132299/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

"A Descriptive Study of Institutional Characteristics of the Introductory Accounting Course," by Jonathan E. Duchac and Anthony J. Amoruso, Issues in Accounting Education, February 2012 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.2308/iace-50089 

ABSTRACT:
Introductory accounting has historically been a foundational course in most undergraduate business curriculums. In many cases, the course serves as a prerequisite for all upper-level business and accounting courses. However, no current public data exist on the structure and characteristics of introductory accounting across a large sample of institutions. This study begins to fill this void by providing descriptive data on institutional characteristics of the introductory accounting course. Data are collected on seven different dimensions of the course suggested by the recommendations of the Accounting Education Change Commission (AECC) and recent trends in higher education: course size and staffing, pedagogical orientation/teaching approach, standardization of course elements across instructors, the textbook selection process, use of technology-based course management tools, off-site course delivery, and transfer credit acceptance. In some cases, the current data can be compared to previous research that examined similar characteristics. The resulting data can provide instructors, administrators, and researchers with a useful benchmark for developing teaching plans, curriculum, and future academic research.

"Improving Student Satisfaction in a First-Year Undergraduate Accounting Course by Team Learning," by Evelien Opdecam and Patricia Everaert, Issues in Accounting Education, February 2012 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.2308/iace-10217

ABSTRACT:
This paper discusses student satisfaction and course experiences of firstyear undergraduate students in an introductory financial accounting course where team learning was implemented during tutorials. Course experiences and satisfaction, as perceived by students in the team learning condition, were compared to those in a traditional lecture-based control condition. A post-experimental questionnaire, with open and closed-ended questions, was administered. Students reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction in the team learning condition and a more positive course experience compared to students in the lecture-based condition. The increased time spent on accounting in the team learning condition resulted in increased learning, as evidenced by higher grades on the final exam in the team learning condition. An analysis of open-ended questions revealed that both learning conditions fit for particular students. High pre-class preparation was considered a strength of the team learning condition, while the comprehensive explanation by the teacher was the most frequently mentioned advantage of the lecture-based condition. This paper further contributes to the practice of accounting education by illustrating a way to implement team learning in a large undergraduate accounting course.

"A Half Century of Close Encounters with the First Course in Accounting," by Doyle Z. Williams, Issues in Accounting Education, November 2011 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.2308/iace-50070 :

ABSTRACT:
This paper describes the author’s encounters with the first course in accounting in his half century of study, teaching, and service on five campuses, as a student, doctoral teaching assistant, lecturer, professor, accounting department administrator, business dean, and senior scholar. Also described are his encounters with issues surrounding the first course in accounting in a variety of leadership roles with the American Accounting Association, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Accounting Education Change Commission, Association for Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business, the Accounting Programs Leadership Group, and the Federation of Schools of Accountancy. Changes in the nature, content, and teaching of the first course in accounting are discussed. Observations for the future of the first course in accounting are offered.

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


A Heads  Up on "Tenacious" Barter Accounting and Bookkeeping

"Al Qaeda Offshoot Offers Camels for Obama's Head, Hens for Hillary Clinton's," Yahoo News, June 8, 2012 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/al-qaeda-offshoot-offers-camels-obamas-head-hens-165924543--abc-news-topstories.html

Jensen Comment
I think the promise of 78 virgins in the hereafter is more effective when recruiting tactic to attract suicide bombers. What good are camels and hens if you blow yourself up?

From an accounting standpoint these are barter transactions. It might be interesting in accounting courses to envision these three types of barter journal entries, but that probably would not be viewed as a politically correct assignment in most universities. Do we capitalize or expense human heads under Al Qaeda accounting standards? In theory, preserved heads have long-term earnings potential as tourist attractions, but what if some of the tourists are Navy Seals? That is one big contingent liability that's hard to book in the ledger ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#TheoryDisputes

"Barter bookkeeping: A tenacious system," by Dale L. Flesher, Accounting Historians Journal, 1979, Vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 83-86 ---
http://umiss.lib.olemiss.edu:82/articles/1000211.225/1.PDF

"Barter: Development of accounting practice and theory," Silliard E.: Stone, Accounting Historians Journal, 1985, Volume 12, no. 2, pp. 95-108 ---
http://umiss.lib.olemiss.edu:82/articles/1000438.694/1.PDF

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting history ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory


Going Global With Laws and Regulations is Often a Disaster

"The Absurd International Criminal Court:  After 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, it has completed precisely one trial," by Eric Posner, The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303753904577452122153205162.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t

Ten years ago, on July 1, 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened its doors. The treaty that created this new body gave it jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and other international offenses committed anywhere in the world, by anyone against anyone. Supporters argued that it would put an end to impunity for dictators and their henchmen, and usher in a new era of international justice.

The court has been a failure. Although it has a staff of more than 700 and an annual budget in excess of $100 million, the ICC has so far completed precisely one trial—that of Thomas Lubanga, a commander in the civil war in Congo. It took three years and ended with a conviction on March 14, 2012. The appeals have not begun. A few other trials are ongoing or set to begin.

Even by the low standards of international tribunals, this performance should raise an eyebrow. What went wrong?

As with any international organization, the court's ability to operate rests on the consent of states. One hundred and twenty-one nations have agreed to the treaty, a number that sounds impressive. But the 121 include few authoritarian countries that employ repression or conduct military operations. Mostly democracies with some semblance of the rule of law have joined. Since the ICC gains jurisdiction over a defendant only if domestic legal institutions fail to investigate international crimes in good faith, most member countries are those least likely to be subject to its jurisdiction.

Yet where the ICC has exercised its authority, its actions have been controversial. Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic have asked the court to investigate crimes committed by various rebel groups. In all these cases, the court has been careful not to offend governments willing to cooperate with it—but the upshot has been that it has pursued rebels only and not government officials who might be responsible for atrocities committed by the military.

Even when the court has acted with more independence, it has caused more harm than good. The court's involvement in Uganda's civil war in 2004 may well have helped persuade rebels to temporarily lay down their arms. But the refusal to withdraw its indictments has so far interfered with attempts to make peace with the rebels, who demand amnesty.

The ICC has also intervened in Kenya, on its own initiative, in the wake of violence that accompanied elections in 2007. Criminal investigations of top-level Kenyan politicians, conducted at a snail's pace, have inflamed tensions in that country but without producing a resolution.

The ICC indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2009 did nothing to bring peace to that country. Other African countries continue to welcome him to their capitals in violation of their treaty obligations.

The court also indicted Moammar Gadhafi, whom Libyan forces murdered, and his son Saif Gadhafi, who is being held by one of the many rebel factions in that unhappy country. An impasse has arisen because Libyans have no desire to yield Saif Gadhafi to the comforts of a Dutch jail and would much prefer to execute him. (The ICC cannot impose the death penalty.)

Meanwhile, African countries accuse the ICC of bias against Africans, as it has never indicted people from any other continent. And few countries have shown much inclination to capture indicted suspects and hand them over to the court.

Why does the International Criminal Court have such difficulty? Unlike a national court, the ICC must constantly convince governments to support it while at the same time avoiding the impression that it is a tool of governments. For all the talk of the "global rule of law," this is an intensely political process and essentially contradictory.

The court focuses on Africa because African countries are weak. It operates with incredible slowness because it needs to give the impression to suspicious audiences that it is fair. But because it moves so slowly, it cannot react in a timely manner to fast-changing international events—and it does little to deter dictators, whose life expectancies tend to be short in any event. The upshot is that the court is both distrusted and ineffectual.

Continued in article


"Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty?" by Diane Ackerman, The New York Times, June 10, 2012 ---
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/are-we-living-in-sensory-overload-or-sensory-poverty/?emc=eta1

. . .

I’m certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders. We’re losing track of our senses, and spending less and less time experiencing the world firsthand. At some medical schools, it’s even possible for future doctors to attend virtual anatomy classes, in which they can dissect a body by computer — minus that whole smelly, fleshy, disturbing human element.

When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards. But they don’t report everything. Or even most things. We’d collapse from sheer exhaustion. They filter experience, so that the brain isn’t swamped by so many stimuli that it can’t focus on what may be lifesaving. Some of their expertise comes with the genetic suit, but most of it must be learned, updated and refined, through the fine art of focusing deeply, in the present, through the senses. Once you’ve held a ball, turning it in your hands, you need only see another ball to remember the feel of roundness. Strip the brain of too much feedback from the senses and life not only feels poorer, but learning grows less reliable. Subtract the subtle physical sensations, and you lose a wealth of problem-solving and lifesaving details.

As an antidote I wish schools would teach the value of cultivating presence. As people complain more and more these days, attention spans are growing shorter, and we’ve begun living in attention blinks. More social than ever before, we’re spending less time alone with our thoughts, and even less relating to other animals and nature. Too often we’re missing in action, brain busy, working or playing indoors, while completely unaware of the world around us.

One solution is to spend a few minutes every day just paying close attention to some facet of nature. A bonus is that the process will be refreshing. When a sense of presence steals up the bones, one enters a mental state where needling worries soften, careers slow their cantering, and the imaginary line between us and the rest of nature dissolves. Then for whole moments one may see nothing but the flaky trunk of a paper-birch tree with its papyrus-like bark. Or, indoors, watch how a vase full of tulips, whose genes have traveled eons and silk roads, arch their spumoni-colored ruffles and nod gently by an open window.

On the periodic table of the heart, somewhere between wonderon and unattainium, lies presence, which one doesn’t so much take as engage in, like a romance, and without which one can live just fine, but not thrive.

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


One of My Heroes in Michael Lewis --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lewis

Michael Lewis Tells Princeton Graduates How Moneyball Rules Apply to Real Life --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/michael_lewis_princeton_graduation_speech.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
 

Jensen Comment
You can read more about the books and videos of Michael Lewis by scrolling down at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds 
 

Breaking the Bank Frontline Video
In Breaking the Bank, FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, Bush’s War) draws on a rare combination of high-profile interviews with key players Ken Lewis and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to reveal the story of two banks at the heart of the financial crisis, the rocky merger, and the government’s new role in taking over — some call it “nationalizing” — the American banking system.
Simoleon Sense, September 18, 2009 --- http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-frontline-breaking-the-bank/
Bob Jensen's threads on the banking bailout --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

I'm suspicious that Andreas Hippin, in the above tidbit, was inspired by "The End" by Michael Lewis
"The End," by Michael Lewis December 2008 Issue The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#TheEnd 

Inside the Wall Street Collapse (Parts 1 and 2) first shown on March 14, 2010

Video 2 (Greatest Swindle in the History of the World) --- http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6298154n&tag=contentMain;contentAux

Video 3 (Swindler's Compensation Scandals) --- http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6298084n&tag=contentMain;contentAux

 

"Michael Lewis: The Economic Crisis -When Irish Eyes Are Crying," Vanity Fair via Simoleon Sense, February 2, 2011 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/michael-lewis-the-economic-crisis-when-irish-eyes-are-crying/

  • This is a must read to understand what went wrong on Wall Street --- especially the punch line!
    "The End," by Michael Lewis December 2008 Issue The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
    http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true

    To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

    I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

    When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.

    Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.

    I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

    I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

    Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.

    In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

    At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

    The New Order The crash did more than wipe out money. It also reordered the power on Wall Street. What a Swell Party A pictorial timeline of some Wall Street highs and lows from 1985 to 2007. Worst of Times Most economists predict a recovery late next year. Don’t bet on it. Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. By the end of the trading day, a woman whom basically no one had ever heard of had shaved $369 billion off the value of financial firms in the market. Four days later, Citigroup’s C.E.O., Chuck Prince, resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend.

    From that moment, Whitney became E.F. Hutton: When she spoke, people listened. Her message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of ­borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people inside the firms were essentially worth nothing. For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.

    Rivals accused Whitney of being overrated; bloggers accused her of being lucky. What she was, mainly, was right. But it’s true that she was, in part, guessing. There was no way she could have known what was going to happen to these Wall Street firms. The C.E.O.’s themselves didn’t know.

    Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn’t sink Wall Street. She just expressed most clearly and loudly a view that was, in retrospect, far more seditious to the financial order than, say, Eliot Spitzer’s campaign against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they’d have vanished long ago. This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn’t even know how to manage their own.

    At some point, I could no longer contain myself: I called Whitney. This was back in March, when Wall Street’s fate still hung in the balance. I thought, If she’s right, then this really could be the end of Wall Street as we’ve known it. I was curious to see if she made sense but also to know where this young woman who was crashing the stock market with her every utterance had come from.

    It turned out that she made a great deal of sense and that she’d arrived on Wall Street in 1993, from the Brown University history department. “I got to New York, and I didn’t even know research existed,” she says. She’d wound up at Oppenheimer and had the most incredible piece of luck: to be trained by a man who helped her establish not merely a career but a worldview. His name, she says, was Steve Eisman.

    Eisman had moved on, but they kept in touch. “After I made the Citi call,” she says, “one of the best things that happened was when Steve called and told me how proud he was of me.”

    Having never heard of Eisman, I didn’t think anything of this. But a few months later, I called Whitney again and asked her, as I was asking others, whom she knew who had anticipated the cataclysm and set themselves up to make a fortune from it. There’s a long list of people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their vision. It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. Whitney rattled off a list with a half-dozen names on it. At the top was Steve Eisman.

    Steve Eisman entered finance about the time I exited it. He’d grown up in New York City and gone to a Jewish day school, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School. In 1991, he was a 30-year-old corporate lawyer. “I hated it,” he says. “I hated being a lawyer. My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer. They managed to finagle me a job. It’s not pretty, but that’s what happened.”

    He was hired as a junior equity analyst, a helpmate who didn’t actually offer his opinions. That changed in December 1991, less than a year into his new job, when a subprime mortgage lender called Ames Financial went public and no one at Oppenheimer particularly cared to express an opinion about it. One of Oppenheimer’s investment bankers stomped around the research department looking for anyone who knew anything about the mortgage business. Recalls Eisman: “I’m a junior analyst and just trying to figure out which end is up, but I told him that as a lawyer I’d worked on a deal for the Money Store.” He was promptly appointed the lead analyst for Ames Financial. “What I didn’t tell him was that my job had been to proofread the ­documents and that I hadn’t understood a word of the fucking things.”

    Ames Financial belonged to a category of firms known as nonbank financial institutions. The category didn’t include J.P. Morgan, but it did encompass many little-known companies that one way or another were involved in the early-1990s boom in subprime mortgage lending—the lower class of American finance.

    The second company for which Eisman was given sole responsibility was Lomas Financial, which had just emerged from bankruptcy. “I put a sell rating on the thing because it was a piece of shit,” Eisman says. “I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to put a sell rating on companies. I thought there were three boxes—buy, hold, sell—and you could pick the one you thought you should.” He was pressured generally to be a bit more upbeat, but upbeat wasn’t Steve Eisman’s style. Upbeat and Eisman didn’t occupy the same planet. A hedge fund manager who counts Eisman as a friend set out to explain him to me but quit a minute into it. After describing how Eisman exposed various important people as either liars or idiots, the hedge fund manager started to laugh. “He’s sort of a prick in a way, but he’s smart and honest and fearless.”

    “A lot of people don’t get Steve,” Whitney says. “But the people who get him love him.” Eisman stuck to his sell rating on Lomas Financial, even after the company announced that investors needn’t worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market risk. “The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst,” says Eisman, “was after Lomas said they were hedged.” He recited the line from memory: “ ‘The Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.” A few months after he’d delivered that line in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.

    Continued in article

    Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Playing the Money Markets (Coronet, 1999, ISBN 0340767006)

    Lewis writes in Partnoy’s earlier whistleblower style with somewhat more intense and comic portrayals of the major players in describing the double dealing and break down of integrity on the trading floor of Salomon Brothers.

    Continued at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

    Bob Jensen's threads on the Lehman Examiner's Report ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Ernst

  • You can read more about the books and videos of Michael Lewis by scrolling down at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds 

     


    Definition of New Hampshire --- A state where residents from Canada, Vermontax, taxachusetts, and Maine come to shop
    Canadians come for lower prices on liquor, cigarettes, beer, and some big ticket items like air a new set of tires. I think there are limits to how much Canadians are allowed to bring back to Canada, and their cars are subject to searches at the border. However, unless narcotics are suspected, I doubt that inspectors look under seats and at all five tires.

    U.S. residents can cross back from New Hampshire with virtually zero risk of car inspections. Hotels commonly locates near a Wal-Mart for shoppers that want to spend the night and shop for two or more days.

    From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on June 18m 2012

    Canadians Crowd U.S. Airports. Why? Taxes
    by: Jack Nicas
    Jun 08, 2012
    Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
    Click here to view the video on WSJ.com WSJ Video
     

    TOPICS: Foreign Currency Exchange Rates, sales tax, Tax Policy, Taxation

    SUMMARY: 'Canadians have discovered a cheaper way to fly to the United States: drive there first." The taxes imposed on airline tickets and the fees charged by Canadian airports to fund major overhauls and expansions-items funded by the federal government in the U.S.-lead to much higher prices in Canada than in the U.S. The result has been a surge in border airline traffic that is mostly due to Canadian passenger travel to and from other U.S. locations "while overall air traffic in the U.S. has fluctuated over the past decade."

    CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article can be used to describe the economic and behavioral effects of tax policy. It also mentions the impact of foreign exchange rates between the U.S. and Canadian dollars.

    QUESTIONS: 
    1. (Introductory) Summarize the conclusions in the recent Canadian Senate Committee report on the economic effects of Canadians migrating to U.S. airports to then fly elsewhere in the U.S.

    2. (Introductory) What are the different governmental policies affecting the difference in taxation of U.S. and Canadian airport operations?

    3. (Advanced) According to the online video and the table entitled "Stacking Up", which shows one airfare example, what two factors increase the price of Canadian airline tickets relative to U.S. ticket prices?

    4. (Introductory) How have smaller airlines in smaller airports along the U.S. border taken advantage of business opportunities from these pricing differences?

    5. (Advanced) Why does the author note that "the Canadian dollar has also remained largely on par with the U.S. dollar over the past two years..." What effect does that exchange rate have on the issues in the article?
     

    Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island

    "Canadians Crowd U.S. Airports. Why? Taxes," by: Jack Nicas, The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2012 ---
    http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303506404577448523616941712.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid&mg=reno64-wsj

    Canadians have discovered a cheaper way to fly to the United States: Drive there first.

    Rising flight taxes and a strengthening Canadian dollar are pushing Canadians to begin their U.S.-bound trips on U.S. soil. Now airlines are rushing to meet the demand, adding service at small outposts along the border.

    Discount carrier Allegiant Travel Co. ALGT +1.54% first stumbled onto the strategy in 2004 when it began service from Bellingham, Wash., a city of 81,000 an hour south of Vancouver. The carrier quickly found that more than half of its passengers were driving there from Canada.

    Since then, Allegiant has unlocked a new customer base by filling planes with Canadians at a dozen lower-cost airports strung along the Canadian border.

    For the border airports, the Canadian passengers have meant new life. At the three where Canadians make up more than 60% of the passengers—Bellingham, Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Plattsburgh, N.Y.—departing passengers have more than tripled to a total of 750,000 since 2007, and major expansions are planned or under way.

    In Plattsburgh, just 60 miles south of Montreal, city officials in 2007 turned the former local Air Force base into an airport and nicknamed it "l'aéroport américain de Montréal." The airport's website and all of its signs are bilingual, and employees are offered French classes.

    "We knew it was going to be successful," said Michele Powers of the area chamber of commerce, "but we had no idea it was going to grow this quickly." Passenger traffic has tripled since 2008, and officials are now planning to double the size of the terminal just five years after its opening.

    Taxes and fees on a flight from Canada to U.S. cities can be four times higher, or nearly $100 more each way, than on flights to the same destinations from U.S. airports located just miles across the border. Canadian airlines say that gap has made it nearly impossible to compete.

    The tax-and-fee gap between the two countries is the result of differing governing philosophies.

    Canada views air travel as best paid for by fliers themselves, requiring them to fund airports' capital projects, said Daniel-Robert Gooch, president of the Canadian Airports Council.

    That strategy has made Canada home to some of the best aviation infrastructure in the world without burdening Canadian taxpayers as a whole, he said.

    The U.S., however, subsidizes many airports, especially in rural areas, betting they can drive economic activity.

    Canadian airports and airlines, meanwhile, are trying to plug the passenger leak. They recently commissioned studies on the exodus to lobby the Canadian government to lower taxes on flying.

    They found that U.S. airports near the border handled roughly 4.8 million Canadians departing or arriving last year—15% more than 2010, when it was first tracked. That is enough passengers to fill 64 Boeing Co. 747s per day, or more traffic than Ottawa International Airport, Canada's sixth-largest airport.

    "Everyone in Quebec is talking about how airline tickets are (less expensive) here" in the U.S., said Caroline Gallant. The Canadian woman made the 2½ hour drive to the airport in Burlington, Vt. because the $400 round-trip flight to Chicago was half the fare from Montreal, which is 20 minutes from her home.

    Friends told her about the Burlington, Vt. airport a year ago, and she has flown from it three times since. "I know it isn't good for our airports, but they should decrease the tax, what can I say?"

    On Tuesday, a Canadian Senate committee released a study on the migration, urging the government to stop charging local airport-operating authorities rent for airport land, and to lower taxes on flying, such as a fee to use the country's navigation system that can run as high as 20 Canadian dollars (US$19.50).

    "Our position is blown out of the water by all the taxes and fees," said Gregg Saretsky, chief executive of WestJet Airlines Ltd., WJA +1.78% Canada's largest discount carrier. If every Canadian who drove to the U.S. for a flight last year instead flew from Canada, Mr. Saretsky said WestJet's $149 million net profit would have increased by roughly half.

    "But this isn't just a question for the airlines; it is a question for the whole Canadian economy."

    Canadian airport officials estimate the preflight migration costs the country nearly 9,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in gross domestic product a year. They also say there are also countless Americans who fly to U.S. border airports and then drive to Canada to save on fares.

    On Wednesday, instead of flying directly to Montreal to visit his parents, Jean-Francois Brossoit and his family flew from their home in Indianapolis to Burlington, and then rented a car and drove to Canada, saving them hundreds of dollars.

    In the past two years, Canada and the U.S. have raised taxes by about $10 on flights south across the border.

    But more increases have come from individual Canadian airports which, unlike those in the U.S., rarely receive government funding and must rely on passenger fees for capital projects. In Calgary, for example, one fee on fliers is increasing to $30 from $20 to pay for a new $1 billion runway.

    In the U.S., however, the federal government is paying for a new runway at the airport in Niagara Falls, N.Y., where workers say they count, on average, eight Canadian license plates out of every 10 cars in the parking lot.

    Continued in article


    "Why Siri Matters," ReadWriteWeb, June 19, 2012 ---
    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why-siri-matters.php

    The revolution in voice-controlled computing is advancing slowly and quietly, with Apple's Siri personal assistant leading the way. Apple didn't invent the idea or even the technology Siri is based on. It purchased Siri through an acquisition, polished the user experience and baked it into the iPhone 4S. The launch of that device last October kicked off a new era in computing: one in which people command data, content and services using their voices. 

    Siri rolled out with deliberately scaled-back features and compatibility. Now we're beginning to see how Apple plans to expand it. Last week, the company announced Siri support for more languages and availability on the iPad, representing an expansion in terms of both geography and cross-device compatibility. These new features are incremental, but they represent important steps toward an era of voice-activated computing that's just around the corner.

    Last week's announcements suggest that Apple wants to establish a meaningful presence in automobilies, and Siri is at the middle of it all. By fall 2012, Siri will land not only in tablets (and presumably a second smartphone, the iPhone 5), but also in cars from Audi, BMW, Chrysler, GM, Honda, Jaguar, Land Rover and Toyota.

    The Power of Apple

    Apple isn't the only tech giant dabbling in voice control. Microsoft already has built it into the XBox 360 via the Kinect, and there's reason to believe it will be integrated with the company's other platforms. Google has its own impressive voice search technology. But Apple's success at getting voice control into the market for mobile devices sets it apart. 

    Continued in article


    From the Scout Report on June 8, 2012

    DataLocker --- http://www.appsense.com/labs/data-locker 

    Personal cloud services are growing rapidly and they can be quite useful. However, they open up various security concerns and people can be a bit wary of using them. The DataLocker suite of products is free, and it can encrypt and store secure files in any local file system or cloud storage system, including Dropbox. First-time visitors can check out a tutorial on this website to decide whether they wish to download the application. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


    DefinePlug --- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cfaknacboecanofknlibmefckmanhjnh 

    Perhaps you are reading along with some text and you'd like to know the meaning of an unfamiliar word. You may not want to switch over to another webpage to look up the word, and this is where DefinePlug comes in handy. DefinePlug incorporates word definitions from abbreviations.com, allowing visitors to click on a word and see its definition. This version is compatible with all computers running the Google Chrome browser.

     

    From the Scout Report on June 15, 2012

  • FastStone Screen Capture 7.1 --- http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

    If you're looking for a well-designed and easy-to-use screen capture program, you may wish to give this version of FastStone Screen Capture a look. It allows users to capture and annotate anything on the screen, including windows, objects, menus, freehand regions, and scrolling windows. Additionally, visitors can also choose to send captures to editor, file, clipboard, or email. Version 7.1 is compatible with systems running Windows 2000 and newer.


    You-Twit  --- http://www.you-twit.com/

    You-Twit is appropriately named, as it brings together the videos from YouTube that are trending on Twitter. It's a nice effective tool for those who love social media. Visitors to the site can sort through videos that are currently trending, or look through the previous day’s trendsetters. This version of You-Twit 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

    "Mentor - Redux," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, June 5, 2012 ---
    http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/06/mentor-redux.html

    A Master List of 500 Free Courses From Great Universities --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/a_master_list_of_500_free_courses_from_great_universities.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

    Bob Jensen's threads on distance education training and education alternatives (most are not free) ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

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


    Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

    What Is a Flame?: The First Prize-Winner at Alan Alda’s Science Video Competition --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/iwhat_is_a_flamei_the_first_prize-winner_at_alan_aldas_science_video_competition.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
    Jensen Comment;  This site was disappointing since there's no explanation that allows me to understand my old flames.

    Teachers' Domain: Earth System, Structure, and Processes ---
    http://www.teachersdomain.org/browse/?fq_hierarchy=k12.sci.ess.earthsys

    Water Resources Center
    http://wrc.umn.edu/

    Ohio State University College of Pharmacy Teaching Resources ---
    http://www.pharmacy.ohio-state.edu/academics/teaching_resources/index.cfm

    The Astronomy Center ---  http://www.astronomycenter.org/index.cfm

    The Transit of Venus in HD Video --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/the_transit_of_venus_in_hd_video.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Never a First Human Being --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/richard_dawkins_explains_why_there_was_never_a_first_human_being.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    NOVA: Venom: Nature's Killer --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/venom-natural-killer.html

    Bill's Design Talks (Cities and Living Spaces) ---  http://www.cooperhewitt.org/billsdesigntalks

    Biosecurity at the National Academies --- http://nas-sites.org/biosecurity/

    Doing Biology --- http://www1.umn.edu/ships/db/

    The Human Heart: An Online Exploration from The Franklin Institute --- http://www.fi.edu/learn/heart/index.html

    The Whole Brain Atlas  --- http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html

    Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science


    Social Science and Economics Tutorials

    Federal Reserve Education --- http://www.federalreserveeducation.org/

    Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: Center for Pacific Basin Studies ---
    http://www.frbsf.org/economics/pbc/

    Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: Teacher Resources Index ---
    http://www.frbsf.org/education/teachers/index.html

    Digital Forensics and Cyber Security Center at the University of Rhode Island ---
    http://www.dfcsc.uri.edu/

    Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social


    Law and Legal Studies

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


    Math Tutorials

    Mathematics Made Visible: The Extraordinary Art of M.C. Escher --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/mathematics_made_visible_the_extraordinary_art_of_mc_escher.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Binary Visions: 19th-Century Woven Coverlets from the Collection of Historic Huguenot Street --- http://www.hrvh.org/exhibit/hhsbinary/

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


    History Tutorials

    In Cuba it's called free housing plus a ration card whether you work or not
    "The Karl Marx Credit Card – When You’re Short of Kapital" --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/the_karl_marx_credit_-_when_youre_short_of_kapital.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps – Peter Adamson’s Podcast Still Going Strong --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/the_history_of_philosophy_without_any_gaps_going_strong.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    George Washington Carver Digital Collection  --- http://www.lib.iastate.edu/preserv/cdm/gwcarver.htm

    Rare 1930s Audio: W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/rare_1930s_audio_wb_yeats_reads_four_of_his_poems.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Found: Lost Great Depression Photos Capturing Hard Times on Farms, and in Town --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/found_lost_great_depression_photos_capturing_hard_times.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina --- http://docsouth.unc.edu/blueridgeparkway/

    National Preservation Institute --- http://www.npi.org/

    Preservation Directory --- http://www.preservationdirectory.com/HistoricalPreservation/Home.aspx

    Binary Visions: 19th-Century Woven Coverlets from the Collection of Historic Huguenot Street --- http://www.hrvh.org/exhibit/hhsbinary/

    Mathematics Made Visible: The Extraordinary Art of M.C. Escher --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/mathematics_made_visible_the_extraordinary_art_of_mc_escher.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Google Now Takes Us to Great Art Works and Art Museums Around the World ---
    http://www.googleartproject.com/
    Especially note the "Education" hot word near the bottom of the page.

    Arizona Regional Image Archive --- http://aria.arizona.edu/

    University of Connecticut Student Yearbook, 1915-1990 --- 
    http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/collections/nutmeg/index.htm

    Leeson's History of Montana, 1735-1885 --- http://www.lib.umt.edu/node/336

    Electronic New Jersey (history for teachers and students) ---  http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/njh/

    New Jersey History --- http://njh.libraries.rutgers.edu/

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

    The New Jersey Historical Society --- http://www.jerseyhistory.org/

    Leslie Jones Collection (Boston historical photographs) ---
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/collections/72157623971760983/

    From the Scout Report on June 8, 2012

    Remains of Shakespeare-associated Curtain Theatre found in London Early theater of Shakespeare is unearthed in London http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/early-theater-of-shakespeares-is-unearthed-in-london/  

    Does the rediscovery of Shakespeare's Curtain theatre matter? Absolutely.
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/07/rediscovery-shakespeare-curtain-theatre-matters?newsfeed=true 

    Developers plan 'performance space' near remains of Shakespeare's Curtain Theatre
    http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/developers-plan-performance-space-near-remains-of-shakespeares-curtain-theatre-7827694.html  

    Curtain up on Shakespeare's lost theatre
    http://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/news/curtain-up-on-shakespeares-lost-theatre.htm  

    Shakespeare's Globe virtual tour
    http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/about-us/virtual-tour 

    Shakespeare Online
    http://www.shakespeare-online.com/

     

    Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Art --- http://www.tate.org.uk/ita/

    Ten years of the Louvre online (art history)
    Musee du Louvre --- http://www.louvre.fr/

    Modern Masters: Watch BBC Series Featuring Warhol, Matisse, Picasso and Dali --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/imodern_mastersi_watch_bbc_series_featuring_warhol_matisse_picasso_and_dali.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Tate Modern: Mark Rothko --- http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/markrothko/default.shtm

    The Croatian Museum of Naive Art (art history) --- http://www.hmnu.org/en/default.asp

    Tate Archive Journeys --- http://www.tate.org.uk/archivejourneys/

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

    The Croatian Museum of Naive Art (art history) --- http://www.hmnu.org/en/default.asp

    Metropolitan Museum of Art --- http://www.metmuseum.org/home.asp

    Guggenheim: Interact [Real Player, Flash Player] --- http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/interact

    The Baltimore Museum of Art --- http://www.artbma.org/

    Princeton Art Museum: Video Archive
    http://www.princetonartmuseum.org/resources/video-archive/

    The Walters Art Museum (Baltimore) --- http://thewalters.org/

    Print by Print: The Baltimore Museum of Art [Flash Player] ---
    http://www.artbma.org/PrintbyPrint-project/index.html

    Explore Art (multimedia) --- http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/

    Digital History - Multimedia --- http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/multimedia.cfm

    William J. Meuer Photoart Collection --- http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UW/subcollections/MeuerAlbumsAbout.html

    Museums and the Web --- http://conference.archimuse.com/

    Finnish National Gallery: Art Collections --- http://kokoelmat.fng.fi/wandora/w?action=gen&lang=en

    British Empire Exhibition 1938 --- http://www.empireexhibition1938.co.uk/

    2020 Whitney Biennial --- http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial 

    Cincinnati Art Museum: The Collection ---
    http://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/absolutenm/templates/ArtTempCollection.aspx?articleid=124&zoneid=71

    University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee Book Arts Collection --- http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/digilib/bookarts/index.cfm

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

    Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive --- http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/

    The Vincent Van Gogh Gallery ---  http://www.vggallery.com/

    Simon Schama Presents Van Gogh and the Beginning of Modern Art --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/simon_schama_presents_vincent_van_gogh_and_the_beginning_of_modern_art.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    NEA Arts Magazine --- http://www.nea.gov/about/NEARTS/2012_v1/index.html

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

     

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


    Language Tutorials

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


    Music Tutorials

    The Symphony of Science --- http://symphonyofscience.com/

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

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


    Writing Tutorials

    Writing at Colorado State University  ---
    http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/index.cfm?guides_active=engineer&category1=41

    Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/ray_bradbury_on_how_to_write_and_why_literature_saves_civilization.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    "Finding Joy in Writing," by Eva Lantsoght, Inside Higher Ed, June 11, 2012 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/finding-joy-writing
    This is great advice to give on a syllabus for students in courses that have major writing components. The title maybe should be changed to "Finding Work in Writing."

    Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries


    Updates from WebMD --- http://www.webmd.com/

    June 12, 2012

    June 13, 2012

    June 14, 2012

    June 16, 2012

    June 18, 2012

    June 19, 2012

    June 20, 2012

    June 21, 2012

    July 22, 2012

    June 23, 2012

     


    "When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind," by Jeneen Interlandi, The New York Times, June 22, 2012 ---
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/magazine/when-my-crazy-father-actually-lost-his-mind.html?_r=1&hpw




    Forwarded by Dan Gheorghe Somnea

    Jewish taxi driver A clearly inebriated woman, stark naked, jumped into a taxi in New York City.

    The cab driver, an old Jewish gentleman, opened his eyes wide and stared at the woman. He made no attempt to start the cab. The woman glared back at him and said, "What's wrong with you, honey? Haven't you ever seen a naked woman before?"

    The old Jewish driver answered, "Let me tell you sumsing, lady - I vasn't staring at you like you tink; det vould not be proper vair I come from."

    The drunk woman giggled and responded, "Well, if you're not staring at my boobs, sweetie, what are you doing then?"

    He paused a moment, then told her... "Vell, M'am, I am looking and I am looking, and I am tinking to myself, 'Vair in da hell is dis lady keeping de money to pay for dis ride?!'"

     


    YES, I'M A SENIOR CITIZEN!

    I'm the life of the party..... Even if it lasts until 8 p.m.

    I'm very good at opening childproof caps..... With a hammer.

    I'm awake many hours before my body allows me to get up.

    I'm smiling all the time because I can't hear a thing you're saying.

    I'm sure everything I can't find is in a safe secure place, somewhere.

    I'm wrinkled, saggy, lumpy, and that's just my left leg.

    I'm beginning to realize that aging is not for wimps.

    Yes, I'm a SENIOR CITIZEN and I think I am having the time of my life!


    Forwarded by Eileen

    There was a bit of confusion at the store this morning. When I was ready to pay for my groceries, the cashier said, "Strip down, facing me.."

    Making a mental note to complain to my congressman about Homeland Security running amok, I did just as she had instructed.

    When the hysterical shrieking and alarms finally subsided, I found out that she was referring to my credit card.

    I have been asked to shop elsewhere in the future.

    They need to make their instructions to us seniors a little clearer!




    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

    The Cult of Statistical Significance: How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm

    How Accountics Scientists Should Change: 
    "Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review I just don't give a damn"
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
    One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.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