Tidbits on July 26, 2012
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Bob
Jensen's Second Set of Hiking Pictures
Including Some More of John Compton's Pictures Taken on White Mountain Hiking
Trails
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/HikingTrails/Set02/HikingTrailsSet02.htm
More
of Bob Jensen's Pictures and Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
Tidbits on July 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
The World in Two Minutes ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrqqD_Tsy4Q
The Higgs Boson explained by PhD Comics July 4, 2012 ---
http://flowingdata.com/2012/07/04/higgs-boson-explained-by-phd-comics/
Infographics by Nathan Yau
Beer Tap App (rhymes) for a Tablet Computer ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=6a8Eimr-fm0
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Kitty Wells (August 30, 1919 – July 16, 2012) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Wells
It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKleTa94dC8
As noted above Kitty died on July 16. CBS News called her the first country and
western singer. I did not verify this.
Search YouTube for many more of her historic recordings.
Swing Girls (with a tuning fork) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=ZDhLJeU455w&NR=1
Shades of Glen Miller
Stringing Along in Spain ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=GBaHPND2QJg&feature=youtu.be
Flash Choir in Times Square ---
http://www.npr.org/event/music/156493791/a-flash-choir-sings-philip-glass-in-times-square
The Amazing B-29 ---
http://vimeo.com/17388627
Sent to me by a close friend who was a belly gunner shot down over Poland. Near
the end of the war he was forced to march for over 1,200 miles into Germany as a
nearn-starved German Prisoner of War. Also in our poker group in San Antonio was
a former B-29 pilot in the Pacific.
Anre Rieu's Rendition of Amazing Grace ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/GInf0lXsyKY?feature=player_embedded
Tanglewood: Celebrating Beethoven In The
Backwoods For 75 Years ---
Click Here
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/07/14/156725774/tanglewood-celebrating-beethoven-in-the-backwoods-for-75-years
Frank Sinatra's Rendition of "Send in the Clowns"
---
http://www.yourememberthat.com/media/10939/Send_In_The_Clowns/
Barbara Streisand's Rendition of "Send in the Clowns" ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnwJ5KIcKX4
Simon and Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water
(Live 1969) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYKJuDxYr3I
Message from Barry Rice on July 17,
2012
There are
some great flash mob videos of accounting practitioners (including the Maryland
Association of CPAs) and accounting students at
https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=f&oq=%22flash+mob%22+accountants&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4LENP_en___US481&q=%22flash+mob%22+accountants&gs_upl=0l0l0l27342lllllllllll0#q=%22flash+mob%22+accountants&hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1T4LENP_en___US481&prmd=imvns&source=univ&tbm=vid&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=rZgFUKLFCY-KrQGt_4jICA&ved=0CGAQqwQ&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=960fd2c1c95a1532&biw=1013&bih=459.
I Goggled “’flash mob’ accountants” to find them.
If practicing accountants can have a “flash mob,”
surely ACADEMIC accountants can do so.
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
PBS: Arts ---
http://www.pbs.org/arts/
Infographic
A Woman's Place: Best and Worst Places To Be A Woman ---
Click Here
http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2012/7/5/a-womans-place-best-and-worst-places-to-be-a-woman.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CoolInfographics+%28Cool+Infographics%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Grassroots Feminist Political Posters in India ---
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/grassroots-feminist-political-posters-in-india
Images of Lake Tahoe ---
http://knowledgecenter.unr.edu/specoll/photoweb/tahoe/
San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (Historical
Photographs) ---
http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000084701
Radical Women (University of Florida,
Photographs) ---
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/rw
Sophia Smith Collection: Women's History Archives
at Smith College ---
http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/digitalcoll.html
British Museum Channel ---
http://www.britishmuseum.org/channel.aspx
Bobbie Hanvey Photographic Archive (Ireland) ---
http://www.bc.edu/sites/libraries/hanvey/
Wyoming State Historical Society ---
http://wyshs.org/
University of Wyoming Digital Collections ---
http://digital.uwyo.edu
MoMA: Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/boetti/
Clement Moran Photography Collection (antique New
Hampshire photographs) ---
Click Here
http://www.library.unh.edu/digital/islandora/solr/search/moran/1/category%3APhotographs~slsh~Clement%5C%20Moran%5C%20Collection%2A~/dismax
Grassroots Feminist Political Posters in India
---
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/grassroots-feminist-political-posters-in-india
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
Carl Sagan’s Reading List ---
Click Here
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/07/11/carl-sagan-reading-list/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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 July 26, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations072612.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/
July 17, 2012
On the CBS Evening News a very short segment between News Anchor
Scott Pelley and Business Correspondent
Anthony Mason sums up what is wrong in our current effort to keep the U.S.
from going off an economic cliff. The context of this segment is a
featured clip of a July 17 Senate Hearing in which Senior Senator
Chuck
Schumer (read that
Senator Mugabe) asserts that Congress is so gridlocked in preventing the
economy from falling off a cliff before 2012 election day that the only thing
that can save the U.S. economy is the Federal Reserve. Senator Mugabe then
orders Fed Chairman Bernanke to "get to work."
I might point out that before this Senate Hearing, Ben Bernanke went on
record as stating that only Congress can keep the economy from going over
the cliff. In this Senate Hearing Senator Mugabe told Bernanke that this is just
not going to happen in a gridlocked Congress before the 2012 election --- which
is too late to prevent going over the cliff.
After airing the clip from Senator Mugabe's Senate Hearing, CBS News Anchor
Scott Pelley pointed out that everything the Fed has tried to date just is not
working. FDIC banks are just not buying into the Fed's current "no money down,
zero interest rate" offers to them from the Fed.
"In this circumstance," asks Scott Pelley, "what can the Fed do to keep the
economy from going over a cliff"? (paraphrased)
"All it can do," answered Anthony Mason, "is buy up U.S. Treasury Bonds and
mortgage-backed securities like it as done recently (to over $2 trillion
dollars).
Jensen Comment
What Pelley and Mason did not explain is what Fed purchasing of trillions of
dollars of U.S. Treasury Bonds really means. I estimate that over 99.999999% of
the CBS News viewers have no idea what this action by the Fed really means or
why it enables the U.S. Government step up public works projects and other cash
bailouts.
What CBS News should've explained, if it was responsible to its viewers, is
that this last arrow in the Fed's quiver is tantamount to printing trillions
of dollars to pay for government spending instead of paying for that spending
with tax money or borrowing (selling U.S. Treasury Bonds on the open market
instead of to itself). Of course by now all readers on the AECM understand
what this Fed action really means. Sadly, 99.999999% of the voters in America do
not have a clue.
Senator Mugabe's wishes are consistent with Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's
advice to print whatever is needed to lower the unemployment rate below 6% in a
Keynesian solution (although I think Keynes only considered taxing or borrowing
to pay for the deficit). I don't think Keynes advised simply printing money to
pay for a government boost to the economy. The thing is that Paul Krugman
naively assumes that when prosperity returns (if ever) that Congress will at
last undertake reducing the annual deficit in tens of trillions of dollars by
then. But this might entail firing tens of millions of people on public works
projects and goring all the other oxen that have grown dependent upon Keynesian
government dole.
The bottom line is that Congress is most likely to never act to
reduce the deficit with taxes and spending cuts. It's so much easier to just pay
for the deficit by printing U.S. dollars. And there's not much hope of
electing true statesmen (and stateswomen) to Congress given the power of special
interest groups to pay whatever it takes to elect their dupes to Congress.
In any case, I don't think CBS News viewers have any idea that the Fed has
been and probably will do in a few months at an accelerating rate is to print
trillions of dollars to support government public works projects and other
spending under explicit orders from Senior Senator Mugabe. Bernanke really does
not want to print trillions more of U.S. dollars, which is why he appealed to
Congress to take other steps to reduce the deficit.
But Congress is full of cowards who care more about what MSNBC and Fox News
will say about them personally than to take unpopular actions to really, really
offend their constituencies. There are no statesmen left in Washington DC ---
only cowards.
And so I say welcome to Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe Economics and the Weimar
Republic ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic
A Pissing Contest Between Bob and Jagdish: An Illustration of How to
Lie With Statistics ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/LieWithStatistics01.htm
Undergraduate Research at Conference at Trinity University ---
http://www.trinity.edu/departments/research/students_index.html
Where are the accounting student researchers?
Undergraduate research is central to the goals and
priorities of the academic program at Trinity University. During the 10-week
summer program, students work on research projects full-time under the close
mentorship of Trinity faculty. These research experiences allow students to
develop a more complete picture of careers in research and academia.
In 2010, 115 students from Trinity and institutions
across the country participated in the Summer Research Program. In most
cases, students receive a stipend and free housing. Some students also
receive one tuition credit free of charge. Students are supported by
individual faculty grants or by one of Trinity's
Research Programs.
The summer research program culminates in a
day-long
conference where students present their research
results in oral or poster presentations.
2012 Undergraduate Research Program
The 2012 Summer Research Program will begin on
Monday, May 21. Students residing on campus may move into the
residence hall between noon and 5 on May 20.
The program will end on Friday, July 27. Dormitories will close on
Saturday, July 28. All events and deadlines will be posted to the
tuResearch
calendar.
Council on Undergraduate Research
Trinity is an enhanced institutional member of
the Council on
Undergraduate Research (CUR), allowing Trinity
faculty to
join CUR
as individual members at no cost.
Jensen Comment
In 1992 Trinity University also Hosted the Annual NCUR Conference
At that time conference organizers Peter French, Bob Jensen, and Kim Robertson
noted the dearth of business undergraduate students participating in the
conference, including zero participation by accounting undergraduates around the
nation. Perhaps our obsession with courses training students to pass the CPA
examination is dysfunctional for educating students undergraduate students about
how to conduct research in accountancy.
"Undergraduate Student Research Programs: Are They as Viable for Accounting
as They are in Science, Humanities, and Other Business Disciplines?"(With
Professors Peter A. French and Kim R. Robertson of Trinity University),
Critical Perspectives on Accounting , Volume
3, 1992, 337-357.
I think our article fell on deaf ears!
I realize that there is some undergraduate accounting research going on where
there is funding and/or sizeable prizes, especially XBRL research. But none of
this ever seems to find its way to the CUR/NCUR conferences.
Question
Why are accountics science journal articles cited in other accountics science
research papers so often?
Answer
It works like this. A prestigious accountics science research journal "suggests"
that you cite some of its previously-published articles before making a decision
to accept your submission. Scroll down deep to find out how it works.
"Journals Inflate Their Prestige by
Coercing Authors to Cite Them," Chronicle of Higher Education,
February 3, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/journals-inflate-rankings-by-coercing-authors-to-cite-them/40233?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A
survey published today in Science shows
that journal editors often ask prospective authors to add
superfluous citations of the journal to articles, and authors feel
they can’t refuse. (The Science paper is for subscribers only, but
you can read a summary here.) The extra citations artificially
inflate a journal’s impact and prestige. About 6,600 academics
responded to the survey, and about 20 percent said they had been
asked to add such citations even though no editor or reviewer had
said their article was deficient without them. About 60 percent of
those surveyed said they would comply with such a request, which was
most often aimed at junior faculty members.
|
Commercial Scholarly and Academic Journals and Oligopoly Textbook
Publishers Are Ripping Off Libraries, Scholars, and Students ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals
The Underground Economy at All Levels of Wealth
The other day I mentioned once again that poverty and wealth statistics are
probably understated because of the the huge and viable underground economy that
greatly distorts statistical data on wealth and income in the United States and
probably most other parts of the world.
My threads on the underground economy are at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm#Poor
Today, on July 24, I had yet another illustration of the underground economy.
In June, 2012 Erika had some periodontal surgery from a doctor in Laconia.
Her surgeon recommended that she have some added and somewhat complicated dental
work done and recommended what he said was the best dentist in New Hampshire for
this type of work. This dentist, Dr. XXXXX, has an office in a beautiful old
mansion about 80 miles south in Concord, our New Hampshire State Capitol City.
His home is elsewhere in Concord, and when we discussed property taxes he
mentioned that Concord has the highest property tax rates in the state. His
personal residence property taxes he said were over $24,000 per year.
Erika had to wait until her gum healed for this dental work .Today we went
down for a second opinion from Dr. XXXXX since our local dentist , Dr. Gouge,
wanted $18,000 for the job. Dr. Gouge also operates out a an old Victorian
mansion in Littleton, but his mansion needs over $100,000 in repairs. I think he
saw us coming.
Dr. XXXXX in Concord, who has a better reputation as a skilled dentist, gave
us two prices:
- $6,760 if we pay in greenback cash from my pocket to his pocket
- $7,640 if we pay by check (which can be cashed immediately in Concord)
There's no option to pay by credit card or debit card with Dr. XXXXX
I don't think it will take AECMers long to figure out this pricing strategy.
How to Game the Tax System ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
Nation's First Ph.D Program in Law
Yale Law School Ph.D. Program With a J.D. Prerequisite
http://www.law.yale.edu/graduate/PHD_program.htm
The Sad (Declining) State of Accounting Ph.D. Programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
"A READING LIST FOR ACCOUNTING CSI’S," by Anthony H. Catanach Jr. and
J. Edward Ketz, Grumpy Old Accountants Blog, July 23, 2012 ---
http://blogs.smeal.psu.edu/grumpyoldaccountants/archives/711
Jensen Comment
This is not a long list of titles, but some of the recommendations are very long
and technical books. Like who sits down to read a thousand page intermediate
accounting text unless one is taking or teaching an intermediate accounting
course? But then this and some of the other listed books probably serve better
as reference books or sleep aids relative to the latest John Grisham novel that
I'm now reading while waiting for Erika in doctor's offices. Actually John
Grisham is not my favorite author by a long ways, but he does have some clever
plots relative to James Patterson.
There is a somewhat long list of book-cooking references.
The above reading list is more significant in terms of what it leaves out
rather than what in includes. For openers, I direct readers to the reading list
that perhaps only Steve Zeff could compile over the past few years of The
Accounting Review book reviews and commentaries. This is a better place to
begin than with the Catanach and Ketz list --- with the exception of the C&K
book-cooking references.
Professionally, I'm now plowing my way through Bourgeois Dignity:
Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey. My two
word description of that book is dull and tedious to a fault. But I'm doing my
best since I have to critique her Plenary Session speech at the 2012 AAA Annual
Meetings. I hope the focus of her talk is more on the following book that I
loved:
The Cult of Statistical Significance: How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs,
Justice, and Lives, by Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ISBN-13: 978-472-05007-9, 2007) ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
My critique of her speech may be a little like my PhD oral examination at
Stanford Universities. The answers that I gave were almost completely
disconnected with the questions that were asked. I had prepared for questions
that these examiners commonly asked in oral examinations according to students
who had gone before me. They decided to redo their question list for me.
Personally, I'm still plowing my way through William Trevor's 80+ outstanding
short stories. Next I think I will take up some Mark Twain books. PBS in Maine
has been running Ken Burn's outstanding modules on the life of Mark Twain (Samuel
Langhorne Clemens, November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
What an exceptional writer --- perhaps the best American writer of all time.
He often started manuscripts and then let them sit on a back burner for years
and years. He also was a very close family man who endured tragedies --- both
personal and financial. He is not a role model for managing personal finances.
He could've accumulated a mass fortune if it was not his obsession for building
the most grand house in Hartford and possibly almost all of New England with the
exception of estates built by the super, super rich like John D. Rockefeller who
could better afford luxurious estates.
I indicated previously that one of economist friends (from Trinity days) was
anti-trust expert and mystery novel writer Bill Breit. Bill liked to spring the
following question on people he met for the first time. It was a great
conversation starter.
"What person living or dead would you most like dine with for a long evening?"
(Bill actually worded it somewhat differently at times)
My answer to this unequivocally would be Samuel Langhorne Clemens. What a
delightful evening of story telling that would become with stories that have a
message and side-splitting humor. Actually Clemens loved to delight his dinner
guests with clever stories, many of which were never put into his books or short
stories.
Sadly, I don't think Clemens told many stories about accountants, but I could
probably lead him into accounting with questions such as how to account for a
paddle-wheeler on the Mississippi or a Nevada newspaper or why he went broke
given the financial successes of his books and stories?
Trivia Question
What's the major reason that Huckleberry Finn became the most banned book in
public schools and libraries?
Answer
If you answer a racist theme you are wrong according to Ken Burns. The major
reason according to Burns is the foul language in the book, which by today's
standards is probably tame indeed since it does not contain those tiresome
F-words, C-word, and S-words.
I can assure you that none of the books recommended by Catanach and Ketz
contain foul language unless you consider the P-word for Ponzi or the K-word for
Kiting horribly objectionable.
Finance Professor Jim Mahar says Barclays really should be removing these
advertisements as soon as possible.
Barclays ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barclays#Rate-fixing_scandal
Rate-fixing scandal
In June 2012, as a result of an international investigation, Barclays
Bank was fined a total of £290 million (US$450 million) for attempting to
manipulate the daily settings of London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor)
and the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (Euribor).
The United States Department of Justice and Barclays officially agreed that
"the manipulation of the submissions affected the fixed rates on some
occasions".[94]
The bank was found to have made 'inappropriate submissions' of rates which
formed part of the Libor and Euribor setting processes, sometimes to make a
profit, and other times to make the bank look more secure during the
financial crisis.[95]
This happened between 2005 and 2009, as often as daily.[96]
The BBC said
revelations concerning the fraud were "greeted with almost universal
astonishment in the banking industry."[97]
The UK's
Financial Services Authority (FSA), which levied a fine of £59.5 million
($92.7 million), gave Barclays the biggest fine it had ever imposed in its
history.[96]
The FSA's director of enforcement described Barclays' behaviour as
"completely unacceptable", adding "Libor is an incredibly important
benchmark reference rate, and it is relied on for many, many hundreds of
thousands of contracts all over the world."[95]
The bank's chief executive
Bob Diamond decided to give up his bonus as a result of the fine.[98]
Liberal Democrat politician
Lord Oakeshott criticised Diamond, saying: "If he had any shame he would
go. If the Barclays board has any backbone, they'll sack him."[95]
The U.S. Department of Justice has also been involved, with "other financial
institutions and individuals" under investigation.[95]
On 2 July 2012, Marcus Agius resigned from the chairman position following
the interest rate rigging scandal.[99]
On 3 July 2012, Bob Diamond resigned with immediate effect, leaving Marcus
Agius to fill his post until a replacement is found.[100]
Some news outlets have highlighted positive trends
in the accounting profession, notes James Schiavone of the AICPA. One article
pointed out that accounting firms have regained 87% of the jobs lost during the
recession, compared with 17% of jobs lost at law firms. Another looked at the
steps an accountant should take to turn accounting into a long-term career.
"Accounting Firms Regain 87% of Jobs Lost During the Recession," AICPA
Insights, July 2012 ---
http://blog.aicpa.org/2012/07/in-the-news-accounting-firms-have-regained-87-of-jobs-lost-during-the-recession.html
Must we blame Republicans for
this as well?
The Congressional Budget Office today released
The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2008 and 2009 (July
2012):
For most income
groups, the 2009 average federal tax rate was the lowest observed in the
1979–2009 period. ... For the lowest income group, the average rate fell
from 7.5% in 1979 to 1.0% in 2009. ... Households in the middle three income
quintiles saw their average tax rate fall by 7.1 percentage points over 30
years, from 19.1% in 1979 to 12.0% in 2009. ... The average tax rate for
households in the 81st to 99th percentiles of the income distribution also
reached a low point in 2009, about 4 percentage points below its 1979 level.
... In contrast, in 2009 the average tax rate for households in the top 1%
of the before-tax income distribution was above its low point, reached in
the early 1980s. ... The tax rate ... rose somewhat from 2007 to 2009, as
sharp declines in capital gains income caused a larger portion of the income
of that group to be subject to the ordinary income tax rates. The decline in
after-tax income between 2007 and 2009 was much larger at the top of the
income distribution than further down the distribution.
How to avoid income taxes:
Case Studies in Gaming the Income Tax Laws ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
Question
For example, Edmunds says that a
2012
Chevy Impala LTZ sells new in San Diego for $27,235, and $21,313 used with
3999 miles. So would an Impala buyer have $6,000 income upon returning the car?
Or would this be analogous to a purchase price adjustment under
§
108(e)(5)?
Answer
I don't think that this has yet been resolved by the IRS, but it is possible
that Chevy's new
Love it or Return it sales promotion is entirely a freebie for taxpayers who
among the 50% of taxpayers who actually pay income taxes.
Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, July 22, 2012 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/
"Penn State president orders Paterno statue removal," Yahoo News,
July 22, 2012 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/penn-state-president-orders-paterno-statue-removal-111940000--spt.html
Jensen Comment
Without encouraging a debate on whether this statue removal is or is not
appropriate, it does make me wonder if there's a full statue or even a mere
marble bust of any accounting professor anywhere in the world? There may be some
portraits of accounting professors who became Presidents of universities. There
also is a portrait of Luca Pacioli ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Luca_Pacioli
A don't know of any statues of this Renaissance mathematician.
It's pretty easy to historically rank football coaches in terms of number of
wins or win-loss percentages over 30 or more years, but it's difficult to rank
accounting professors on explicit criteria. But such rankings differ from
rankings on other criteria such as the percentage of varsity players who
received diplomas in less than six years.
Some analysts, including me, have done so on the basis of publication records
in selected accounting research journals. This, however, falls way short of a
"win-loss" record as an accounting professor as a teacher or as a
teacher/researcher.
The AAA has had an Outstanding Educator Award for many years, and I'm told
that this award is heavily based upon a research record. I'm also told that it's
very difficult to win the award without ever having advised doctoral students,
although teaching testimonials of students at all levels of coursework are also
factored into the granting of this award ---
http://aaahq.org/awards/nominat4.htm
. . .
Award Criteria
The Outstanding Accounting Educator Award recognizes contributions to
accounting education from scholarly endeavors in research and teaching over
a sustained period of time through:
- Educational innovation,
- Excellence in teaching,
- Publications,
- Research guidance to graduate students, and
- Significant involvement in professional and
academic societies and activities.
- A nominee need not excel in each of these
general criteria to merit consideration for the award.
Continued in article
But it's a pretty safe bet that no campus in North America has a statue of an
AAA Outstanding Educator.
Richard Sansing found a link to a statue of Luca Pacioli in his hometown ---
http://renaissanceaccountant.blogspot.com/2007/10/statue-of-pucioli-in-his-hometown.html
"The California Dream is fizzling out," By John D. Sutter, CNN, June
27, 2011 ---
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/27/california.dream.census.slump/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
PBS News Hour
California Community Colleges Face Dilemmas Amid Tighter Budgets ---
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june12/commcolleges_04-10.html
Tax and Spend," by Kevin Kiley and Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, May
15, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/15/californias-public-colleges-face-more-budget-cuts-if-tax-hike-fails
"Further trigger cuts in January could be the
breaking point financially for some colleges," said Jack Scott, the system's
chancellor, in a written statement,"
The End of History
Hi Jagdish,
Oops, I accidentally hit the send button too soon.
Francis Fukuyama ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama
He is best known for his book
The End of History and the Last Man (1992),
which argued that the worldwide spread of
liberal democracies and free market capitalism of
the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's
sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government.
However, his subsequent book "Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of
Prosperity" (1995) modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture
cannot be cleanly separated from economics. Fukuyama is also associated with
the rise of the
neoconservative movement, from which he has since
distanced himself.
Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at the Center on
Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at
Stanford University.Before that he served as a
professor and director of the International Development program at
the School of Advanced International Studies of
the Johns Hopkins University.
Continued in article
The phrase for what this nation and many others aspire towards is "Limited
Democracy" or "Liberal Democracy" where certain rights (constitutional rights,
safety, education, voting, religion, and even health care in an emergency room)
are inalienable rights that cannot be voted away for any minority by a majority.
The term is probably best known in the writings of Fukuyama. When I taught one
of the sections of Trinity University's First-Year Seminar, the best known of
Fukuyama's books was one of the assigned six books to read and debate in my
section of this seminar. Each instructor was free to choose the theme for
her/his section and the assigned readings. The purpose of this course was to
provide a seminar experience for first-year students without dictating content
for the course. It would, however, be deemed inappropriate to turn the course
into a skills course such as math, computer programming, or bookkeeping)
End of History ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_History
Fukuyama's sequence of books clearly demonstrate the evolution and mutations
of his thinking over time.
Universities Approaching a Financial Cliff
"One-Third of Colleges Are on Financially 'Unsustainable' Path, Bain Study
Finds," by Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July
23, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/One-Third-of-Colleges-Are-on/133095/
An analysis of nearly 1,700 public and private
nonprofit colleges being unveiled this week by Bain & Company finds that
one-third of the institutions have been on an "unsustainable financial path"
in recent years, and an additional 28 percent are "at risk of slipping into
an unsustainable condition."
At a surprising number of colleges, "operating
expenses are getting higher" and "they're running out of cash to cover it,"
says Jeff Denneen, a Bain partner who heads the consulting firm's American
higher-education practice.
Bain and Sterling Partners, a private-equity firm,
collaborated on the project. They have published their findings on a
publicly available
interactive Web site that allows users to type in
the name of a college and see where it falls on the analysts' nine-part
matrix.
The methodology is based on just two financial
ratios, and they produce some findings that may seem incongruous with
conventional views on colleges' financial standing. The tool classifies
wealthy institutions such as Cornell, Harvard, and Princeton Universities as
being on an "unsustainable path" alongside tuition-dependent institutions
like Central Bible College, in Missouri. But the very public nature of the
findings is sure to bring some attention to the analysis. Bain and Sterling
provided advance copies of the analysis and the tool to The Wall Street
Journal and The Chronicle.
Overly Alarmist?
Mr. Denneen allows that the analysis may be skewed,
particularly for the wealthiest institutions, because the period studied,
2005 through 2010, concludes with a fiscal year in which endowments were hit
with record losses. One of the two ratios used in the analysis, called the
"equity ratio," is based on the change in value of an institution's assets,
including its endowment, relative to its liabilities. Since 2010 the value
of many endowments has rebounded. The other, the "expense ratio," looks at
changes in expenses as a percentage of revenue.
Still, Bain and Sterling maintain the analysis
sends a sobering signal, even if some might see the findings as overly
alarmist and self-serving. "Financial statements have gotten significantly
weaker in a very short period of time," says Tom Dretler, an executive in
residence at Sterling, a firm that is a major investor in Laureate Education
Inc. and other educational companies.
Besides the credit ratings and reports produced by
bond-rating agencies and the Education Department's controversial annual
listing of colleges'
financial-responsibility scores, there are few
public sources of information on colleges' financial health.
The new analytic tool classifies colleges based on
whether their expense ratios increased or their equity ratios decreased,
giving the harshest rankings to those with changes of more than 5 percent,
moderate rankings to those with changes of 0 to 5 percent, and good rankings
to those where expense ratios didn't increase and equity ratios didn't
decrease.
For example, it lists Bennington and Rollins
Colleges along with California State University-Channel Islands and Georgia
Southwestern State University as being on an unsustainable financial path
for several years because their ratios of expenses relative to revenues
spiked up while their equity ratios fell. (For all four, the expense ratio
increased by 25 percent or more.) Hundreds of other colleges were classified
with that same designation if only one of the ratios changed by more than 5
percent.Higher-education leaders who say the Education Department's scores
can be a flawed way of measuring a college's health say the Bain-Sterling
analysis may suffer the same weaknesses.
"Places that are viewed by some as having an
unsustainable way of operating may not be," says Richard H. Ekman, president
of the Council of Independent Colleges. Analyses like this, which rely on
data from a particular period of time, he says, "may not tell the full
story."
Susan M. Menditto, an expert on accounting matters
at the National Association of College and University Business Officers,
notes that even the way colleges account for their endowments—in some cases
counting restricted gifts, in other cases not—might not be reflected in the
analysis.
Mr. Denneen says the simple tool serves a different
purpose than does a report on the creditworthiness of an institution from
Moody's Investors Service, which uses 36 criteria to formulate its ratings.
"This does provide a useful lens," he says. "This is really a guidepost for
how hard you ought to be thinking about pushing on your financial model."
Disconcerting
Trends
Along with the tool, Bain and Sterling are
publishing a paper, "The Financially Sustainable University." It is their
take on what they view as several disconcerting trends in spending, and it
puts the two firms among an ever-growing list of analysts, pundits, and
policy makers who have been calling on higher-education leaders to rethink
how colleges are administered. (Jeffrey J. Selingo, The Chronicle's
vice president and editorial director, contributed to the paper.)
The paper covers familiar ground, although some of
the fresher recommendations and findings could resonate with the college
administrators, campus leaders, and trustees who are its intended audience.
Most notably, it suggests that colleges tap into their real estate, energy
plants, and other capital assets more creatively to generate revenue for new
academic investments, and it concludes that colleges have too many middle
managers.
While it fails to make distinctions between
different kinds of colleges, as do other respected analyses such as those of
the Delta Project on College Costs, the Bain-Sterling paper shows that, over
all, the growth in colleges' debt and the rate of spending on interest
payments and on plant, property, and equipment rose far faster than did
spending on instruction from 2002 to 2008 for the colleges studied.
It says long-term debt increased by 11.7 percent,
interest expenses by 9.2 percent, and property, plant, and equipment
expenses by 6.6 percent. Meanwhile, instruction expenses increased by just
4.8 percent.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why," by Kyle Wiens,
Harvard Business Review Blog, July 20, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Jensen Comment
One exception my be applicants for whom English is the second or third language.
Having said this, employers must use caution when bad English gets in the way
of job performance. For example, a chronic complaint of students and their
parents is that their "child" in college is taking a course where the instructor
is so difficult to understand that this gets in the way of learning. It would
seem that doctoral programs in North America should add more requirements for
communication skills in English (except in Quebec where courses are taught in
French).
"How Cybersleuths Took Down Spam King Grum," by Dan Rowinski,
ReadWriteWeb, July 20, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-cybersleuths-took-down-spam-king-grum.php
Governments, researchers and private companies are
working overtime to root out spam from the Internet. Today brings good news:
Grum, a botnet responsible for 18% of all spam, is no more. Here's how a
team of crack cybersleuths took down the world's third-largest spammer.
The search-and-destroy stories that surface when a
spam botnet is taken down are some of the juiciest to be found in any
medium. Botnet takedowns have all the elements of a great plot: a global
villain, exotic locales, despicable offenses, dedicated heroes who strive
for the good of humanity, and a mystery that takes many steps to uncover. It
is "Dick Tracy" meets "Hackers."
Grum was a devious mist of a network with no
obvious central structure. The face of a botnet like Grum is a distributed
sub-network of command-and-control (CnC) servers. These machines direct an
army of zombie underlings, ordinary personal computers that have been
infected with malware that takes orders from CnC to churn out spam. Grum
marshaled at least 120,000 spam-spewing zombies, according to Spamhaus. The
actual number of zombies in the network could have been a lot more.
Grum has been in existence for at least four years,
an impressive lifespan for a botnet, according to Atif Mushtaq, senior staff
scientist at security company
FireEye. Mushtaq, along with Carel van
Straten and Thomas Morrison from
Spamhaus
and Alex Kuzmin from
CERT-GIB,
tracked down the botnet. An anonymous security
researcher who goes by the name Nova7 also helped track down the
spammers. Their mission was to discover the CnC servers and systematically
take them offline.
By tracking IP addresses, FireEye and other
researchers were able to track Grum to a central CnC location in the
Netherlands. The team sent abuse notifications to the Dutch authorities
telling them to cut off access to the servers through its Internet Service
Provider (ISP). Authorities in the Netherlands acted fairly quickly and
Grum's primary hub was taken down.
But Grum was not so easily stopped. Like Hercules
battling the Lernaean Hydra, the team cut off one head only to watch two
grow in its place. Its Dutch head having been decapitated, the botnet moved
its resources to secondary servers in Panama and Ukraine. These servers were
more difficult to deal with because ISPs in those countries often look the
other way, making them notorious safe havens for botnets. “Shutting down any
servers there has never been easy," Mushtaq said.
The sleuths applied pressure until the ISP hosting
Grum in Panama shut off access to the botnet. It was a big success for the
research team, but the battle was not yet over.
“After seeing the Panamanian server had been shut
down, the bot herders moved quickly and started pointing the rest of the
CnCs to new secondary servers in Ukraine," Mushtaq
wrote. "I was thinking that all we needed was to
take down one Russian server, but right in front of my eyes, the bot herders
started pointing their botnet to new destinations. I must say, for a moment,
I was stunned. The bot herders replaced the two Dutch servers with six new
servers located in Ukraine."
Mushtaq passed this information to the other
researchers who then pressured their contacts in Ukraine and Russia to take
down these servers. By 11:00 a.m. PST on July 18th, the servers had been
taken offline and the battle to destroy Grum was won.
The Battle Against Botnets
For a long while, the primary agents against
botnets were governments. These entities could use their power to force ISPs
to sever access to CnCs that control the zombie armies. But governments are
often not well equipped to do so. Moreover, they act slowly and do not
always prioritize campaigns against botnets.
That has changed. In the last several years, the
fighting of botnets has become a private-sector effort, with researchers
such as those at FireEye leading the charge. Microsoft has also entered the
fray. In July 2011,
Microsoft offered $250,000 for information leading to the capture and
conviction of the individuals responsible for
Rustock. This makes sense: Microsoft’s Windows operating system is the most
installed computer software in the world. Malicious hackers who launch
botnet malware have historically focused on Windows for this reason. It
behooves Microsoft to be as proactive as possible in helping track down the
people responsible.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's sadly neglected threads on computer and network security are
at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
LIBOR ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIBOR
Note that LIBOR is a global index used in hundreds of millions of contracts
around the world as an underlying for interest rate movements. Nobody ever
argued that LIBOR was as risk free as the U.S. Treasury Rate, but globally the
U.S. Treasury rate paled relative to LIBOR as a market index for interest rates,
especially hundreds of trillions of dollars in interest rate swaps.
Hence when LIBOR becomes manipulated by traders it affects worldwide
settlements. This is why pension funds of small U.S. towns, labor unions, and
banks of all sizes are now suing Barclays and the other U.K banks that allegedly
manipulated the LIBOR market rates for their own personal agenda.
"Lies, Damn Lies and Libor: Call it one more improvisation in 'too
big to fail' crisis management," by Holman W. Jenkins Jr., The Wall
Street Journal, July 6, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304141204577510490732163260.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno64-wsj
Ignore the man behind the curtain, said the Wizard
of Oz. That advice doesn't pay in the latest scandal of the century, over
manipulation of Libor, or the London Interbank Offered Rate. The mess is one
more proof of the failing wizardry of the First World's monetary-cum-banking
arrangements.
Libor is a reference point for interest rates on
everything from auto loans and mortgages to commercial credit and complex
derivatives. Major world banks are accused of artificially suppressing their
claimed Libor rates during the 2007-08 financial crisis to hide an erosion
of trust in each other.
Did the Bank of England or other regulators
encourage and abet this manipulation of a global financial indicator?
We are talking about TBTF banks—too big to fail
banks. Banks that, by definition, become suspect only when creditors begin
to wonder if regulators might seize them and impose losses selectively on
creditors. Their overseers could not have failed to notice that interbank
liquidity was drying up and the banks nevertheless were reporting Libor
rates that suggested all was well. The now-famous nudging phone call from
the Bank of England's Paul Tucker to Barclays's Bob Diamond came many months
after Libor manipulation had already been aired in the press and in meetings
on both sides of the Atlantic. That call was meant to convey the British
establishment's concern about Barclays's too-high Libor submissions.
Let's not kid ourselves about something else:
Central banks everywhere at the time were fighting collapsing confidence by
cutting rates to stimulate retail lending. Their efforts would have been
thwarted if Libor flew up on panic about the solvency of the major banks.
Of all the questionably legal improvisations
regulators resorted to during the crisis, then, the Libor fudge appears to
be just one more. Regulators everywhere gamed their own capital standards to
keep banks afloat. The Fed's bailout of AIG, an insurance company, hardly
bears close examination. And who can forget J.P. Morgan's last-minute
decision to pay Bear Stearns shareholders $10 a share, rather than the $2
mandated by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, to avoid a legal test of the
Fed-orchestrated takeover? Even today, the European Central Bank continues
to extend its mandate in dubious ways to fight the euro crisis.
There has been little legal blowback from any of
this, but apparently there will be a great deal of blowback from the Libor
fudge. Barclays has paid $453 million in fines. Half its top management has
resigned. A dozen banks—including Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup
and J.P. Morgan Chase—remain under investigation. Private litigants are
lining up even as officialdom seemingly intends to wash its hands of its own
role.
Yet the larger lesson isn't that bankers are moral
scum, badder than the rest of us. The Libor scandal is another testimony (as
if more were needed) of just how lacking in rational design most human
institutions inevitably are.
Libor was flawed by the assumption that the banks
setting it would always be seen as top-drawer credit risks. The Basel
capital-adequacy rules were flawed because they incentivized banks to
overproduce "safe" assets, like Greek bonds and U.S. mortgages. The ratings
process was flawed eight ways from Sunday, including the fact that many
fiduciaries, under law, were required to invest in securities blessed by the
rating agencies.
Some Barclays emails imply that traders, even
before the crisis, sought to influence the bank's Libor submissions for
profit-seeking reasons. This is puzzling and may amount to empty chest
thumping. Barclays's "submitters" wouldn't seem in a position to move Libor
in ways of great use to traders. Sixteen banks are polled to set Libor and
any outlying results are thrown out. Plus each bank's name and submission
are published daily. But let's ask: Instead of trying to manipulate Libor in
a crisis, what would have been a more straightforward way of dealing with
its exposed flaws, considering the many trillions in outstanding credit tied
to Libor?
Continued in article
Compounding the Felony
"Libor problems haven't been fixed, regulators say," by Ben Protess and
Mark Scott, The New York Times, July 17, 2012 ---
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/after-barclays-scandal-regulators-say-rates-remain-flawed/?ref=business
Federal authorities cast further doubt on Tuesday
about the integrity of a key interest rate that is the subject of a growing
investigation into wrongdoing at big banks around the globe.
In Congressional testimony, the chairman of the
Federal Reserve and the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission
expressed concern that banks had manipulated interest rates for their own
gain. They also indicated that flaws in the system — which were highlighted
in a recent enforcement case against Barclays — persist.
“If these key benchmarks are not based on honest
submissions, we all lose,” Gary Gensler, head of the trading commission,
which led the investigation into Barclays, said in testimony before the
Senate Agriculture Committee.
In separate testimony before the Senate Banking
Committee, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, said he lacked
“full confidence” in the accuracy of the rate-setting process.
The Fed faces questions itself over whether it
should have reined in the rate-manipulation scheme, which took place from at
least 2005 to 2010.
Documents released last week show that the New York
Fed was well aware of potential problems at Barclays in 2008. At a hearing
in London on Tuesday, British authorities said the New York Fed never told
them Barclays was breaking the law.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Governance
Bob Jensen's threads on interest rate swaps and LIBOR ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133glosf.htm
Search for LIBOR or swap.
Timeline of Financial Scandals, Auditing
Failures, and the Evolution of International Accounting Standards ----
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm#DerivativesFrauds
LIBOR ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor
"How Barclays Rigged the Machine," by Rana Foroohar, Time Magazine,
July 23, 2012 ---
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2119318,00.html
Ever wonder why surveys about very personal topics
(think sex and money) are done anonymously? Of course you don't, because
it's obvious that people wouldn't tell the truth if they were identified on
the record. That's a key point in understanding the latest scandal to hit
the banking industry, which comes, as ever, with much hand-wringing,
assorted apologies and a crazy-sounding acronym--this time, LIBOR. That's
short for the London interbank offered rate, the interest rate that banks
charge one another to borrow money. On June 27, Britain's Barclays bank
admitted that it had deliberately understated that rate for years.
LIBOR is a measure of banks' trust in their
solvency. And around the time of the financial crisis of 2008, Barclays'
rate was rising. If a bank revealed publicly that it could borrow only at
elevated rates, it would essentially be admitting that it--and perhaps the
financial system as a whole--was vulnerable. So Barclays gamed the system to
make the financial picture prettier than it was. The charade was possible
because LIBOR is calculated not on the basis of documented lending
transactions but on the banks' own estimates, which can be whatever bankers
decree. This Kafkaesque system is overseen for bizarre historical reasons by
an association of British bankers rather than any government body.
The LIBOR scandal has already claimed Barclays'
brash American CEO, Bob Diamond, a man infamous for taking huge bonuses
while his company's share price and profit were declining. Diamond resigned,
but his head may not be the only one to roll. As many as 20 of the world's
largest banks are being sued or investigated for manipulating over the
course of many years the interest rate to which $350 trillion worth of
derivatives contracts are pegged. Bank of England and former
British-government officials accused of colluding with Barclays to stem a
financial panic may also be caught up in the mess.
What's surprising is that individual consumers may
actually have benefited, at least financially, from the collusion. Not only
the central reference point for derivatives markets, LIBOR is also the rate
to which all sorts of loans--variable mortgage rates, student loans, even
car payments--may be pegged. To the extent that banks kept LIBOR
artificially low, all those other loan rates were marked down too. Unlike
the JPMorgan trading fiasco of a few weeks ago, which has resulted in a
multibillion-dollar loss, the only apparent red ink so far in the LIBOR
scandal is the $450 million in fines that Barclays will pay to the U.K. and
U.S. governments for rigging rates (though pension funds and insurance
companies on the short end of LIBOR-pegged financial transactions may have
lost a lot of money).
Either way, the truth is that LIBOR is a much, much
bigger deal than what happened at JPMorgan. Rather than one screwed-up trade
that was--whether you like it or not (and I don't)--most likely legal, it
represents a financial system that is still, four years after the crisis
began, opaque, insular and dangerously underregulated. "This is a very, very
significant event," says Gary Gensler, chairman of the U.S. Commodity
Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which is one of the regulators
investigating the scandal. "LIBOR is the mother of all financial indices,
and it's at the heart of the consumer-lending markets. There have been
winners and losers on both sides [of the LIBOR deals], but collectively we
all lose if the market isn't perceived to be honest."
Continued in article
View from the Left
"Barclays and the Limits of Financial Reform," by Alexander Cockburn,
The Nation, July 30, 2012 ---
http://www.thenation.com/article/168834/barclays-and-limits-financial-reform
"Execs to Cash In Despite Market Woes: Even companies whose
investors received a negative return this year expect to fund at least
100% of formula-based annual bonus plans," David McCann, CFO.com,
December 9, 2011 ---
http://www3.cfo.com/article/2011/12/compensation_executive-bonus-larre-towers-watson-
Are companies in denial when it comes to
executives' annual bonuses for 2011? Judge for yourself.
Among 265 companies that participated in a
newly released Towers Watson survey, 42% said their shareholders'
total returns were lower this year than in 2010. No surprise there,
given the stock markets' flat performance in 2011.
Yet among those that reported declining
shareholder value, a majority (54%) said they expected their bonus
plan to be at least 100% funded, based on the plan's funding
formula. That wasn't much behind the 58% of all companies that
expected full or greater funding (see chart).
"It boggles the mind. How do you articulate
that to your investors?" asks Eric Larre, consulting director and
senior executive pay consultant at Towers Watson. Noting that stocks
performed excellently in 2010 while corporate earnings stagnated —
the opposite of what has happened this year — he adds, "How are you
going to say to them, 'We made more money than we did last year, but
you didn't'?"
In particular, companies would have to
convincingly explain that annual bonus plans are intended to
motivate executives to achieve targets for short-term, internal
financial metrics such as EBITDA, operating margin, or earnings per
share, and that long-term incentive programs — which generally rest
on stock-option or restricted-stock awards, giving executives, like
investors, an ownership stake in the company — are more germane to
investors.
But such arguments may hold little sway
with the average investor, who "doesn't bifurcate compensation that
discretely," says Larre. Rather, investors simply look at the pay
packages as displayed in the proxy statement to see how much top
executives were paid overall, and at how the stock performed.
Larre attributes much of the current,
seeming generosity to executives to complacence within corporate
boards. This year, the first in which public companies were required
to give shareholders an advisory ("say on pay") vote on
executive-compensation plans, 89% received a thumbs-up. But that
came on the heels of 2010, when the S&P 500 gained some 13% and
investors were relatively content with their returns. "They may not
be as content now," Larre observes. "I think the number of 'no'
say-on-pay votes will be larger during the 2012 proxy season."
Continued in article
Timeline of Financial Scandals, Auditing Failures, and the
Evolution of International Accounting Standards ----
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm#DerivativesFrauds
(to view on a new page)
Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Governance
"An Architect and Scholar Weighs the Value of the Physical Campus," by
Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-We-Need-the-Physical/133041/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
I don't think it comes as a surprise to parents and anybody connected with
higher education that a whole lot is gained by having students, especially
students recently graduated from high school, learn and live on campus while
enrolled as full-time students. Parents like this cushion between having their
children live at home and live on the mean streets. Young students, especially
male students, are still immature for their age when they graduate from high
school. Many are not yet prepared for living and learning completely on their
own. And then there's the on-campus social and sexual interactions. How many
marriages emerge from campus living versus living in the virtual world of
education?
And I still think students learn as much or more from each other as they
learn from their instructors. This is possible in online communications, but
online interactions are somewhat more formalized by taking a class together.
Online campus interactions are more serendipitous in dorm lounges, libraries,
student commons, dining halls, sports events, sports team participation, music
group participation, chapel participation, etc.
Having said this there can also be some advantages gained from online
learning such as in an online tax accounting course at the University of
Connecticut where students in the course are mostly full time professionals,
many working for insurance companies, who share their career experiences with
other students. This is less likely to happen in onsite courses where students
tend to be not working full time as professionals and are often not as street
smart as the older online working stiffs.
The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns
About Technologies in Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Are Universities Becoming EMOs (Educational
Maintenance Organizations)? ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#EMOs
Small and midsize businesses are foregoing millions
of dollars in targeted tax breaks because they decided the incentives aren't
enough to justify the time, effort and expense to qualify for them. The Internal
Revenue Service estimated that only about 20,000 of 1.78 million corporate-tax
returns filed in the U.S. claim any of three dozen credits available.
"Firms Pass Up Tax Breaks, Citing Hassles, Complexity," by John McKinnon,
The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444025204577543060812237798.html?mod=dist_smartbrief&mg=reno-wsj
Jensen Comments
Corporate tax breaks have something in common those elaborate cameras and
expensive network video recorders given by their children. Jay Leno once
commented that he gave a new VCR years ago and set it all up for his parents.
When he came back a year later he found it back in a box in the basement. They
never could figure out how to use the complicated thing.
I've taken over 10,000 pictures on my old and reliable Sony camera without
learning to use more than a couple of the many functions of my camera. And there
are all the great features of my newer Dell laptop. Forget them! Life is just
too short for learning all those.
Internet History ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
Question
Have I been wrong about crediting the ARPANET in 1969 (and Al Gore) all
these years?
By December 5, 1969, a 4-node network was connected
by adding the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa
Barbara. Building on ideas developed in ALOHAnet, the ARPANET grew rapidly.
By 1981, the number of hosts had grown to 213, with a new host being added
approximately every twenty days.
"Who Really Invented the Internet? Contrary to legend, it wasn't the
federal government, and the Internet had nothing to do with maintaining
communications during a war," by Gordon Crovitz, The Wall Street Journal,
July 22, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444464304577539063008406518.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno64-wsj
A telling moment in the presidential race came
recently when Barack Obama said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build
that. Somebody else made that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats
over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet
didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so
that all companies could make money off the Internet."
It's an urban legend that the government launched
the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its
communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more
interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to
build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of
the way.
For many technologists, the idea of the Internet
traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War
II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project. In a 1946
article in The Atlantic titled "As We May Think," Bush defined an ambitious
peacetime goal for technologists: Build what he called a "memex" through
which "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh
of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the
memex and there amplified."
That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s
technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications
networks into one global network—a "world-wide web." The federal government
was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency
Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear
attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA
program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting
the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by
considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a
connection between two or more computer networks."
If the government didn't invent the Internet, who
did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and
Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company where Mr.
Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in
Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link
different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first
personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that
still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of
Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't
wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do
it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert
Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than
they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under
government funding and university contracts. They had contract
administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend
with."
So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox
become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect
between a government-led view of business and how innovation actually
happens.
Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester,
N.Y., were focused on selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet
was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share
a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's
venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement
that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. "They just
had no idea what they had," Jobs later said, after launching hugely
profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox.
Xerox's copier business was lucrative for decades,
but the company eventually had years of losses during the digital
revolution. Xerox managers can console themselves that it's rare for a
company to make the transition from one technology era to another.
As for the government's role, the Internet was
fully privatized in 1995, when a remaining piece of the network run by the
National Science Foundation was closed—just as the commercial Web began to
boom. Economist Tyler Cowen wrote in 2005: "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms
the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the
government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information,
TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a decade, private concerns
have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological
revolutions of the millennia."
It's important to understand the history of the
Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government.
It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses
requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As
the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in
this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for
making it happen.
July 25, 2012 reply from Chuck White
Bob:
Since you cited the WSJ on the sources of the
Internet you might find this other view of history worth reading.
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-mo-who-invented-internet-20120723,0,5052169.story
Hope you are well.
chuck
July 25, 2012 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
There is a wonderful article on slate
that debunks the recent op-ed article by
Crovitz in WSJ
The Slate article substantiates my own
arguments
better than I could have done myself.
Here are a few snippets from the Slate
article:
Regards,
Jagdish
Personal Computer History
"Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer --- The PC's
back story involves a little-known Texas connection," by Lamont Wood,
Computer World, August 8, 2008 ---
Click Here
Steve Jobs at the Smithsonian ---
http://www.si.edu/Exhibitions/stevejobsputational Science Education Reference Desk ---
http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/
Timeline of Computing History ---
http://www.computer.org/computer/timeline/
Making the Macintosh ---
http://library.stanford.edu/mac/index.html
History of Computing
Internet Archive: Computers & Technology ---
http://archive.org/details/computersandtechvideos
History of Computing
Internet Archive: Computers & Technology ---
http://archive.org/details/computersandtechvideos
The History of Computing ---
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/
Steve Jobs at the Smithsonian ---
http://www.si.edu/Exhibitions/stevejobs
American University Computer History Museum ---
http://www.computinghistorymuseum.org/
The Apple (Computer) Museum ---
http://www.theapplemuseum.com/
A History of Microsoft Windows (slide show from Wired News)
---
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/pcs/multimedia/2007/01/wiredphotos31
Oldcomputers.com ---
http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
Aesthetics + Computation Group: MIT Media Laboratory ---
http://acg.media.mit.edu/projects/
Digital History - Multimedia ---
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/multimedia.cfm
Portland State University Digital Repository ---
http://dr.archives.pdx.edu/xmlui/
Dartmouth Digital Collections: Books ---
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/books.html
The University of Michigan Digital Humanities Series---
http://www.digitalculture.org/books/book-series/digital-humanities-series/
From SUNY Albany: How to Improve Your
Digital Photography
Interactive Media Center: Digital Image Information ---
http://library.albany.edu/imc/tutimages.htm
Computational Science Education Reference Desk ---
http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/
Digital Forensics and Cyber Security Center at the University of Rhode
Island ---
http://www.dfcsc.uri.edu/
Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG877.html
Bob Jensen's threads on computing and network security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
"An Economist Finds Herself in the Political Cross Hairs," by Tom
Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/an-economist-finds-herself-in-the-political-crosshairs/30119
On Monday, President Obama
made fun of Mitt Romney’s
jobs plan, citing
a commentary by an economist who estimated that
his proposal to shift to a so-called territorial corporate-tax system—that
is, to exempt American corporations from taxes on their foreign income—would
cause them to move their operations overseas, creating 800,000 jobs in other
countries.
The commentary was by Kimberly A. Clausing, a
professor of economics at Reed College, and published in Tax Notes.
She doesn’t mention Mitt Romney by name, writing that “others” are pushing
for such a system, but it’s clear who she’s talking about, and it’s obvious
that she thinks it’s a bad idea.
“U.S. tax payments for the income from foreign
operations of U.S. multinational corporations would not simply be deferred;
they would be completely erased,” she writes. “That would eliminate
constraints on shifting income abroad.”
Clausing counters the claim that moving to a
territorial system would put the United States on the same footing as many
of its trading partners. Their systems, she writes, have built-in safeguards
that prevent companies from moving their operations elsewhere to avoid
taxes. “[T]he hybrid systems used by our largest trading partners have more
in common with the reforms suggested by the Obama administration,” Clausing
writes.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This is a tough issue that Professor Clausing treats all too superficially.
Firstly, she does not acknowledge that U.S. corporations, large and small,
are now paying little or no corporate income taxes because of loopholes already
existing in the tax code. The corporate income tax collections as a percentage
of GDP have been declining steadily since 1955 and now stand at less than 1% of
GDP ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States
Secondly, she does not consider the impact of either the Obama or Romney
sides of the argument on the reactive tax codes of other nations.
Presently, other nations are enjoying the higher employment revenues, local bank
liquidities, and corporate tax revenues of U.S. corporation profits and
property value taxes in their nations. If the U.S. acts in such a way to
jeopardize their jobs, savings, and tax revenues these nations may provide even
more incentives to operate internationally. This is not entirely a zero-sum
game, but there are aspects of a zero-sum game involved in global taxation that
Professor Clausing ignores entirely. The worst-case scenario is where the U.S.
makes it so unprofitable to be an American Corporation that the corporations
become Bermuda Corporations --- which is what many of "our" giant corporations
like Accenture have already done ostensibly for tax reasons.
Thirdly, she does not consider the opposite side of the coin that perhaps
millions of jobs are being lost because corporations are already keeping and
investing their foreign profits in foreign countries. There's no incentive to
bring those profits home because the U.S. corporate tax rates are the highest in
the world, and the only incentive to bring the cash home is when lawyers and
accountants find some loophole that will prevent foreign from being taxed if
they are sent back to the U.S.
Fourthly, she does not consider more efficient and effective alternatives to
corporate taxation in general. Personally, I favor the VAT tax, although I doubt
that this is a tax that Romney would advocate.
The simple answer to the political position Romney is taking is to force him
to demonstrate how he plans to make up for the revenue lost if the corporate
income tax is dropped entirely.
I think Professor Clausing's essay is weak in terms of academic rigor. But we
can certainly rely upon political debate over this issue to be even more
superficial. Her essay will, however, be praised ad ad nauseam on MSNBC
criticized ad ad nauseam on Fox News.
Her weak essay is at
http://www.taxanalysts.com/www/website.nsf/Web/HomePage/$file/clausing.pdf
A New Second Life 3-D Application in Higher Education
"Immersive Learning in Preservice Teacher Education: Using Virtual Worlds,"
by Paula M. Selvester, The International HETL Review, Volume 2 ISSN 2164-3091,
July 8, 2012 ---
http://hetl.org/
Abstract
The purpose of this project was to use virtual
world technology in a fully online course to assist preservice teachers in
examining their stated and implied beliefs, attitudes, and expectations
about social roles related to gender. Second Life was explored as a viable
means to enhance interactivity and engagement in an asynchronous entirely
online class. Data was generated by a social roles questionnaire, a
perception survey, journal entries and written final examinations. Results
showed that students’ initially held beliefs about social roles as
determined by the questionnaire did not significantly change; however, data
generated from journals and final exam indicated that experiences exploring
gender and social roles in a virtual environment were powerful and
transformative, leading to new insights into gender roles and how these
roles impact our beliefs about ourselves and others and how teachers and
students are impacted by these beliefs. Preservice teachers surveyed
indicated agreement with the idea that Second Life makes online coursework
more interactive.
Key Words: Virtual learning,
gender, social roles, teacher beliefs, second life, teacher preparation,
online learning.
INTRODUCTION
Professors of all disciplines can impact student
learning by varying the way in which they engage students in knowledge
sharing and creation. Online education technologies have become an important
means to provide a more varied and differentiated curriculum, especially in
higher education settings. Not only do online technologies provide an
alternative or supplement to face-to-face lecture, but they also provide a
variety of ways for students to interact with the content of the curriculum
as well as the professor. Through technology experiences, especially when
social media is employed, students become more actively engaged in their own
learning when provided the opportunity to collaboratively work with their
peers in constructing information (Norton & Sprague, 2001). Many
universities offer courses through an online learning management system such
as Blackboard Vista; Discussions, emailing, virtual meetings, instant
messaging and a variety of other functions allow for students to interact
with each other and with the professor; however, with the advent and
development of virtual world technology for use in education, immersive
education within these virtual worlds offer an alternative education
experience.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
There is emerging evidence that virtual world
technologies supplement and provide the online education experience by
providing opportunities for meaningful social interaction, a constructivist
element that can improve student learning during online instruction. When
students meet together in virtual settings where they can “see” each other
via avatars and interact in a virtual world a sense of belonging and an
embodied social presence is created (Edirisingha et al., 2009; Holmberg &
Huvila, 2008; Omale, Hung, Luetkehans, & Cooke-Plagwitz, 2009; Salmon, 2009;
Warburton, 2009).
How Do Virtual Worlds Enrich Learning?
Immersive or virtual world learning provides
students a multimodality experience. These technologies are 3D
Internet-based simulation environments in which users can play games, they
are not games (Dawley, 2009). The virtual learning environment offers the
opportunity for students to do what might otherwise be impractical or
impossible in the real world (Twinning, 2009). Students can communicate with
each other while walking, running, swimming, flying through environments as
varied as coral reefs, Antarctic ice caps, volcanoes, or they can visit
museums, art galleries, and classrooms that are virtual replicas of the
real-world locations. Users can build buildings, cars, upload pictures and
watch movies together.
Web-based applications have facilitated the use of
virtual worlds in learning, allowing the development of a range of teaching
tools such as document and file sharing, holding meetings, conferences, and
class lectures and seminars. In particular, virtual worlds have been studied
as environments in which to instruct using problem-based and project-based
education methodologies (Mayrath, Sanchez, Traphagan, Heikes, & Trivedi,
2007). Virtual environments appear to provide opportunities for situated
learning, contextualized and supported by communities of practice which can
provide powerful experiences that engage and inspire education that goes
beyond the traditional classroom (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lave, 1996; Wenger,
1998).
Research on the use of virtual world learning has
shown that learners are motivated to engage in the learning events because
of the life-like avatars and the interactivity with digital mentors and
role-playing actors within world (Veletsianos, 2008; 2009). Ang & Wang,
(2006) studied students using virtual learning environments for science
education. They observed notable improvements in engagement and in
attendance. Scores on science exams were reported to have improved.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on Second Life are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
These threads include links to Steve Hornik's pioneering applications of
Second Life in accounting higher education.
Statistical Reasoning 1 ---
http://ocw.jhsph.edu/index.cfm/go/viewCourse/course/StatisticalReasoning1/coursePage/index/
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: Statway
(statistics tutorials) ---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/statway
CAUSEweb Resources (statistics education) ---
http://www.causeweb.org/resources/
The bottom line is that
accountics research rarely have findings of great interest to either practicing
professionals or accounting teachers.
The Cult of Statistical
Significance: How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
Research at the University of Rochester ---
https://urresearch.rochester.edu/home.action
Jensen Comment
Note that this site includes a long listing of research in accounting, finance,
and economics, much of it based on positivism and financial markets.
July 8m 2012 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
Bob,
I browsed the PhD theses list at this site. One
interesting observation I can make is that many of them are collection of
essays. I know that many universities, including us, discourage this type of
theses.
I personally think it is a very good idea, but was
not able to convince my colleagues. A year ago for the first time, I did sit
on a dissertation committee where the student wrote a bunch of essays (they
were in the area of computational linguistics in medical informatics). I was
thrilled.
I wonder what the practice is at other schools.
Regards,
Jagdish
Jagdish S. Gangolly
Department of Informatics
College of Computing & Information
State University of New York at Albany Harriman Campus,
Building 7A, Suite 220
Albany, NY 12222
Phone: 518-956-8251, Fax: 518-956-8247
Question
How can you capture part of a screen such a a text phrase in a document that
would let you select that phrase as text to copy?
Answer
There are many screen capturing alternatives. I ten dot use PaintShop Pro or
SnagIt, neither of which are free programs.
From the Scout Report on July 6, 2012
Kwout ---
http://kwout.com/
What is "kwout"? Basically, it's a tiny application
that allows users to "quote" a part of a web page as an image with an image
map. It is easy to use, as all users have to do is add the kwout bookmarklet
to their favorite browser. Visitors can then grab a screenshot, cut out the
area of interest.
Windows 7 Kwout ---
http://kwout.com/quote/aci6ehrw
"3 Reasons You'll Buy Google's Nexus 7 Tablet," by Eliot Weisberg,
ReadWriteWeb, June 28, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/video-3-reasons-youll-buy-googles-nexus-7-tablet.php
"Google Nexus 7 Makes Amazon Kindle Fire Irrelevant," by Dan Rowinski,
ReadWriteWeb, June 28, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/06/google-nexus-7-makes-amazon-kindle-fire-irrelevant.php
"Will Google’s New Nexus Q Kill Google TV?" by Mark Hachman,
ReadWriteWeb, June 28, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/will-googles-new-nexus-q-kill-google-tv.php
Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on Tricks and Tools of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
BAM (making the students struggle to find their own answers) is good for
metacognitive learning.
Structure and making it easier is bad for metacognitive learning and long-term
memory
Working Paper 265 on Metacognition
Metacognitive Concerns in Designs
and Evaluations of Computer Aided Education and Training: Are We Misleading
Ourselves About Measures of Success?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
"Why Floundering Is Good: Trying and failing leads to faster learning,"
by Annie Murphy Paul, Psychology Today, July 11, 2012 ---
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-be-brilliant/201207/why-floundering-is-good
Call it the “learning paradox”: the more you
struggle and even fail while you’re trying to master new information, the
better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later.
The learning paradox is at the heart of “productive
failure,” a phenomenon identified by Manu Kapur, a researcher at the
Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore.
Kapur points out that while the model adopted by many teachers and employers
when introducing others to new knowledge — providing lots of structure and
guidance early on, until the students or workers show that they can do it on
their own — makes intuitive sense, it may not be the best way to promote
learning. Rather, it’s better to let the neophytes wrestle with the material
on their own for a while, refraining from giving them any assistance at the
start. In a paper published earlier this year in the Journal of the Learning
Sciences, Kapur and a co-author, Katerine Bielaczyc, applied the principle
of productive failure to mathematical problem solving in three schools in
Singapore.
With one group of students, the teacher provided
strong “scaffolding” — instructional support — and feedback. With the
teacher’s help, these pupils were able to find the answers to their set of
problems. Meanwhile, a second group was directed to solve the same problems
by collaborating with one another, absent any prompts from their instructor.
These students weren’t able to complete the problems correctly. But in the
course of trying to do so, they generated a lot of ideas about the nature of
the problems and about what potential solutions would look like. And when
the two groups were tested on what they’d learned, the second group
“significantly outperformed” the first.
The apparent struggles of the floundering group
have what Kapur calls a “hidden efficacy”: they lead people to understand
the deep structure of problems, not simply their correct solutions. When
these students encounter a new problem of the same type on a test, they’re
able to transfer the knowledge they’ve gathered more effectively than those
who were the passive recipients of someone else’s expertise.
In the real world, problems rarely come neatly
packaged, so being able to discern their deep structure is key. But, Kapur
notes, none of us like to fail, no matter how often Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs praise the salutary effects of an idea that flops or a
start-up that crashes and burns. So, he says, we need to “design for
productive failure” by building it into the learning process. Kapur has
identified three conditions that promote this kind of beneficial struggle.
First, choose problems to work on that “challenge but do not frustrate.”
Second, provide learners with opportunities to explain and elaborate on what
they’re doing. Third, give learners the chance to compare and contrast good
and bad solutions to the problems. And to those students and workers who
protest this tough-love teaching style: you’ll thank me later.
Competency-Based Programs (where instructors do not assign the grades) Can
Work Well But Do Not Always Work Well
A Research Report
"Competency-Based Degree Programs in the U.S. Postsecondary Credentials for
Measurable Student Learning and Performance," Council on Adult and Experiential
Learning," 2012 ---
http://www.cael.org/pdfs/2012_CompetencyBasedPrograms
Executive Summary
As our economy evolves, there is growing recognition of the importance of an
educated workforce. A key challenge is how to help more people, particularly
adults, succeed at the postsecondary level and earn degrees. However,
promoting degree completion is not our only challenge. Today our higher
education system is facing a crisis regarding its perceived quality. One
model for improving quality is competency-based education, in which an
institution clearly defines the specific competencies expected of its
graduates. This paper examines the current state of competency-based
postsecondary education in the U.S., profiling the various types of
competency-based, or competency-focused, models that currently exist, the
extent to which these programs assess for student competencies or learning
outcomes, and the extent to which these programs operate outside of a
credit-based system. These programs can help inform other institutions
interested in developing a stronger focus on competencies, whether by
demonstrating the possibilities of high quality programs or by facilitating
the recognition of learning.
Jensen Comment
The good news is that competency-based grades virtually put an end to games
played by students to influence their grades from their instructors. Instead
they may be more demanding on their instructors to do a better job on content
rather than being their buddies. Competency-based grading goes a long way to
leveling the playing field.
However, a competency-based system can be dysfunctional to motivation and
self-esteem. One of my old girl friends at the University of Denver was called
in by her physical chemistry professor who made a deal with her. If she would
change her major from chemistry he agreed to give her a C grade. I honestly
think an F grade would've discouraged her to a point where she dropped out of
college. Instead she changed to DU's nursing school and flourished with a 3.3
gpa. Purportedly she became an outstanding nurse in a long and very satisfying
career that didn't require much aptitude for physical chemistry. For some reason
she was better in organic chemistry.
I can't imagine teaching a case course in the Harvard Business School where
the course grades are entirely based on a final examination that depends zero
upon what the course instructor feels was "class participation." There's not
much incentive to participate in class discussions if the those discussions
impact some way upon grades and instructor evaluations (such as evaluations for
graduate school and employment).
Much of what is learned in a course or an entire college curriculum cannot be
measured in test grades and term paper grading (where the readers of the term
papers are not the instructors).
In spite of all the worries about competency-based grading and student
evaluations, there are circumstances where competency-based education inspires
terrrific learning experiences.
Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge
Working Paper 265 on Metacognition
Metacognitive Concerns in Designs
and Evaluations of Computer Aided Education and Training: Are We Misleading
Ourselves About Measures of Success?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
"Starting to Reprogram Your Students - Part One," by Joe Hoyle,
Teaching Blog, July 1, 2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/07/starting-to-reprogram-your-students.html
"Starting to Reprogram Your Students - Part Two," by Joe Hoyle,
Teaching Blog, July 12, 2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/07/starting-to-reprogram-your-students_12.html
Jensen Comment
I wonder why reprogramming students is different from reprogramming a PC that is
loaded with malicious malware. My tech experts tell me that the only solutions
to many malware infestations is to "rebuild the PC" which is tantamount to
erasing the hard drive and re-installing the operating system and desired
programs.
Sadly, we cannot reprogram a student like we can rebuild a PC. Thus,
Professor Hoyle's rebuilding efforts entails trying to work around the malware
that's already embedded in a student. That's a really tough problem for some
types of human malware.
"Yes, College Essays Are Ruining Our Economy," by David Silverman,
Harvard Business Review Blog, July 12, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/yes_college_essays_are_ruining.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Some view it as a scandal that the CEO of J.P.
Morgan "knew" about the risky trades long ago. Or that the Bush
administration knew "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.." Or that the
average cell phone customer can know when they're roaming, and yet still be
surprised by the data charges from vacation, whether it's $100 to upload a
photo to Facebook, or $62,000 for downloading Wall-E.
What is rarely mentioned is the amount of
information that lands on the desk of a CEO or a President, or every single
one of us, every day.
In that tsunami of information, spotting the
information you need to act on is as hopeless as identifying the rain drops
that will flood your house. Is it the clause in the iTunes agreement on page
10 that matters or the third page of your credit card agreement? Does your
mortgage rate go up when the moon is full? How would you know? Sifting out
important from extraneous requires reading everything. Thus: it's all
important.
In fact, everyone, not just CEOs, should be
seriously worried about the time-bomb waiting to go off in their inbox.
Consider this: I regularly meet with people who develop methods of improving
the email experience. They tell me that it's not unusual to find several
thousand emails in the average inbox, thousands more squirreled away in
stored folders, and that most of us receive hundreds to that collection
every day. The technological solution they propose is to use algorithms to
sort your missives by importance based on what they can infer about who and
what you think is important. In theory, that sounds great. The critical,
must-read items tend to come from people we communicate with regularly and
knowing if it's an email from the boss or a salesperson should assist in
getting to first things first. But what about that email I got out of the
blue from a friend I hadn't talked to in years alerting me to a news article
about the breach of LinkedIn email passwords? The email prioritization
software put it at the bottom of the pile, which wasn't so good because I
(used to) use that same password for several sites. Without quick action, my
personal identity would have been further compromised.
Ultimately, the problem is that we write too many
words. We simply make too much Content, and that starts with "C" which
rhymes with "E" which stands for Education. As a teacher I've witnessed how
we imply that an increase in word count equals an advancement in learning.
In elementary school, we identify "key sentences" and write one- or two-page
essays, which is wonderful, but then it all goes wrong. By junior high we're
on to 10-page papers, by high school we're up to 25 pages, in college, the
triumph is a 50-page thesis, and then the Ph.D. produces 100-plus pages to
prove their smarts.
But more doesn't mean better for anything other
than active cranial hair follicles (of which I have very few). Consider this
chart:
. . .
My suggestion: require a class in headline writing
for all students in high school and college. Give them A+ marks for turning
this:
In today's turbulent times, it is more important
than ever to remember that we are living in a world that, currently, is
now more difficult to live in, and that we should be exercising extreme
caution because of the evolution and advancement of artificial
intelligence combined with mechanical apparatus that provides a method
and capability for these new beings created in laboratories around the
world to develop their own impulses, agendas and goal states, which, we
have been lead to believe by reliable experts and a variety of
eyewitness accounts, have already evolved via a combined intelligence
network and communications subsystem into semi-sentient destroyers of
life, liberty and happiness.
Into this:
Killer Robots!
Teach them that the best message is one that lets
you know if you don't need to read it at all (or if, alternatively, there is
a killer robot behind the door).
And for the rest of us, let's simply make this
pledge:I
solemnly swear that I will take the time to make it short.
Bob Jensen's Helpers for Writers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Grammatically Correct English
"A Matter of Fashion," by John McWhorter, The New York Times, July
9, 2012 ---
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/a-matter-of-fashion/
“Much was said, and much was ate, and all went
well.” Clearly this sentence was written by a fourth grader – or at best
someone not ushered into acquaintance with “proper” grammar. Like, say, Jane
Austen? That’s straight out of her novel “Mansfield Park.”
Linguists insist that it’s wrong to designate any
kind of English “proper” because language always changes and always has. A
common objection is that even so, all people must know which forms of
language are acceptable in the public sphere, at the peril of
unemployability or, at least, social handicap.
Fair enough – but there’s a middle ground. We can
teach people which forms of English are acceptable without thinking of the
more colloquial phrases and words as errors. Rather, what is considered
proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion.
Those who ignore rules of fashion exercise little
influence in society, whether we like it or not. But we wouldn’t see someone
wearing breeches or petticoats as mentally ungifted, and the same should go
for the person who, as millions of English speakers do every day year round,
use they in the singular as in Tell each student that they can hand the
paper in until 4.
We are taught that a proper language makes perfect
logical sense, and that allowing changes willy-nilly threatens chaos. But we
get a different perspective with a trip back in time.
Not to the Stone Age: just to the 19th century, to
the characters in, say, Edith Wharton’s novels.
Not to the Stone Age: just to the 19th century, to
the characters in, say, Edith Wharton’s novels. Certain expressions that
were considered mistakes unworthy of polite company then seem utterly normal
today. It’s almost funny how arbitrary these things seem from our vantage
point. “Properly,” one was to say the two first people in a line. The
well-spoken person said first two only if the people in the line were
divided into pairs. Um, O.K. – one sees the logic, but senses a certain
triviality. Or, one talked about how a street was well-lighted: lit was
considered vulgar, as was have a look at rather than look at. (In fact, it’s
the style of this newspaper to use well-lighted.)
¶To say the house is being built felt slangy and
newfangled to many. Better, grammarians thought, was the house is building.
Again, we can perceive that they weren’t crazy: “is being” certainly can
seem a little weird if you roll it around in your mouth and imagine hearing
it anew. Yet who among us would welcome going back to the house is building?
¶An especially enlightening read is William
Cobbett’s book-length lecture to his son called “A Grammar of the English
Language.” Cobbett’s sense of what good English was in 1818 seems, in 2012,
so bizarre we can scarcely imagine someone speaking in such a way and being
taken seriously.
¶To Cobbett, the past tense forms awoke, blew,
built, burst, clung, dealt, dug, drew, froze, grew, hung, meant, spat,
stung, swept, swam, threw and wove were all mistakes. The well-spoken
person, Cobbett instructed, swimmed yesterday and builded a house last year.
In Google’s handy Ngram viewer, using data from millions of books over
several centuries, one can see that builded only started falling out of
disuse around 1920. Not for any reason; no one discovered that builded was
somehow elementally deficient. Fashion changed.
¶So, hemlines went up, while Lobster Newburg,
chintz and sarsaparilla fell out of fashion. Likewise did concerns like
chiding people for saying first two – or for saying chided rather than chid,
another token of Cobbett’s day.
¶Today, we have our own fads. We’re more likely to
hear about using nouns as verbs – structure a lesson, impact a discussion –
or making new verbs from nouns, such as liaise. Yet the verbs copy, view,
worship and silence were born from nouns to no complaint. The fashion simply
hadn’t yet arisen to condemn them. Or, for that matter, no fuss was made at
the time when William Shakespeare and William Makepeace Thackeray, both
celebrated as masters of the tongue, used they in the singular form.
¶Charles Dickens is one more example demonstrating
the magnificent evanescence of what is considered sophisticated. In “David
Copperfield,” Aunt Betsey says “Mr. Dick is his name here, and everywhere
else, now – if he ever went anywhere else, which he don’t.”
Continued in article¶
Bob Jensen's Helpers for Writers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
All the jobs are not going to Asia, They're going to Hal ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Space_Oddessey
"When Machines Do Your Job: Researcher Andrew McAfee says advances in
computing and artificial intelligence could create a more unequal society,"
by Antonio Regalado, MIT's Technology Review, July 11, 2012 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428429/when-machines-do-your-job/
Thank you Ramest Fernando for the heads up.
Are American workers losing their jobs to machines?
That was the question posed by
Race Against the
Machine, an influential e-book published last
October by MIT business school researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew
McAfee. The pair looked at troubling U.S. employment numbers—which
have declined since the recession of 2008-2009 even as economic output has
risen—and concluded that computer technology was
partly to blame.
Advances in hardware and software mean it's
possible to automate more white-collar jobs, and to do so more quickly than
in the past. Think of the airline staffers whose job checking in passengers
has been taken by self-service kiosks. While more productivity is a
positive, wealth is becoming more concentrated, and more middle-class
workers are getting left behind.
What does it mean to have "technological
unemployment" even amidst apparent digital plenty? Technology Review
spoke to McAfee at the Center for Digital Business, part of the MIT Sloan
School of Management, where as principal research scientist he studies
new employment trends and definitions of the workplace.
TR: What's your definition of
automation?
McAfee: The obvious definition is one fewer job
than there used to be, with the same amount of output. A tax preparer can
get automated away by software like TurboTax, and just not find work
anymore. An assembly line worker could be flat-out automated away by a robot
on the assembly line. There is a closely related phenomenon, which is the
massive increases in productivity brought on by digital technology. An
example is the legal discovery process. By one estimate we heard, one lawyer
is now as productive as 500 used to be. You might not lay off 500 lawyers,
but the next time you might hire a few people and some software to read
documents.
Where do you see automation leading to the
loss of jobs?
Others have done work showing that if you are a
"routine cognitive worker" following instructions or doing a structured
mental task, you have been under a lot of downward wage pressure for a while
now. I think that is largely a technology story. Payroll clerks, travel
agents—we don't have as many of them as we used to. We don't have as many
people working in manufacturing, even though manufacturing is a growing
industry.
What was the response you received to
Race Against the Machine?
People accepted that technology was really
accelerating and that there were going to be labor-force consequences. The
broader discussion was between optimism and pessimism. Does it feel like we
are heading into the kind of economy and society that we want, or the kind
of economy and society that we don't? A lot of people who commented said,
"Look, if these guys are anywhere near right, we are heading into an economy
that is going to be dire for a lot of people."
What does the economy that we don't want
look like?
The spread between the haves and the have-nots
continues to grow, and more importantly, the absolute standard of living of
the people at the middle and the bottom goes down. That is the economy that
I don't want to head into.
What is the optimistic view?
Erik Brynjolfsson came up with a great phrase:
"digital Athens." The Athenian citizens had lives of leisure; they got to
participate in democracy and create art. That was largely because they had
slaves to do the work. Okay, I don't want human slaves, but in a very, very
automated and digitally productive economy you don't need to work as much,
as hard, with as many people, to get the fruits of the economy. So the
optimistic version is that we finally have more hours in our week freed up
from toil and drudgery.
Do you see evidence for a digital Athens on
the street, in the real economy?
No. What we are seeing—and this was pretty much
unanticipated—is that the people at the top of the skill, wage, and income
distribution are working more hours. We have this preference for doing more
work. The people who have a lot of leisure—I think in too many cases it's
involuntary. It's unemployment or underemployment. That is not my version of
digital Athens.
Which is further advanced, the automation
of intellectual work or of physical tasks?
The automation of knowledge work is way, way
farther along. It's really hard to get computers to do things that your
four-year-old can do, like walk across the room and pick up a pen, and
recognize it as a pen. So the physical world presents a lot of challenges to
digital technologies.
But it feels to me as if we are starting to turn a
corner. The data available to help a robot is big data, and it's exploding.
The sensors have been progressing along a Moore's Law trajectory. And the
physical pieces of a robot, the actuators and so on, have gotten a lot
better too. So it seems the ingredients are all in place for the robots to
start getting into the economy.
How should businesses react to the trend
toward more automation?
I think the companies that succeed going forward
are the ones that figure out what mix of human and digital labor is going to
be the right mix. And I think that that proper mix is going to involve more,
and more types of, digital labor than we are using right now.
What is your advice to the individual, or
to the parent educating a child?
To the parent, make sure your kid's education is
geared toward things that machines appear not to be very good at. Computers
are still lousy at programming computers. Computers are still bad at
figuring out what questions need to be answered. I would encourage every kid
these days to buckle down and do a double major, one in the liberal arts and
one in the college of sciences.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It's interesting to read some of the many comments to this article.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
"What Americans Earn," by Lam Thuy Vo, NPR, July 16, 2012 ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/16/156688596/what-americans-earn
Jensen Comment
It's important to read the part that reveals what items are excluded from the
data. I'm not certain how non-monetary items that are returns for labor are
accounted for. For example, some employees get free housing (e.g., university
administrators and security employees), free cars for personal as well as
business use, free food, stock options, etc.
The Humane Society's TV adds with the adorable and sad dogs and cats are
probably among the most successful advertisements on television
But are they misleading in terms of not giving more than 1% of the donations to
Humane Society shelters?
I'm always suspicious of these hard-sell fund raisers.
"Consumer group wants probe of Humane Society ads," WPXI Pittsburgh, July
13, 2012 ---
http://www.wpxi.com/news/news/local/consumer-group-wants-probe-humane-society-ads/nPsXB/
An organization wants attorneys general in
Pennsylvania and 11 other states to investigate whether advertisements by
the Humane Society of the United States violate laws by implying that money
from donors supports animal shelters.
HumaneWatch, a nonprofit project of the
Washington-based Center for Consumer Freedom, released a report on Thursday
claiming that the Humane Society gives 1 percent or less of its income to
local animal shelters, despite ads showing animals in shelters.
“Consistently, there is a disconnect between what
they use to raise money and what they spend that money on,” said Justin
Wilson, senior research analyst at the Center for Consumer Freedom.
Humane Society of the United States spokeswoman
Stephanie Twinings said the Center for Consumer Freedom represents food
industry interests in Washington and is more interested in stopping the
Humane Society’s lobbying efforts than steering more money to shelters.
“This is all just their desperate attempts to pull
fundraising away from us because we’re effective in getting regulations
changed for the food industry,” she said.
Nils Fredricksen, spokesman for Pennsylvania
Attorney General Linda Kelly, said his office neither confirms nor denies
the existence of any investigations, but said Kelly reads and responds to
any petition that crosses her desk.
“There is a belief in the public that the Humane
Society of the United States is the mothership, so to speak, and that all
the local humane societies ... must answer to them. That’s not true,” said
Gretchen Fieser, spokeswoman for the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society in
the North Side.
Local shelters and humane societies are concerned
with animal welfare, rather than animal rights, food-industry issues or
national campaigns, she said.
“(HSUS) can get better cages for chickens in
factory farms,” Fieser said. “When we get chickens, they were someone’s pet
or a science project that got too big.”
The Western Pennsylvania Humane Society on the
North Side is in no way affiliated with the national group.
Jensen Comment
Obviously you can't adopt a pet like we "adopted" a young girl in Latin America
by donating cash each month. The Human Society may send you a picture of your
pet, but most likely it is either adopted for real by a loving family or
euthanized since the Humane Society does not generally provide facilities for
the long-term life of a dog or cat.
It's beginning to sound like Girl Scout Cookie money going toward bloated
salaries of Girl Scout executives in luxurious Manhattan offices..
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"ACLU: Judge's Decision on Protest Tweets Is Troubling," by
Nancy Scola, ReadWriteWeb, July 17, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/aclu-judges-decision-on-protest-tweets-is-troubling.php
Data stored on Twitter's servers became fair game
for eager prosecutors on July 2, when a New York City criminal court judge
once again upheld the District Attorney's subpoena for more than a hundred
days' worth of tweets and user information tied to a Brooklyn man arrested
during the Occupy Wall Street protests. But the judge's decisions are all
wrong, warns American Civil Liberties Union Senior Attorney Aden Fine. The
judge's linked pair of groundbreaking rulings, Fine says, redefined
constitutional rights in the social media era in frightening new ways.
Tweets & Metadata
For starters, Fine argued, Judge Sciarrino mixed up
two different kinds of data: tweets and metadata. "All the decision talks
about is the public nature of tweets," Fine said in a phone interview about
Sciarrino's late June ruling to deny Twitter Inc.'s motion to quash the
subpoena. But the Manhattan district attorney has requested more than the
public information associated with the account of @destructuremal, allegedly
used by Malcolm Harris, an Occupy participant arrested on the bridge.
Sciarrino's concern is for the tweets themselves,
and there he has a straightforward framing. "What you give to the public
belongs to the public," he declared in late April. "What you keep to
yourself belongs only to you." To bolster his ruling, the judge pointed to
two projects that suggest just how tremendously public a medium Twitter
truly is: the Library of Congress' long-promised tweet archive and
Politwoops, a running feed of politicians' deleted tweets. They're
complicated pieces of evidence. The Library of Congress is wrestling with
how to meet Twitter's restrictions on researcher access. Politwoops may well
violate the Twitter API's terms of service. But for Fine, they're perfect
examples of how, in celebrating Twitter's publicness, Sciarrino is eliding
public tweets and collected nonpublic data like IP addresses, email
addresses, timestamps and more. Whether that's error or intentional, Fine
won't speculate. But "it's one of the big problems with this decision."
(The ACLU joined with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and Public Citizen on an amicus brief supporting Twitter's motion
to quash the DA's subpoena.)
Which brings us to a big problem with treating
public tweets and Twitter metadata as one and the same thing. No Warrant
Necessary
Sciarrino implicitly decided that users like Harris
have no right to go to court to protect any of it. "There is no proprietary
interest in your tweets," Sciarrino wrote, "which you have now gifted to the
world." On this point, Twitter and the judge lobbed terms of service
provisions at one another. The company pointed to the part that said users
retain their rights to content. The jurist highlighted the part that said
Twitter is free to use and reproduce tweets. "Twitter's license to use the
defendant's Tweets," Sciarrino wrote, "means that the Tweets posted were not
his." If Harris' tweets don't belong to him, then he has no leg to stand on
when the government combs through Twitter's servers for them. "As a user, we
may think that storage space to be like a 'virtual home,'" wrote the judge,
"and with that strong privacy protection similar to our physical homes." But
we'd be mistaken. "That 'home' is a block of ones and zeros stored somewhere
on someone's computer." As such, we have no right to tell the government not
to enter our Twitter accounts without a warrant - whether we're talking
about the data we voluntarily make public or the data we generate as we go
about doing it.
Users have no recourse on those constitutional
questions, says the ACLU's Fine. And that problem goes beyond Twitter. "The
rationale of that decision means that Internet users never have the right to
go to court to protect their own constitutional rights on the Internet."
Deliberate Versus Automated Disclosure
All of which adds up to another concern for Fine:
The government's ability to combine easy-to-get public social data with
easy-to-get social metadata can reveal a tremendous amount. Say I tweet,
"About to do something very, very bad." That line's meaning is far different
if metadata places me outside the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck parked at New
York's Union Square than it does outside a subsequently robbed Citibank in
the Bronx. Sciarrino, in his rulings, cited United States vs. Miller, a
landmark Supreme Court case that held that bank customers had no privacy
right to records on their accounts maintained by banks. The Miller decision
on banking was controversial enough back in 1976, Fine says. But it's worse
now, when social media users aren't fully aware of the information being
collected about them. "When you knowingly disclose something, that's one
thing," argues Fine. "But when you unknowing disclose your location, for
example, to a company, that can't be enough to eliminate your expectation of
privacy." The worry goes beyond privacy to the chilling of free speech.
By combining public tweets and privately held
metadata, "[the government] can create a very detailed map of your speech
activities," Fine says. "And that raises serious First Amendment issues."
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on computing and networking security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
Question
So what's wrong with TED Talks?
Answer
At their worst, TED talks turn science into a rat-a-tat of meaningless anecdotes
and sweeping generalizations.
Exhibit A: Philip Zimbardo
The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan.
TED Books. Kindle, Nook, iBooks, $2.99
Reviewed by Carl Zimmer
http://www.downloadtheuniverse.com/dtu/2012/06/the-demise-of-guys-why-boys-are-struggling-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-by-philip-zimbardo-and-nikita-duncan-ted-books-ki.html
Here are my comments on another TED Talk from the June 26, 2012 Edition of
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/tidbits062612.htm
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.
"Do Gold ETFs Really Move on Inflation Expectations?" by John Spence,
ETF Trends, Junw 15, 2012 ---
http://www.etftrends.com/2012/06/do-gold-etfs-really-move-on-inflation-expectations/
Thank you Jim Mahar for the heads up.
Gold ETFs are often described as an inflation hedge
but recent academic research suggests the precious metal is more dependent
on emerging market demand, particularly from central banks that hold less
gold than their counterparts in developed countries.
“Assuming that gold moved in lockstep with the CPI,
the implied price would be about $780 an ounce, according to Duke University
Professor Campbell R. Harvey and his collaborator, Claude B. Erb,”
Bloomberg News reports.
Gold is trading back above $1,600 an ounce as
traders speculate on the odds of further monetary easing before next week’s
Federal Reserve meeting.
[Gold ETFs Eye Fed, Europe]
Since the gold bull market started in about 2001,
prices have risen more than sevenfold.
“If gold is an inflation hedge, then on average its
real return should be zero,” Erb and Harvey wrote, according to the
Bloomberg report. Instead, returns from 2000 through March of this year
averaged 13% a year on an inflation-adjusted basis.
Gold ETFs such as
SPDR Gold Shares (NYSEArca:
GLD), iShares Gold Trust (NYSEArca:
IAU) and
ETFS Physical Swiss Gold Shares (NYSEArca:
SGOL)
have likely fueled the metal’s rise since they have made it easier for more
investors to buy gold.
“Global ETF investor positions have continued to
trend up in both gold and silver, reflecting the fact that long term price
supports such as negative real interest rates, currency debasement and
sovereign/financial sector default risk, and rising emerging market/central
bank demand remain embedded in the 2012 outlook,” ETF Securities said in a
report earlier this year.
[Measuring the Impact of Gold ETFs]
Harvey and Erb wrote that emerging markets can
support gold because the precious metal represents a smaller part of central
bank reserves than developed nations.
Foreign central banks are “one of the more
intriguing sources of incremental demand for gold,” says ConvergEx Group
strategist Nicholas Colas.
[Strategist: Why Gold ETFs Still Make Sense]
“Among emerging economies, for example, central
banks are actively buying gold to add to their reserves. The trend is most
noticeable in Russia and India, but increasingly in China as well. Press
accounts placed China’s net gold purchases in 2011 at over 200 tons,
doubling its position in one year,” he said in a recent report.
“And gold is clearly playing a role at the central
bank level in these countries’ efforts to hedge such price increases,” Colas
noted. “There is a popular saying on Wall Street – ‘Don’t fight the Fed.’
Why fight the Chinese, Russian and Indian central banks on gold? Like the
Fed, they have much deeper pockets than you.”
See Chart
Continued in article
"Canadian Supreme Court’s Copyright Rulings Are Called ‘Big Win’ for
Colleges," Chronicle of Higher Education, July 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/global/canadian-supreme-courts-copyright-rulings-are-called-big-win-for-colleges/33897
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that
photocopying material for student use does not infringe the country’s
Copyright Act, reports CTV news. The ruling, one of five copyright decisions
issued on Thursday by the court, means that colleges and universities stand
to save millions of dollars in copyright fees. Academics applauded the
rulings. Laura Murray, a copyright expert at Queen’s University, called it
“a big win for education.” Michael Geist, a law professor at the University
of Ottawa, expressed similar sentiments in a blog post about the rulings.
Bob Jensen's threads on copyrights ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright
July 13, 2012 reply from Ramesh Fernando
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6571/125/
I strongly recommend for anyone interested in Canadian
copyright law follow Professor Geist of the University of Ottawa at
http://www.michaelgeist.ca
Audience Response ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_response
"App Tries to Increase Student Participation
by Simplifying Clicker Technology," by Angela Chen, Chronicle of Higher
Education, July 11, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/app-tries-to-increase-student-participation-by-simplifying-clicker-technology/37855?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
From
clickers to programs like Learning
Catalytics—which data-mines to match students
with discussion partners—student-response systems are becoming more and
more sophisticated. But Liam Kaufman, a graduate of the University of
Toronto, thinks that the key to effective feedback is a tool with fewer
bells and whistles.
Mr. Kaufman is the developer of Understoodit,
a browser-based app that lets students indicate their level of
comprehension during class, and then see how much everyone else
understands.
The idea is that, during
a lecture, everyone runs the Understoodit Web site, which is also
accessible via mobile and tablet devices. Students press buttons to
indicate that they either understand the material or are confused by it.
The feedback is displayed in real time, in the form of a
“confus-o-meter” and an “understand-o-meter,” which show the percentage
of students who comprehend the material.
The app was inspired by
clickers, Mr. Kaufman says. But whereas clickers usually require
students to answer questions so the professor can gauge their
understanding, Understoodit lets them directly indicate confusion or
comprehension, which is then available for everyone to see. That
approach, he hopes, will encourage students to ask more questions when
they realize that others are confused as well.
Mr. Kaufman first tested
the app on an entry-level computer-science class at the University of
Toronto in February. The app is still in beta testing, and available by
invitation only. More than 2,000 people have signed up so far, Mr.
Kaufman says, including professors at institutions such as Harvard
University, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on audience response
pads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#ResponsePads
Are we expecting too much from K-12 schools? What's wrong with football and
basketball?
"ACLU alleges Michigan school district violated students’ ‘right to learn
to read’," by Lindsey Layton, Washington Times, July 12, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/aclu-alleges-michigan-school-district-violated-students-right-to-learn-to-read/2012/07/11/gJQArf1jeW_story.html
Hundreds of Atlanta K-12 Teachers and Administrators Caught Revising
Student Test Scores for Personal Gain
They met in large groups for more than a decade and cheated in Score Revision
Parties --- it was fun to game the system
Changing a student's test score is so much easier than
teaching that student how to read the test questions.
And these teachers are the role models for honesty and
ethics of our children.
What says even more about society is the current effort of parents and unions
not to punish the cheating teachers.
Do these parents and teachers' unions really care if the K-12 students cannot
read?
Who really cares if high school graduates in Atlanta cannot read a newspaper or
convert 523 inches into feet?
You will never see liberal Hollywood make a movie critical of this type of
teacher cheating!
When I watched this on ABC News I became depressed to the point of changing from
scotch to gin.
"Area superintendents
silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any
means possible."
"Investigation into APS cheating finds unethical behavior across every
level," by Heather Vogell, The Atlanta Joiurnal Constitution, July 6,
2011 ---
http://www.ajc.com/news/investigation-into-aps-cheating-1001375.html
Japan ---
http://countrystudies.us/japan/
"Presidents Give Japanese Universities Poor Grades," Daily Yomiuri
Online, July 5, 2012 ---
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T120704004463.htm
More than 30 percent of university presidents said
class content is boring and does not match student interests, according to a
survey by the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry.
The survey, conducted in May and June, received
answers from 684 presidents of public and private universities nationwide.
According to the survey, 34.4 percent of the
respondents found their classes boring because of content that does not
interest students. Many of these respondents said the puny amount of hours
studied by students and their minimal achievements at university needed to
be addressed urgently.
Many presidents said debate-oriented or
goal-orientated classes should be introduced to improve class content.
Meanwhile, 74.6 percent of respondents said
students were performing insufficient hours of study outside class, and 55.8
percent said students lack sufficient problem-solving abilities.
More than 60 percent of the respondents said their
university lacks coordination among lecturers, with course contents
depending on the discretion of individual teachers. They also said there was
a shortage of support staff who could help teachers to provide detailed
instructions to students.
Jensen Comment
Getting into college in Japan is tough and competitive ---
http://countrystudies.us/japan/77.htm
Also see ---
http://countrystudies.us/japan/79.htm
But more often than not the undergraduate college experience is far more
parting than perspiring.
Whatever the club the main activity is partying.
Japanese University students seldom go to class.
http://www.japan-talk.com/jt/new/kyoto-university
Japan is a nation of contradictions.
The Japanese are formally polite and it's amazing how there is virtually no
looting at times of disaster such as a tsunami.
At the same time, the very crowded Japanese trains have special cars for
women because so many Japanese men are prone to copping feels in crowded places.
Japanese society is very orderly and yet organized crime permeates nearly all
levels of business and government.
"A Pile of Products Worth Looking At," by David Pogue, The New York
Times,, July 18, 2012 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/a-pile-of-products-worth-looking-at/
As I mentioned a
couple of weeks ago, there are too many new tech products and services for
one man to review in a single lifetime.
Here, then, for your
summertime skimming, is another batch of interesting-looking tech
developments. Again, I haven’t tried these and don’t endorse them — I just
think they’re cool ideas worth noting.
Onavo Extend
By compressing data, Onavo Extend can increase the power of your data plan
by up to 500 percent. Avoid overage charges, roaming fees, data throttling
and poor performance, without draining your battery. Also provides a
breakdown of your data usage. Free. (www.Onavo.com)
OptimumCS-Pro
This app finds the lens settings that minimize the blurring caused by
defocus and diffraction, so that you can get the sharpest images from your
D.S.L.R. that the laws of optics will allow. For iPhone, $7. (www.georgedouvos.com)
YouVisit
This app offers prospective students GPS-guided tours of college campuses
and academic programs. Offers news, weather, photos and contact info for
each college. Free for iPhone/Android. (www.youvisit.com)
SproutConverter You know all those distorted and blank sections on
your home video tapes that remain after you transfer them to your computer?
SproutConverter gets rid of them automatically. Import your videos to your
computer using whatever device you choose, then drag and drop. $30, for Mac.
(www.gearsprout.com.)
Addressgate
Ever wanted to contact a neighbor you don’t know? Sign up to this
specialized social network with your home address, then communicate with
neighbors privately, or view/post neighborhoodwide alerts, news and events.
Free. (www.addressgate.com)
Gogobot
This app lets friends and like-minded travelers, rather than anonymous
strangers, provide tips for coming trips. Online/iPhone/iPod Touch, free. (www.gogobot.com)
Novatel MiFi
4620L Mobile Hotspot No larger than a stack of cards, this
self-powered pocket 4G WiFi hot spot has an interactive OLED screen and
five-hour battery life. Connects up to 10 Wi-Fi devices. $50 with two-year
Verizon contract. (www.verizonwireless.com/verizon-jetpack-mifi-4620l.shtml)
FlightView
This app offers push alerts on flight status changes, visibility into
nationwide airport delays, directions to the airport and social integration
for sharing your flight’s status with the people picking you up from the
airport. (j.mp/SEUePI)
YouMail
Visual voice mail on steroids. Customized greetings, smart and social caller
ID, call blocking and the ability to save your messages. Free. For Android,
iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone. (Voice mail transcription services,
performed by people instead of software, is available for $5 to $40 a month.
(www.youmail.com)
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
From the Scout Report on July 13, 2012
Bundlenut ---
http://www.bundlenut.com/
Have you ever wanted to create a bundle of links to
share with friends, colleagues, and others with simpatico interests?
Bundlenut makes this possible with just a few easy steps. Visitors can use
the site to create a bundle of links and give the bundle a title. There's a
"bundle browser" as well, and it's easy to share them. Some of the sample
bundles on the site include "Food from Scratch," "West Coast Road Trip
Itinerary," and "Mrs. Comstock's 11th Grade Reading List." This version is
compatible with all operating systems.
Tilt 3D 1.0.1 ---
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tilt/
Have you ever wanted to see a website in 3D? Well,
this is now possible with Tilt3D 1.0.1. Created by Victor Porof, the tool is
"layers each node based on the nesting in the tree, creating stacks of
elements, each having a corresponding depth and being textured according to
the webpage rendering." It's a pretty fun little tool and it is compatible
with all operating systems running Mozilla Firefox.
Looking back into one magazine's online presence raises questions about
the problems involved with creating web archives
Digital Archives: Difference Engine: Lost in Cyberspace
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/07/digital-archives-0
Survey Finds That Libraries Are Interested in Collaborating on Online
Projects, but Don't Do It Yet
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/survey-finds-that-
libraries-are-interested-in-collaborating-on-online-projects-but-dont-do-it-
yet/259486/
Neatline helps Map New World of Digital Humanities Scholarship
http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=19012
Neatline
http://neatline.org/
Internet Archive
http://archive.org/index.php
Internet Memory Foundation
http://internetmemory.org/en/
From the Scout Report on July 20, 2012
Google Maps 3D ---
http://www.google.com/mobile/maps/3d/
Several major companies, including Google, are
working on getting elaborate 3D maps online. This latest iteration of Google
maps for Android-powered devices allows users to browse select cities in a
3D fashion. Utilizing aerial imagery, the buildings appear in a
three-dimensional format, which can aid people navigating their way around
an unfamiliar urban environment. Visitors can customize their own views with
the "tilt" and "compass" mode features, which makes things a bit more fun.
PicMonkey ---
http://www.picmonkey.com/
Looking to do some quick photo editing? PicMonkey
can make that happen, and it's fun to use. The site allows visitors to check
out some craft scissor frames, which can give every photo that "hand-made"
look. First-time users can click on the "Edit a Photo" tab to start working
on their own image. Some of the tools here include a crop feature, along
with rotate, exposure, and sharpen. Also, the Create a Collage feature is
quite fun, and a nice way to play around with a variety of photos. This
version 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
Teachers Homepage: National Geographic Education ---
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/?ar_a=1
Digital Teaching Resources Laboratory
http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/facilities/ditrl/
Teacher Resources-The Canadian Council for Geographic Education ---
http://www.ccge.org/resources/
PBS creates a library of digital resources for free use in schools ---
http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/07/08/pbs-creates-library-of-digital-resources-targeted-to-classroom-use.aspx
The Center for Teaching Excellence: Lansing Community College ---
http://www.lcc.edu/cte/
Statistical Reasoning 1 ---
http://ocw.jhsph.edu/index.cfm/go/viewCourse/course/StatisticalReasoning1/coursePage/index/
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: Statway
(statistics tutorials) ---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/statway
CAUSEweb Resources (statistics education) ---
http://www.causeweb.org/resources/
University of Washington: Center for Engineering, Learning, and Teaching ---
http://depts.washington.edu/celtweb/
National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Education Programs ---
http://www.nrel.gov/education/
PBS: Arts ---
http://www.pbs.org/arts/
Guide to MIT Open Courseware, July 6, 2012 ---
http://diyscholar.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/guide-to-mit-open-courseware/
Coursera ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera
Coursera, Sera, Whatever Will Be Will Be
Free Online Courses From More and More Prestigious Universities
"Into the Fray," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, July 17, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/17/uva-and-11-others-become-latest-plan-moocs
A dozen more universities have signed partnerships
with Coursera, a company that provides hosting services for massively open
online courses (MOOCs), the company announced today. Coursera’s new partners
include
the University of Virginia, whose highly
publicized
administrative ballyhoo last month made it the
epicenter of the debate over how traditional universities should adapt to
the rise of online education in general and MOOCs in particular.
In addition to U.Va.,
Coursera
will also be serving as a platform for open online
courses from the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (in Switzerland), Georgia Institute of
Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, and the Universities
of California at San Francisco, Edinburgh (U.K.), Illinois, Toronto and
Washington.
Sticking to
its theme of hosting “elite” MOOCs, Coursera plans
to adapt the most highly reputed parts of each new partner’s curriculum --
medicine and public health courses from UCSF and Johns Hopkins, biology and
life sciences courses from Duke, business and software courses from
Washington, and so on. Those institutions join Princeton University,
Stanford University, and the University of Michigan and University of
Pennsylvania as Coursera partners.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's helpers for educators ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#000000Education%20in%20General
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 general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
The Higgs Boson explained by PhD Comics July 4, 2012 ---
http://flowingdata.com/2012/07/04/higgs-boson-explained-by-phd-comics/
Infographics by Nathan Yau
Carl Sagan’s Reading List ---
Click Here
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/07/11/carl-sagan-reading-list/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Nanotechnology Center for Learning and Teaching ---
http://community.nsee.us/
NanoTeachers: Bringing Nanoscience into the Classroom ---
http://teachers.stanford.edu/
Physics World ---
http://physicsworld.com/
The Physics Front ---
http://www.thephysicsfront.org/
National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Education Programs ---
http://www.nrel.gov/education/
Spatial Thinking in the Geosciences ---
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/spatial/index.html
Army Geospatial Center (Geosciences, Hydrology) ---
http://www.agc.army.mil/
Zachry Department of Civil Engineering Ethics Site ---
http://ethics.tamu.edu/
University of Washington: Center for Engineering, Learning, and Teaching ---
http://depts.washington.edu/celtweb/
Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Research (particular focus is
given to emerging technology ethics) ---
http://www.onlineethics.org/Topics/EmergingTech.aspx
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
Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore ---
http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/ACC
American Folklore ---
http://www.americanfolklore.net
Anthropology Outreach Office: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
---
http://anthropology.si.edu/outreach/outrch1.html
National Museum of the American Indian: Collections Search ---
http://www.americanindian.si.edu/searchcollections/home.aspx
Radical Women (University of Florida, Photographs) ---
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/rw
"What Americans Earn," by Lam Thuy Vo, NPR, July 16, 2012 ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/16/156688596/what-americans-earn
Jensen Comment
It's important to read the part that reveals what items are excluded from the
data. I'm not certain how non-monetary items that are returns for labor are
accounted for. For example, some employees get free housing (e.g., university
administrators and security employees), free cars for personal as well as
business use, free food, stock options, etc.
Identifying Challenges to Improve the Investigation and Prosecution of State
and Local Human Trafficking Cases ---
http://www.urban.org/publications/412593.html
Grassroots Feminist Political Posters in India ---
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/grassroots-feminist-political-posters-in-india
Infographic
A Woman's Place: Best and Worst Places To Be A Woman ---
Click Here
http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2012/7/5/a-womans-place-best-and-worst-places-to-be-a-woman.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CoolInfographics+%28Cool+Infographics%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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
Identifying Challenges to Improve the Investigation and Prosecution of State
and Local Human Trafficking Cases ---
http://www.urban.org/publications/412593.html
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math and Statistics Tutorials
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: Statway
(statistics tutorials) ---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/statway
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
600-year-old linen bras found in Austrian castle ---
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-year-old-linen-bras-austrian-castle.html
"Things the Way They Were," Ann Brenoff, Huffington Post, July 10,
2012 ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-brenoff/things-were-different-in-the-50s_b_1651511.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share
Bobbie Hanvey Photographic Archive (Ireland) ---
http://www.bc.edu/sites/libraries/hanvey/
San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (Historical Photographs) ---
http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000084701
Remembering Paul Harvey ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/H3Az0okaHig?rel=0
Radical Women (University of Florida, Photographs) ---
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/rw
A Woman's Place: Best and Worst Places To Be A Woman ---
Click Here
http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2012/7/5/a-womans-place-best-and-worst-places-to-be-a-woman.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CoolInfographics+%28Cool+Infographics%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Grassroots Feminist Political Posters in India ---
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/grassroots-feminist-political-posters-in-india
International Museum of Women ---
http://imow.or
University of Chicago ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Chicago
Sophia Smith Collection: Women's History Archives at Smith College ---
http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/digitalcoll.html
Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore ---
http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/ACC
National Museum of the American Indian: Collections Search ---
http://www.americanindian.si.edu/searchcollections/home.aspx
American Folklore ---
http://www.americanfolklore.net
Wyoming State Historical Society ---
http://wyshs.org/
University of Wyoming Digital Collections ---
http://digital.uwyo.edu
Images of Lake Tahoe ---
http://knowledgecenter.unr.edu/specoll/photoweb/tahoe/
British Museum Channel ---
http://www.britishmuseum.org/channel.aspx
MoMA: Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/boetti/
Clement Moran Photography Collection (antique New Hampshire photographs) ---
Click Here
http://www.library.unh.edu/digital/islandora/solr/search/moran/1/category%3APhotographs~slsh~Clement%5C%20Moran%5C%20Collection%2A~/dismax
Aftermath of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 ---
http://epfl.mdch.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/mdbf
Anthropology Outreach Office: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
---
http://anthropology.si.edu/outreach/outrch1.html
Indian Converts Collection (Native American converts to Christianity) ---
http://cdm.reed.edu/cdm4/indianconverts/
Air Conditioning History
From the Scout Report on July 20, 2012
Amidst a heat wave, a pause to remember the inventor of modern air-
conditioning Before Anyone Complained About the Air-Conditioning, an Idea
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/before-anyone-complained-about-the-air-conditioning-an-idea/?hp
Summer Heat Wave Before AC: History of Air-Conditioning
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2003081,00.html
Gorrie's Fridge
http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~ihas/gorrie/fridge.htm
John Gorrie Museum State Park
http://www.floridastateparks.org/johngorriemuseum/default.cfm
HowStuffWorks: How Air Conditioners Work
http://home.howstuffworks.com/ac.htm
The Writings of Benjamin Franklin: Cooling by Evaporation
http://www.historycarper.com/resources/twobf3/letter1.htm
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
Tanglewood: Celebrating Beethoven In The Backwoods For 75 Years ---
Click Here
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/07/14/156725774/tanglewood-celebrating-beethoven-in-the-backwoods-for-75-years
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
July 16, 2012
July 17, 2012
July 18, 2012
July 19, 2012
July 22, 2012
July 23, 2012
July 26, 2012
Cost keeps many Americans from good dental care: report ---
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-americans-good-dental.html
Paula forwarded these quips by Maxine
1. Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggert have written An impressive new book. It's
called ....... 'Ministers Do More Than Lay People'
2. Transvestite: A guy who likes to eat, drink And be Mary..
3. The difference between the Pope and Your boss, the Pope only expects you
To kiss his ring.
4. My mind works like lightning, One brilliant Flash and it is gone.
5. The only time the world beats a path to Your door is if you're in the
bathroom.
6. I hate sex in the movies. Tried it once. The seat folded up, the drink
spilled and That ice, well, it really chilled the mood.
7. It used to be only death and taxes Now, of course, there's Shipping and
handling, too.
8. A husband is someone who, after taking The trash out, gives the impression
that He just cleaned the whole house.
9. My next house will have no kitchen - just Vending machines and a large
trash can.
11. Definition of a teenager? God's punishment...for enjoying sex.
12. As you slide down the banister of life, may The splinters never point the
wrong way...
Forwarded by Auntie Bev
Little
Red Hen version 2012
"Who will help me plant my wheat?" asked the little red hen.
"Not I," said the cow.
"Not I," said the duck.
"Not I," said the pig.
"Not I," said the goose.
"Then I will do it by myself." She planted her crop and the wheat
grew and ripened.
"Who will help me reap my wheat?" asked the little red hen.
"Not I," said the duck.
"Out of my classification," said the pig.
"I'd lose my seniority," said the cow.
"I'd lose my unemployment compensation," said the goose.
"Then I will do it by myself," said the little red hen, and so she
did.
"Who will help me bake the bread?" asked the little red hen.
"That would be overtime for me," said the cow.
"I'd lose my welfare benefits," said the duck.
"I'm a dropout and never learned how," said the pig.
"If I'm to be the only helper, that's discrimination," said the
goose.
"Then I will do it by myself," said the little red hen.
She baked five loaves and held them up for all of her neighbors to
see. They wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share but the little
red hen said, "No, I shall eat all five loaves."
"Excess profits!" cried the cow. (Nancy Pelosi)
"Capitalist leech!" screamed the duck. (Barbara Boxer)
"I
demand equal rights!" yelled the goose. (Jesse Jackson)
The pig just grunted in disdain. (Harry Reid)
And they all painted 'Unfair!' picket signs and marched around and
around the little red hen, shouting obscenities.
Then the farmer (Obama) came He said to the little red hen, "You
must not be so greedy."
"But I earned the bread," said the little red hen.
"Exactly," said Barack the farmer. "That is what makes our free
enterprise system so wonderful. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as
much as he wants. But under our modern government regulations, the
productive workers must divide the fruits of their labor with those
who are lazy and idle."
And they all lived happily ever after, including the little red hen,
who smiled and clucked, "I am grateful, for now I truly understand."
But her neighbors became quite disappointed in her. She never again
baked bread because she joined the 'party' and got her bread free.
And all the Democrats smiled. 'Fairness' had been established.
Individual initiative had died but nobody noticed; perhaps no one
cared so long as there was free bread that 'the rich' were paying
for.
EPILOGUE
Bill Clinton is getting $12 million for his memoirs.
Hillary got $8 million for hers.
That's $20 million for the memories from two people, who for eight
years repeatedly testified, under oath, that they couldn't remember
anything.
IS THIS A GREAT BARNYARD OR WHAT?
Forwarded by Jim
TEN THOUGHTS TO PONDER
Number 10: Life is sexually transmitted.
Number 9: Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can
die.
Number 8: Men have two emotions: Hungry and Horny. If you see him without an
erection, make him a sandwich .
Number 7: Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach a person to
use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks, months, maybe years.
Number 6: Some people are like a Slinky - not really good for anything, but
you still can't help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.
Number 5: Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in the
hospitals, dying of nothing.
Number 4; All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no
attention to criticism.
Number 3; Why does a slight tax increase cost you $800.- , and a substantial
tax cut saves you $30.- ?
Number 2; In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the
world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
And The Number 1 Thought: Life is like a jar of Jalapeno peppers-- what you
do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
- - - and as someone recently said to me:
"Don't worry about old age-- it doesn't last that long."
Forwarded by Auntie Bev
Anagrams
PRESBYTERIAN:
When you rearrange the letters:
BEST IN PRAYER
ASTRONOMER:
When you rearrange the letters:
MOON STARER
DESPERATION:
When
you rearrange the letters:
A ROPE ENDS IT
THE EYES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THEY SEE
GEORGE BUSH:
When you rearrange the letters:
HE BUGS GORE
THE MORSE CODE:
When you rearrange the letters:
HERE COME DOTS
DORMITORY:
When you rearrange the letters:
DIRTY ROOM
SLOT
MACHINES:
When you rearrange the letters:
CASH LOST IN ME
ANIMOSITY:
When you rearrange the letters:
IS NO AMITY
ELECTION RESULTS:
When you rearrange the letters:
LIES - LET'S RECOUNT
SNOOZE ALARMS:
When you rearrange the letters:
ALAS! NO MORE Z 'S
A DECIMAL POINT:
When you rearrange the letters:
I'M A DOT IN PLACE
THE EARTHQUAKES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THAT QUEER SHAKE
ELEVEN PLUS TWO:
When you rearrange the letters:
TWELVE PLUS ONE
MOTHER-IN-LAW:
When you rearrange the letters:
WOMAN HITLER
AND
FINALLY
FOR THE
GRAND FINALE:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
Jensen deleted this one
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray Zone
of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
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