Tidbits on September 26, 2012
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
My Photographic Special on Hydrangea,
Buddleja and Polka Weigela
Life Cycles Near Our Cottage
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Hydrangeas/01/Hydrangeas01.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
Tidbits on September 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 KFPS Friesian Horse (Beautiful Black Horses in Motion) ---
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Y5XJbSqwriM?rel=0
You may remember Steve Bridges as the guy who imitated George Bush so well on
the Jay Leno Show. He has now started imitating Obama and REALLY does it really
well ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?feature=player_embedded&v=WH_a0cGVRmI
Milgram Psychology Tutorial ---
http://networkedblogs.com/ChqMl
How Security Leaks Jeopardize National Secuity (video produced
by Navy Seals) ---
http://www.youtube.com/v/X-Xfti7qtT0?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0
A zoo worker gets hugs and kisses from lion cubs ---
http://www.slothster.com/3005-Worker-At-L
ion-Park-Gets-Hugs-From-Sweet-Lion-Cubs.h tml
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Leonard Cohen’s 1983 Musical for Canadian
Television: I Am a Hotel ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/leonard_cohens_1983_musical_for_canadian_television_ii_am_a_hoteli.html
Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing Traditional American
Folk Song “Mule on the Mount” (1939) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/hear_zora_neale_hurston_sing_traditional_american_folk_song_mule_on_the_mountain_1939.html
Classic Ray Charles Performance: ‘What’d I Say’
Live in Paris, 1968 ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/classic_ray_charles_performance_whatd_i_say_live_in_paris_1968.html
Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood Join Forces at the
Historic Blind Faith Concert in Hyde Park, 1969 ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/eric_clapton_and_steve_winwood_join_forces_at_the_historic_blind_faith_concert_in_hyde_park_1969.html
Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis - Side by Side ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50xGa0rQ3s4&feature=related
Tommy Emmanuel - Somewhere Over The Rainbow (live 2006
Leverkusen) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo8U20LicdU&noredirect=1
Classical New England ---
http://www.wgbh.org/995/index.cfm
Pop Goes Classical ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/09/18/161349284/pop-goes-classical-puzzler
Leif Ove Andsnes: Fatherhood And Freedom At The
Piano ---
http://www.npr.org/event/music/158492258/leif-ove-andsnes-fatherhood-and-freedom-at-the-piano
ACME In Concert: Steve Reich's Complete String
Quartets ---
http://www.npr.org/event/music/160620377/acme-in-concert-steve-reichs-complete-string-quartets
Hamilton College: Jazz Archives ---
http://www.hamilton.edu/jazzarchive
Why did I walk into this room? (Toon) ---
Click Here
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid67524056001?bckey=AQ~~%2cAAAAAjHM3KE~%2cue6IyhgccnQfCR9niUq7SpiGuvtClfZX&bclid=0&bctid=1799012627001
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
"Alan Turing at 100: Exhibit celebrates
pivotal pioneer of computer, artificial intelligence," Harvard Gazette,
September 16, 2012 ---
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/09/alan-turing-at-100/
MoMA Lets Kids Record Audio Tours of Modern Art
(with Some Silly Results) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/moma_lets_kids_record_audio_tours_of_modern_art_with_some_silly_results.html
The KFPS Friesian Horse (Beautiful Black Horses
in Motion) ---
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Y5XJbSqwriM?rel=0
The Oldest Color Movies Bring Sunflowers, Exotic Birds and
Goldfish Back to Life (1902) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/the_oldest_color_movies_bring_sunflowers_exotic_birds_and_goldfish_back_to_life_1902.html
Art of the Poison Pens (From MAAW's Blog by Jim
Martin at
http://maaw.blogspot.com/ ) ---
http://news.usf.edu/article/templates/?a=4663&z=186
Beloit College: Jay "Ding" Darling Collection
(historic political cartoons) ---
http://www.beloit.edu/bcdc/darling/
The Atkins Family in Cuba: A Photograph Exhibit ---
http://www.masshist.org/photographs/atkins.cfm?queryID=27
Manuel R. Bustamante Photograph Collection (Cuba, History) ---
http://www.library.miami.edu/chcdigital/chc5017_main.html
World War II Poster Collection ---
http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/wwii-posters/
In Honor of the People (Minnesota history and
Native Americans) ---
http://www.inhonorofthepeople.org/
National Atlas [Maps] ---
http://www.nationalatlas.gov/
Century of the Child: Growing by Design,
1900-2000 [MoMa history of children in art] ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/centuryofthechild/
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
A Big List of 375 Free eBooks for Your iPad, Kindle, Nook and
Other Devices ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/a_big_list_of_375_free_ebooks_for_your_ipad_kindle_nook_and_other_devices.html
And There's the Humor of it: Shakespeare and the Four Humors
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/shakespeare/index.html
Math and Metaphor: Using Poetry to Teach College Mathematics
---
http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol20/bahls.pdf
Ted Hughes on the Universal Inner Child, in a Moving Letter to
His Son ---
http://brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0cf54afdbc&e=4d2bd13843
Folger Shakespeare Library ---
http://folger.edu/index.cfm
And There's the Humor of it: Shakespeare and the Four Humors
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/shakespeare/index.html
Remembering George Whitman, Owner of Famed Bookstore, Shakespeare &
Company ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/remembering_george_whitman.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Shakespeare in the Parlor (Art, Illustrations, Drawings) ---
http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Exhibitions/Printsinparlor/shakespeare/index.htm
And There's the Humor of it: Shakespeare and the Four Humors
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/shakespeare/index.html
In Search
of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Sonnets Lesson Plan ---
http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/educators/language/lessonplan.html
Video
James Earl Jones Reads Othello at White House Poetry Jam ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/03/james_earl_jones_reads_othello_at_white_house_poetry_jam.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Shakespeare's Staging ---
http://shakespeare.berkeley.edu/
Arden: World of William Shakespeare ---
http://swi.indiana.edu/arden/gi_specs.shtml
From the Scout Report
on June 8, 2012
Remains of Shakespeare-associated
Curtain Theatre found in London Early theater of Shakespeare is
unearthed in London
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/early-theater-of-shakespeares-is-unearthed-in-london/
Does the rediscovery of
Shakespeare's Curtain theatre matter? Absolutely.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/07/rediscovery-shakespeare-curtain-theatre-matters?newsfeed=true
Developers plan 'performance
space' near remains of Shakespeare's Curtain Theatre
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/developers-plan-performance-space-near-remains-of-shakespeares-curtain-theatre-7827694.html
Curtain up on Shakespeare's lost
theatre
http://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/news/curtain-up-on-shakespeares-lost-theatre.htm
Shakespeare's Globe virtual tour
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/about-us/virtual-tour
Shakespeare Online
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/
From the
Scout Report on March 13, 2009
Original Shakespeare portrait unveiled Is This a Shakespeare Which I
See Before Me?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/world/europe/10shakespeare.html?ref=world
Why
is this the definitive image of Shakespeare?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7936629.stm
Shakespeare's first theatre found
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7931823.stm
William Shakespeare at the National Portrait Gallery
http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?search=ss&role=sit&LinkID=mp04051
William Shakespeare Quiz
http://www.npg.org.uk/learning/digital/history/shakespeare-quiz.php
William Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
http://www.shakespeare.org.uk/index.html
The
Complete Works of William Shakepeare
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/
In
Search of Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Sonnets Lesson Plan ---
http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/educators/language/lessonplan.html
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 September 26, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations092612.htm
U.S. National Debt Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Also see
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Peter G.
Peterson Website on Deficit/Debt Solutions ---
http://www.pgpf.org/
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
2012 AAA Meeting Plenary
Speakers and Response Panel Videos ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/hives/20a292d7e9/summary
I think you have to be a an AAA member and log into the AAA Commons to view
these videos.
Bob Jensen is an obscure speaker following the handsome Rob Bloomfield
in the 1.02 Deirdre McCloskey Follow-up Panel—Video ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/a0be33f7fc
My
threads on Deidre McCloskey and my own talk are at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
September 13, 2012 reply
from Jagdish Gangolly
Bob,
Thanks you so much for posting this.
What a wonderful speaker Deidre McCloskey! Reminded
me of JR Hicks who also was a stammerer. For an economist, I was amazed by
her deep and remarkable understanding of statistics.
It was nice to hear about Gossett, perhaps the only
human being who got along well with both Karl Pearson and R.A. Fisher,
getting along with the latter itself a Herculean feat.
Gosset was helped in the mathematical derivation of
small sample theory by Karl Pearson, he did not appreciate its importance,
it was left to his nemesis R.A. Fisher. It is remarkable that he could work
with these two giants who couldn't stand each other.
In later life Fisher and Gosset parted ways in that
Fisher was a proponent of randomization of experiments while Gosset was a
proponent of systematic planning of experiments and in fact proved
decisively that balanced designs are more precise, powerful and efficient
compared with Fisher's randomized experiments (see
http://sites.roosevelt.edu/sziliak/files/2012/02/William-S-Gosset-and-Experimental-Statistics-Ziliak-JWE-2011.pdf
)
I remember my father (who designed experiments in
horticulture for a living) telling me the virtues of balanced designs at the
same time my professors in school were extolling the virtues of
randomisation.
In Gosset we also find seeds of Bayesian thinking
in his writings.
While I have always had a great regard for Fisher
(visit to the tree he planted at the Indian Statistical Institute in
Calcutta was for me more of a pilgrimage), I think his influence on the
development of statistics was less than ideal.
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
Hi Jagdish,
You're one of the few people who can really appreciate Deidre's scholarship in
history, economics, and statistics. When she stumbled for what seemed like
forever trying to get a word out, it helped afterwards when trying to remember
that word.
Interestingly, two Nobel economists slugged out the very essence of theory some
years back. Herb Simon insisted that the purpose of theory was to explain.
Milton Friedman went off on the F-Twist tangent saying that it was enough if a
theory merely predicted. I lost some (certainly not all) respect for Friedman
over this. Deidre, who knew Milton, claims that deep in his heart, Milton did
not ultimately believe this to the degree that it is attributed to him. Of
course Deidre herself is not a great admirer of Neyman, Savage, or Fisher.
Friedman's essay
"The
Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953) provided
the
epistemological pattern for his own subsequent
research and to a degree that of the Chicago School. There he argued that
economics as science should be free of value judgments for it to be
objective. Moreover, a useful economic theory should be judged not by its
descriptive realism but by its simplicity and fruitfulness as an engine of
prediction. That is, students should measure the accuracy of its
predictions, rather than the 'soundness of its assumptions'. His argument
was part of an ongoing debate among such statisticians as
Jerzy Neyman,
Leonard Savage, and
Ronald Fisher.
.
"Milton Friedman's grand illusion," by Mark Buchanan, The
Physics of Finance: A look at economics and finance through the lens of physics,
September 16, 2011 ---
http://physicsoffinance.blogspot.com/2011/09/milton-friedmans-grand-illusion.html
Many of us on the AECM are not great admirers of positive economics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory02.htm#PostPositiveThinking
Everyone
is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan --- FactCheck.org ---
http://www.factcheck.org/
Then again, maybe we're all
entitled to our own facts!
"The Power of Postpositive
Thinking," Scott McLemee,
Inside Higher Ed, August 2, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/02/mclemee
In particular,
a dominant trend in critical theory was the rejection of the concept of
objectivity as something that rests on a more or less naive
epistemology: a simple belief that “facts” exist in some pristine state
untouched by “theory.” To avoid being naive, the dutiful student learned
to insist that, after all, all facts come to us embedded in various
assumptions about the world. Hence (ta da!) “objectivity” exists only
within an agreed-upon framework. It is relative to that framework. So it
isn’t really objective....
What Mohanty
found in his readings of the philosophy of science were much less naïve,
and more robust, conceptions of objectivity than the straw men being
thrashed by young Foucauldians at the time. We are not all prisoners of
our paradigms. Some theoretical frameworks permit the discovery of new
facts and the testing of interpretations or hypotheses. Others do not.
In short, objectivity is a possibility and a goal — not just in the
natural sciences, but for social inquiry and humanistic research as
well.
Mohanty’s major
theoretical statement on PPR arrived in 1997 with Literary Theory and
the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural
Politics (Cornell University Press). Because poststructurally
inspired notions of cultural relativism are usually understood to be
left wing in intention, there is often a tendency to assume that
hard-edged notions of objectivity must have conservative implications.
But Mohanty’s work went very much against the current.
“Since the
lowest common principle of evaluation is all that I can invoke,” wrote
Mohanty, complaining about certain strains of multicultural relativism,
“I cannot — and consequently need not — think about how your space
impinges on mine or how my history is defined together with yours. If
that is the case, I may have started by declaring a pious political
wish, but I end up denying that I need to take you seriously.”
PPR did
not require throwing out the multicultural baby with the relativist
bathwater, however. It meant developing ways to think about cultural
identity and its discontents. A number of Mohanty’s students and
scholarly colleagues have pursued the implications of postpositive
identity politics.
I’ve written elsewhere
about Moya, an associate professor of English at Stanford University who
has played an important role in developing PPR ideas about identity. And
one academic critic has written
an interesting review essay
on early postpositive scholarship — highly recommended for anyone with a
hankering for more cultural theory right about now.
Not everybody
with a sophisticated epistemological critique manages to turn it into a
functioning think tank — which is what started to happen when people in
the postpositive circle started organizing the first Future of Minority
Studies meetings at Cornell and Stanford in 2000. Others followed at the
University of Michigan and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Two years ago FMS applied for a grant from Mellon Foundation, receiving
$350,000 to create a series of programs for graduate students and junior
faculty from minority backgrounds.
The FMS Summer
Institute, first held in 2005, is a two-week seminar with about a dozen
participants — most of them ABD or just starting their first
tenure-track jobs. The institute is followed by a much larger colloquium
(the part I got to attend last week). As schools of thought in the
humanities go, the postpositivists are remarkably light on the in-group
jargon. Someone emerging from the Institute does not, it seems, need a
translator to be understood by the uninitated. Nor was there a dominant
theme at the various panels I heard.
Rather, the
distinctive quality of FMS discourse seems to derive from a certain very
clear, but largely unstated, assumption: It can be useful for scholars
concerned with issues particular to one group to listen to the research
being done on problems pertaining to other groups.
That sounds
pretty simple. But there is rather more behind it than the belief that
we should all just try to get along. Diversity (of background, of
experience, of disciplinary formation) is not something that exists
alongside or in addition to whatever happens in the “real world.” It is
an inescapable and enabling condition of life in a more or less
democratic society. And anyone who wants it to become more democratic,
rather than less, has an interest in learning to understand both its
inequities and how other people are affected by them.
A case in point
might be the findings discussed by Claude Steele, a professor of
psychology at Stanford, in a panel on Friday. His paper reviewed some of
the research on “identity contingencies,” meaning “things you have to
deal with because of your social identity.” One such contingency is what
he called “stereotype threat” — a situation in which an individual
becomes aware of the risk that what you are doing will confirm some
established negative quality associated with your group. And in keeping
with the threat, there is a tendency to become vigilant and defensive.
Steele did not
just have a string of concepts to put up on PowerPoint. He had research
findings on how stereotype threat can affect education. The most
striking involved results from a puzzle-solving test given to groups of
white and black students. When the test was described as a game, the
scores for the black students were excellent — conspicuously higher, in
fact, than the scores of white students. But in experiments where the
very same puzzle was described as an intelligence test, the results were
reversed. The black kids scores dropped by about half, while the graph
for their white peers spiked.
The only
variable? How the puzzle was framed — with distracting thoughts about
African-American performance on IQ tests creating “stereotype threat” in
a way that game-playing did not.
Steele also
cited an experiment in which white engineering students were given a
mathematics test. Just beforehand, some groups were told that Asian
students usually did really well on this particular test. Others were
simply handed the test without comment. Students who heard about their
Asian competitors tended to get much lower scores than the control
group.
Extrapolate
from the social psychologist’s experiments with the effect of a few
innocent-sounding remarks — and imagine the cumulative effect of more
overt forms of domination. The picture is one of a culture that is
profoundly wasteful, even destructive, of the best abilities of many of
its members.
“It’s not easy
for minority folks to discuss these things,” Satya Mohanty told me on
the final day of the colloquium. “But I don’t think we can afford to
wait until it becomes comfortable to start thinking about them. Our
future depends on it. By ‘our’ I mean everyone’s future. How we enrich
and deepen our democratic society and institutions depends on the
answers we come up with now.”
Earlier this year, Oxford
University Press published a major new work on postpositivist theory,
Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self,by Linda Martin
Alcoff, a professor of philosophy at Syracuse University. Several essays
from the book are available at
the author’s
Web site.
"Alternative Use of Video in The Classroom – It’s Not Just for Homework
Anymore," by Jessie LaHaie, Techsmith, September 21, 2012 ---
http://blogs.techsmith.com/for-educators/video-in-the-flipped-classroom/#.UFzKBmcsGN8
Guest post by FLN executive director, Kari Arfstrom.
Thank you Richard Campbell for the heads up.
This may flip you out!
"New TED-Ed Site Turns YouTube Videos Into ‘Flipped’ Lessons," by Nick
DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-ted-ed-site-turns-youtube-videos-into-flipped-lessons/36109?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on flipped interactive video ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Flipped
"Grad Student's Guide to Good Coffee," by Rob Gee, Inside Higher
Ed, September 23, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/grad-students-guide-good-coffee
More Clever than the Thumb of a Butcher
September 21, 2012 message from Dan Stone
One semester, I used the news story at the end of
this post in an accounting systems class. I thought it was a clever, funny
example of a failure of accounting controls. As was evident from my student
evaluations, many students were not amused. I have since learned that, at
least in Kentucky, anything related to sex or body functions -- even if
relevant to the class -- must not be spoken about.
Dan Stone
Title: Co-op apologises after shopper is
overcharged because store assistant's breasts were resting on the scales
A supermarket customer was over-charged by
around £5 while buying fruit and vegetables because the cashier's
breasts were resting on the weighing scales.
Bosses at a Jersey branch of Co-operative
explained that the mistake occurred because the shop assistant's seat
had been too low, causing her to lean on the counter.
Jim Hopley, chief executive of Channel Islands
Co-operative, said the money has now been refunded and admitted that he
has never seen anything like it in his 40 years of retail experience.
"Bank worker, 24, who stole £46,000 to fund boob job and party lifestyle
told police she earned the money working as an escort," by Emma Clark, Daily
Mail, September 21, 2012 --- Click Here
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2206764/Bank-worker-24-stole-46-000-fund-boob-job-party-lifestyle-told-police-earned-money-working-escort.html?ITO=socialnet-twitter-mailonline
Rachael Martin, who has an eight-year-old son, told
police she could afford her lifestyle by working as a 'common prostitute'
but later admitted to thefts Underwent complete body overhaul in just weeks,
including £4,000 on breast surgery, £1,700 on dental surgery, and
liposuction She also spent £670 at exclusive jewellers Tiffany, and £506 on
a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes The law graduate was jailed for 52 weeks
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Apple Makes a Wrong Turn as Users Blast Map Switch," by Ian Sherr,
The Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443890304578008712527187512.html?mod=ITP_pageone_0&mg=reno64-wsj
Apple Inc.'s move to replace Google Inc.'s mapping
software with its own on its mobile devices sparked a world-wide consumer
backlash, marking a rare strategic blunder by a company more accustomed to
rave reviews from users.
As Apple prepped its stores for the first sales of
the iPhone 5 on Friday, the company faced vociferous complaints from
consumers over the mapping application it released this week, which replaces
the Google maps that have been part of the iPhone since the device's initial
2007 release. The new maps come installed on the iPhone 5 and will be seen
by other users who upgrade their iPhones and iPads to the company's latest
iOS 6 mobile operating system.
The criticism poured in world-wide as users of the
new maps found misplaced labels for businesses and landmarks, cities with
missing roads and erroneous features like a fractured river in Ann Arbor,
Mich. A search for the Golden Gate Bridge yielded a marker roughly four
miles away in San Francisco.
Complaints of the application came amid praise for
the new iPhone and mobile software as consumers and bloggers took to dozens
of websites—including Facebook, Twitter and a newly created blog
sarcastically called "The Amazing iOS 6 Maps"—to circulate screen shots of
the mapping errors and compare them to Google's service. Smartphone Wars
But more than an embarrassment, the misstep
highlights Apple's challenge as it takes on Google and others with Web
services.
While the two Silicon Valley companies were once on
good terms, they began encroaching on one another's turf in recent years and
are now fighting to take the lead in the fast-growing mobile software and
device market. Google today makes Android mobile software, which competes
with Apple's mobile operating system.
Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said the company
knows its map service is a major initiative and designed it so that it would
get better as more people use it. She also acknowledged that some features,
such as transit information, were absent and would be integrated with the
help of application developers.
"We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are
working hard to make the customer experience even better," she said.
Apple's new maps app does have some new and
improved features. It offers free turn-by-turn voice-guided navigation,
something that wasn't available in the old app. It also integrates reviews
from Yelp Inc. into its map listings.
Maps are a key element of the rivalry between the
two companies. Mobile ads associated with maps or locations are a big
business, estimated to account for about 25% of the roughly $2.5 billion
spent on ads on mobile devices in 2012, up from 10% two years ago, according
to Opus Research.
Apple's iPhone has been preloaded with Google Maps
since it first went on sale, and it was the default mapping app on the iPad.
More than 90% of U.S. iPhone owners use Google Maps, but as tensions rose
between the two companies over competitive products and features, Apple
decided to go its own way.
Starting in 2009, Apple began acquiring several
companies to build its mapping technology. Its new maps app also uses
information from Dutch navigation system maker TomTom
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
"New iOS 6 Loses Google Maps, but
Adds Other Features," by David Pogue, The New York Times, September
19, 2012 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/new-ios-6-loses-google-maps-but-adds-other-features/
The
arrival of the iPhone 5 isn’t the only big news
for phone fans this week. Wednesday, Apple is
also making iOS 6 available to anyone with a
recent iPhone (3GS, 4, or 4S), iPod Touch
(fourth generation) or iPad (2 or 3). It comes
installed on the iPhone 5 and the new
fifth-generation iPod Touch.
(Caution:
Not all features are available on the older
models. I’ve noted the biggest such exceptions
below, but you should
check here for full details.)
The challenge in creating a new operating
system is always this: How do you add
features without adding complexity?
On a tiny phone screen, that challenge
becomes even more difficult. The answer, of
course, is, you can’t — but few companies
try harder to minimize the complexity than
Apple. In iOS 6, for example, Apple counts
more than 200 new features, but you wouldn’t
know it with a quick glance.
Here’s the best of what’s new:
Maps. Apple, as you may
have noticed, has been quietly dismantling
its relationship with Google. In iOS 6, for
example, there’s no longer a built-in
YouTube app (Google owns YouTube);
fortunately, YouTube offers a new app of its
own.
And now Apple has replaced the iPhone’s
longstanding Google Maps app. Apple says
that Google had been steadily improving its
Maps app — but only for Android phones,
leaving the iPhone in the dust. For example,
the iPhone app didn’t have spoken
turn-by-turn directions. And on Android, the
maps are composed of vector art—smooth lines
generated by the computer — rather than the
square tiles of pixels that you saw on the
iPhone.
In any case, the new iOS Maps app offers
those features — spoken navigation, vector
maps — and more. You can just tell Siri
where you want to go (“Give me directions to
LaGuardia Airport”), and let the app start
getting you there with one of the cleanest,
least distracting navigation screens ever to
appear on a GPS unit. The visual cues are
big, bold and readable at a glance, and the
spoken cues are timed perfectly so that you
don’t miss a turn. You can even turn the
screen off and let the voice alone guide
you.
Real-time traffic and accident alerts are
built in — no charge, courtesy of
crowdsourced speed and position data from
millions of other iPhone owners out driving.
Not all is rosy in Mapsland, though. Apple’s
database of points of interest (stores,
restaurants, and so on), powered by Yelp, is
sparser than Google’s. There’s no built-in
public-transportation guidance. For big
cities, you get Flyover, a super-cool 3-D
photographic model of the actual buildings —
but losing Google’s Street View feature is a
real shame.
During navigation guidance, you can’t rotate
the map with your fingers or zoom in by more
than a couple of degrees—to see your entire
route, for example. Turns out you have to
tap the screen and then tap Overview to
access that more detailed, zoomable,
rotatable map.
Flyover and the vector maps require a fast
Internet connection, by the way. When you’re
not in a 4G cellular area, it can take quite
awhile for the blank canvas to fill in.
(Navigation and Flyover don’t work on the
iPhone 3GS or 4, the original iPad, or
pre-2012 iPod Touches.)
Call smarts. These are some
of my favorite new features. If you’re
driving or in a meeting when a call comes
in, you can flick upward on the screen to
reveal two new buttons: Remind Me Later and
Reply With Message. The first button offers
choices like “In 1 hour” or “When I get
home” (a message will remind you to call
back); the second offers canned text
messages, like “I’ll call you later” or a
custom message, that let your caller know
you can’t take the call now. Excellent.
Do Not Disturb is also incredibly useful.
It’s like Airplane Mode — the phone won’t
buzz, ring or light up — except that (a) it
can turn itself on during certain hours,
like your sleeping hours, and (b) it can
allow certain people’s calls or texts
through (people on your phone’s Favorites
list, for example). You can sleep soundly,
knowing that your boss or family can reach
you in an emergency, but idiot telemarketers
will go straight to voice mail.
(Similarly ingenious: The option called
Repeated Calls. If someone calls you twice
in three minutes — possibly someone who
needs to reach you urgently — that call is
allowed to ring during Do Not Disturb.)
Siri. Siri, the
voice-activated servant, now understands
questions about movies (“When is the next
showtime of ‘Finding Nemo 3D?’” or “Who
directed ‘Chinatown?’”), sports (“Who won
the Yankees game yesterday?”) and
restaurants (“Where’s the closest diner?”).
In each case, Siri’s responses are visual
and detailed—for restaurants, you can even
make a reservation with one tap, courtesy of
Open Table.
You can also speak Twitter or Facebook posts
(“Tweet, ‘I just broke my shin on a poorly
placed coffee table’”) and—hallelujah!—open
apps by voice (“open Camera”). That’s a huge
win.
Siri is also available in more languages and
on more gadgets (the new iPod Touch; the
iPad 3).
FaceTime over cellular.
FaceTime is Apple’s video-chatting feature —
and until today, it worked only in Wi-Fi hot
spots. Now, at last, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and
cellular iPad 3 owners can make video calls
(to other iPhone, iPad, Touch and Mac
owners) even when they’re out of Wi-Fi
range, out in cellular land. When the signal
is decent, the picture looks great. (AT&T
doesn’t let you use FaceTime over cellular
unless you have one of its complicated and
expensive shared-data plans.)
Camera panoramas. You can
now capture a 240-degree, ultra-wide-angle,
28-megapixel photo by swinging the phone
around you in an arc. The phone creates the
panorama in real time (you don’t have to
line up the sections yourself). Available on
iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and iPod touch (5th
generation), and very welcome.
Passbook. This app collects
and consolidates barcodes: for airline
boarding passes, movie tickets you bought
online, electronic coupons and so on. The
feature hasn’t gone live yet, so I couldn’t
test it except with phony coupons and
boarding passes supplied by Apple to
reviewers. But the apps for Delta, American,
Starbucks and Fandango will be
Passbook-compatible almost immediately, and
that should be a great time-saver—your
boarding-pass barcode appears automatically
when you arrive at the airport (thank you,
GPS), even on the Lock screen.
Safari browser. You can now
save a Web page to read later, when you
don’t have an Internet connection, and in
landscape mode, a full-screen browsing mode
maximizes screen space by hiding toolbars.
(I don’t think the third new Safari,
feature, iCloud Tabs, will be as useful. It
lets you open up whatever browser tabs you
left open on your Mac or iPad—if, that is,
they’re all signed into the same iCloud
account.)
Shared photo streams. You
can “publish” groups of photos to specified
friends; they can view the pictures on their
Apple gadgets or on a Web page. They can add
comments or “like” them.
Mail. In Mail, you can
indicate the most important people; they get
their own folder in the Inbox, helping to
lift them out of the clutter. And at long
last, you can now attach photos to a Mail
message you’re already writing, instead of
having to start in the Photos app — better
late than never, I guess.
Miscellaneous. The option
to publish utterances, photos or other bits
to Facebook pops up in a bunch of different
apps. A new Privacy settings page gives you
on/off switches for the kinds of data each
app might request (access to your contacts,
location and so on). Tweaks have been made
to the App Store app, Reminders, Videos and
other apps.
And you no longer have to enter your Apple
password just to download an update to an
app you already have. Hosannah.
Continued in article
Note especially the comments, some
of which are negative
CyclocrosserSeattle, WAReport
My biggest pet peeve is the loss of YouTube on the iPad. While there is
a YouTube app for the iPhone there is (so far) no app for the iPad. The
iPhone app, like most iPhone apps, look terrible when used on the iPad.
Also seems like wifi connectivity has really gone downhill. The Podcast
app is also a complete mess.
Amazes me that
people still like to claim Apple is superior to MS. More and more iOS
seems to be faltering. Each new release seems buggier than the last,
features being taken away, etc. Even in terms of design it's looking
pretty dated compared to Win 8/WP 8. ***IF*** MS can convince developers
to actually start making apps for their platforms they might just have a
shot at taking on Apple. I definitely get the impression that Apple is
resting on their laurels at this stage.
Joseph Hémard ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_H%C3%A9mard
Joseph Hémard,
a popular French book illustrator, was born in
Les Mureaux, France, a small town on the
Seine, northwest of Paris, on August 2, 1880, and died on August 9, 1961, in
Paris.[He
was a prolific artist. During the early years of the 20th century he
published cartoons and comics in illustrated newspapers like Le Pêle-mêle
or Le Bon Vivant. He also designed costumes and sets for several
operas, patterns for printed textiles, bookbindings, posters and even a
facade for a bar in the 1925
Paris Exposition of Decorative Art. His
lasting fame, however, lies in his book illustrations — always distinctly
French in character and often erotic — which he produced for a great number
of titles including many classics of French literature such as
Le Malade Imaginaire (1920),
Gargantua et Pantagruel (1922),
Jacques Le Fataliste (1923),
Cyrano de Bergerac (1927), and
Aucassin et Nicolette (1936).
Hémard also provided illustrations — typically
humorous cartoon-like drawings — for many unlikely non-fiction works
including a variety of technical and reference books. These included
drawings for Le Formulaire Magistral, a technical pharmacological
manual with formulas for preparing medications, as well as a French grammar
and an arithmetic textbook, both of which he also authored, all published in
1927. The following year he published books he wrote and illustrated on
French history and geography.
Hémard also published a number of humorously
illustrated law codes, including the family law provisions of Le Code
Civil, published in 1925, the Code Pénal published in about 1929,
and, in 1944, he published a lengthy, illustrated tax code of France, the
Code Général des Impôts Directs et Taxes Assimilées, all published in
Paris.
The illustrations in these three works, along
with many others of Hémard's, were printed in color using the "pochoir"
(French for stencil) method in which stencils for
each color to be printed are hand cut, typically out of celluloid or
plastic, and the colors painted on using special brushes. Pochoir produces
intensely colored prints with a distinct fresh look and is best known for
its use in French
Art Nouveau and
Art Deco prints in the early 20th Century.
Hémard wrote a brief autobiographical essay,
published by Babou and
Kahane in French in 1928 and in English
translation in 1929, which is largely devoid of factual detail. For example,
after a random history of several "Hémards", purportedly his ancestors,
ending with his birth and two paragraphs on his childhood, he states, "And
then I drew for books." Hémard said that he spent four and a half years as a
prisoner of war in Germany during World War I, and must have been captured
shortly after the war began. Hémard had his most prolific period of book
illustrations in the 1920s and 1930s. Although he remained in Paris and
continued to work as an illustrator during the War, his anti-Nazi sentiments
were expressed in illustrations and stories he contributed to a collection
of humorous stories about the Occupation.
Hémard continued his work at a reduced level after the War. In 1947, for
example, he illustrated an edition of
Brillat-Savarin's classic work on gastronomy,
Physiologie du Goût ("Physiology of Taste")
Continued in article
Yale Law Library - Rare Books Blog (I don't think this can be viewed online)
http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/rarebooks/default.aspx
New exhibit: "The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard"
Posted Monday, September 17, 2012 4:59 PM by Mike Widener
http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/rarebooks/archive/2012/09/17/new-exhibit-quot-the-comic-art-of-joseph-h-233-mard-quot.aspx
Thank you Paul Caron for the heads up
It would take a genius to illustrate one of
the most boring books imaginable, a code of tax laws, and create a comic
tour-de-force. That genius was Joseph Hémard (1880-1961), who in his
lifetime was probably France's most prolific book illustrator. His
illustrations are the focus of the latest exhibit in the Yale Law Library,
"'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard."
The exhibit, on display until December 15, is
curated by Farley P. Katz and Michael Widener. Katz, a tax attorney from San
Antonio, has built one of the world's finest collections of Hémard's works.
Widener is the Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.
Hémard's illustrations have a distinctly
French character, usually comic, and often mildly erotic. Many of his
illustrations were executed in pochoir, a hand stenciling process producing
intense, gorgeous colors still vibrant after three-quarters of a century.
The exhibit showcases eight of the 183
illustrations in Hémard's Tax Code, donated to the Yale Law Library by Katz,
along with two of the other three law books on display from the library's
Rare Book Collection.
The other 19 titles on view are all from
Katz's personal collection. They include children's books and some of the
many classics of French literature that Hémard illustrated, such as works by
Balzac and Anatole France. Items on war include Hémard's own pictorial
account of his time as a German prisoner in World War I, and a set of
anti-Hitler postcards. Hémard even illustrated a pharmacy manual and a
pamphlet on the prostate.
The exhibition's title comes from Hémard's
tongue-in-cheek autobiography. Following a long, rambling description of
supposed ancestors, he devotes two paragraphs to his early life, and
finishes with: "And then I drew for books."
The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm
daily, September 15 - December 15, 2012 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library,
Yale Law School. It will also go online here in the Yale Law Library Rare
Books Blog.
On October 5, Katz will give an exhibit talk
at 1:00 p.m. in Room 128 of the Yale Law School. The talk is also open to
the public.
MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian
A Debate by Experts About Teaching Evaluations
"Professors and the Students Who Grade Them," The New York Times,
September 17, 2012 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/17/professors-and-the-students-who-grade-them?hp
Jensen Comment
One of the experts is a man after my own heart:
Stuart Rojstaczer, a
former professor of geology and civil engineering at Duke University, is the
creator of of the Grade
Inflation Web site. He is writing a book about undergraduate education in
the U.S.
Grade inflation is, in my opinion, the Number One disgrace in higher
education, and the major cause of grade inflation is the teaching evaluation
process where students impact the promotion, tenure, and salary outcomes of
their teachers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
2012 Ig Nobel Prizes ---
http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Anita Eerland and Rolf
Zwaan [THE NETHERLANDS] and Tulio Guadalupe [PERU, RUSSIA, and THE
NETHERLANDS] for their study "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower
Seem Smaller"
PEACE PRIZE: The SKN Company [RUSSIA], for
converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Igor Petrov
. . .
ANATOMY PRIZE: Frans de Waal [The
Netherlands and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering that
chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing
photographs of their rear ends. REFERENCE: "Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee
Sex Perception" Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science
Letters, vol. 1, 99–103, 2008.
ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny
MEDICINE PRIZE: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and
Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies
how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.
REFERENCE: "Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with
Electrocautery," Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, Emmanuel Ben-Soussan,
World Journal of Gastroenterology, vol. 13, no. 40, October 2007, pp.
5295–8. REFERENCE: "Argon Plasma Coagulation in the Treatment of Hemorrhagic
Radiation Proctitis is Efficient But Requires a Perfect Colonic Cleansing to
Be Safe," E. Ben-Soussan, M. Antonietti, G. Savoye, S. Herve, P. Ducrotté,
and E. Lerebours, European Journal of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, vol.
16, no. 12, December 2004, pp 1315-8.
ATTENDING THE THE CEREMONY: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I was going to comment on the Anatomy Prize and then decided otherwise.
"Emory University to eliminate programs," by Laura Diamond, The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 14, 2012 ---
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/emory-university-to-eliminate-programs/nSByn/
. . .
Emory will phase out the journalism program,
department of visual arts, division of educational studies and department of
physical education. Students enrolled in these programs will be able to
complete their degrees and tenured faculty will move to other departments.
The university will suspend admissions to
Spanish and economics graduate programs so leaders there can redefine the
missions, Forman said. Emory also will
suspend admissions to the Institute for Liberal Arts so it can be
restructured.
The changes will begin at the end of this academic
year and finish by the end of the 2016-17 academic year. About 20 staff
positions will be cut over the next five years, officials said.
Savings from the changes will be re-invested into
existing programs and growing areas, such as neurosciences, contemporary
China studies and digital and new media studies, Emory officials said.
Leaders of affected departments sent letters and
emails to students.
“These changes represent very difficult choices but
I am confident it will lead to a more exciting future for Emory College,”
Forman said. “These were fundamental decisions about the size and scope of
our mission and how we use our resources to realize our mission of providing
a world-class education for our students.”
President Jim Wagner endorsed the plan, saying
Forman and others had the “willingness to go back to first principles, look
at each department and program afresh, and begin the process of reallocating
resources for emerging needs and opportunities.”
The college has shuttered programs before. Emory
decided to close the dental school in 1990 and shut down the geology
department in 1986.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Jensen Comment
If there ever was BS about a BS or a PhD this has to be the site ---
http://www.collegemeasures.org/
One thing I always warned my students about is that education is much more
than a ticket to a job. Education is part and parcel to almost everything in
life.
And when looking at career alternatives, I always warned my students to
pretty much ignore starting salaries when choosing a career or choosing
from first-time job alternatives. Reasons are as follows:
- Some companies will offer higher starting salaries because they're weak
in other attractions such as training, exposure to quality clients, job
security, travel requirements, benefits, etc. In public accountancy, for
example, the most important things are training and exposure to quality
clients who frequently offer jobs to selected members of audit teams that
conduct onsite audits or consulting for these clients.
- Local, state, and federal government job offers often look low relative
to job offers from the private sector. But there are often many advantages
to starting out with government such as starting out with the IRS.
Government sometimes offers great training opportunities. Secondly,
government may offer "client" exposures that provide similar opportunities
for career advancement in the private sector following that first-job in
government. Some of our best accounting firm tax experts are former IRS
agents, and some of our best tax professors were former IRS agents. The name
Amy Dunbar at the University of Connecticut rings a bell here.
- Large firms may offer the highest starting salaries, but the career
opportunities may be greater in small firms. For example, the probability
that an accounting graduate who starts out in a Big Four accounting firm
will ultimately make partner varies among the hundreds of offices around the
world, but the overall probability is much less than 20%. In fairness, most
graduates want Big Four training and client exposure opportunities without
ever intending to stick around long enough to become partners. Other
accounting graduates would prefer to start out with smaller accounting firms
or companies where they can start out as larger fish in small ponds with
much greater opportunity to become partners or senior managers or
executives.
- Relative to salary at any point in a career, also think about mobility.
It is quite common for employees to change jobs for a number of reasons,
including termination (e.g., no tenure or promotion), unhappiness in a
particular job, transfer of a spouse, desire to get out of a city, desire to
get into a city, etc. Some careers have greater mobility upon relocation.
And high-mobility careers may not have the highest starting salaries. For
example, my UPS driver up here in the mountains has a BS in finance. He
could've had a higher starting salary when he graduated in Boston, but when
he moved to these mountains he could not find any job in finance. If he had
instead been a nurse, he could've found a nursing job immediately.
- Think of the lifestyle aspects of a career that become much more
important later in life than salary. For example, many first-year premed
majors change majors after their science teachers fully explain the
lifestyle advantages and disadvantages of being a lifetime medical doctor.
For example, if every day is the same old thing of reading radiology film,
fixing herniated discs, putting in lens implants, or replacing knees and
hips, life can be pretty boring over the next 40 years. Students should
consider the many aspects of a career other than expected earnings. And
there are many aspects to consider. Physicians generally get rewards of
improving or restoring the lives of their patients. But many also take on
heavy pressures of possibly ruining the lives of their patients.
- Think of the debt and such things as malpractice insurance. For example,
physicians who start out at relatively high salaries or billings often spend
years of paying off the tens of thousands or more dollars of debt
accumulated in medical school. Getting free of that debt may take a long
time. One of my granddaughters estimates she will be 50 years old before she
makes the last payment on student loans. Also, consider the costs of a
career. The malpractice insurance of my wife's spine surgeon is over
$500,000 per year plus he has to pay for his own office staff, his own
office nurses, his physician assistants, and even his own accountants and
computer specialists.
Lastly, when reading the charts and tables in the site below consider the
aggregation and other weaknesses of the data. For example, accounting is mixed
in with business studies. But the advantages and disadvantages of an accounting
career are much, much different than those of marketing, management, finance,
and other types of business careers. For example, I looked up the PhD starting
salary for a "business" major in one major university. It was stated as $90,000.
However, accounting PhD graduates at that particular university are more apt to
be $150,000 or more. Plus there are summer stipends that add up to 20% more to
starting salaries.
And while we're at it, consider the starting salary of an accounting PhD. The
highest salary offer may come from Harvard or Stanford, but the living costs in
Cambridge or Palo Alto are possibly twice as much or more than the living costs
in Ames, Iowa --- perhaps ten times as much in terms of house purchase and
rental prices. And the odds of getting tenure are low at Harvard or Stanford
such that considerations such as research opportunities should outweigh starting
salary considerations.
And now for the BS about a BS ---
http://www.collegemeasures.org/
"All About the Money: What if lawmakers and students used starting
salaries to evaluate colleges and their programs?" by Dan Berrett, Chronicle
of Higher Education, September 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/All-About-the-Money/134422/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
What is your college degree truly worth?
That is the question that a new report seeks to
answer. And it does so by distilling college into a number, expressed in
dollars.
"The Earning Power of Graduates From Tennessee's
Colleges and Universities" is the latest effort to precisely quantify the
value of a degree. It identifies the payoff that individual programs at
specific colleges yield the first year after graduation. While limited to
Tennessee, it will be followed by similar analyses in other states, and it
marks the arrival of a new way of evaluating higher education that brings
conversations about college productivity and performance to the program
level.
Due out this week, the report—by College Measures,
a partnership of the American Institutes for Research and Matrix Knowledge,
a consulting firm—is bound to spark debate about what it counts and omits,
and to raise fears over how its findings will be used.
The report has been praised by some analysts for
merging data on education and employment in valuable ways and for producing
revealing insights. For instance, in Tennessee, attending the flagship, in
Knoxville, might not lead to a higher paycheck for new graduates than
completing a community-college program, depending on the major a student
chooses.
The report also exposes simmering arguments in
higher education: whether college is chiefly for personal economic gain or
for serving the public good, whether teaching potential students about the
costs and benefits of their college choices will further cement an already
widespread consumerist ethos, and whether data on disparate outcomes by
discipline will fuel more attacks on liberal-arts programs, whose graduates
may not earn large salaries right after college but fare better later.
Produced in collaboration with the Tennessee Higher
Education Commission, the report was preceded by a Web site, which became
public last month, with
data for
institutions in Arkansas. College Measures is also
producing analyses for Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Virginia.
More states may follow suit. About half the states
have the ability to link postsecondary academic records with labor data,
according to a 2010 report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers.
Few states have done so, says Travis J. Reindl, a program director for the
National Governors Association, but interest is growing in the types of
analyses that College Measures performs.
"Governors care very much about job creation, and
they care very much about meeting work-force needs. Both of these things
rely on good information," says Mr. Reindl. "This is an issue that's clearly
starting to percolate because it all goes back to jobs, job, jobs."
Salary Matters
Previous
studies by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce,
among others, have analyzed wage differences by major.
The Tennessee report breaks new ground, says Jeff Strohl, director of
research at the Georgetown center, by marshaling data from disparate state
agencies to identify the average first-year wages of the state's college
graduates between 2006 and 2010, and linking those data to the majors they
pursued and institutions they attended.
Continued in article
From the Chronicle of Higher
Education
Look up salary data for your university ---
http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-data-2012/131431#id=144050
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Book Review of The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College
Kids Cheat by Dave Tomar (Bloomsbury, 251 pages, $25)
"A Man for All Semesters: An exposé reveals how the Internet has turned
collegiate cheating into big business," by Charles Dameron, The Wall
Street Journal, September 20, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443816804578004570701056956.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno64-wsj
'If you knew how I work!" Balzac wrote to a friend
in 1832 as he finished up another volume of what would become the "Comédie
humaine." "I am a galley slave to pen and ink, a true dealer in ideas." Dave
Tomar is no stranger to the feeling of tortured subjugation to the written
word, though whether one could justly call him a "dealer in ideas" is
another matter—"counterfeiter" is more like it.
In "The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping
College Kids Cheat," Mr. Tomar, a 32-year-old Rutgers graduate, describes
how, for the better part of a decade, he labored as a writer-for-hire
catering to incompetent and lazy students. It didn't matter if the task at
hand was a reflection on Nietzsche, a piece on Piaget's theory of genetic
epistemology, or a 150-page paper on public-sector investment in China and
India. Mr. Tomar, with not a small amount of help from Wikipedia, was a man
for all semesters.
The most amusing and disturbing tidbits of "The
Shadow Scholar" are excerpted communiqués from Mr. Tomar's clients that show
just how badly these arrested young minds required his assistance. "Let me
know what will the paper going to be about," one college student instructs
Mr. Tomar. "Also dont write about, abortion, euthanasia, clothing or death
penalty, yhose were not allowed by my teacher."
Mr. Tomar worked for only a few cents a word, but
he kept busy enough to earn $66,000 in 2010. (Not bad, especially
considering that the average pay for a non-tenure-track lecturer at Harvard
last year—an institution with its own student-plagiarism scandal at the
moment—was just under $57,000.) He was a freelancer for several of the
"hundreds and possibly thousands" of online paper mills in the United
States, services with names like rushessay.com and college-paper.org that
produce custom essays for their student clients. Lest you think that this
sleazy racket is a fringe, underground phenomenon, Mr. Tomar is here to
declare otherwise: "It's mainstream. It's popular culture. It's taxable
income. It's googleable."
"The Shadow Scholar" is a follow-up to a 2010 essay
of the same name that Mr. Tomar wrote, under the pseudonym Ed Dante, for the
Chronicle of Higher Education. The original essay was concise, hard-hitting
and topical, revealing the dirty details of a business that educators try
studiously to ignore. By contrast, Mr. Tomar's book is frequently
self-indulgent and meandering, as much a memoir of the author's post-college
search for purpose as a whistleblowing manifesto. Clichés and mixed
metaphors abound: "I'm tumbling into a well of bad memories the way that a
motorcycle backfiring in the distance might take a guy back to 'Nam," he
tells us in an eight-page account of a phone call to the Rutgers Parking and
Transportation Department.
For those willing to wade through it, however, "The
Shadow Scholar" is a fascinating exposé of the remarkably robust industry of
academic ghostwriting. Assuming that Mr. Tomar's story is at least roughly
faithful to the truth, his testimony amounts to a harrowing indictment of
the modern American university's current shortcomings as a meritocratic,
credentializing institution, much less a home for mental and moral growth.
Mr. Tomar didn't just aid and abet casual cheating.
Rather, he claims, he was engaged in a process of systemic intellectual
fraud that students took advantage of all the way up the academic ziggurat:
fabricating "personal statements" for unqualified college applicants;
crafting term papers for undergraduates and "cockpit parents" who diligently
directed their children's plagiarism; sweating over doctoral dissertations
with only one page of instructions to go on; even, in one extraordinary
case, doing the writing for an entire Ph.D. program in cognitive and
behavioral psychology on someone else's behalf.
Mr. Tomar's dispatches from the dark side certainly
do nothing to dispel the impression that, even as tuition hikes at many
colleges outpace inflation, American colleges and universities may be
delivering a product of declining value. Former Emory University president
William Chace, in a recent essay on the normalization of cheating in the
academy, wrote of a "suspicion that students are studying less, reading
less, and learning less all the time." The numbers back this up. Economists
Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks reported in 2010 that the number of hours
that full-time college students spent on their studies dropped by a third
between 1961 and 2003, to 27 hours per week from 40.
Having largely abandoned the mission of molding
student character, many American universities and colleges today find
themselves challenged to uphold the most minimal standards of technical
training and assessment. Sociologists Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum, in
their 2011 book "Academically Adrift," found that, of a nationally
representative sample of thousands of college students, over a third
demonstrated "no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex
reasoning and writing" after four years in college. Unable or unwilling to
do the work, many students find it far easier to hand it off to a
subcontractor.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Dave Tomar is now a student in the Yale Law school. He hopes that his extensive
experience in cheating will make him a successful lawyer.
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and cheating are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Detroit ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick turned City Hall into a den of bribes,
prosecutor says," by Ed White, Mercury News, September 21, 2012 ---
http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_21601773/detroit-ex-mayor-kwame-kilpatrick-turned-city-hall
Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick conspired
with his father and best friend to turn City Hall into a den of bribes and
kickbacks, a prosecutor said Friday as jurors heard opening statements in
Kilpatrick's corruption trial.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Chutkow gave jurors a
40-minute overview of what they'll see and hear in the months ahead. He said
Kilpatrick was an enthusiastic rising star in Michigan politics who moved
from the state Legislature, then enriched himself with hundreds of thousands
of dollars by muscling contractors, fooling political supporters and rigging
city business.
"This was not politics as usual," Chutkow said.
"This was extortion, bribery, fraud. ... They broke their oath to serve this
city. It was the citizens of the city of Detroit who were left holding the
short end of the stick."
Kilpatrick -- who quit office in 2008 in an
unrelated scandal and eventually served more than a year in prison for a
probation violation -- is charged with racketeering conspiracy, extortion,
bribery, fraud, false tax returns and tax evasion. His father, Bernard, also
is on trial, along with the ex-mayor's best friend, Bobby Ferguson, and
former Detroit water boss Victor Mercado.
Chutkow described how Kilpatrick deposited more
than $200,000 in cash in his bank account and paid his credit card bills
with another $280,000 in cash.
"He no longer lived like the citizens he governed,"
the prosecutor said, Advertisement noting luxurious travel and custom-made
suits.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Deputy RI House speaker to admit tax fraud guilt," by David Klepper,
Boston.com, September 14, 2012 ---
http://www.boston.com/news/local/rhode-island/2012/09/14/deputy-house-speaker-admit-tax-fraud-guilt/CsbaWCaSHNc4X1sHAzPqhJ/story.html
The outgoing deputy speaker of the Rhode Island
House and a business partner have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and
tax fraud for cheating the federal government out of more than $500,000 in
tax payments, federal prosecutors said Friday.
Rep. John McCauley Jr., a Democrat who represents
Providence, was charged Friday in federal court along with William L'Europa,
his partner in their insurance adjuster business. Both indicated in court
filings that they plan to plead guilty. The men were charged with conspiracy
to defraud the United States and filing false tax returns.
McCauley is the sixth Rhode Island lawmaker to face
criminal charges in the past year.
Prosecutors said McCauley and L'Europa
underreported nearly $1.8 million dollars in receipts for tax years 2007 to
2010. They face up to eight years in prison.
McCauley, 54, was first elected in 1990 and is not
seeking re-election. He didn’t immediately return a message left at his
home. No one answered a phone listing for L'Europa.
Federal agents raided McCauley and L'Europa’s
office in November and seized several boxes. They later said the search was
part of an investigation into an arson fraud. Louisa Knight later pleaded
guilty to federal fraud charges after admitting setting fire to her home and
later filing an insurance claim. Authorities said at the time there was no
indication that McCauley or L'Europa knew about the fraud.
A spokesman for Rhode Island U.S. Attorney Peter
Neronha wouldn’t comment on whether the new charges are related to that
investigation.
House Speaker Gordon Fox issued a statement Friday
saying that the charges against McCauley had ‘‘nothing to do with his role
at the Statehouse’’ and that McCauley has taken responsibility in
‘‘addressing his personal issues.’’
‘‘He has been a long-time friend who always
represented his district well,’’ said Fox, D-Providence.
Five other lawmakers have faced criminal charges in
the past year.
State Sen. Majority Leader Dominick Ruggerio,
D-North Providence, was charged with driving under the influence in April,
but the charge was dropped when Ruggerio admitted refusing an alcohol test
and agreed to perform community service. His license was suspended for six
months.
Rep. Robert Watson, R-East Greenwich, was charged
with marijuana possession and DUI in April in Connecticut and was arrested
in Rhode Island in January on a charge of marijuana possession. The former
House minority leader pleaded not guilty to charges from the first incident
and pleaded no-contest to the more recent charge. He is not seeking
re-election.
Police arrested Rep. Dan Gordon, R-Portsmouth, in
September after learning that he faced charges in Massachusetts that he
failed to stop for police and drove with a suspended license stemming from a
2008 traffic stop. Gordon agreed to pay $1,000 to resolve the evasion charge
and received probation for other traffic charges. He is not seeking
re-election.
Rep. Leo Medina, D-Providence, was charged last
month with practicing law without a license. Not guilty pleas were entered
on his behalf. He is also accused of pocketing proceeds from a life
insurance policy on a friend’s deceased daughter. Medina pleaded not guilty
to those charges. He was defeated in this week’s Democratic primary.
In January, prosecutors dismissed a sexual assault
case against Rep. John Carnevale, D-Providence, after the accuser died of
medical causes. He had pleaded not guilty.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
2012 Working Mother: 100 Best Companies ---
http://www.workingmother.com/best-company-list/129110
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"Google Glass and the Future of Technology," by David A. Pogue, The
New York Times, September 13, 2012 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/google-glass-and-the-future-of-technology/
New gadgets — I mean whole new gadget categories —
don’t come along very often. The iPhone was one recent example. You could
argue that the iPad was another. But if there’s anything at all as different
and bold on the horizon, surely it’s Google Glass.
That, of course, is Google’s prototype of a device
you wear on your face. Google doesn’t like the term “glasses,” because there
aren’t any lenses. (The Glass team, part of Google’s experimental labs, also
doesn’t like terms like “augmented reality” or “wearable computer,” which
both have certain baggage.)
¶Instead, Glass looks like only the headband of a
pair of glasses — the part that hooks on your ears and lies along your
eyebrow line — with a small, transparent block positioned above and to the
right of your right eye. That, of course, is a screen, and the Google Glass
is actually a fairly full-blown computer. Or maybe like a smartphone that
you never have to take out of your pocket.
¶This idea got a lot of people excited when Nick
Bilton of The New York Times broke the story of the glasses in February.
Google first demonstrated it April in a video. In May, at Google’s I/O
conference, Glass got some more play as attendees watched a live video feed
from the Glass as a sky diver leapt from a plane and parachuted onto the
roof of the conference building. But so far, very few non-Googlers have been
allowed to try them on.
¶Last week, I got a chance to put one on. I’m
hosting a PBS series called “Nova ScienceNow” (it premieres Oct. 10), and
one of the episodes is about the future of tech. Of course, projecting
what’s yet to come in consumer tech is nearly impossible, but Google Glass
seemed like a perfect example of a breakthrough on the verge. So last week
the Nova crew and I met with Babak Parviz, head of the Glass project, to
discuss and try out the prototypes.
¶Now, Google emphasized — and so do I — that Google
Glass is still at a very, very early stage. Lots of factors still haven’t
been finalized, including what Glass will do, what the interface will look
like, how it will work, and so on. Google doesn’t want to get the public
excited about some feature that may not materialize in the final version.
(At the moment, Google is planning to offer the prototypes to developers
next year — for $1,500 — in anticipation of selling Glass to the public in,
perhaps, 2014.)
¶When you actually handle these things, you can’t
believe how little they weigh. Less than a pair of sunglasses, in my
estimation. Glass is an absolutely astonishing feat of miniaturization and
integration.
¶Inside the right earpiece — that is, the
horizontal support that goes over your ear — Google has packed memory, a
processor, a camera, speaker and microphone, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennas,
accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and a battery. All inside the earpiece.
¶Google has said that eventually, Glass will have a
cellular radio, so it can get online; at this point, it hooks up wirelessly
with your phone for an online connection. And the mind-blowing thing is,
this slim thing is the prototype. It’s only going to get smaller in future
generations. “This is the bulkiest version of Glass we’ll ever make,” Babak
told me.
¶The biggest triumph — and to me, the biggest
surprise — is that the tiny screen is completely invisible when you’re
talking or driving or reading. You just forget about it completely. There’s
nothing at all between your eyes and whatever, or whomever, you’re looking
at.
¶And yet when you do focus on the screen, shifting
your gaze up and to the right, that tiny half-inch display is surprisingly
immersive. It’s as though you’re looking at a big laptop screen or
something.
¶(Even though I usually need reading glasses for
close-up material, this very close-up display seemed to float far enough
away that I didn’t need them. Because, yeah — wearing glasses under Glass
might look weird.)
¶The hardware breakthrough, in other words, is
there. Google is proceeding carefully to make sure it gets the rest of it as
right as possible on the first try.
¶But the potential is already amazing. Mr. Pariz
stressed that Glass is designed for two primary purposes — sharing and
instant access to information — hands-free, without having to pull anything
out of your pocket.
¶You can control the software by swiping a finger
on that right earpiece in different directions; it’s a touchpad. Your swipes
could guide you through simple menus. In various presentations, Google has
proposed icons for things like taking a picture, recording video, making a
phone call, navigating on Google Maps, checking your calendar and so on. A
tap selects the option you want.
¶In recent demonstrations, Google has also shown
that you can use speech recognition to control Glass. You say “O.K., Glass”
to call up the menu.
¶To illustrate how Glass might change the game for
sharing your life with others, I tried a demo in which a photo appeared — a
jungly scene with a wooden footbridge just in front of me. The theme from
“Jurassic Park” played crisply in my right ear. (Cute, real cute.)
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Technology
"Website update," by J.
Carlton Collins, Journal of Accountancy, September 2012 ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2012/Sep/Website-update.htm
Q:
I have been tasked with reviewing and updating our firm’s website content,
and I want to go about it as efficiently as possible. Can you help me get
started?
A:
I find that I can review content better on a printed page with pencil in
hand. Adobe Acrobat Standard X ($139) provides the ability to produce a
single document containing your entire website. To use this feature, from
the Acrobat X menu, select Create, Create PDF from
Web Page, and enter the website’s URL (URL is an acronym for
uniform resource locator, which is the site’s home page web address) in the
URL box. Click the Capture Multiple Levels
button, select the Get entire site radio button, and then
click Create.
Math and Metaphor: Using Poetry to Teach College Mathematics ---
http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol20/bahls.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Evernote ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evernote
"Skitch Finds New Life At Evernote With iPhone Version," by Jon
Mitchell, ReadWriteWeb, September 19, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/skitch-finds-new-life-at-evernote-with-iphone-version.php
"A Brief Word from an Evernote Convert," by Kathleen Fitzpatrick,
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 6, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/A-Brief-Word-from-an-Evernote/25291/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"6 Awesome Evernote Apps That We Guarantee You've Never Seen," by Jon
Mitchell, ReadWriteWeb, July 27, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/evernote-announces-6-awesome-apps-as-2012-devcup-finalists.php
Bob Jensen's threads on Evernote ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Search for "Evernote"
Short-Term Memory (including chunking) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_memory
"The Science of “Chunking: Working Memory, and How Pattern
Recognition Fuels Creativity," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings,
September 4, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/04/the-ravenous-brain-daniel-bor/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
It seems to be the season for fascinating
meditations on consciousness, exploring such questions as
what happens while we sleep,
how complex cognition evolved, and
why the world exists. Joining them and prior
explorations of
what it means to be human is
The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our
Insatiable Search for Meaning (public
library) by Cambridge neuroscientist
Daniel Bor in which, among other things, he sheds light on how our
species’ penchant for pattern-recognition is essential to consciousness and
our entire experience of life.
The process of combining more primitive pieces
of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect
both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining
features of human experience. Once we have reached adulthood, we have
decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of
thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of
combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich,
hierarchical model of the world. Inside us is also written a multitude
of mini strategies about how to direct our attention in order to
maximize further learning. We can allow our attention to roam anywhere
around us and glean interesting new clues about any facet of our local
environment, to compare and potentially add to our extensive internal
model.
Much of this capacity relies on our working memory
— the temporary storage that holds these primitive pieces of information in
order to make them available for further processing — and yet what’s most
striking about our ability to build such an “amazingly rich” model of the
world is that the limit of our working memory is hardly different from that
of a monkey, even though the monkey’s brain is roughly one-fifteenth the
size of ours: Experiment after experiment has shown that, on average, the
human brain can hold 4 different items in its working memory, compared to 3
or 4 for the monkey.
What makes the difference, Bor argues, is a concept
called chunking, which allows us to hack the
limits of our working memory — a kind of cognitive compression mechanism
wherein we parse information into chunks that are more memorable and easier
to process than the seemingly random bits of which they’re composed. Bor
explains:
In terms of grand purpose, chunking can be seen
as a similar mechanism to attention: Both processes are concerned with
compressing an unwieldy dataset into those small nuggets of meaning that
are particularly salient. But while chunking is a marvelous complement
to attention, chunking diverges from its counterpart in focusing on the
compression of conscious data according to its inherent structure or the
way it relates to our preexisting memories.
To illustrate the power of chunking, Bor gives an
astounding example of how one man was able to use this mental mechanism in
greatly expanding the capacity of his working memory. The man, an
undergraduate volunteer in a psychology experiment with an average IQ and
memory capacity, took part in a simple experiment, in which the researchers
read to him a sequence of random digits and asked him to say the digits back
in the order he’d heard them. If he was correct, the next trial sequence
would be one digit longer; if incorrect, one digit shorter. This standard
test for verbal working memory had one twist — it took place over two years,
where the young man did this task for an hour a day four days a week.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on metacognition are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Metacognition in Learning
To my knowledge, Bob Jensen is the first author to discuss the importance of
metacognition in learning.
That paper focuses on the metacognitive advantages of
self-learning (with blood, sweat, and tears) over memorizing answers given out
by teachers.
"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
Now we have a second paper on he importance of metacognition in learning
The paper below focuses on the metacognitive mindset
"Accounting Students' Metacognition: The Association of Performance,
Calibration Error, and Mindset," by Susan P. Ravenscroft, Tammy R. Waymire,
and Timothy D. West, Issues in Accounting Education, Vol. 27, No. 3, August
2012, pp. 707-732 (not free) ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/iace-50148
In recognition of the evolving body of knowledge in
the accounting profession, the American Institute of Certified Public
Accountants (AICPA 2010) highlights the importance of viewing learning as a
lifelong process that requires self-awareness and extends beyond the
academic setting. Metacognition, the assessment and regulation of one's own
learning, is a crucial element in lifelong learning. We draw upon judgment
of learning research and introduce mindset theory to explore the
relationship among (1) exam performance, (2) calibration error, measured as
expected minus actual exam scores, and (3) mindset, a person's basic beliefs
about learning and ability (Dweck 2000, 2006) in the accounting classroom.
We find strong evidence that exam performance is inversely related to
calibration error (Kruger and Dunning 1999). We also find modest evidence
that a growth mindset is associated with improved performance and decreased
calibration error. While the mindset results were not entirely consistent
with prior research in educational psychology, we explore possible reasons
and future directions for accounting education research.
. . .
DISCUSSION Limitations
Our sample consisted of students taught by a single
instructor at a single institution who took an elective governmental and
nonprofit accounting course during one of three semesters. This course is
typically viewed as difficult and as needed for the CPA examination. While
this could restrict the generalizability of the results, we do not believe
that it does so seriously. We are aware of no research findings indicating
that judgments of learning or mindsets differ across social demographics.
Instead, the findings on which we relied are found across broad categories
of groups. However, to establish generalizability, we hope to use multiple
institutions, instructors, and courses in future research.
Another limitation is the restriction of range that
we found in the independent variable of mindset. Dweck and Molden (2005)
note that when they assess children or adults, they find that about 40
percent endorse the fixed view of mindset, another 40 percent endorse the
growth view, and about 20 percent are undecided. Given that a majority of
the subjects were categorized as having a growth mindset, the likelihood of
seeing a significant relationship was decreased. Because we did not
manipulate this variable, we could not create a full range of mindsets for
our analysis. Moreover, we have a restricted range of performance. Students
taking the governmental and nonprofit accounting course have all succeeded
in a competitive accounting program, with average GPAs above that required
for remaining the program. Both of these restrictions bias against finding
statistically significant relationships, and we believe that the results
can, therefore, still be of benefit to a broad range of accounting
educators. Discussion of Results
The initial goal of this study was to better
understand why accounting students sometimes lack self-awareness about their
own abilities and skills, and to explore factors that may assist accounting
educators. The study's results point to three implications for accounting
educators. First, consistent with Kruger and Dunning (1999), we found that
students who overestimate their abilities likely do so because they lack the
technical knowledge to evaluate their own performance, as evidenced by lower
performance. We also found, in the first two exams, evidence of a magnitude
effect that suggests that high-performing students calibrate more accurately
than low-performing students do, expressed in absolute terms. This may
affirm observations by accounting faculty and help them in assisting
students with their self-regulated learning and self-insight.
Second, in exploring the average calibration errors
of high- and low-performing students, we found that low-performing students
tend to improve their calibration accuracy, while high-performing students
tend to become increasingly underconfident relative to their performance.
These results demonstrate the concerns that accounting educators may have
for both low performers and high performers. Low performers' lack the
self-awareness of their technical skills to accurately calibrate their own
performance, and this may cause them to continue to underperform. High
performers fail to recognize their strong technical skills and may become
overly critical of their own performance.
Third, in exploring the role of mindset regarding
an individual's approach to learning and response to failure, we predicted
that students with a growth mindset (i.e., those who were motivated by
learning, resilient, and focused on learning from feedback) would
demonstrate higher exam performance, improvement in performance, lower
calibration error, and improvement in their calibration. We find modest
evidence supporting these predictions. Mindset was significantly associated
with performance on only one of three exams, and improvement from Exam 1 to
Exam 2. Mindset was not associated with level of calibration error, but was
associated with improvement in calibration from Exam 1 to Exam 2 and from
Exam 1 to Exam 3. We expected growth mindset to be more consistently
associated with the level of, and improvements in, calibration error;
however, we believe that the short, one-semester timeline may make it more
difficult to capture the impact of mindset. Furthermore, we present evidence
that the final exam (Exam 3) may reflect unique resource allocation
decisions on the part of students that may affect both the performance and
calibration error results. Although inconsistent, the results provide some
modest evidence that encouraging a growth mindset may offer benefits to
students in improving their performance and calibration accuracy.
Mindset theory originated as a way to explain why
students have differing goals and reactions to failure (Dweck and Leggett
1988), but as the research in this area has continued, the significance and
implications of mindset have grown. For instance, more recent work implies
that mindsets—although malleable experimentally—represent a fundamental view
of the world, quoting Piaget to the effect that worldviews of children “can
be as important to their functioning as the logical reasoning he studied for
much of his career,” (Molden and Dweck 2006, 200). Molden and Dweck (2006)
survey research showing that mindset plays a role in many behaviors,
including goal setting, attributions, strategies, grades, perceptions of
others, responses to stereotypes, self-esteem, and self-regulatory
strategies.
In our setting, senior-level and graduate
accounting students who have met stringent admissions criteria and who are
very grade-conscious may hold strong achievement goals. The connection
between mindset and performance may be altered in the presence of strongly
held achievement goals (grade-based as opposed to learning-based). Dweck and
other researchers (e.g., Dweck and Leggett 1988; Shunk 1995) observe that
the positive effect of mindset on achievement can be overridden by the
effect of goals. Shunk (1995, 317) discusses the interaction of goals and
mindset, and notes that sometimes “success-oriented persons who perform
poorly on one occasion will work harder and improve their performance on
another.” The integration of the goals literature may, therefore, be helpful
in future exploration of the role of mindset in the accounting education
setting and extending the results presented in this study. Furthermore,
because research suggests that business students generally approach studying
in a more superficial way than non-business students (Arum and Roska 2011),
future research studies could be conducted across academic disciplines,
preferably including students in and outside the college of business to make
comparisons among groups.
In sum, our study presents evidence of an inverse
relationship between performance and calibration error in an accounting
education setting, and offers an initial step in understanding the role
mindset plays in metacognitive self-awareness of accounting students.
Although this research represents an early effort to introduce mindset
concepts within the accounting education literature, our results and the
underlying research suggest that faculty could introduce the concept of
mindset to students, which could be particularly useful for those students
with fixed mindsets. Introducing the concept of a growth mindset leads
naturally into a discussion of the effort that is necessary for deep
learning, and could motivate a discussion with student involvement about the
students' study approaches and preparation for tests. Finally, recent
research (Anseel et al. 2009) suggests that the beneficial effects of
faculty feedback to students can be amplified if students are appropriately
guided to reflect on their performance. Mindset, in conjunction with
feedback, offers promise as a way to encourage learning and self-awareness.
Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous versus synchronous learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
"Leave for Prof Accused of In-Class Pitch for Obama," Inside Higher
Ed, September 18, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/09/18/leave-prof-accused-class-pitch-obama
A faculty member at Brevard Community College has
requested and been granted an unpaid leave after she was alleged to have
used class time to urge students to vote for President Obama and handed out
campaign material on behalf of the Obama campaign and other Democratic
candidates for office,
Florida Today reported. Sharon Sweet, the
faculty member, did not respond to requests for comment. College officials
said that a parent of a student complained reported the allegations, setting
off an investigation. "We are a nonpartisan, public institution,” a
spokesman for the college said. "It is very important that all of our
faculty and staff act in that manner at work and while they’re on campus."
Jensen Question
This is a blatant violation of AAUP rules discussed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
I wonder if she would've been fired for entertaining the class with the
following video?
You may remember Steve Bridges as the guy who imitated George Bush so well on
the Jay Leno Show. He has now started imitating Obama and REALLY does it really
well ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?feature=player_embedded&v=WH_a0cGVRmI
Bob Jensen's threads on liberal bias in the media and in academe ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
Epistemologists present several challenges to Popper's arguments
"Separating the Pseudo From Science," by Michael D. Gordon, Chronicle
of Higher Education, September 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Separating-the-Pseudo-From/134412/
Bob Jensen's threads on how accountics scientists shield their findings from
validation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Google's New Course
Builder System
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Bob Jensen's threads for education technology in general are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Google Releases “Course Builder,” an Open Source Platform for Building Your
Own Big Online Courses ---
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/google-launches-open-course-builder/
University of Capetown's Centre for Education Technology ---
http://www.cet.uct.ac
Online Instructional Resources: Faculty Development Programs at Michigan
State University ---
http://fod.msu.edu/OIR/index.asp
4Teachers: Teach with Technology ---
http://www.4teachers.org/
Technology Student Association ---
http://www.tsaweb.org/
New Learning Institute ---
http://newlearninginstitute.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on Education Technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
eLearn Magazine ---
http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=best_practices&article=57-1#
Skylight: eTLC Resource Project [Teaching Improvement] ---
http://www.skylight.science.ubc.ca/aboutetlc
First Monday ---
http://firstmonday.org/
Educause ---
http://www.educause.edu/
The University of Iowa: Center for Teaching ---
http://centeach.uiowa.edu/
Educational Comics Collection ---
http://contentdm.unl.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/edcomics
Search Tricks ---
http://prezi.com/mohshuoe-qcf/google-search-tricks/
Converge Magazine: Technology in Education ---
http://www.convergemag.com/
Bowling Green State University: Resources from the Center for Teaching and
Learning ---
http://www.bgsu.edu/ctl/page10679.html
Boston University Libraries: Research Guide ---
http://www.bu.edu/library/guides/index.html
Ethics Education Library (and tutorials) ---
http://ethics.iit.edu/eelibrary/
TED Video
Harvard Thinks Big 2012: 8 All-Star Professors. 8 Big Ideas ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/harvard_thinks_big_2012.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
"10 Faculty Perspectives on What Works in Lecture Capture,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/10-Faculty-Perspectives-on/129268/
A Must Read
Educause: Emerging Trends in Education Technology ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/09/qt#250713
Educause and the New Media Consortium have released
the
2011 Horizon Report, an annual study of emerging
issues in technology in higher education. The issues that are seen as likely
to have great impact:
- Over the next year: e-books and mobile
devices.
- From two to three years out: augmented reality
and game-based learning.
- From four to five years out: gesture-based
computing and learning analytics.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on listservs, blogs, Twitter, and social networks are
at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Video Helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm
Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/electronicliterature.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing of knowledge ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
"Java Is No Longer Needed. Pull The Plug-In," by Antone Gonsalves,
ReadWriteWeb, September 5, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2012/09/java-is-no-longer-needed-pull-the-plug-in.php
For nearly everyone, it’s time to dump Java. Once
promising, it has outlived its usefulness in the browser, and has become a
nightmare that delights cyber-criminals at the expense of computer users.
Java Today
Sun Microsystems released Java in 1995
as a technology for building applications that could run on any platform,
including Windows, Macintosh and Linux. In its heyday, major browsers
embraced Java for running applets within pages. All anyone needed was a
browser plug-in for executing programs.
Today, that plug-in has become a top
security risk, along with Adobe Flash. Partly to blame for the problem is
Oracle, which acquired Sun and its invention in 2009. The database vendor
has heightened the risk by failing to launch timely patches.
The latest security meltdown is a case
in point. Despite
being warned in April of critical vulnerabilities,
Oracle did not get around to releasing an emergency patch until last week,
after reports that cyber-criminals were exploiting the flaws. Security
Explorations, the Polish firm that first reported the vulnerabilities to
Oracle,
later said the patch contained a flaw that could
be used to circumvent the fix.
The Latest Threats
In the meantime, criminals are having a
field day. Atif Mushtaq, security researcher at FireEye, says the number of
computers infected with malware exploiting the flaws is growing. As of
Tuesday, up to a quarter-million computers had been infected. Hackers are at
an advantage because computers users are laggards when it comes to applying
Java patches. Up to 60 percent of Java installations are never updated to
the latest version, according to
security vendor Rapid7.
Over the just-past Labor Day weekend,
the SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center and Websense reported finding
separate phishing campaigns trying to lure people to malicious sites capable
of exploiting the vulnerabilities.
SANS
discovered link-carrying emails that copied a
recent Microsoft message about service agreement changes.
Websense found emails
disguised as order verification messages from Amazon.
Security experts rate the latest flaws
as critical, because hackers can use them to commandeer a computer and take
whatever data they want. Risking that kind of damage for a technology with
little purpose makes no sense.
What Security Experts Advise
Security experts are hard pressed to say
what Java does for most people. While some online games and business
applications need a Java plug-in to run, nearly all modern sites, including
Facebook and Twitter, use JavaScript, XML and HTML 5, which run natively in
the browser. Therefore, people could happily surf the Web for years without
ever running Java.
Those who are using a Java application,
should run it in a dedicated browser that’s used for nothing else, Patrik
Runald, director of security research at Websense, says. Another browser
should be used for daily Web surfing. “I’ve run a browser with Java disabled
for years,” he said.
Supporters once believed that Java would
play a significant role in running Web applications. That never happened.
Instead, browsers became the operating system for the Web. “(Java) never
took off the way it was anticipated,” Runald said.
So the verdict is clear. Disable Java
plug-ins in all browsers, whether Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer.
Java’s glory days are over and it’s time to pull the plug.
September 13, 2012 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
Bob,
It is true that the use of java applets never did
take-off as expected. Many started developing swing applications and
server-side scripting instead, to avoid incompatibility problems with
applets. Development of languages such as PHP also was a factor. Another
factor was the reluctance of companies to relegate any aspect of computing
to the browser, coupled with the decreases in hardware costs.
Java remains the language of choice to date,
Gonsalves notwithstanding. It is a very safe language, safer than all others
I know and have programmed in. It is nowadays the first language that most
students study. It is also the language of choice in teaching and in
developing industrial applications.
I have taught AIS courses using prolog, C, C++, as
well as Java. Java was the language that gave me and the students least
headaches. I also have worked with research labs in industry, and Java is
the language of choice, and the only language that comes even close is C++.
Mr Gonsalves is mixing up java as a language and
java applets as a browser plug-in.
Regards,
Jagdish
Bob Jensen's threads on computer and networking security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
"Do You Have to Be Entertaining to Be Popular?" by Joe Hoyle,
Teaching Blog, September 11, 2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/09/do-you-have-to-be-entertaining-to-be.html
Jensen Comment
I think this is the wrong question. The question might instead read:
"Do you have to be entertaining to be an effective teacher?"
The answer, to both questions, in my opinion is "No." There are too many
alternative ways to be popular and an effective teacher. Entertaining is neither
a necessary nor a sufficient condition to popularity and effective teaching.
For a teacher, we must then as why being entertaining my be an advantage.
Probably the main advantage of entertainment is that it both draws attention and
may and may be a memory aid.
For example, a good cartoon may be more memorable than several pages of text.
A Jeopardy-style learning game in an accounting course may get the juices
flowing more than any lecture.
Bob Jensen's threads hundreds of ideas in "edutainment" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
The Pentagon ordered 1,500 Turkeys for Thanksgiving
The expensive luxury and heavy Chevy Volt is a turkey and less environmentally
friendly than hybrid cars of competitors (because of low gas mileage and
miniscule electric power range). It appears that it's only customer is, get
this, the Pentagon that just ordered 1,500 Volts.
The (Liberal, Obama-Loving) Washington Post Editorial Board
admits that the Chevy Volt is on the road to nowhere fast
"GM’s vaunted Volt is on the road to nowhere fast," The Washington
Post, September 12, 2012 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gms-volt-is-on-the-road-to-nowhere/2012/09/12/29cd8216-fd0d-11e1-a31e-804fccb658f9_story.html
AS A CANDIDATE for president in 2008, Barack Obama
set a goal of getting 1 million all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on
the road by 2015. In February 2011, the Obama administration’s Energy
Department issued an analysis purporting to show that, with the help of
subsidies and tax credits, “the goal is achievable.” This was a paltry claim
in the first place, since 1 million cars amount to less than 1 percent of
the total U.S. fleet. Yet it is increasingly clear that, despite the
commitment of many millions of taxpayer dollars, the United States will not
hit Mr. Obama’s target by 2015. A recent CBS News analysis suggested that
we’ll be lucky to get a third of the way there.
The Energy Department study assumed that General
Motors would produce 120,000 plug-in hybrid Volts in 2012. GM never came
close to that and recently suspended Volt production at its Hamtramck,
Mich., plant, scene of a presidential photo-op. So far, GM has sold a little
more than 21,000 Volts, even with the help of a $7,500 tax credit, recent
dealer discounting and U.S. government purchases. When you factor in the
$1.2 billion cost of developing the Volt, GM loses tens of thousands of
dollars on each model.
Some such losses are normal in the early phases of
a product’s life cycle. Perhaps the knowledge and technological advances GM
has reaped from developing the Volt will help the company over the long
term. But this is cold comfort for the taxpayers who still own more than a
quarter of the firm.
The Energy Department predicted that Nissan,
recipient of a $1.5 billion government-guaranteed loan, would build 25,000
of its all-electric Leaf this year; that car has sold only 14,000 units in
the United States.
As these companies flail, they are taking the
much-ballyhooed U.S. advanced-battery industry down with them. A Chinese
company had to buy out distressed A123, to which the Energy Department has
committed $263 million in production aid and research money. Ener1, which
ran through $55 million of a $118 million federal grant before going
bankrupt, sold out to a Russian tycoon.
No matter how you slice it, the American taxpayer
has gotten precious little for the administration’s investment in
battery-powered vehicles, in terms of permanent jobs or lower carbon dioxide
emissions. There is no market, or not much of one, for vehicles that are
less convenient and cost thousands of dollars more than similar-sized
gas-powered alternatives — but do not save enough fuel to compensate. The
basic theory of the Obama push for electric vehicles — if you build them,
customers will come — was a myth. And an expensive one, at that.
Chevy Volt ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevy_Volt#Controversies_and_criticism
Production cost and sales price
In 2009, the Presidential Task Force on the Auto
Industry said that "GM is at least one generation behind Toyota on advanced,
“green” powertrain development. In an attempt to leapfrog Toyota, GM has
devoted significant resources to the Chevy Volt." and that "while the Chevy
Volt holds promise, it is currently projected to be much more expensive than
its gasoline-fueled peers and will likely need substantial reductions in
manufacturing cost in order to become commercially viable." A 2009 Carnegie
Mellon University study found that a PHEV-40 will be less cost effective
than a HEV or a PHEV-7 in all of the scenarios considered, due to the cost
and weight of the battery Jon Lauckner, a Vice President at General Motors,
responded that the study did not consider the inconvenience of a 7 miles (11
km) electric range and that the study's cost estimate of US$1,000 per kWh
for the Volt's battery pack was "many hundreds of dollars per kilowatt hour
higher" than what it costs to make today." President Barack Obama behind the
wheel of a new Chevy Volt during his tour of the General Motors Auto Plant
in Hamtramck, Michigan
In early 2010, it was reported that General Motors
would lose money on the Volt for at least the first couple of generations,
but it hoped the car would create a green image that could rival the Prius.
After the Volt's sales price was announced in July
2010, there was concern expressed of the launch price of the Volt and its
affordability and resulting popularity, especially when the federal
subsidies of US$2.4 billion were taken into account in the development of
the car.
General Motors CEO Edward Whitacre Jr. rejected as
"ridiculous" criticism that the Volt's price is too expensive. He said that
"I think it's a very fair price. It's the only car that will go coast to
coast on electricity without plugging it in, and nobody else can come
close." Despite the federal government being the major GM shareholder due to
the 2009 government-led bankruptcy of the automaker, during a press briefing
at the White House a Treasury official clarified that the federal government
did not have any input on the pricing of the 2011 Chevrolet Volt.
There have also been complaints regarding price
markups due to the initial limited availability in 2010 of between US$5,000
to US$12,000 above the recommended price,[232] and at least in one case a
US$20,000 mark up in California.[233] Even though the carmaker cannot
dictate vehicle pricing to its dealers, GM said that it had requested its
dealers to keep prices in line with the company’s suggested retail price.
In May 2011 the National Legal and Policy Center
announced that some Chevrolet dealers were selling Volts to other dealers
and claiming the US$7,500 federal tax credit for themselves. Then the
dealers who bought the Volts sell them as used cars with low mileage to
private buyers, who no longer qualify for the credit. General Motors
acknowledged that 10 dealer-to-dealer Volt sales had taken place among
Chevrolet dealers, but the carmaker said they do not encourage such
practice.
In September 2012, Reuters published an
opinion/editorial article where it claimed that General Motors, nearly two
years after the introduction of the car, was losing $49,000 on each Volt it
built. The article concludes that the Volt is "over-engineered and
over-priced" and that its technological complexity has put off many
prospective buyers, due to fears the car may be unreliable. GM executives
replied that Reuters' estimates were grossly wrong as they allocated the
production costs only on the number of Volts sold instead of spreading the
production costs in the future, over the entire lifetime of the model. GM
explained that the investments will pay off once the innovative technologies
of the Volt will be applied across multiple current and future products
Continued in article
Is the Chevy Volt losing $49,000 on each model built?
Not any longer thanks to the Pentagon.
"Pentagon to Buy 1,500 Chevy Volts," by Brian Koenig, The New
American, September 12, 2012 ---
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/12819-pentagon-plans-to-buy-1500-chevy-volts
September 13, 2012 reply from Cheryl Dunn
Actually, I was told by our associate vice provost
that our engineering department bought a Volt that its staff drive back and
forth between Grand Rapids and Traverse City and they are getting 57 miles
per gallon. That does not seem like "low" gas mileage to me, and it would be
much higher if they weren't driving such long distances (Grand Rapids to
Traverse City is approximately 140 miles). I think the Volt may be getting a
bad rap, and the Pentagon may be making a good purchase.
Cheryl
September 13, 2012 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Cheryl,
I'm don't agree that the Pentagon is getting such a good deal. It may take
several wars to hit the payback point.
The NYT reported that the Chevy Volt "would need to reach
US$12.50 a gallon for the Volt to
break even, while the
Nissan Leaf would be competitive with a similar gasoline-powered
compact car at US$8.53 a
gallon."
Chevy Volt ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevy_Volt
According to
Edmunds.com, the price premium paid for the Volt, after discounting
the US$7,500
U.S. federal tax credit, takes a long time for consumers to recover
in fuel savings, often longer than the normal ownership time period.
Edmunds compared the Volt (priced at
US$31,712) with the same-size gasoline-powered
Chevrolet Cruze (priced at
US$19,656) and found that the payback period for the plug-in
hybrid is 15 years for gasoline prices at
US$3 per gallon, 12 years at
US$4 per gallon, and drops to 9
years with gasoline prices at US$5
per gallon. At February 2012 prices, the break even period is 14 years.
These estimates assume an average of 15,000 miles (24,000 km) annual
driving and vehicle prices correspond to Edmunds.com's true market value
estimates.[90]
In a similar comparison carried out by
TrueCar in April 2012 for
The New York Times, the analysis found that the payback period for
the Volt takes 26.6 years versus a Chevrolet Cruze Eco, assuming it was
regularly driven farther than its battery-only range allows, and with
gasoline priced at US$3.85 per
gallon. The analysis assumes an average of 15,000 miles (24,000 km)
driven a year, a fuel economy of 34.3 mpg-US
(6.86 L/100 km; 41.2 mpg-imp)
for the Cruze Eco, priced at US$19,925,
and a Volt price of US$31,767,
after discounting the US$7,500
federal tax. TrueCar also found that with gasoline priced at
US$5 per gallon, the payback
time could drop to about 8 years if the Volt were to be operated
exclusively on battery power. The newspaper also reported that according
to the March 2012 Lundberg Survey, gasoline prices would need to reach
US$12.50 a gallon for the Volt
to break even, while the
Nissan Leaf would be competitive with a similar gasoline-powered
compact car at US$8.53 a
gallon
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
September 15, 2012 message from Jim Martin
I have developed a summary of the WEF's Global Competitiveness Index (GCI)
for 2011 and 2012. The GCI is Part 1 of a 500+ page report that provides a
considerable amount of information for self reflection as well as political
debate and argument.
The Global Competitiveness Index measures the microeconomic and
macroeconomic foundations of national competitiveness defined as the set of
institutions, policies, and factors that determine the level of productivity
of a country. The U.S. is ranked as follows in the overall index: 2008, 1,
2009, 2, 2010, 4, 2011, 5, 2012, 7.
According to the WEG there are 12 pillars of competitiveness as follows:
Institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health and primary
education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labor
market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness,
market size, business sophistication, and technological innovation.
Although the pillars are aggregated into a single index, values and ranks
are reported for the 12 pillars separately to indicate the areas in which
countries need to improve. Each pillar includes a number of indicators. For
example, there are 21 indicators for the first pillar, i.e., institutions.
An indicator value is calculated for each country and used to rank the
countries from 1 to 144 in 2012. Some examples from the 2012 report: the
U.S. ranks 54th in terms of public trust of politicians, 76th in terms of
wasteful government spending, 87th in terms of organized crime, and 37th in
strength of auditing and reporting standards. The U.S. is ranked 26th in
quality of overall infrastructure, 140th in terms of government budget
balance, 34th in life expectancy, 58th in primary education enrollment, 47th
for secondary education enrollment, 142nd for imports as a percentage of
GDP, 42nd in cooperation in labor-employer relations, and 80th in terms of
soundness of banks.
For values and ranks for all of the pillars and indicators see my summary at
http://maaw.info/WorldCompetitivenessReports.htm
Free Book Online ---
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13396&page=1
Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital
to Our Nation's Prosperity and Security ---
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13396
Summary from the Scout Report on September 7, 2012
What is the state of America's universities? That
is a vast question, and it was posed to the National Academies by the U.S.
Congress. Specifically, Congress asked the National Academies to assess the
competitive position of America's research universities over the coming
decades. The results of the Academies' findings are in this 227-page report
issued in 2012. Visitors to the site can download the entire report,
although those looking for something a bit more brief may wish to download
the 24-page executive summary. The summary offers some terse advice in the
"Ten Strategic Actions" area, including the suggestion that states may wish
to provide greater autonomy for public research universities so that these
institutions may "leverage local and regional strengths to compete
strategically and respond with agility to new opportunities." Some of the
other suggestions include improving university productivity and reducing
regulatory burdens. [KMG]
To find more high-quality online resources in math
and science, visit Scout's sister site: AMSER, the Applied Math and Science
Educational Repository at
http://amser.org
Rebooting the Academy (not a free book)
Chronicle of Higher Education
2012
https://www.chronicle-store.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ID=79485&WG=350&cid=rebootWC
Rebooting the Academy: 12 Tech Innovators Who Are
Transforming Campuses, tells the stories of a dozen key figures who are
changing research, teaching, and the management of colleges in this time of
technological change. The e-book features essays by each of the 12
innovators, explaining their visions in their own words and providing more
details on their projects, plus The Chronicle’s profiles of them.
Among the highlights: Salman Khan, founder of Khan
Academy, riffs on how video lectures can improve teaching; Dan Cohen, of
George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, asks whether
Google is good for the study of history; and Jim Groom, an
instructional-technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington,
argues against the very premise of the collection, noting that the best
innovations come from groups, not individual leaders.
You will receive a confirmation email immediately
after your Digital Edition order is placed allowing you to download the
e-book to any of your preferred reading devices (includes formats for the
Kindle, Nook, and iPad).
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Khan was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and moved to the
United States when he was 16 to study at the University of Illinois at
Urbana–Champaign. He said he spent his first night in a $2/night room at the
Champaign YMCA and that his first job in the United States was washing
dishes for $1.20 an hour. He joined the Beta Theta Pi fraternity at the
school. He graduated from the UIUC School of Mechanical and Industrial
Engineering with a BSc in 1971.
Shahid Khan: The New Face Of The NFL And The American Dream
"Face of the American Dream: Immigrant-Turned-Billionaire:
Shahid Khan's
Innovative Car Design Gives Hope to the Rust Belt
Now He's Keen to Cure Football's Biggest Headache."
Forbes, September 24, 2012, pp. 122-128 ---
http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2012/09/05/shahid-khan-the-new-face-of-the-nfl-and-the-american-dream/
. . .
With flowing black hair and the thick handlebar
mustache of a man used to leaving a lasting impression, the 62-year-old
Khan, driving a shiny white Grand Cherokee, is a swashbuckling contrast to
the desolation around him. While Danville and the rest of the Rust Belt were
deteriorating over the last 40 years, Khan was moving in exactly the
opposite direction. The sole owner and CEO of Flex-N-Gate, he built one of
the biggest automotive parts suppliers in North America almost from scratch
from his headquarters just 35 miles away and now employs more than 13,000
people at 52 factories around the globe. Sales reached $3.4 billion in 2011.
FORBES estimates his net worth at $2.5 billion, placing him in the top half
of the soon-to-be-released 2012 Forbes 400.
An enormous accomplishment for anyone, it’s more
like a Mars landing for a middle-class kid from Pakistan who flew into
Illinois for an engineering degree at 16 and never left. Khan’s is the kind
of only-in-America success story that has filled boats and planes with
dreamers for the past 150 years, one that gives a face to an ironclad fact:
Skilled, motivated immigrants are proven job creators, not job takers.
Khan’s American Dream continued this January, when
he purchased the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars for $770 million. In so doing,
he became the first ethnic-minority owner in a league synonymous with
cheerleaders and tailgate parties, Thanksgiving grudge matches and that most
secular of U.S. holidays, Super Bowl Sunday. Buying into the NFL, he says,
was a statement about the opportunity America offers.
It’s also a statement about his can-do
entrepreneurialism. The Jags are to football what Rust Belt manufacturing
has been to U.S. industry: the financially challenged, least popular team in
a league otherwise envied around the world. A mere 0.4% of NFL fans in a
recent ESPN poll cited the Jaguars as their favorite franchise, ranking them
dead last out of 32. (Recent headline in The Onion : “New Commercial Posits
Existence of Jaguars Fans.”)
They have the fourth-smallest market in the league,
with just 1.4 million people in the Jacksonville metro area. They haven’t
had a winning season since 2007, nor won their division since 1999, nor been
to the Super Bowl, ever. And they play in a cavernous stadium, 76,877-seat
EverBank Field, which Mark Lamping, the Jags’ new team president, describes
as “a church built for Easter Sunday,” which in this college-football-crazed
region means the annual game between the University of Florida and the
University of Georgia. Filling a stadium that size every other Sunday might
be simple in New York or Dallas, but it’s proved nearly impossible in
northern Florida. In 2005 the Jaguars surrendered, covering nearly 10,000
upper-deck seats with tarps, but they still had trouble selling out,
resulting in local television blackouts, which suppressed fan interest even
more.
But now they have Shahid Khan, who knows how to
find the bright side in a dismal situation—and says he has a plan.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One of the wonderful thing about America is that the American Dream is still
possible from those that accumulate over a million dollars to those that
accumulate over a billion dollars. The key is motivation and willingness to take
risk on business ventures coupled with a government and legal system that
enforces contracts and does not discourage entrepreneurial spirit with an
oppressive tax system and socialism.
Bob Jensen's threads on the American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm
A Science/English Lesson for Caleb Newquist
"Anecdotal, Unverifiable Evidence Confirms That Broker-Dealer Audits Are as
Bad as You Thought They Were," by Caleb Newquist, Going Concern,
September 14, 2012 ---
http://goingconcern.com/post/anecdotal-unverifiable-evidence-confirms-broker-dealer-audits-are-bad-you-thought-they-were
,
Jensen Comment
Anecdotal, unverifiable evidence never confirms or proves anything. All it takes
is a simple wording change to "anecdotal, unverifiable evidence indicates a
possibility that . . . "
However, in the above illustration with respect to broker dealer audits we
cannot even "suggest that" for all broker-dealer audits.
A better title might read:
"Anecdotal, Unverifiable Evidence Indicates a Possibility That One
Broker-Dealer Audit Might Be as Bad as You Thought It Was,"
And even this headline is questionable since the incompetent auditor that
sent Caleb the message was only one auditor in a team of auditors where his
colleagues may have been much more competent that he was at auditing broker
dealers.
Anecdotal evidence at its best refutes absolutes. For example, suppose a CPA
review course made a claim that everybody who passes this course will also pass
the CPA exam. This absolute statement is open to anecdotal refutation of having
just one graduate of the course fail the CPA examination. That would be
confirming/refuting anecdotal evidence.
However, the criterion "as bad as you thought they were" is not an absolute
statement. Anecdotal evidence cannot confirm this statement.
By the way, absolutes can impossible to refute. For example, if nobody ever
passes the CPA review course mentioned above, this absolute becomes impossible
to refute.
Question
If the job market does not improve, how long will it take for the Fed to own all
the real estate mortgages in the United States?
"Fed to Purchase $40 Billion Per Month in Bonds Until Job Market Improves,"
Time Magazine, September 12, 2012 ---
http://business.time.com/2012/09/13/fed-to-purchase-40-billion-per-month-in-bonds-until-job-market-improves/
The Federal Reserve says it will spend $40 billion
a month to buy mortgage-backed securities for long as necessary to stimulate
the still-weak economy and reduce high unemployment.
It also extended a plan to keep short-term interest
rates at record lows through mid-2015. And it said it’s ready to take other
steps to boost the economy even after it strengthens.
The Fed announced the series of bold steps after
its two-day policy meeting ended Thursday. Its actions pointed to how
sluggish the economy remains more than three years after the Great Recession
ended. “We’re not sure what the economic effects of this program will be –
it should help growth and employment on the margin,” Dan Greenhaus, chief
global strategist at BTIG LLC, said in a research note.
(VIDEO:
How the Federal Reserve Works)
Stocks rose after the announcement. The Dow Jones
industrial average was up 15 points for the day just before 12:30 p.m. It
surged by 105 points within minutes of the announcement, then gave up some
gains to be just 35 points higher.
The dollar dropped against major currencies, and
the price of gold shot up about $16 an ounce, roughly 1 percent, to $1,750.
“If the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the
committee will continue its purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities,
undertake additional asset purchases and employ its other policy tools as
appropriate until such improvement is achieved in a context of price
stability,” the Fed said in a statement released after the meeting.
The statement was approved on an 11-1 vote. The
lone dissenter was Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker, who worries about
igniting inflation.
The bond purchases are intended to lower long-term
interest rates to spur borrowing and spending. The Fed has previously bought
$2 trillion in Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities since the 2008
financial crisis.
(MORE:
U.S. Federal Reserve Earned $77 Billion Profit in 2011)
Skeptics caution that further bond buying might
provide little benefit. Rates are already near record lows. Critics also
warn that more bond purchases raise the risk of higher inflation later.
With less than eight weeks left until Election Day,
the economy remains the top issue on most voters’ minds. Many Republicans
have been critical of the Fed’s continued efforts to drive interest rates
lower, saying they fear it could ignite inflation.
The Fed is under pressure to act because the U.S.
economy is still growing too slowly to reduce high unemployment. The
unemployment rate has topped 8 percent every month since the Great Recession
officially ended more than three years ago.
Continued in article
"Bernanke Unbounded: The Fed enters a brave new world of unlimited
monetary easing," The Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444709004577649831698298106.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
So much for fears that the Federal Reserve might
disappoint Wall Street. Chairman Ben Bernanke and his music men at the Fed's
Open Market Committee put on their party hats Thursday and unleashed an
unlimited program of monetary easing. The move exceeded even Wall Street's
expectations, but whether it will help the real economy in the long term is
doubtful.
This is the Fed's third round of quantitative
easing (QE3) since the 2008 panic, and the difference this time is that Ben
is unbounded. The Fed said it will keep interest rates at near-zero "at
least through mid-2015," which is six months longer than its previous vow.
The bigger news is that the Fed announced another round of asset
purchases—only this time as far as the eye can see.
The Fed will start buying $40 billion of additional
mortgage assets a month, with a goal of further reducing long-term interest
rates. But if "the labor market does not improve substantially," as the
central bankers put it, the Fed will plunge ahead and buy more assets. And
if that doesn't work, it will buy still more. And if . . .
The Fed statement paid lip service to pursuing its
"dual mandate" of controlling inflation and reducing unemployment, but no
one should be fooled. The Fed has declared that it is going all-in to cut
the jobless rate, no matter what it takes.
"We have to do more, and we'll do enough to make
sure the economy gets on the right track," Mr. Bernanke declared at his
Thursday press conference. That bravado contradicts the Chairman's by now
routine caveat that monetary policy "is no panacea" and can't save the
economy by itself, but no matter. He's going to try.
Will it work? Mr. Bernanke recently offered a
scholarly defense of his extraordinary policy actions since 2008, and
there's no doubt that QE1 was necessary in the heat of the panic. We
supported it at the time. The returns on QE2 in 2010-2011 and the Fed's
other actions look far sketchier, even counterproductive.
QE2 succeeded in lifting stocks for a time, but it
also lifted other asset prices, notably commodities and oil. The Fed's QE2
goal was to conjure what economists call "wealth effects," or a greater
propensity to spend and invest as consumers and businesses see the value of
their stock holdings rise. But the simultaneous increase in commodity prices
lifted food and energy prices, which raised costs for businesses and made
consumers feel poorer.
These "income effects" countered Mr. Bernanke's
wealth effects, and the proof is that growth in the real economy decelerated
in 2011. It decelerated again this year amid Operation Twist. When does the
Fed take some responsibility for policies that fail in their self-professed
goal of spurring growth, rather than blaming everyone else while claiming to
be the only policy hero?
Then there are the real and potential costs of
endless easing, three of which Mr. Bernanke addressed at his Thursday press
conference. He said Americans shouldn't complain about getting a pittance of
interest on their savings because they'll benefit in the long term from a
better economy spurred by low rates. Retirees might retort that they know
what Lord Keynes said about the long term.
Mr. Bernanke was also as slippery as a politician
in claiming that his policies don't promote deficit spending because the Fed
earns interest on the bonds it buys and hands that as revenue to the
Treasury. Yes, but its near-zero policy also disguises the real
interest-payment burden of running serial $1.2 trillion deficits, while
creating a debt-repayment cliff when interest rates inevitably rise. Does he
really think Congress would spend as much if he weren't making the cost of
government borrowing essentially free?
The third cost is the risk of future inflation,
which Mr. Bernanke accurately said hasn't strayed too far above the Fed's 2%
"core inflation" target. That conveniently ignores the run-up in food and
energy prices, which consumers pay even if the Fed discounts them in its own
"core" calculations.
The deeper into exotic monetary easing the Fed
goes, the harder it will also be to unwind in a timely fashion. Mr. Bernanke
says not to worry, he has the tools and the will to pull the trigger before
inflation builds.
That's what central bankers always say. But good
luck picking the right moment, which may be before prices are seen to be
rising but also before the expansion has begun to lift middle-class incomes.
That's one more Bernanke Cliff the economy will eventually face—maybe after
Ben has left the Eccles Building. ***
Given the proximity to the Presidential election,
the Fed move can't be divorced from its political implications. Mr. Bernanke
forswore any partisan motives on Thursday, and we'll give him the benefit of
the personal doubt. But by goosing stock prices, and thus lifting the
short-term economic mood, the Fed has surely provided President Obama an
in-kind re-election contribution.
The irony is that, with this historic and
open-ended easing, Mr. Bernanke is also tacitly admitting how lousy the
Obama-Bernanke economy really is. For all the back-slapping by the Fed and
the White House about how they've saved us from a Great Depression, four
years later the Fed is acknowledging that the recovery is rotten, that job
creation stinks, and that their policies haven't helped the middle class.
But, hey, it's great for Wall Street.
Jensen Comment
What is really sad that in it's effort to deceive the public, our deceptive
government removed increases in food and fuel prices from the definition of
"inflation."
From Duke University: Bernanke's $40 billion per month currency
printing is a failure from the start
"QE3 is a Mistake," Garden of Eden, September 2012 ---
http://gardenofecon.com/2012/09/qe3-is-a-mistake/
The Fed made a mistake today in launching QE3. This
is not just my opinion. It is the overwhelming opinion of America’s CFOs.
In the
Duke University-CFO
Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey released
September 10, 2012, we asked a key question. If your borrowing costs were
reduced by 50bp [an optimist assessment of QE3], would you accelerate or
increase your capital investment? 647 of 667 or 97% of CFOs said "No".
We also asked them why? Here I quote them directly
(I did not correct spelling or grammar). An extraordinary 343 CFOs took the
time to respond. Here is an excerpt of some of their comments.
CFOs: We need increased growth not lower rates
- "Forecasted sales will determine the
justfication for increased investment plans
much more than interest rates, which we feel will continue to be low for
quite
some time."
- "We have been getting good rates so far but I
need revenue to stay consistent to
want to invest in projects – we need the sales"
- "We need to see reliable growth before we are
willing to invest any further."
- "The main driver of investment decisions for
us is consumer demand and/or new
products/new market entries. Borrowing costs in an important factor, but
at
current levels not a determinant one."
- "We are currently in a holding pattern on
capital investments regardless of rates
until the overall economy recovers more."
- "The investment plans are not tied to the
interest rate, but rather to sales and profit"
CFOs: Rates already low so even lower irrelevant
- "Currently financing capital additions in the
3% range. The desired yields on a
project just won’t be effected by couple points of interest cost one way
or the
other."
- "Rates are already so historically low that
there is not room to lower them enough
to make a significant difference."
- "The interest rate will not fluctuate that
great to influence our decisions in this area.
We already have exceptionally low financing available to us. Our
weighted average interest rate on debt is currently the lowest in our
history."
- "We have a stated strategy and borrowing costs
would likely not cause us to
accelerate our plan."
- "Rates already extremely low – further
reductions can only be minimual and will
not drive investment decisions."
- "Borrowing costs are already very low. Overall
economy is weak not warranting
any need for additional investment."
- "Interests rates are low enough for
investments to be made. However, near and
mid term economic conditions do not allow for these decisions to be
executed at
this time."
CFOs: Uncertainty and regulatory climate hurts
investment
- "We need a better economic and regulatory
climate. A decrease in interest rates is
not what we need."
- "Interest rates already at historic lows. It’s
not high interest rates that are holding
us back, but uncertainty about federal policies and loss of financial
wealth of our
customers."
- "Too much economic uncertainty – want to be
able to respond should the fiscal
cliff scenario occur in the US."
- "It is not interest rates but ROI and
uncertainty."
Summary
It is amazing to me that all of the focus is on
interest rates – when these rates are at a 50-year low.
Continued in article
"Bernanke Unbounded: The Fed enters a brave new world of unlimited
monetary easing," The Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444709004577649831698298106.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Jensen Comment
I won't call the QE3 printing of currency a mistake until I get my home
refinanced for less than two percent on a 30-year mortgage.
"Longer-term inflation expectations spike in reaction to the Fed"
Sober Look, September 13, 2012 ---
http://soberlook.com/2012/09/longer-term-inflation-expectations.html
The sad, sad state of governmental accounting that's all done with smoke
and mirrors ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
"Longer-term inflation expectations spike in reaction to the Fed" Sober
Look, September 13, 2012 ---
http://soberlook.com/2012/09/longer-term-inflation-expectations.html
Bob Jensen's threads on the bailout are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm
How we all live on welfare in the United States
"One Nation on Welfare: Living Your Life on the Dole," by Michael
Grunwald, Time Magazine, September 17, pp. 32-37 ---
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2123809,00.html
The sun is shining on Miami Beach, and I wake up in
subsidized housing. I throw on a T-shirt made of subsidized cotton, brush my
teeth with subsidized water and eat cereal made of subsidized grain. Soon
the chaos begins, two hours of pillow forts, dance parties and other
craziness with two hyper kids and two hyper Boston terriers, until our
subsidized nanny arrives to watch our 2-year-old. My wife Cristina then
drives to her subsidized job while listening to the subsidized news on
public radio. I bike our 4-year-old to school on public roads, play tennis
on a public court...
It's just another manic Monday, brought to us by
the deep pockets of Big Government. The sunshine is a natural perk, and
while our kids are tax-deductible, the fun we have with them is not. The
dogs are on our dime too. Otherwise, taxpayers help support just about every
aspect of our lives.
Of course, we're taxpayers too, and we don't
exactly fit the stereotype of entitled welfare queens. Cristina is an
attorney and until recently was a small-business owner. I'm a journalist, an
economic red flag these days, but I work for the company behind the Harry
Potter and Batman movies, so at press time I was still getting paid. My
family's subsidies are not the handouts to the poor that help fuel America's
political culture wars but the kind of government goodies that make the
comfortable even more comfortable. Our federally subsidized housing, for
example, is a two-story Art Deco home in the overpriced heart of South
Beach. But our mortgage interest is a personal deduction, my home office is
a business deduction, and federal subsidies keep our flood insurance cheap.
Even our property taxes are deductible. So thanks for your help.
The 2012 election is shaping up as a debate over
Big Government, but it is only loosely tethered to the reality of Big
Government. The vast majority of federal spending goes to defense, health
care and Social Security plus interest payments on the debt we've run up
paying for defense, health care and Social Security. Nondefense
discretionary spending--Washingtonese for "everything else," from the FBI to
the TSA to the center for grape genetics--amounts to only 12% of the budget.
Still, it's a big government. The U.S. did not
spend even $1 billion in 1912; it will spend $3.8 trillion in 2012 on
everything from Missing Alzheimer's Disease Patient Assistance ($593,842) to
Snow Survey and Water Supply Forecasting ($9,409,400), from mortgage
insurance for manufactured homes ($64,724,187) to ironworker training on
Indian reservations. There will be an additional $1.3 trillion in tax
expenditures, federal benefits (like the deductions for my 401(k) and my
nanny's salary) that are basically identical to those normal spending
programs except that they happen to be provided through the tax code.
The rise of the Tea Party and the weakness of the
Obama economy have fueled a Republican narrative about Big Government as a
threat to liberty, redistributing wealth from honorable Americans to
undeserving moochers, from taxpaying "makers" to freeloading "takers." In
fact, most Americans are makers and takers--proud of our making, blind to
our taking. Republicans often point out that only half the country pays
income taxes, but just about all Americans pay taxes: payroll taxes, state
and local taxes, gas taxes and much more. The problem is that we pay in $2.5
trillion and pay out $3.8 trillion. And those trillions of dollars don't all
go to undeserving moochers, except insofar as we're all undeserving
moochers.
7 a.m.: Subsidized food, water, electricity and
clothing
The right routinely portrays government as a giant
mess of Solyndra failures, lavish agency conferences in Vegas and pork for
society's leeches. But my taxpayer-supported morning didn't feel like
mooching at the time.
For example, my family pays for that water I use to
brush my teeth, about $100 a month. But that's a small fraction of the true
cost of delivering clean water to our home and treating the sewage that
leaves our home. And it certainly doesn't reflect the $15 billion federal
project to protect and restore the ravaged Everglades, which sit on top of
the aquifers that provide our drinking water. Most Americans think of the
water that comes out of our faucets as an entitlement, not a handout, but
it's a government service, and it's often subsidized.
Similarly, my family pays more than $200 a month
for the electricity that powers our toaster at breakfast. But that number
would be much higher if the feds didn't subsidize the construction,
liability insurance and just about every other cost associated with my
utility's nuclear power plants while also providing generous tax advantages
("depletion allowances," "intangible drilling costs" and so forth) for
natural gas and other fossil fuels. The $487 we're paying this year for
federal flood insurance is also outrageously low, considering that our
low-lying street floods all the time, that a major hurricane could wipe out
Miami Beach and that the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America
estimates that premiums in high-risk areas would be three times as high
without government aid.
Some federal largesse--tax breaks for NASCAR
racetracks ($40 million) and subsidies for rum distilleries ($172 million)
and rural airports ($200 million)--is just silly. There's no reason my poker
buddies should be able to deduct the gambling losses I inflict on them once
a month. (Just kidding, guys!)
The silliest handouts that brighten my morning are
the boondoggles that funnel billions to America's cotton and grain farmers
and maybe knock a few cents off the price of my T-shirts and my kids'
breakfast waffles. Uncle Sam sends at least $15 billion every year to
farmers and agribusinesses in the form of grants, loans, crop insurance and
other goodies. The farm lobby is so omnipotent in Washington that when the
World Trade Organization ruled that U.S. handouts give our cotton farmers an
unfair advantage over Brazil, the U.S. cut a deal to shovel $147 million a
year to Brazilian cotton farmers rather than kick our own farmers off the
dole. Our food and clothing may seem cheap, but, oh, we pay for them.
Reasonable people can disagree about most
government aid. I enjoy NPR, even though I don't really see why it needs
about $3 million a year of our tax dollars to produce good journalism;
public-radio stations receive only about 15% of their revenue from the
government anyway. On the other hand, I think my $500 Florida tax rebate for
the energy-efficient water heater that warms my shower made great sense,
promoting economic, environmental and national security by reducing
fossil-fuel use.
Unless you're a hardcore libertarian, it probably
doesn't bother you that the city of Miami Beach spends $500 million a year
building roads, fixing potholes, picking up trash, putting out fires and
creating bike lanes that make my cycling somewhat less life-threatening. The
city also owns my local tennis courts, which are receiving a somewhat
controversial $5 million upgrade, as well as the playground my 2-year-old
visits frequently and the track where Cristina and I work out much less
frequently. My mayor, Matti Herrera Bower, told me tennis players are the
city's most aggressive and obnoxious special interest. We're the farmers of
Miami Beach.
When I spoke to Bower, a former dental assistant
and PTA mom who got into politics after years of community activism, the FBI
had just busted a bunch of city code inspectors for shaking down a nightclub
owner, and the city manager had just quit. MIAMI BEACH SINKING IN A VAST
SWAMP OF DISHONESTY, a Miami Herald column declared. Citizens notice the bad
news, Bower said with a sigh, but they don't appreciate that government
keeps them safe and cleans their streets. They're not too interested in
learning more, either; Bower holds regular Mayor on the Move forums to bring
City Hall to Miami Beach's neighborhoods, but only two residents showed up
to the last one. "There's this perception that government is all dirty, and
perception is 99% of what matters," Bower says. "People are busy living
their lives. They don't understand where their taxes go and what they get."
One thing my family gets from government is
Cristina's paycheck from an advocacy group called Americans for Immigrant
Justice, which is nearly 30% funded by the feds. Cristina is paid less than
she would make at a private law firm, though more than most Americans, to
represent undocumented minors in detention centers--in other words, kids in
jail, some as young as 6, many victims of gang rape, gang terror or horrific
family abuse. Cristina helps save the time of judges and immigration
officials by advising these kids about their rights, and she probably saves
taxpayers money overall by advising her clients when they have no legal case
for staying. That said, it's unlikely that her job would exist without Uncle
Sam's help.
Continued in article
The end of capitalism, economics, and investment banking as we know it ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#InvestmentBanking
Question
What is one of the major historical sources of copyright law?
A review of Unfair to Genius by Gary A. Rosen (Oxford, 307
pages, $27.95)
"The Scourge Of Tin Pan Alley: Ira Arnstein's frivolous suits against
America's greatest composers created modern copyright law," by Ken Emerson,
The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444327204577614533857436886.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno64-wsj
. . .
According to Ira B. Arnstein, he did, and for more
than three decades he persistently sued the likes of Irving Berlin and Cole
Porter, their publishers and their rights organizations for plagiarizing his
own ditties. In truth, Arnstein contributed less to the Great American
Songbook than he did to "copyright law and lore," as Gary A. Rosen explains
in his entertaining and instructive book, "Unfair to Genius: The Strange and
Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein."
Arnstein, Mr. Rosen writes, was "a crank, a noodnik,
and a loser." He was briefly committed to a mental hospital and certified a
lunatic. Even Arnstein himself once confessed in court: "Reading my
testimony, anyone would get an idea that the person testifying is of a
disordered mind." Though he never won a case, Mr. Rosen argues that
Arnstein's quixotic claims "engaged some of the finest legal minds of his
era, forcing them to refine and sharpen their doctrines."
. . .
Much of "Unfair to Genius" chronicles the battles
royal over rights between songwriters, publishers and the new technologies
of records, radio and film. Lyricist Lorenz Hart sneered that Ascap's
archrival, BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.), stood for "Bad Music Instead." In
the late 1950s, crooner Rudy Vallée castigated Judge Learned Hand and his
1940 ruling in favor of radio broadcasters for spawning rock 'n' roll and
"the cacophony that floods the air waves." Today the devastation of the
music industry by the equally if not even more disruptive technology of the
Internet makes these battles of more than merely historical interest.
In Mr. Rosen's view, power in popular music and
control over copyright gradually passed from the sheet-music publishers of
Tin Pan Alley to the songwriters who composed the Great American Songbook,
and from them to the "superstar performers and integrated big media
companies" of the rock era. Arnstein, whom Mr. Rosen likens to Woody Allen's
Zelig, pops up intermittently in this narrative, illuminating it fitfully.
Much about Arnstein's life, including his date of
birth (somewhere between 1876 and 1883), is unknown or undiscovered by Mr.
Rosen. Having emigrated from a Ukrainian shtetl, Arnstein sang as a boy
soprano in a Russian peasant choir at the World's Columbian Exposition of
1893. After Arnstein's voice changed, he studied violin and composition in
New York and toured the U.S. as a pianist supporting opera diva Nellie
Melba. He began to make a respectable living as a composer and voice and
piano teacher in Harlem and augmented his income by dabbling in popular
music, publishing a few pop songs and playing piano accompaniment to silent
films. His greatest ambition was to compose an opera based on the life of
David. After the Metropolitan Opera rejected it as "amateurish," Arnstein
slipped gradually but ineluctably into penury and a dementia that Mr. Rosen
diagnoses as "morbid querulousness," a behavior disorder characterized by a
self-destructive and disruptive pursuit of personal vindication in the
courts.
Mr. Rosen, a lawyer specializing in intellectual
property, admits that his book isn't a biography but "a narrative romp
across six decades of understudied legal and cultural history." Sometimes it
romps into the weeds of irrelevance. Do we really care to learn that an
ostensibly expert witness who "played a relentless Inspector Javert to . . .
Arnstein's beleaguered Jean Valjean" devoured cauliflower in college? And
Mr. Rosen never quite clinches his argument for Arnstein's significance by
explaining clearly how copyright and intellectual property law would be
different today if he had never filed a suit.
But if Arnstein at times seems like a bit player in
the book whose subtitle bears his name, Mr. Rosen's cast of characters,
which sprawls from the bench to business to the boards, contains some real
corkers. One standout is cantor Josef "Yossele" Rosenblatt, "the Jewish
Caruso," whom Mr. Rosen compares, in his refusal to compromise his faith, to
Sandy Koufax. Rosenblatt's beard, Mr. Rosen writes, 'in impossibly literal
compliance with Leviticus 19:27," sported "four perfect, hospital corners."
His voice seemed impossible, too, spanning 3½ octaves. "Doubtless he could
sing the whole score of the Barber of Seville all by himself," one critic
marveled. Unlike Arnstein, whom the Metropolitan Opera spurned, Rosenblatt
starred there in "La Juive" and elsewhere on a vaudeville bill that included
the young Gypsy Rose Lee.
That improbable leap from high opera to low
vaudeville suggests the fun to be found in "Unfair to Genius" as it leavens
legal history with showbiz anecdote, and insight with amusement.
Copyright Troll ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_troll
TED Video: Drew Curtis: How I beat a patent troll ---
Click Here
http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_troll.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TEDTalks_video+%28TEDTalks+Main+%28SD%29+-+Site%29&utm_content=Google+Reade
American Library Association's Slide Rule Helper for Copyright Law---
http://librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/
"Colleges Offer Online Help on Copyright Law for Instructors," by Marc
Beja, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3846&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A Fair(y) Tale: Animated cartoon about copyright law ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created this humorous, yet
informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the
very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms. Also see
http://snipurl.com/fairu1
Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the dreaded DMCA are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright
"Theory Of Spain's Political Class," by Cesar Molinas, The Browser,
September 12, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://thebrowser.com/articles/theory-spains-political-class?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BestOfTheMoment+%28The+Browser%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Direct Link ---
http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/09/12/inenglish/1347449744_053124.html
In this article I propose a theory of Spain's
political class to make a case for the urgent, imperious need to change our
voting system and adopt a majority system. A good theory of Spain's
political class should at least explain the following issues:
1. How is it possible that five years after the
crisis began, no political party has a coherent diagnosis of what is going
on in Spain?
2. How is it possible that no political party has a
credible long-term plan or strategy to pull Spain out of the crisis? How is
it possible that Spain's political class seems genetically incapable of
planning?
3. How is it possible that Spain's political class
is incapable of setting an example? How is it possible that nobody - except
the king and for personal motives at that - has ever apologized for
anything?
4. How is it possible the most obvious strategy for
a better future - improving education, encouraging innovation, development
and entrepreneurship, and supporting research - is not just being ignored,
but downright massacred with spending cuts by the majority parties?
In the following lines I posit that over the last
few decades, Spain's political class has developed its own particular
interest above the general interest of the nation, which it sustains through
a system of rent-seeking. In this sense it is an extractive elite, to use
the term popularized by Acemoglu and Robinson. Spanish politicians are the
main culprits of the real estate bubble, of the savings banks collapse, of
the renewable energy bubble and of the unnecessary infrastructure bubble.
These processes have put Spain in the position of requiring European
bailouts, a move which our political class has resisted to the bitter end
because it forces them to implement reforms that erode their own particular
sphere of interest. A legal reform that enforced a majority voting system
would make elected officials accountable to their voters instead of to their
party leaders; it would mark a very positive turn for Spanish democracy and
it would make the structural reforms easier. THE HISTORY
The politicians who participated in the transition
process from Franco's regime to democracy came from very diverse
backgrounds: some had worked for Franco, others had been in exile and yet
others were part of the illegal opposition within national borders. They had
neither a collective spirit nor a particular group interest. These
individuals made two major decisions that shaped the political class that
followed them. The first was to adopt a proportional representation voting
system with closed, blocked lists. The goal was to consolidate the party
system by strengthening the internal power of their leaders, which sounded
reasonable in a fledgling democracy. The second decision was to strongly
decentralize the state with many devolved powers for regional governments.
The evident dangers of excessive decentralization were to be conjured by the
cohesive role of the great national parties and their strong leaderships. It
seemed like a sensible plan.
But four imponderables resulted in the young
Spanish democracy acquiring a professional political class that quickly grew
dysfunctional and monstrous. The first was the proportional system with its
closed lists. For a long time now, members of party youth groups get
themselves on the voting lists on the sole merit of loyalty to their
leaders. This system has turned parties into closed rooms full of people
where nobody dares open the windows despite the stifling atmosphere. The air
does not flow, ideas do not flow, and almost nobody in the room has personal
direct knowledge of civil society or the real economy. Politics has become a
way of life that alternates official positions with arbitrarily awarded jobs
at corporations, foundations and public agencies, as well as sinecures at
private regulated companies that depend on the government to prosper.
Secondly, the decentralization of the state, which
began in the early 1980s, went much further than was imaginable when the
Constitution was approved. As Enric Juliana notes in his recent book Modesta
España (or, Modest Spain), the controlled top-down decentralization was
quicky overtaken by a bottom-up movement led by local elites to the cry of
"We want no less!" As a result, there emerged 17 regional governments, 17
regional parliaments and literally thousands of new regional companies and
agencies whose ultimate goal in many cases was simply to extend paychecks
and bonuses. In the absence of established procedures for selecting staff,
politicians simply appointed friends and relatives, which led to a
politicized patronage system. The new political class had created a
rent-seeking system - that is to say, a system that does not create new
wealth but appropriates existing wealth - whose sewers were a channel for
party financing.
Thirdly, political parties' internal power was
decentralized even faster than the public administration. The notion that
the Spain of the Regions could be managed by the two majority parties (the
conservative Popular Party and the Socialists) fell apart when the regional
"barons" accumulated power and, like the Earl of Warwick, became kingmakers
within their own parties. This accelerated the decentralization and loss of
control over the regional savings banks. Regional governments quickly passed
laws to take over the cajas de ahorros, then filled the boards with
politicians, unionists, friends and cronies. Under their leadership, the
savings banks financed or created yet more businesses, agencies and
affiliated foundations with no clear goal other than to provide yet more
jobs for people with the right connections.
Additionally, Spain's political class has colonized
areas that are not the preserve of politics, such as the Constitutional
Court, the General Council of the Judiciary (the legal watchdog), the Bank
of Spain and the CNMV (the market watchdog). Their politicized nature has
strangled their independence and deeply delegitimized them, severely
deteriorating our political system. But there's more. While it invaded new
terrain, the Spanish political class abandoned its natural environment:
parliament. Congress is not just the place where laws are made; it is also
the institution that must demand accountability. This essential role
completely disappeared in Spain many years ago. The downfall of Bankia,
played out grotesquely in last July's parliamentary appearances, is just the
latest in a long series of cases that Congress has decided to treat as
though they were natural disasters, like an earthquake, which has victims
but no culprits. THE BUBBLES
These processes created a political system in which
institutions are excessively politicized and where nobody feels responsible
for their actions because nobody is held accountable. Nobody within the
system questions the rent-seeking that conforms the particular interest of
Spain's political class. This is the background for the real estate bubble
and the failure of most savings banks, as well as other "natural disasters"
and "acts of God" that our politicians are so good at creating. And they do
so not so much out of ignorance or incompetence but because all these acts
generate rent.
The Spanish real estate bubble was, in relative
terms, the largest of the three that are at the origin of today's global
crisis, the US bubble and the Irish bubble being the other two. There is no
doubt that, like the others, it fed on low interest rates and macroeconomic
imbalances on a global scale. But unlike the US, in Spain decisions
regarding what gets built where are taken at the political level. In Spain,
the political class inflated the real estate bubble through direct action,
not omission or oversight. City planning is born out of complex, opaque
negotiations which, besides creating new buildings, also give rise to party
financing and many personal fortunes, both among the owners of rezoned land
and those doing the rezoning. As if this power were not enough, by
transferring control of the savings banks to regional governments the
politicians also had power of decision over who received money to build.
This represented a quantum leap in the Spanish political class' capacity for
rent-seeking. Five years on, the situation could not be more bleak. The
Spanish economy will not grow for many years to come. The savings banks have
disappeared, mostly due to bankruptcy.
The other two bubbles I will mention are a result
of the peculiar symbiosis between our political class and Spanish
capitalists who live off government favors. At a recent meeting, a
well-known foreign investor called it "an incestuous relationship" while a
Spanish investor talked about "a collusion against consumers and taxpayers."
Be that as it may, let us first discuss the renewable energy bubble. Spain
represents two percent of world GDP yet it is paying 15 percent of the
global total of renewable energy subsidies. This absurd situation, which was
sold to the public as a move that would put Spain on the forefront of the
fight against climate change, creates lots of fraud and corruption, and
naturally captured rent, too. In order to finance these subsidies, Spanish
households and businesses pay the highest electricity rates in all of
Europe, which seriously undermines the competitiveness of our economy.
Despite these exaggerated prices, the Spanish power system debt is several
million euros a year, with an accumulated debt of over 24 billion euros that
nobody knows how to pay.
The last bubble I will discuss concerns the
countless unnecessary infrastructure projects built in the last two decades
at an astronomical cost, benefiting the builders and hurting the taxpayers.
One of the most scandalous cases is the spoke highways into and out of
Madrid. Meant to improve traffic flows into the capital, the radiales were
built with no thought given to important principles of prudence and good
management. First, rash forecasts were made regarding the potential traffic
on these roads (currently it is 30 percent of expectations and not because
of the crisis; there was no traffic in boom times, either.) The government
allowed the builders and the concessionaires to be essentially the same
people. This is madness, because when builders disguised themselves as
license holders through companies with very little capital and huge debt,
builders basically got money from the concessionaires to build the highways,
and when there was no traffic, they threatened to let the latter go broke.
The main creditors were - surprise! - the savings banks. So nobody knows how
to pay the more than three billion euros in debt, which will ultimately fall
on the taxpayers' shoulders. THE THEORY
The principle is very simple. Spain's political
class has not only turned itself into a special interest group, like air
traffic controllers for example; it has taken a step further and formed an
extractive elite in the sense given to this term by Acemoglu and Robinson in
their recent and already famous book Why Nations Fail. An extractive elite
is defined by:
"Having a rent-seeking system which allows, without
creating new wealth, for the extraction of rent from a majority of the
population for one's own benefit."
"Having enough power to prevent an inclusive
institutional system - in other words, a system that distributes political
and economic power broadly, that respects the rule of law and free market
rules."
Abominating the 'creative destruction' that
characterizes the most dynamic forms of capitalism. In Schumpeter's words,
"creative destruction is the process of industrial mutation that incessantly
revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying
the old one, incessantly creating a new one." Innovation tends to create new
centers of power, and that's why it is detested.
What does this simple theory have to say about the
four questions set forth at the beginning of this article? Let us see:
1. Spain's political class, as an extractive elite,
cannot effect a reasonable diagnosis of the crisis. It was their
rent-seeking mechanisms that provoked it, but obviously they cannot say
that. The Spanish political class needs to defend, as it is indeed doing to
a man, that the crisis is an act of God, something that comes from the
outside, unpredictable by nature, and in the face of which we can only show
resignation.
2. Spain's political class, as an extractive elite,
cannot have any exit strategy other than waiting for the storm to pass. Any
credible long-term plan must include the dismantling of the rent-seeking
mechanisms that the political class benefits from. And this is not an
option.
3. Nobody apologizes for defending their particular
interests. Air traffic controllers didn't, and neither will our politicians.
4. Just as the theory of extractive elites states,
Spanish political parties share a great contempt for education, innovation
and entrepreneurship, and a deep-seated hostility towards science and
research. The loud arguments over the civics education course Educación para
la Ciudadanía are in stark contrast with the thick silence regarding the
truly relevant problems of our education system. Meanwhile, innovation and
entrepreneurship languish in the midst of regulatory deterrents and punitive
fiscal measures. And spending on scientific research is viewed as a luxury
that politicians cut back savagely on, given half a chance.
Continued in articl
September 16, 2012 reply from MacEwan Wright
Dear Bob,
An interesting commentary.
Australia has proportional
representation. At the Senate level proportional
representation does allow minority parties to exist, often
with the balance of power. This has some interesting side
effects. However, when combined with compulsory voting the
principal outcome would appear to be mediocrity!
The secondary effect is mild pork barreling, but with the
wide spread of interest groups, this is also fairly evenly
spread.
But the voters have only themselves to blame. There is
virtually no electoral fraud - very difficult given the
requirement for compulsory voting. I have acted as a
scrutineer, and my brother as an electoral official, and we
have not seen any fraud.
Best wishes,
Mac
"African Students See China as a Path to a Prosperous Future," by By
Ryan Brown, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 10, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Many-Africans-Look-to-China/134246/
In 2011, Gontse Nosi, a South African, was working
for an electricity company here when he heard about an unusual
opportunity—to earn a master's degree in China, paid for by the Chinese
government. He applied and was accepted to a program at the Beijing
University of Technology to study renewable energy. There was just one
problem. The program was taught entirely in Mandarin, and Mr. Nosi didn't
speak a word of it.
So for the first year of his studies, the Chinese
government arranged for him to live in the central Chinese city of Wuhan,
where he attended intensive language classes for 10 hours a day. And
although that may seem like a winding path to a degree that Mr. Nosi could
have earned at home, the added investment, he says, was worth it.
"There are Chinese businesses in South Africa now,
and South African businesses in China," he says. "Studying there will really
open doors for me when I want to find a job."
Mr. Nosi is part of a growing cadre of African
students whose pursuit of an internationally recognized university degree
has taken them not to Europe or the United States but to China. The country
hopes to become a major destination for international students, with some
293,000 currently enrolled in its universities—more than 20,000 of them from
Africa.
The figures are small but rising rapidly: As late
as 2006, African students made up only 2 percent of foreign students in
China. And nearly one-third of the scholarships given by the Chinese
government to foreign students now go to Africans. American colleges, by
contrast, have failed to raise their enrollments from Africa, which have
hovered around 36,000 since 2006, or about 5 percent of the total
international-student population.
African students are being lured to China by a free
education or low tuition (around $4,500 per year), the hope of a job with
one of the Chinese corporations scattered across Africa, or simply an escape
from overcrowded domestic universities. Whatever their motives, African
students also hold a symbolic importance for leaders both on the continent
and in China itself.
Over the past decade, China has risen to become
Africa's single largest trading partner, and its stake in the continent is
mushrooming. From 2003 to 2011, China's direct investment in Africa rose
from $100-million to $12-billion. Like Chinese-built superhighways in Kenya
or Chinese corporations mining diamonds in Zambia, drawing African students
to China offers a way for the country to shore up its diplomatic and
financial relationship with the continent.
And Chinese educational investment—whether in the
form of drawing African students to China, the building of Chinese-language
institutes across the continent, or Chinese aid to African universities—has
a special potency on a continent scarred by European colonialism. It offers
a new channel of international educational opportunity for African students,
one that sidesteps the West altogether.
"Not just the universities but the country of China
itself is a learning experience for students from my country," says Yilak
Elu, an Ethiopian who completed a master's degree in international
development at Beijing's Tsinghua University. "We go there to see how a
country can develop itself quickly." A Complicated History
Although Africans have flocked to Chinese
universities in significant numbers only in the past decade, the history of
diplomatic relations between Beijing and the continent is littered with
attempts to recruit African students.
In the 1960s, the Chinese government began to
sponsor a small cadre of international students from new postcolonial states
to foster solidarity in the so-called third world. Flush with revolution and
full of newly emerging socialist states, Africa became an obvious target for
this new educational exchange, and in 1961 the first group of 118 African
students arrived to great fanfare in Beijing.
The experience did not end well.
Blindsided by racism and isolation, 96 of the
original group of students returned to their home countries by the following
year.
China's Cultural Revolution also cut short those
first feeble exchange programs, but when the government reinstated its
scholarships for African students, in the 1970s, they began to return. In
the decades that followed, African students continued to filter into China,
drawn by the undeniable lure of a free education.
The pace quickened in the mid-2000s, when the newly
founded Forum on China-Africa Cooperation began to endorse the expansion of
Chinese government scholarships for African students as part of its bid to
improve diplomacy with the African continent. From 2000 to 2007, 12,000
African students received government scholarships to study in China. In 2009
alone, more than 4,000 African students won Chinese funds for their degrees.
And as they arrived in the country, paying students began to follow.
Many paying students come not because they are
particularly drawn to China, but because they have struggled to find
institutions to meet their needs in their home countries. And they often
steer clear of Western universities because they are wary of the cost and
the maze of immigration bureaucracy that awaits them there.
"Whatever you pay, a degree is a degree," says
Rowena Ungen, a South African student who earned her medical degree from
Shandong University. "People see that, and that's why they don't want to go
to England anymore."
And visas for most African students are far easier
to come by in China than in Europe, creating an added draw.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One of the most popular languages to study on the Trinity University campus is
Chinese. This in large measure is due to student perceptions that their hiring
and promotion prospects might one day increase due to knowledge of the Chinese
languages.
Having said this, it must be recognized that over the last 200 years or more
the global language of commerce and diplomacy evolved as English. It is the most
widely taught second language around the world from Europe to Africa and Asia.
Hence, if China wants to play a larger role in educating the
world, the Chinese must consider two major strategies.
Educating the Masses: Coursera doubles the number of university
partners
"MOOC Host Expands," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, September 19,
2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/19/coursera-doubles-university-partnerships
Coursera continued its ambitious expansion in the
growing market for MOOC support today, announcing accords with 16 new
universities to help them produce massive open online courses — more than
doubling the company’s number of institutional partners and pushing its
course count near 200.
The new partners include the first liberal arts
college, Wesleyan University, to leap formally into the MOOC game, as well
as the first music school, the Berklee College of Music.
Coursera also announced deals with name-brand
private universities, such as Brown, Columbia, Emory and Vanderbilt
Universities; some major state institutions, such as the University of
Maryland System, the Ohio State University and the Universities of Florida,
and California at Irvine; and several international universities, such as
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, and the Universities of British Columbia, London, and Melbourne.
The company already boasted the most courses and
student registrations of any MOOC providers, having registered 1.3 million
students for its courses (although far fewer have actually stuck with a
course). Andrew Ng, one of its co-founders, said Coursera will probably
double its university partnerships at least one more time before it stops
recruiting new institutions.
“I think we’ll wind up with at least twice the
universities that we have now, but we’re not sure what the number is,” said
Ng in an interview.
Continued in article
The Big List of 530 Free Online Courses from Top Universities (New
Additions) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/new_additions_to_our_list_of_530_free_online_courses_from_top_universities_.html
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs and free courses, videos, and course
materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
"What You Need to Know About MOOC's," Chronicle of Higher Education,
August 20, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/What-You-Need-to-Know-About/133475/
. . .
Who are the major players?
Several start-up companies are working with
universities and professors to offer MOOC's. Meanwhile, some colleges are
starting their own efforts, and some individual professors are offering
their courses to the world. Right now four names are the ones to know:
edX
A nonprofit effort run jointly by
MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley.
Leaders of the group say they intend to slowly add
other university partners over time. edX plans to freely give away the
software platform it is building to offer the free courses, so that anyone
can use it to run MOOC’s.
Coursera
A for-profit company founded by two computer-science
professors from Stanford.
The company’s model is to sign contracts with colleges that agree to use
the platform to offer free courses and to get a percentage of any revenue.
More than a dozen high-profile institutions, including Princeton and the U.
of Virginia, have joined.
Udacity
Another for-profit company founded
by a Stanford computer-science professor.
The company, which works with individual professors
rather than institutions, has attracted a range of well-known scholars.
Unlike other providers of MOOC’s, it has said it will focus all of its
courses on computer science and related fields.
Udemy
A for-profit platform that lets
anyone set up a course.
The company encourages its instructors to charge a
small fee, with the revenue split between instructor and company. Authors
themselves, more than a few of them with no academic affiliation, teach many
of the courses.
"The Future Is Now?" by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, August 13,
2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-future-is-now.html
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, MITx, and Courses from Prestigious
Universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Bob Jensen's threads on distance education and training alternatives in
general ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Wars Without Guns and Bombs
"Exclusive: Iranian hackers target Bank of America, JPMorgan, Citi," by y
Jim Finkle and Rick Rothacker, Reuters, September 21, 2012 ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/21/us-iran-cyberattacks-idUSBRE88K12H20120921
The attacks, which began in late 2011 and escalated
this year, have primarily been "denial of service" campaigns that disrupted
the banks' websites and corporate networks by overwhelming them with
incoming web traffic, said the sources.
Whether the hackers have been able to inflict more
serious damage on computer networks or steal critical data is not yet known.
The sources said there was evidence suggesting the hackers targeted the
banks in retaliation for their enforcement of Western economic sanctions
against Iran.
Iran has beefed up its cyber capabilities after its
nuclear program was damaged in 2010 by the Stuxnet virus, widely believed to
have been developed by the United States. Tehran has publicly advertised its
intentions to build a cyber army and encouraged private citizens to hack
against Western countries.
The attacks on the three largest U.S. banks
originated in Iran, but it is not clear if they were launched by the state,
groups working on behalf of the government, or "patriotic" citizens,
according to the sources, who requested anonymity as they were not
authorized to discuss the matter.
They said the attacks shed new light on the
potential for Iran to lash out at Western nations' information networks.
"Most people didn't take Iran seriously. Now most
people are taking them very seriously," said one of the sources, referring
to Iran's cyber capabilities.
Iranian officials were not available for comment.
Bank of America, JPMorgan and Citigroup declined to comment, as did
officials with the Pentagon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Federal
Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency and Secret Service.
A U.S. financial services industry group this week
warned banks, brokerages and insurers to be on heightened alert for cyber
attacks after the websites of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase's
experienced unexplained service disruptions.
NBC reported late on Thursday that the Iranian
government was behind these attacks, citing U.S. national security sources.
Reuters could not verify that independently.
Tensions between the United States and Iran, which
date back to the revolution in 1979 that resulted in the current Islamic
republic, have escalated in recent years as Washington led the effort to
prevent Tehran from getting a nuclear bomb and imposed tough economic
sanctions.
DISRUPTIVE CAMPAIGN
Denial-of-service campaigns are among the oldest
types of cyber attacks and do not require highly skilled computer
programmers or advanced expertise, compared with sophisticated and
destructive weapons like Stuxnet.
But denial-of-service attacks can still be very
disruptive: If a bank's website is repeatedly shut down, the attacks can
hurt its reputation, affect customer retention and cause revenue losses as
customers cannot open accounts or conduct other business.
Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase have
consulted the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and National Security
Agency on how to strengthen their networks in the face of the Iranian
attacks, the sources said. It was not clear whether law enforcement agencies
are formally investigating the attacks.
The Iranian attackers may have used
denial-of-service to distract the victims from other, more destructive
assaults that have yet to be uncovered, the sources said.
Frank Cilluffo, who served as homeland security
adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush, told Reuters that he knows of
"cyber reconnaissance" missions that have come from Iran but declined to
give specifics.
"It is yet to be seen whether they have the
wherewithal to cause significant damage," said Cilluffo, who is now director
of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Cyberwars work both ways. President Obama bragged that U.S. succeeded in burning
out millions of dollars worth of Iranian centrifuges.
"Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran," by David E.
Sanger, The New York Times, June
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www
"Sabotaging
the System," CBS Sixty Minutes
class video posted November 9, 2009
by
Bob Jensen, last edited February 10, 2012 , tagged
accounting information systems,
behavioral,
ethics,
government/not for profit,
internal audit,
phd seminar,
public interest,
sustainability
author name:
"Sabotaging the System," CBS Sixty Minutes
title:
"Sabotaging the System," CBS Sixty Minutes, November
8, 2009 ---
topic:
Information Warfare, Hacking, Security
review:
Sabotaging Life on
Earth: Backdoor Computer Hacking
According a Sixty
Minutes Video
National Leaders Secretly Assume
All Strategic
Computer and Networking Systems are Infected by WMDs
(the one exception might be our nuclear defense system but don't
count on it)
Did you know that such
WMD computer warfare experiments already transpired on unsuspecting
Brazil?
"Good and Bad Teachers: How to Tell the Difference," by Nobel Laureate
Gary Becker, Becker-Posner Blog, September 23, 2012 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/good-and-bad-teachers-how-to-tell-the-difference-becker.html
"Rating Teachers," by Judge
Richard Posner, Becker-Posner Blog, September 23, 2012 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/rating-teachersposner.html
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm
"Alleged Academic Fraud at U. of North Carolina Tests NCAA's Reach:
Myths surrounding the group's investigation cloud the controversy at Chapel Hill,"
by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alleged-Academic-Fraud-at-U/134270/
More than a year after allegations of academic
improprieties surfaced in the University of North Carolina's athletic
department, we're still a long way from knowing the full extent of the
problems and whether the NCAA might issue new sanctions.
But you wouldn't know that from a statement the
university released last week, in which it said that the NCAA had yet to
find any rules violations following an apparently extensive joint
investigation. That assertion led to a chorus of unfair criticism against
the NCAA for failing to act.
Several investigations still have yet to be
completed in Chapel Hill, including one led by a former North Carolina
governor. And the allegations—which include reports of players' enrolling in
aberrant courses, unauthorized grade changes, and forged faculty
signatures—could still lead to NCAA sanctions, say former enforcement and
infractions officials at the NCAA, and others familiar with its
investigation.
What once looked like an open-and-shut case of
high-profile players' taking bogus classes to stay eligible is anything but
straightforward. Let's explore a few myths surrounding the case, which could
help explain the public's heightened expectations of penalties and give
clues to where things might be headed.
1. Academic fraud constitutes an NCAA
violation.
Academic impropriety would appear to strike at the
heart of college sports and the NCAA's stated mission to be "an integral
part of higher education and to focus on the development of our
student-athletes."
Yet, despite being a cornerstone of NCAA rules, the
term "academic fraud" is mentioned only once in the entire Division I
manual, as a basis for postseason bans, says John Infante, a former
compliance officer at Colorado State University.
As hard as it may be for the public to understand,
the NCAA rarely gets involved in issues of academic fraud, instead leaving
it up to colleges to police the integrity of their curricula.
In cases involving extra benefits for athletes,
preferential treatment of them, or recruiting violations, the NCAA is and
should be the sole arbiter, college officials say. But in situations that
touch on academic irregularities, NCAA institutions have made it clear that
they don't want the association to meddle.
Unless a member of an athletic department knowingly
arranges for an athlete to receive fraudulent credit, knows about such
fraud, or helps facilitate improper grade changes or other academic
shenanigans, the NCAA usually stays away.
Likewise, if both nonathletes and athletes are
enrolled in the sham classes, the NCAA often doesn't get involved. Its
thinking: This goes beyond sports.
You can question the logic—some, in fact, have said
any form of academic misconduct deserves the NCAA's attention—but it's hard
to argue that the NCAA is better positioned to enforce academic standards
than the faculty.
2. This is one of the biggest academic
scandals college sports has ever seen.
Pat Forde, the national college columnist for
Yahoo! Sports, was among several writers to weigh in on the problems in
recent weeks, saying that North Carolina seems to have "made a mockery of
its ballyhooed academic mission for a long time in order to gain competitive
advantage in football and men's basketball." Its alleged violations, he
argued, could call for the most severe of NCAA penalties, as it may have
demonstrated a lack of institutional control.
A
university report
released in May found that Julius Nyang'oro, a former chair of the
department of African and Afro-American studies, and Deborah Crowder, a
former department manager, had been involved in creating at least 54 classes
that had little or no instruction.
Through a public-records request, the Raleigh
News & Observer
determined that
athletes had accounted
for nearly two-thirds of the enrollments, with football players taking up
more than a third of the seats.
Last month the
newspaper found evidence
that Julius Peppers, a former two-sport star at North Carolina who is now an
all-pro player in the NFL, had gotten D's and F's in many courses, but had
received a B or better in some of the no-show ones.
According to the player's transcript, which the
university accidentally posted on its Web site, he was allowed to take an
independent-studies class the summer after his freshman year—a course
typically offered to more-experienced students who have demonstrated
academic proficiency. Those classes appeared to help Mr. Peppers maintain
his eligibility in football and basketball. (In a statement released by his
agent, Mr. Peppers said he had committed no academic fraud.)
It's hard to see how those alleged transgressions,
which stretched back to the 1990s, didn't provide certain athletes with an
unfair advantage. But are they among the worst ever, as some observers have
claimed?
On the continuum of academic fraud in the NCAA, the
worst violations usually involve accusations of academic dishonesty, in
which someone else does the work for the athletes or they either buy or
plagiarize papers or get access to exam answers ahead of time, says Mr.
Infante, the former Colorado State compliance officer, who now works as an
NCAA expert for Athleticscholarships.net, a Web site on recruiting.
On the opposite end, he says, are examples of
athletes who cluster in easier majors or are directed into snap courses.
Somewhere in the middle are independent-study
courses where there's less assurance that the players are actually doing the
work.
Poorly supervised independent-study courses were
part of the problem at North Carolina, the university's report says. But the
university also found evidence that students had completed written work.
For those and other reasons, maybe this won't turn
out to be one of the worst academic scandals we've seen, says Mr. Infante.
But the North Carolina case could turn out to be one of the more important
ones in pushing the NCAA and member institutions to take a closer look at
how athletes progress through the system.
"The NCAA as a whole ... needs to move beyond [the
Academic Progress Rate] and the awarding of degrees into regulating how
athletes are educated," he says. "If it starts with stricter regulation of
online and independent-study classes, that sounds like a good first step."
3. The NCAA went outside its typical
judicial process to punish Penn State. It should do the same with North
Carolina.
Mr. Forde, the Yahoo! columnist, believes the
situation demands a signal from Mark Emmert, the NCAA's president. "Will he
and the NCAA Executive Committee cowboy up again?" he wrote last month.
"Will they circumvent the rules manual and due process and go after Carolina
on the basis of general principle, à la Penn State?"
Earlier this year the NCAA penalized North Carolina
after members of its football team committed academic fraud and multiple
athletes accepted $31,000 in impermissible benefits. But as the academic
problems there have widened, NCAA leaders have made it clear they're in no
hurry.
They have also done what they can to distance the
problems at North Carolina from those at Penn State, where a former
assistant football coach serially molested young boys while top
administrators reportedly worked to conceal the crimes. The alleged cover-up
led Mr. Emmert to impose unprecedented penalties on the university,
including a $60-million fine and a four-year bowl ban.
But as recently as last week, Mr. Emmert called the
Penn State situation extraordinary and said he hoped he never had to
exercise that type of power again.
Continued in article
"North
Carolina Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program," Inside Higher
Ed, September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
The Privileged Learners on Campus With Scholarships and Tutors
"Big Sports Programs Step Up Hiring to Help Marginal Students,"
by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2012
---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/the-fastest-growing-job-in-sports-helping-marginal-students/30171
"What the Hell Has Happened to College Sports?"
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/What-the-Hell-Has-Happened-to/130071/
Flaunting the NCAA
Academic Standards for Top Athletes
"Bad Apples or More?" by Doug Lederman, Inside Highe Ed,
February 7, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/07/ncaa_punishes_almost_half_of_members_of_football_bowl_subdivision_for_major_rules_violations
"College athletes studies guided toward 'major in eligibility'," by Jill
Steeg et al., USA Today, November 2008, Page 1A ---
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2008-11-18-majors-cover_N.htm
"The Education of Dasmine Cathey," by Brad Wolverton,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Education-of-Dasmine/132065/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"Dasmine Cathey Reflects on His Moment in the Spotlight," by
Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/dasmine-reaction/30411
Jensen Comment
This is an article that each of us will probably react differently to
after reading it carefully. Some readers will see this as another case,
in a long list of cases, where a NCAA Division 1 university makes a sham
out of college education of a star, albeit learning disabled, athlete.
By sham I mean where the main goal is to make that athlete able to read
after four years --- whereas the goal for non-athletes in the university
is much higher. As a non-athlete he probably would have flunked out of
the university in the first year. The coaches helped pull him through
courses while he was still eligible to play football only to leave him
hanging out to dry in completing the requirements for a diploma.
Other readers will see this as a case where a learning disabled
student was pushed beyond what he might have otherwise been without
special treatment as an athlete in college. The tragedy is that his
non-athlete counterparts receive no such special treatment from
"coaches."
As a retired college professor I question the commitment of any
student who does not care enough to try by attending class every day and
by seeking help from the teachers.
Personally, I think if Dasmine Cathey gets his diploma it makes a
sham out of that diploma. Dasmine deserves better in life, but why does
it have to be at the expense of lowered academic standards in higher
education?
Has academic fraud become the name of the game in NCAA Division 1
athletics?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
In the wake of cheating scandals the Chancellor of the University of North
Carolina resigns
"The Achilles Heel," by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, September 18, 2012
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/18/unc-president-steps-down-after-two-years-athletics-scandals
You can’t plan for everything, and increasingly it
seems like the one thing you don’t plan for will undermine your public
university presidency.
Holden Thorp, chancellor at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, announced Monday that he would step down as
chancellor at the end of the school year, only his fifth on the job, a
premature exit for a chancellor whom many expected to serve at least 10
years.
Prior to being named chancellor in May 2008 at just
43 years old, Thorp had risen meteorically through the ranks of UNC’s
administration, from professor to dean of the university’s College of Arts
and Sciences in five years, and was seen as something of a wunderkind. A UNC
graduate with deep ties to the state, a noted chemist who spent his career
at the university, and a successful entrepreneur, Thorp was viewed by many
as a perfect fit for helping move the university into the 21st century,
bring entrepreneurship and innovation to the forefront of campus activity,
and confront a litany of challenges related to funding, direction and
academics.
But less than six months into his tenure, the
country and state’s economies collapsed, forcing Thorp to confront budget
cuts, salary freezes and protracted revenue constraints. The state’s
political leadership, once immensely supportive of UNC-Chapel Hill and the
rest of the university system, saw significant turnover in 2010. And since
2010, the university has been plagued by a series of scandals -- many
originating in the university’s athletics program – that have dominated
local media headlines.
Many at UNC say Thorp's seemingly perfect pedigree
for the job was undermined by what he inherited: a series of
headline-grabbing and time-consuming problems that they say would doom any
president. “Holden Thorp was largely the victim of circumstance,” said Jay
Smith, a history professor at the university who worked on a faculty
investigation of the university’s athletics problems. “His experience shows
just how treacherous the waters of higher education are right now. If
someone of his talents and energy and commitment can’t succeed in this
position, it makes you wonder who can.”
But others say that Thorp’s background in academics
and quick rise through the ranks left him unprepared to tackle the types of
Gordian knots that modern university presidents face, particularly the
athletics scandals. “The drip-drip-drip of scandals suggest that Thorp has a
poor understanding of shortcomings on his campus and insufficient
appreciation of their import once they come to his attention,” wrote
The Charlotte Observer’s
editorial board on Sunday.
A spokesman for UNC-Chapel Hill said Thorp did not
have time Monday to respond to a request for comment.
Regardless of the exact reason for Thorp’s
departure, he is the latest in a long list of prominent public university
presidents who were either forced out of their positions or chose to step
down in the past two years. That list includes the presidents of the
University of Arizona, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the
University of Oregon, Pennsylvania State University, and, depending on the
criteria, the University of Virginia, whose president was reinstated shortly
after she was forced out.
In many cases, these presidents said they were
either driven out by scandals that happened on their watch but that they
were unaware of, or that political forces conspired to drive them out. You
can do everything right, they say, and the job will still find a way to
bring you down.
Higher education observers say the widespread
turnover – and
occasional panic by boards – is indicative of
broader shifts in the higher education landscape that are making the role of
public university president increasingly difficult and different from any
other job.
“These universities are going through historic,
unprecedented change that no one is prepared for. Truly, it’s an environment
where, particularly at large universities, you’re responsible for bringing
in hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding, hundreds of millions
in endowments, engaging in economic development and entrepreneurial
activity,” said Lucy Leske, vice president, partner, and co-director of the
education and not-for-profit practice at Witt/Kieffer, an executive search
firm. “How can you be trained for this?”
Those shifts are forcing people like Leske to
reconsider how colleges and universities choose new leaders.
A Difficult Job
Flagship Public University President Departures since 2010
Resignations:
Firings:
“Near Misses”:
By many measures of university success, UNC-Chapel
Hill thrived under Thorp’s leadership. The institution has been steadily
climbing the ranks in terms of research expenditures, cracking the top 10
this year. Student applications increased, and the academic profile of the
incoming class was at its highest levels. Fund-raising increased despite the
recession.
Immediately prior to the recession the university
brought in management consultants Bain & Company to review the institution’s
administrative structure and find ways to reduce costs. The university made
national headlines for that review, the
recommendations from which are estimated to save $50 million a year. Other
notable universities, including the University of California at Berkeley,
Cornell University and the University of Connecticut, have since hired
consultants to perform similar work.
Joe Templeton, a long-serving chemistry professor
at UNC who once chaired the university’s faculty and has led the
implementation of the Bain report as special assistant to the chancellor,
said that in terms of faculty and student success, the university is right
where it should be. “As far as the things that as faculty we care about and
pay attention to, the structure is in good shape and the future is bright,”
he said.
But Templeton and others note that those victories
have been overshadowed by the myriad scandals Thorp has faced, particularly
in the state and in the local media.
First there was the NCAA investigation into the
university’s football program that found that players received impermissible
benefits from agents. The football program received sanctions from the NCAA
that included a one-year ban in post-season play and scholarship reductions.
That scandal led to the firing of head football coach Butch Davis -- a story
that caught national attention and generated significant controversy among
fans and alumni -- and the resignation of longtime athletic director Dick
Baddour.
The football scandal also uncovered academic fraud
by some members of the football team, including evidence that a tutor
altered players’ papers.
Continued in article
Professors who let students cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Coaches who let students cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
Debt ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt
History of Money and Debt ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
Debt (booked by accountants) versus Entitlements (promises made that are not
yet booked) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement
"We've Always Been Deadbeats Debt is not a new American way," by Scott
Reynolds Nelson, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 10, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Borrowed-Dreams/134146/
My father was a repo man. He did not look the part,
which made him all the more effective. He alternately wore a long mustache
or a shaggy beard and owned bell-bottoms in black, blue, and cherry red. His
imitation-silk shirts were festooned with city maps, cartoon characters, or
sailing ships. Dad sang in the car, at the top of his lungs, mostly obscure
show tunes. His white Dodge Dart had Mach 1 racing stripes that he had
lifted from a souped-up Ford Mustang. The "deadbeats" saw him coming, that's
for sure, but they did not understand his profession until he walked into
their homes and took away their televisions.
Dad worked for Woolco, a company that lent
appliances on an installment plan. When borrowers failed to pay, ignored the
letters and phone calls, my father would come by. He often posed as a meter
reader or someone with a broken-down car. If he saw a random object lying
abandoned in the yard, he would pick it up and bring it to the door as if he
were returning it. He was warm and funny, charming, but pushy. He did not
carry a gun, but he was fearless under pressure and impervious to verbal
abuse. If the door opened, he was inside; if he was inside, he shortly had
his hands on the appliance; the rest was bookkeeping.
. . .
In each case, lenders had created complex financial
instruments to protect themselves from defaulters like the ones I watched
from the car. And in each case, the very complexity of the chain of
institutions linking borrowers and lenders made it impossible for those
lenders to distinguish good loans from bad.
In 1837, for example, banks in the north of England
discovered that the unpaid "cotton bills of exchange" in their vaults made
them the indirect owners of slaves in Mississippi. In 2007, shareholders in
DBS, the largest bank in Singapore, found themselves part owners of homes
facing foreclosure in California, Florida, and Nevada. In both cases,
efficient foreclosure proved impossible.
In those crashes in America's past, perhaps a repo
man in a Dodge Dart with a million gallons of gas could have visited every
debtor, edged his way in, and decided who was good for it. (My dad did
accept cash or money orders for Woolco's goods.) But big lenders have
neither the time nor the capacity to act with the diligence of a repo man.
Instead, such lenders (let's agree to call them all banks) try to unload
debts, hide from their own creditors, go into bankruptcy, and call on state
and federal institutions for relief. Banks have also routinely overestimated
the collateral—the underlying asset—for the loans they hold. When those
debts go unpaid or appear unpayable, banks quickly withdraw lending; the
teller's window slams shut. A crisis on Wall Street becomes a crisis on Main
Street. Money is tight. Loans are impossible: Crash.
***
Scholarship on these financial downturns has its
own long and checkered past.
From the 1880s to the 1950s, scholars told the
history of the nation's economic downturns as the history of banks. Such an
approach was not entirely wrong, but it tended to focus on big personalities
like J.P. Morgan or New York institutions; it tended to ignore the farmers,
artisans, slaveholders, and shopkeepers whose borrowing had fed the booms
and busts.
Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called new
economic historians (or cliometricians) came along with a different story.
Using state and federal data, they tried to build mathematical models of the
nation's financial health. Moving beyond banks, they emphasized what they
termed the "real economy," by which they meant measurable indices of growth
and profit. Taking the nation's health like a simple temperature reading,
they used gross domestic product, gross income, or collective return on
investment. Of course, none of those figures had been measured directly
before the 1930s, and so the prognoses tended to vary widely.
Such economic models of financial health, however
scientific they looked, tended to be abstract representations of an economy
that was, in fact, more complex and more interconnected than they pictured.
The models, for example, often assumed that old banks were like modern
banks, sharing common accounting principles, or that because banks first
issued credit cards in the 1960s, they offered no consumer credit before
then. Drilling into historical documents for seemingly relevant numbers,
then plugging those numbers into a model of a world they understood rather
than the economy they sought to describe, the cliometricians often produced
ahistorical work. Hence, one economic historian assumed that American
barrels of flour sent to New Orleans were consumed in the South, though most
were bound for re-export to the Caribbean. Another calculated that railroads
played little role in America's economic booms by modeling a scenario in
which canals could have (somehow) crossed the arid plains into the Sierra
Nevada mountains.
Bear in mind, that same kind of intellectual hubris
about models of economic behavior had awful effects in the recent past.
Around 2000, Barclays Bank borrowed a simple diffusion model from physics
(called the "Gaussian copula function") to suggest that foreclosures would
have a relatively small effect on nearby property values. Economists tested
it with two years of foreclosure and price data and agreed. Billions of
investment in real-estate followed, often in indirect markets like
real-estate derivatives and collateralized debt obligations. By 2008 the
model proved shockingly inaccurate.
If some historians focused on the temperature of
the "real economy," economists were becoming obsessed with the money supply
as the single factor explaining most American panics. Again, a certain kind
of blindness to the history of debt and deadbeats ensued. The most important
book here was Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz's seminal A
Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963). It urged economists
to steer away from stories of speculation spun out by Keynesians like John
Kenneth Galbraith.
How, according to Friedman and Schwartz, can we
separate speculation and investment? All loans are risky. The riskier they
are, the higher the return. Some investments will fail. Markets need to
clear, and those buyers who come along to sweep up bargains are not ruthless
profiteers but simply maximizers who make markets work. Thus, the pair
steered economists away from problems of risk and toward the problems of
state intervention. They were the prophets of financial deregulation.
Their story about past financial panics had the
advantage of suggesting simple solutions: Use the Federal Reserve to inflate
or deflate the currency. For them, financial crises were mostly monetary.
Thus, the 1929 downturn started with a financial shock and then was
prolonged by an overly tight monetary policy. After A Monetary History
became gospel, economics textbooks dropped their numerous chapters on
financial panics because the policy solution became so clear; economists
trained after 1965 know little about financial downturns before the Great
Depression.
Yet a tripling of the money supply has still not
fully pulled the United States and the rest of the world out of our current
financial crisis—suggesting that our problems, and all the previous ones,
were not just monetary. My dad would have pointed out that economists have
misunderstood the problem. Crises are mostly about productive assets—the
promises in his trunk.
Social historians (and I count myself among them)
tell a very different story about financial panics, but we have our own
blind spots. Since the late 1960s, we have often discussed the American
economy as if farmers were coherent families of self-sufficient yeomen
surprised by the market economy. That story of a sudden revolution misses
the early and intimate relationship between Americans and credit. It
overlooks how American stores provided consumer credit to farmers,
plantations owners, and renters who settled the West.
Thus, American social historians have used the term
"market revolution" to describe the period after the 1819 panic. Accordingly
market forces rushed in as repo men like my dad became vanguards of a new
capitalist order. The financial jeremiads of Jacksonian Democrats of the
1820s and 30s against bankers and paper money became the natural outgrowth
of frontier farmers' anger at a capitalism they had never seen before. But
the store system of Andrew Jackson's day borrowed practices from the
colonial store system that goes back to the 17th century, if not earlier. It
was how the fur-trading and East and West India companies prospered. John
Jacob Astor and Andrew Jackson were cut from the same cloth. They made their
fortunes from their stores, and their store system made settlement possible.
Part of the reason we overlook the importance of
credit in American history is our continued attachment to Marx's divide
between precapitalist and capitalist forms of agriculture. That misses the
relationship between farming and credit for most of the people who settled
America. The more I study panics, the more I am persuaded that the pioneer
American institution of the 18th and early 19th centuries was not the
homestead or the trapper's shack but the store, an institution that sold
foreign goods to farmers on credit, taking payment in easily movable settler
products like furs, potash, barrel hoops, and butter.
Rather than imagining some golden age of
subsistence, scholars in the Marxist tradition should look more closely at
anticapitalist movements in the wake of panics. I include here not just the
utopian and religious communities like Quakers, Shakers, and Oneidans but
also the early Mormons, the Grangers, and the Populists. Those people
understood what it meant for banks, and then railroads, to extend credit
through stores. Often regarding capital as a collective inheritance, they
built their own associations to replace such institutions of credit (and the
railroad was an institution of credit) with locally managed cooperatives
that distributed agricultural benefits in a way that served the broader
community. The temple, the elevator, and the cooperative were attempts to
break the chain of debt without demonizing capital.
From the perspective of business history, Joseph A.
Schumpeter argued that business-cycle downturns came from periods of
"creative destruction" in which new technologies undermined old ones.
Outdated technologies, with millions invested in them, became instantly
obsolete, leading to financial failures that cascaded to other industries.
While Schumpeter, who died in 1950, once persuaded me, I think there is a
mechanistic fallacy in the argument. Railroads, for example, have taken the
blame for the 1857, 1873 and 1893 downturns. While there may be something
there, the whole account seems reductive and technologically determinist.
For example, canals, the Bessemer process, fractional distillation of oil,
and washing machines are all revolutionary technologies that flourished
during the American panics, not before them. They did sweep away older
technologies, but rather than causing panics those technologies benefited by
the uncertainty that panic created.
In a very different camp, neo-Marxists like
Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey betray a similar kind of reductive
history, a latter-day Schumpeterianism. Their work posits a "spatial fix," a
center of capitalism that then organizes and draws tribute from the rest of
the world. For the late Arrighi, it was a kind of pump that sucked assets
from elsewhere as states were forming throughout the sweep of centuries. For
Harvey it is an investment in a capital city (Amsterdam, London, New York)
and a new communication technology (telegraph, telephone, the Internet) that
drew higher profits from everywhere else. Dutch and British hegemony became
American hegemony after World War II. That suggests that these scholars have
not really considered the tremendous influence of the U.S. Federal Reserve
in reorienting international trade between 1913 and the 1920s. Their story
seems more or less political to me: American empire comes when Americans
claim victory in World War II. The economic material seems to be used in the
service of a story about the rise and decline of empires.
If we follow the money, the American empire emerged
during World War I, when the international flow of debt changed drastically.
For Arrighi and Harvey, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank
are the pathbreakers of financial empire. But it is worth remembering that
those institutions were explicitly designed to restrain the dirty tricks of
financial empires of the 1920s and 1930s: No more American banks using
gunboat diplomacy in Peru; no more Germans sending tanks into Poland to
collect unpaid debts.
***
As a historian, I have learned the most about
financial disasters from long-dead historians whose work blended primary,
secondary, and quantitative material. Rosa Luxemburg, William Graham Sumner,
Frank W. Taussig, and Charles Kindleberger would never have agreed about
anything. Luxemburg, a renegade Marxist who read in five languages,
described how the dangerous mix of a hierarchical production process with
the anarchy of international trade could lead manufacturers to block free
trade and embrace higher prices for their raw materials in the wake of a
panic. Sumner, a laissez-faire Social Darwinist who argued that income
inequality benefited society, carefully explained how drastic economic
changes could follow from tiny changes in international trade deals. Put in
a room together, each would have retreated to a corner to begin throwing
furniture. But they and the others were storytellers who used a mixture of
sources. Telling a story by looking through the trunk of assets and watching
the damage afterward makes more sense to me than simple models of financial
contagion, money supply, technological watersheds, or global fixes.
My father died before I started writing about
financial panics, but my thoughts have grown out of our 30-year-long
argument about financial downturns. Not surprisingly, he disliked
"deadbeats," seeing them as the people whose false promises weakened our
country. He probably had a point, and no doubt the executives of Woolco
would agree. But I find much in them to admire, for defaulters are often
dreamers. Viewing America's financial panics through the lens of numerous
unfulfilled and forgotten debts that even the oldest banker cannot possibly
remember can afford a perspective my dad would have appreciated: with my
view from the Dodge Dart, the minute he rang the doorbell, when both debtor
and creditor prepared their stories.
Scott Reynolds Nelson is a professor of history at the College of
William and Mary. His book A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of
America's Financial Disasters has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Video
"Debt: The First 5,000 Years," by Paul Kedrosky , Kedrosky.com, September
10, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/09/debt-the-first-5000-years.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InfectiousGreed+%28Paul+Kedrosky%27s+Infectious+Greed%29
Debt versus Equity ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#FAS150
The booked National
Debt in August 2012 went over $16 trillion ---
U.S. National Debt Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Also see
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
The unbooked entitlements have a present value between $80 and $100 trillion.
But who's counting?
Pending Collapse of the United States ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Should we never pay down (even partly) the U.S. National Debt or
Spending Deficit? ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/NationalDeficit-Debt.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting history ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
"The Plagiarism Perplex," by Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed,
September 6, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/plagiarism-perplex
There is an extraordinary tension in our culture
between individual creativity and the creative community, between
originality and a shared body of knowledge, between the acts of reading
culture and writing culture. And our students are caught in the middle.
In reality, culture exists in that in-between space
where things are shared. When we read, we inscribe what we read with our own
meaning. When we write, we draw inspiration from all of the things we have
read; they follow our words like shadows thrown behind us. When we come up
with a new idea, we’ve built it on ideas that others have already had and
hope our ideas become a platform for new construction. We are never entirely
alone, and our ideas are never entirely original.
These things become murky when students who are
told to work independently break the rules and collaborate on homework or an
exam.
Harvard students are currently in the news for
having done this; a few years ago
students at Ryerson University in Canada formed a
Facebook group to work on homework problems (and were, wittingly or not,
following advice provided on the university’s own website advising students
how to study effectively). One can argue that these students violated a
clearly-stated rule and so are unequivocally guilty of cheating. But it also
seems clear that we are sending mixed messages: forming study groups is good
for learning. Except when you’re told not to, in which case it’s so
unethical it can get you expelled.
Some argue that students’ willingness to cheat is a
symptom of our skewed values as a society – that getting a grade and being
awarded a degree is more important than learning, that an investment in
college has become less to do with knowledge or personal development and
everything to do with material success. This is nothing new; we’ve grumbled
about students being too focused on grades for as long as I can remember.
Students quoted in the Times seemed to feel they were the
ones who had been cheated, that they had been tricked into thinking they
could pass the course without much work and were unfairly given tests that
were harder than expected, that the rules of engagement were violated. Other
commentaries suggest (as
did the Harvard dean of undergraduate
education) that technology feeds cheating because it makes sharing too easy.
(Libraries work hard to make sharing easy, and still largely fail; faulting
our systems for being “too easy” seems a bit perverse.) On the other hand,
it also makes it more detectable. Had the students at Ryerson met face to
face in the library to work on homework problems rather than on Facebook,
they likely would never have faced punishment.
I suspect a large part of the problem is that we
send such mixed messages to students. You may hate group work, but it will
prepare you for the reality of the workplace - but when we tell you to work
alone, don’t discuss the test or homework problems with anybody else or face
severe punishment. When you write a paper, your work must be original - but
back up every point by quoting someone else who thought of it first. Develop
your own voice as a writer – but try to sound as much like us as possible.
The fire and brimstone tone of plagiarism warnings
are another kind of mixed message. Most students understand that it’s
ethically wrong to purchase a paper and hand it in as one’s own. Most
students understand that copying chunks of text without acknowledging the
source is plagiarism. But most students will encounter gray areas. What if
they can’t recall where they first encountered an idea? What if they only
found a source because another source pointed them toward it? Given they
weren’t born knowing what they are writing about, what is there that they
shouldn’t cite? If they check Wikipedia to refresh their memory of
a film, should they cite it, or does the “common knowledge” loophole absolve
them of that duty?
Apparently not.
Conscientious students spend an inordinate amount
of time trying to figure out how to cite new forms of publication that
continually escape the rulebooks, and the rules are updated in ways that are
puzzling and complex. The APA now encourages writers to say they articles
were retrieved from publishers’ websites when, in fact, they were retrieved
from a library website. (Of course, the APA makes a great deal of money as a
publisher, and they probably feel publishers are the rock-solid source of
knowledge, now that libraries are mostly renting information on a temporary
basis.) Deciding how to cite an article requires
a daunting flowchart – which nevertheless fails to
answer the problem of how to locate the link to the publisher’s website when
you actually got the article from a library database. Saying an article was
“retrieved from” a site where it wasn’t seems wrong. Yet following citation
rules is an important part of academic integrity. My head hurts.
Continued in article
"The Typo That Unfurled Harvard’s Cheating Scandal," Chronicle of
Higher Education, September 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/the-typo-that-unfurled-harvards-cheating-scandal?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
"Facing Cheating Inquiry, Harvard Basketball Co-Captains Withdraw," Inside
Higher Ed, September 12, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/09/12/facing-cheating-inquiry-harvard-basketball-co-captains-withdraw
"Cheating Scandal at Harvard," Inside Higher Ed, August 31,
2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/08/31/cheating-scandal-harvard
Harvard University is investigating about 125 students
-- nearly 2 percent of all undergraduates -- who are suspected of cheating
on a take-home final during the spring semester,
The Boston Globe reported Thursday. The
students will appear before the college’s disciplinary board over the coming
weeks, seem to have copied each other’s work, the dean of undergraduate
education said. Those found guilty could face up to a one-year suspension.
The dean would not comment on whether students who had already graduated
would have their degrees revoked but he did tell the Globe, “this
is something we take really, really seriously.” Harvard administrators said
they are considering new ways to educate students about cheating and
academic ethics. While the university has no honor code, the Globe
noted, its official handbook says students should “assume that collaboration
in the completion of assignments is prohibited unless explicitly permitted
by the instructor.”
Huge Cheating Scandals at the University of Virginia, Harvard, Ohio, Duke,
Cambridge, and Other Universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#UVA
Including Plagiarism
"Ward Churchill Loses Again," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
September 11, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/11/colorado-supreme-court-rejects-ward-churchills-appeal
The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday rejected an
appeal in which Ward Churchill sought to get back his job as a tenured
professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The court's
50-page decision focused on whether the University
of Colorado had acted in a "quasi-judicial" fashion when it reviewed charges
of research misconduct against Churchill. The state's highest court ruled
that the university did act in that way, and so was entitled to immunity
from being sued, much as judges are immune from being sued for their
decisions. The university's Board of Regents
fired Churchill in 2007, based on the findings of a faculty panel,
which found that he had engaged in repeated instances of research misconduct
-- including
plagiarism, fabrication and
falsification.
Churchill has maintained from the start that the
investigation and his dismissal were motivated by outrage over his political
views, and that the university had violated his First Amendment rights and
taken away his academic freedom. The Colorado Supreme Court's ruling didn't
weigh these claims directly, but several times in the opinion cited evidence
that the university's procedures gave Churchill important due process rights
and reflected the legitimate needs of a university to assure professional
conduct by its faculty members.
As the Churchill case has dragged on, the various
rulings have had an impact beyond the plaintiff. In fact, several college
associations had urged the Colorado Supreme Court to rule as it did, arguing
that failure to respect the university's quasi-judicial role would open up
many other universities to lawsuits by anyone found to have engaged in
research misconduct.
But some civil liberties and faculty groups --
including the Colorado chapter of the American Association of University
Professors -- backed Churchill. They argued that affirming the university's
quasi-judicial status would effectively enable public universities to fire
controversial professors without appropriate opportunity for them to bring
grievances to the courts. Both the college groups and the faculty
associations argued in their briefs to the court that academic freedom was
at stake in the case, although they argued for opposite outcomes.
In Monday's ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court
noted the lengthy process that the university used to investigate the
allegations against Churchill and to determine that dismissal was
appropriate. "The proceedings against Churchill took more than two years and
included five separate opportunities for Churchill to present witnesses,
cross-examine adverse witnesses, and argue his positions," the Supreme Court
opinion said. "It possessed the characteristics of an adversary proceeding
and was functionally comparable to a judicial proceeding." For this reason,
the justices ruled, the university was acting sufficiently closely to the
judicial function of government that it was immune from being sued.
The ruling cited a series of procedural and
fairness tests in case law to determine whether the Board of Regents acted
in a judicial manner, and said that the governing board met all the relevant
tests. While that finding was the crucial one, various parts of the decision
also suggested that the Supreme Court viewed the findings against Churchill
to be reasonable ones. For instance, the Supreme Court said that the trial
judge in the case -- who rejected Churchill's request for reinstatement --
had acted on the basis of "credible evidence" about Churchill's conduct.
An Inflammatory Essay and Its Aftermath
The University of Colorado hired Churchill in 1991,
and promoted him to full professor in 1997. He was active in Native American
political movements, and gave lectures on college campuses nationwide --
regularly criticizing U.S. policies but doing so largely without attention
in the mainstream press.
Then early in 2005, he became a flashpoint in the
culture wars. He had been invited to give a talk at Hamilton College -- the
kind of speaking invitation Churchill had accepted for years. Hamilton
professors unhappy about the invitation circulated some of his writings,
including the now-notorious
"little Eichmanns" speech in which he derided the
people killed at the World Trade Center on September 11.
The attention led both to calls for Colorado to
fire him and to reports of incidents of research misconduct. The university
said it couldn't fire him for the essay, but could investigate the
allegations -- and that started the process that was reviewed by the
Colorado Supreme Court.
David A. Lane, Churchill's lawyer, issued a
statement blasting the decision and vowing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme
Court.
Continued in article
Ward Churchill, who is
suing the University of Colorado at Boulder to get his job back, admitted on
Tuesday that portions of a book he edited and wrote parts of were plagiarized,
but he said he wasn't responsible for doing so,
9 News reported. "Plagiarism occurred," Churchill said
in reference to the writings. But Churchill (who prefers to be called "Doctor"
Churchill) said that others who were involved in the project did the
plagiarizing and that he was unaware of it. Churchill has generally not
admitted that any plagiarism occurred in his work, arguing that minor errors
have been stretched by the university to fire him for his controversial
political views. University of Colorado officials also asked Churchill on
Tuesday why he had indicated that he wanted to be called "Dr. Churchill" when he
has only a master's degree. Churchill responded that he has an honorary
doctorate and asked the lawyer, "You wish to dishonor it?"
The
Denver Post noted that while there were some sharp
exchanges in the testimony, much of it was detailed discussion of sources and
the details of scholarly writing, and that the judge had to call a recess at one
point when a juror appeared to be having difficulty staying awake.
"Churchill: 'Plagiarism Occurred' (But He Didn't Do It)
Jensen Comment
If Doctor Churchill pursues this babe-in-the woods line of defense it seems to
me he should name the plagiarists who led him on.
One of the most liberal academic associations is
the highly liberal Modern Language Association. However, even the MLA could not
muster up a vote critical of the firing of Ward Churchill by the University of
Colorado.
While material distributed by those seeking to condemn
Churchill’s firing portrayed him favorably, and as a victim of the right wing,
some of those who criticized the pro-Churchill effort at the meeting are
long-time experts in Native American studies and decidedly not conservative.
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, December 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/mla
Question
What does a leading Native American scholar think of Ward
Churchill's scholarship and integrity?
And this
was the judgment of Churchill's academic peers. UCLA professor
Russell Thornton, a Cherokee tribe member whose work was
misrepresented by Churchill, said "I don't see how the
University of Colorado can keep him with a straight face,"
calling his material on smallpox a "fabrication" of history, and
accusing him of "gross, gross scholarly misconduct." Real
American Indian history, he told the Rocky Mountain News, is
vitally important, not "a bunch of B.S. that someone made up."
R.G. Robertson, author of Rotting Face: Smallpox and the
American Indian and another scholar who has accused Churchill of
misrepresenting his work, says that he's "happy that [he was
fired], that he's been found out, and by his peers—meaning other
university people—and been called what he is, a plagiarizer and
a liar." Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar
University who has also investigated Churchill's smallpox
research, said his work on the subject is "fabricated almost
entirely from scratch."
Michael C. Moynihan, "Ward of the State: Why the
state of Colorado was right to sack Ward Churchill," Reason
Magazine, August 1, 2007 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/121682.html
A huge factor in the granting of tenure to Ward
Churchill was purportedly his affirmative action claim of being Native American.
Bob Jensen's threads on Doctor Churchill, the "Cherokee Wannabe" who most likely
does not have drop of Native American blood, are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
"Ward Churchill Will Get Another Day in Court," Inside Higher Ed,
June 4, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/06/04/ward-churchill-will-get-another-day-court
Jensen Comment
The outcome of this appeal could have wide-ranging implications in terms of a
college's authority to terminate a plagiarizing tenured faculty member. I hope
that the University of Colorado appeals this to the U.S. Supreme Court if the
Colorado Supreme Court rules in favor of Churchill.
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Bob Jensen's threads on Ward Churchill are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on faculty who plagiarize and otherwise cheat --
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"CEO Pay in FTSE 100: Pay Inequality, Board Size and Performance," by
William Patrick Forbes, SSRN, September 1, 2012 ---
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2140204
Abstract: n this paper we examine the agency costs
of seemingly excessive pay awards to CEO's within the FTSE 100 in the last
decade. Are CEOs taking a large proportion of the total pot (a big "pay
slice") more, or less, able to return value to shareholders by better
management? In presenting this evidence we describe variations in whole
distribution of executive pay, rather than invoking some arbitrary cut-off
point (e.g. the CEO's pay as a percentage of their five highest paid peers
or the CPS), to determine how changes in shareholder value match to
concurrent changes in the distribution of executive pay. We ask is the
impact of executive pay-inequality a function of board size, rendering the
CPS measure problematic in this context? If so how does the interaction of
board size and corporate performance size, as measured by shareholder
returns, explain variation in the sensitivity of the pay-performance
relationship for UK FTSE executives? We advance the Gini coefficient as a
preferable measure of executive pay inequality in order to capture the
impact of perceived inequality upon corporate performance.
Jensen Comment
Although the findings in this study in terms of CEO pay, I strongly object to
the Gini coefficient for comparison of poverty levels between countries. For
example, Canada and North Korea have roughly the same Gini coefficient. Yeah
Right! You get a higher Gini coefficient just for spreading the poverty equally.
Having said that, I'm a long-time advocate for curbing excessive executive
compensation, especially those that reward failure and fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation
On CBS news last week, it was stated that Putin's in house in Russia cost a mere
$1 billion. When it comes to corruption, start at the top with government.
This is the graph of political corruption.
Bob Jensen's threads on the American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm
"LSAT Scores at Top Schools Are Dropping Like Flies," by Vivia Chen,
The Careerist.com, September 7, 2012 ---
http://thecareerist.typepad.com/thecareerist/2012/09/law-school-applicants-dumbing-down.html
If you think you're a pretty smart cookie—but not
spectacularly so—this might be the year that you can squeeze into a better
law school than you thought possible.
The reason is simple: There are fewer applicants,
which results in more opportunities at more prestigious law schools. You've
probably heard about
that 25 percent drop in law school applications in
the past three years or so, but did you know that the top 14 law schools
will be forced to accept students who are below the top 2 percent of their
LSATs? (Sobs, please.)
Here's the
nitty gritty from Blueprint, an LSAT tutoring
company, based on statistics from the
Law School Admissions Council, Inc.:
We see that in
2010/2011, there were 3,430 students in the top 2 percent on the LSAT
(171+), which is at or near the median LSAT score for most elite (top 14 or
T14 as determined by U.S. News & World Report rankings) law
schools. That number drops to 2,600 in 2011/2012, resulting in nearly 1,000
fewer top percentile scores from which law schools can recruit.
So what does this all mean? Naturally, Blueprint is
telling people to go for it—since it's in the LSAT tutoring biz. Here's how
it explains the trickle-down effect of lowered law school admissions
standards:
With fewer applicants
at the top for the same number of slots, the entire admissions game is going
to undergo a large shift. Students traditionally just outside the T14 based
on their numbers will find themselves admitted, or on waitlists. As they
jump at the opportunity to mortgage their future for a top school . . .
their slots in T20 schools will open up for those below them, and so on.
LSAT scores more than any other aspect of the
application determines acceptance, notes Blueprint: "LSAT accounts for up to
60 percent of the admission decision."
Blueprint also says that applicants are too
pessimistic about the cost of law school tuition and their prospects for
getting into law schools. It conducted a poll of of nearly 600 prospective
law students, in conjunction with Above the Law. Their finding:
"The majority of prelaw students are actually overestimating the cost of
attending law school." It also finds that more than a quarter of the
students (27 percent) think it's harder to gain admission than it actually
is.
So is law school easier to get into now?
Perhaps. But is that a good enough reason to dedicate yourself to three
years of schooling for a profession you might not like (assuming you can get
a job that requires a legal degree)?
Uh, I don't think so.
Jensen Question
So where are those top prospects going who decide not to go to law school?
Answer
I really don't know, but if they were thinking about law school as
undergraduates not many of them probably did not earn enough undergraduate
credits for accounting, architecture, engineering, medical school, vet
school, and science. Some may be applying for government work. Others may be
applying for doctoral programs in humanities. Who knows?
A goodly number of them may instead be applying to MBA programs in
prestigious universities. I'll bet that's it!
"Why an MBA Is Not Always the Right Choice," by Rose
Martinelli , Bloomberg Business Week, April 4, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-04/why-an-mba-is-not-always-the-right-choice
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Some of the Worst Internal Controls in History
"Fraud Case Spurs Show-Horse Sale," by Mark Peters, The Wall Street
Journal, September 10, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444772804577623731324455136.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_news&mg=reno64-wsj
The show-horse set will descend on this small city
this month to bid on the crown jewel of what federal authorities allege to
be a massive fraud: Hundreds of top-ranked quarter horses amassed by the
former city comptroller accused of stealing tens of millions of dollars from
public coffers.
Rita Crundwell, 59 years old, was arrested by
federal authorities in April and accused of stealing more than $53 million
from this city of 15,700 whose finances she ran since the 1980s.
Federal authorities said the alleged theft took
place starting in 1990, and say that Ms. Crundwell, whose salary was around
$80,000, also used the allegedly pilfered funds to buy sports cars, a boat,
a home in Florida and a $2 million motor home.
Ms. Crundwell has pleaded not guilty to one charge
of wire fraud. After her arrest, she was released from federal custody and
is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Rockford, Ill., in October.
She declined to comment through her lawyers.
Authorities say that Ms. Crundwell used the
allegedly stolen funds to furnish a horse ranch that housed nearly 400
quarter horses with names like Have Faith in Money, Jewels by Tiffany, and
Secure with Cash.
Ms. Crundwell worked for the city nearly all her
life, becoming comptroller in 1983. Over the years, she also became known as
a renowned breeder of horses that she bought and sold and showed. The
government also is auctioning other of her assets, including the motor home
and horse equipment.
Authorities say Ms. Crundwell no longer can afford
the $200,000 a month required to care for all the horses.
Ms. Crundwell agreed to the sale, authorities say,
which was ordered through a court process. Federal authorities believe that
horses were purchased and possibly maintained with funds from the alleged
fraud. Money from the auction eventually could go to Dixon as partial
restitution, but proceeds will be held in escrow until the case concludes.
Auctioneers said the size of the horse sale by a
single owner is rare. A spokesman for the American Quarter Horse Association
said the high caliber of the horses also makes it extraordinary.
"In all my years in the business, we've never done
anything quite like this," said Mike Jennings, a four-decade veteran of the
horse-auction business who the government hired to oversee the Crundwell
sale, scheduled to take place on Sept. 23 and 24, and online starting last
Friday, though no sales will take place until this week.
More than a thousand bidders, bargain hunters and
onlookers are expected to attend the auction. Hotels in Dixon are sold out
for the auction weekend, and city officials plan to run buses between
downtown and the Crundwell ranch about four miles away.
Ms. Crundwell built her empire on a horse farm here
known as the RC Ranch. Her initials are on the peak of the main barn and in
mosaic on the tile floor of her trophy room, where hundreds of ribbons and
horse statuettes are displayed.
On the walls are poster-size photographs of Ms.
Crundwell, often in a white cowboy hat, showing her horses. She excelled in
the beauty event known as halter, and holds more world championships than
any other amateur owner. Eight years in a row, she was crowned top owner at
the world championship show in Oklahoma City.
Ms. Crundwell also was popular with some on the
circuit. She sponsored events, rented stalls at shows, and hired trainers
and other staff. "For years, people felt they weren't able to compete
against Rita and stopped trying," said Amy Gumz, owner of Gumz Farms in
western Kentucky.
Ms. Crundwell's exit appears to be sparking new
interest in the events she once dominated. That could help fuel demand at
the upcoming auction where Mr. Jennings, the auctioneer, said the top horses
could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The quarter horse is the U.S.'s most popular breed,
used widely for trail riding, ranching and equestrian events. The breed is
also trained to race short distances—its name comes from the quarter-mile
that quarter horses typically run. The competitive show world ranges from
cowboys riding them to rope cattle, to muscular horses being paraded in a
ring and judged on their beauty.
In Dixon, Ms. Crundwell's hometown, many residents
remain baffled by her arrest, which came after a colleague filling in while
she was on vacation spotted alleged irregularities in the accounts. Dixon
Mayor Jim Burke said because of the size and success of her horse operations
Dixonites believed Ms. Crundwell's booming horse business financed her
lifestyle.
"She carefully cultivated this image of having a
successful horse operation," Mr. Burke said.
Dixon officials expect the auction to net several
million dollars, which they hope will eventually end up with the city. Mr.
Burke would like to use auction proceeds to pay off municipal debt and
possibly to give residents rebates on water or other municipal bills.
Continued in article
How true can you get?
As (Commissioner) Bridgeman left office last year, he praised (Controller) Rita
Crundwell for being an asset to the city and said she "looks
after every tax dollar as if it were her own,"
according to meeting minutes.
As quoted by Caleb Newquest on April 27, 2012 ---
http://goingconcern.com/post/heres-ominous-statement-former-dixon-city-finance-commissioner-made-about-accused-embezzler
She was mostly just horsing around
"Somehow the City of Dixon, Illinois Just Noticed (after six years) That $30
Million Was Missing," Going Concern, April 19, 2012 ---
http://goingconcern.com/post/somehow-city-dixon-illinois-just-noticed-30-million-was-missing
Rita Crundwell has been the CFO/comptroller of
Dixon, Illinois since the 1980s; a typical tenure for even an unelected
Illinois official. In those 30-ish years, it appears that she performed her
duties adequately enough, but she was just put on unpaid leave. You see, at
some point in 2006, it is alleged that Ms. Crundwell started helping herself
to money that belonged to the citizens of
Ronald Reagan's boyhood home. Prosecutors allege
that this went for the last six years and that
Crundwell made off with $30,236,503 (and 51¢).
Federal agents served warrants and seized
contents of her bank accounts, seven trucks and trailers, a $2 million
motor home and a Ford Thunderbird—all of which prosecutors allege were
paid for with money taken from city bank accounts by Crundwell.
[...] Bank records obtained by the FBI allegedly show Crundwell
illegally withdrew $30,236,503 from Dixon accounts since July 2006 ,
money she used, among other things, to buy a 2009 Liberty Coach Motor
home for $2.1 million; a tractor truck for $147,000; a horse trailer for
$260,000; and $2.5 million in credit card payments for items that
included $340,000 in jewelry.
So a decent haul, but a Ford Thunderbird?
Good Christ, spring a bit for the Lincoln Continental at least. Questionable
taste in automobiles aside, one can't help but wonder how Dixon - a city
with a population of just ~15,000 - could not notice millions of dollars
missing. But they did! It's strange because in a city of that size, people
gossip about one another's $35 overdraft fees, never mind millions of
dollars being spent on multi-million dollar motorhomes. Anyway, Crundwell
(who has a thing for horses apparently) had a good thing going, but then
made the mistake of taking a little extra vacation:
[L]ast year she took an additional 12 weeks of
unpaid vacation. A city employee substituting for Crundwell examined
bank statements and notified the mayor of activity in an account that,
according to the complaint, he didn't know existed. Bank records list
the primary account holder as the City of Dixon. An entity named RSCDA
also is named on the account, with checks written on the account more
expansively identifying that second account holder as "R.S.C.D.A., C/O
Rita Crundwell."
So basically the city discovere the missing cash by
the virtue of dumb luck, which sometimes is what it takes for these things
to get uncovered. Better late than, oh
whatever... seriously, a Thunderbird?
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Ex-UBS Trader Kweku Adoboli’s E-Mail to Accountant: Full Text," by
Edward Robinson, Bloomberg, September 14, 2012 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-14/ex-ubs-trader-kweku-adoboli-s-e-mail-to-accountant-full-text.html
Below is the text of an e-mail former UBS AG (UBSN)
trader Kweku Adoboli sent to bank accountant William Steward on Sept. 14,
2011, describing how he accrued trading losses.
The e-mail was read out by prosecutor Sasha Wass at
Adoboli’s fraud trial in London today.
The subject line for the e-mail, sent from
Adoboli’s home e-mail account, was: “An explanation of my trades.”
Dear Will,
It is with great stress that I write this mail.
First of all the ETF (Exchange Traded Funds) trades that you see on the
ledger are not trades that I have done with a counterparty as I
previously described.
I used the bookings as a way to suppress the
PnL losses that I have accrued through off-book trades that I made.
Those trades were previously profit making, became loss making as the
market sold off aggressively though the aggressive sell-off days of July
and early August.
Initially, I had been short futures through
June and those lost money when the first Greek confidence vote went
through in mid-June. In order to try and make the money back I flipped
the trade long through the rally.
Although I had a couple of opportunities to
unwind the long trade for a negligible loss, I did not move quickly
enough for the market weakness on the back of the first back macro data
and then an escalation Eurozone crisis cost me the losses you will see
when the ETF bookings are cancelled. The aim had been to try and make
the money back before the September expiry date came through but I
clearly failed.
These are still live trades on the book that
will need to be unwound. Namely a short position in DAX futures [which
had been rolled to December expiry] and a short position in S and P 500
futures that are due to expire on Friday.
I have now left the office for the sake of
discretion. I will need to come back in to discuss the positions and
explain face to face, but for reasons that are obvious, I did not think
it wise to stay on the desk this afternoon.
I will expect that questions will be asked as
to why nobody else was aware of these trades. The reality is that I have
always maintained that these were EFP trades to the member of my team,
BUC, trade support and John Di Bacco (Adoboli’s manager).
I take full responsibility for my actions and
the stilt storm that will now ensue. I am deeply sorry to have left this
mess for everyone and to have put my bank and my colleagues at risk.
Thanks,
Kweku.
Jensen Comment
Derivatives trading is not a St. Petersburg Paradox Game ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
"3 Scams That Are More Social Than Technical," by Brian Proffitt,
ReadWriteWeb, September 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/3-scams-that-are-more-social-than-technical.php
Internet scams always have a target-rich
environment, and they exploit it with a little bit of technology and a lot
more con-artistry. Here's a look at three such social-engineering scams to
be aware of, including one that targeted me recently.
Scam A: Gary from IT
The caller ID showed an unknown person, which is
never a good sign. On a whim, I picked it up instead of letting it roll to
voice mail.
"Hello, Mr. Proffitt, this is Gary from the IT
department calling about the trouble you are having with your Windows
computer."
(A couple notes about "Gary": he sounded like he
had a bad cell connection, and his accent was that of a Southwestern Asian,
thick enough that I had to ask him to repeat himself, thanks to the quality
of the call.)
When he repeated his greeting, I was intrigued,
mostly because I didn't currently work for any client that's providing IT
support for me and (this is key) the one Windows machine in my office had
been sitting idle for a couple of weeks.
The signs were clear: I was being approached for a
clever scam that's seen a resurgence in recent months. In the con, someone
calls pretending to be tech support and attempts to gain access to business
or personal computers. The methods vary, ranging from password acquisition
to instructing targets to point their browsers at a "diagnostic" site that
will actually download malware to the target's computer. Glancing to make
absolutely sure that the Windows PC was powered down, I played along.
"Um, sure… 'Gary'… though I have to say I wasn't
aware my machine was having any problems." The truth, and I wanted to see
what he would do with it.
He was ready. "You are not having a problem that
you can see, but we are showing that your computer needs to have some
upgrades soon."
"I see. Well, I can have the computer run its
upgrade cycle and get that fixed."
Gary paused. Careful, I thought, you just spoke
geek, so he knows you're not dumb.
"No… what you need to do is go to a special
Microsoft upgrade site and download the software right away. I will help you
install the software."
That answered that question: He wasn't phishing for
passwords, he was trying to get me to download the malware needed to
remotely access and possibly control my computer. At this point, I was
standing by my Linux machine and was ready to follow along and see what
would happen next. Windows programs don't run on Linux, so anything that
tried to download would be effectively rendered harmless. But then in my
arrogance, I tipped my hand.
"Okay, sure, no problem. I wasn't aware Microsoft
had special sites like this set up," I replied.
Click.
Maybe the call was dropped, but he probably figured
I was on to him and didn't want to waste time with me. My life as a sting
operator would have to wait.
Fake technical support calls are nothing new, but
reports are on the rise of late, and they are getting more sophisticated.
Mine, which happened about two weeks ago, called my business line and
behaved as if they were from my workplace's IT department. There is little
doubt that had they called a home number, they might have tried a different
approach, like claiming they were calling from Microsoft.
Solution: No tech support from any third-party
vendor will call you unbidden to offer to fix something. Your own company
might, and to make sure that you're dealing with the home office, hang up
and call your IT department. If anyone asks you for a password, hang up.
Never visit a strange site because you are asked by
someone claiming to be from any kind of tech support, whether by phone or
email. Legitimate email requests will tell you to visit your company's
support site.
Scam B: Your Computer as Hostage
According to the Better Business Bureau, this is
not the only kind of attack that's on the rise. The association is also
reporting more complaints from its members of so-called scareware or
ransomware scams.
Ransomware is a form of trojan attack that uses a
combination of malware and social engineering that's a flip on the tech
support con. With ransomware, the illicit software is downloaded first and
then the victim is tricked into parting with their money and their credit
information.
Here's how ransomware works: After surreptitiously
installing itself on a Windows PC, ransomware pretends to be a very
realistic-looking antivirus software application that has "found" terrible,
bad viruses on a PC. As if to demonstrate just how bad these viruses are,
anytime you try to open an application, the attempt is blocked with a
message that the "application is infected." Indeed, the only thing that will
run is Internet Explorer, which is key to the next step of the scam.
Why does ransomware need a browser? In order to
have the "antivirus" software "clean" your machine, you'll need to pay a
low, low $39.95 to activate the software. If you can't get to the Internet,
you can't log on to the payment site and enter your credit information.
Victims of this con are lucky if they just lose the
initial fee, but usually they've just given their credit-card number to the
same person who infected their machine.
Solution: There are a number of solutions proffered
by blogs and real antivirus-software creators. Note the name of the fake
anti-virus software and run it through your search engine to research it.
The steps to remove ransomware can be complicated, but it's not impossible.
Also, don't run your Windows PC with an
all-powerful administrative account. Use a regular user account that won't
let anything install without the administrator's password. That does a good
job blocking malware like this from being installed in the first place.
Scam C: The Grandparent Gambit
Social engineering is very much at the heart of the
another scam that the bureau says is being reported: the grandparent scam.
Curiously, while this con seems to have a lot of success among the elderly,
it's also targeted at anyone about whom a scam artist has personal
information.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on computer and networking security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
From the Scout Report on September 7, 2012
TaskBadges ---
http://kitestack.com/taskbadges/
This application is quite simple and is designed to
keep life's tasks in order. Billed as "plain-text todo list kung fu," Task
Badges adds the number of open tasks in your plain-text todo list to the
file's icon so that it shows up in Finder and on the desktop. It's easy to
use and it is compatible with Macs running Snow Leopard or Lion.
Viewshare ---
http://viewshare.org/
Viewshare is a free web application that can be
used for "generating and customizing unique, dynamic views through which
users can experience cultural heritage digital collections." The site is
administered by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and
Preservation Program at the Library of Congress. On the homepage, visitors
can watch a demonstration of the program, look through some sample views,
and then get started. This version of Viewshare is compatible with all
operating systems. (For a great example of Viewshare in action, check out
"Swag Diplomacy" in this issue of the Scout Report:
http://professorevans.net/SWAG.html )
From the Scout Report on September 14, 2012
Background Tabs 1.0.1 ---
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-background-tabs/
This extension for Firefox allows visitors to cut
down on their battery usage, which can be quite useful. Background Tabs
suspends actions in background tabs until they become active again and it is
quite easy to use. This version is compatible with computers running Firefox
6.0.
Color Uncovered: An Interactive Book for the
iPad ---
http://www.exploratorium.edu/downloads/coloruncovered/
If you've ever wondered what color a whisper might
be, this delightful interactive book is for you. Created by the folks at the
Exploratorium in San Francisco, "Color Uncovered" is a unique volume
complete with articles, illusions, and videos that explore the art, physics,
and psychology of color. Also, the book has some color activities that just
require an iPad and basic items such as a drop of water and a piece of
paper. This book is compatible with all iPads running iOS 4.3 and newer.
Bob Jensen's threads on data visualization ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
The Big List of 530 Free Online Courses from Top Universities (New Additions)
---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/new_additions_to_our_list_of_530_free_online_courses_from_top_universities_.html
Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Radio Stories ---
http://www.womeninscience.org/series.php?seriesID=1
Change the Equation (STEM Education)
http://changetheequation.org/
International Museum of Women ---
http://imow.org
The International Center for Research on Women
http://www.icrw.org/
African-American Women: Duke University Libraries
---
http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/collections/digitized/african-american-women
Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais Dissect the Craft of
Comedy (NSFW) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/seinfeld_louis_ck_chris_rock_and_ricky_gervais_dissect_the_craft_of_comedy_nsfw.html
Free Book Online
Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital
to Our Nation's Prosperity and Security ---
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13396
The National Academies Press
PAPERBACK $49
ISBN-10: 0-309-25639-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-309-25639-1
|
|
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Profiles of Scientists and Engineers
http://science360.gov/series/Profiles+of+Scientists+and+Engineers/711d5cab-8416-40f7-9297-099c1f37a9bd
Change the Equation (STEM Education)
http://changetheequation.org/
Center for Astronomy Education ---
http://astronomy101.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
Chemistry Laboratory Techniques
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/chemistry/5-301-chemistry-laboratory-techniques-january-iap-2012/
Playing With Fire (fire retardants) ---
http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html
Distillations Podcast (chemistry) ---
http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/media/distillations/index.aspx
NASA: Higher Education ---
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/postsecondary/index.html
NASA - Educators ---
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/index.html
Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Radio Stories ---
http://www.womeninscience.org/series.php?seriesID=1
The Discovery and Early Development of Insulin ---
http://link.library.utoronto.ca/insulin/
Digital Journal of Ophthalmology ---
http://www.djo.harvard.edu/
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: National Digital Library ---
http://digitalmedia.fws.gov/
From the Scout Report on September 7, 2012
If architects don't draw by their own hand, is something lost in
translation? Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing [Registration may be
required]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/opinion/sunday/architecture-and-the-lost-art-of-drawing.html?pagewanted=all
Drawing Architecture
http://drawingarchitecture.tumblr.com/
Architect Philip Johnson's Glass House
http://www.architecturaldigest.com/architecture/2012-09/architect-philip-johnson-glass-house-modernism-article
Architectural Drawings of Willis and Lillian Leenhouts
https://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/digilib/leenh/index.cfm
Hugh Ferriss: Architectural Drawings
http://library.columbia.edu/indiv/avery/da/collections/ferriss.html
A primer for architectural drawing for young students
http://books.google.com/books/about/A_primer_of_architectural_drawing_for_yo.html?id=AxRNAAAAMAAJ
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
Art of the Poison Pens (From MAAW's Blog by Jim Martin at
http://maaw.blogspot.com/
) ---
http://news.usf.edu/article/templates/?a=4663&z=186
Crime Solutions ---
http://www.crimesolutions.gov/
Milgram Psychology Tutorial ---
http://networkedblogs.com/ChqMl
2012 Working Mother: 100 Best Companies ---
http://www.workingmother.com/best-company-list/129110
National Atlas [Maps] ---
http://www.nationalatlas.gov/
Where is Cuba Going? ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/where-is-cuba-going.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais Dissect the Craft of
Comedy (NSFW) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/seinfeld_louis_ck_chris_rock_and_ricky_gervais_dissect_the_craft_of_comedy_nsfw.html
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
Crime Solutions ---
http://www.crimesolutions.gov/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Math and Metaphor: Using Poetry to Teach College Mathematics ---
http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol20/bahls.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
The Big List of 530 Free Online Courses from Top Universities (New Additions)
---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/new_additions_to_our_list_of_530_free_online_courses_from_top_universities_.html
"Alan Turing at 100: Exhibit celebrates pivotal pioneer of computer,
artificial intelligence," Harvard Gazette, September 16, 2012 ---
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/09/alan-turing-at-100/
Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000 [MoMa history of children
in art] ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/centuryofthechild/
Art of the Poison Pens (From MAAW's Blog by Jim Martin at
http://maaw.blogspot.com/
) ---
http://news.usf.edu/article/templates/?a=4663&z=186
Beloit College: Jay "Ding" Darling Collection (historic political cartoons)
---
http://www.beloit.edu/bcdc/darling/
The Center for Cartoon Studies ---
http://www.cartoonstudies.org/
The Hale Scrapbook (cartoon history) ---
http://cartoons.osu.edu/hale/Hale.php
The Stuart McDonald Cartoon
Collection
http://www.library.und.edu/digital/McDonald.htm
Bill Mauldin's Military Cartoons ---
Click Here
The Opper Project (editorial cartoons) ---
http://hti.osu.edu/opper/index.cfm
University of Nebraska Libraries Digital Collections: Government Comics
Collection ---
http://contentdm.unl.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/comics
Educational Comics Collection ---
http://contentdm.unl.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/edcomics
National Atlas [Maps] ---
http://www.nationalatlas.gov/
The Warhol: Heroes & Villains: The Comic Book Art of Alex Ross ---
http://www.warhol.org/exhibitions/2011/heroesandvillains/
The Warhol: Time Capsule 21 ---
http://www.warhol.org/tc21/main.html
Digital Comic Museum ---
http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/
Hamilton College: Jazz Archives ---
http://www.hamilton.edu/jazzarchive
MoMA Lets Kids Record Audio Tours of Modern Art (with Some Silly Results) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/moma_lets_kids_record_audio_tours_of_modern_art_with_some_silly_results.html
The Discovery and Early Development of Insulin ---
http://link.library.utoronto.ca/insulin/
And There's the Humor of it: Shakespeare and the Four Humors
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/shakespeare/index.html
Maryland Map Collection ---
http://libraries.umd.edu/mdmap/
Eastern North Carolina Digital Library ---
http://digital.lib.ecu.edu/historyfiction/
In Honor of the People (Minnesota history and Native Americans) ---
http://www.inhonorofthepeople.org/
World War II Poster Collection ---
http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/wwii-posters/
The Atkins Family in Cuba: A Photograph Exhibit ---
http://www.masshist.org/photographs/atkins.cfm?queryID=27
McIntosh Cookery Collection ---
http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/cookbooks/
University of Washington Digital Collections: Menus
Collection
http://content.lib.washington.edu/menusweb/index.html
1850s & 1860s Hotel and Restaurant Menus ---
http://digital.lib.uh.edu/cdm4/about_collection.php?CISOROOT=/p15195coll34
Evanion Collection of Ephemera (including catalogs, menus, etc.) ---
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/evan
Menus: The Art of Dining ---
http://digital.library.unlv.edu/collections/menus
The Oldest Color Movies Bring Sunflowers, Exotic Birds and Goldfish Back to
Life (1902) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/the_oldest_color_movies_bring_sunflowers_exotic_birds_and_goldfish_back_to_life_1902.html
Where is Cuba Going? ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/where-is-cuba-going.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Radio Stories ---
http://www.womeninscience.org/series.php?seriesID=1
International Museum of Women ---
http://imow.org
American Women Through Time
---
http://www.mtsu.edu/~kmiddlet/history/women/wh-timeline.html
The International Center for Research on Women
http://www.icrw.org/
Worth & Mainbocher (fashion design) ---
http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MNYO28_2
Places Reflecting America's Diverse Cultures: A Shared Heritage Travel
Itinerary ---
http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/cultural_diversity/
Swag Diplomacy: Black Travel Memoirs ---
http://professorevans.net/SWAG.html
African-American Women: Duke University Libraries
---
http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/collections/digitized/african-american-women
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
Classical New England ---
http://www.wgbh.org/995/index.cfm
Hamilton College: Jazz Archives ---
http://www.hamilton.edu/jazzarchive
Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing Traditional American Folk Song “Mule on the
Mount” (1939) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/hear_zora_neale_hurston_sing_traditional_american_folk_song_mule_on_the_mountain_1939.html
From the Scout Report on September 14, 2012
Can a more dictatorial conductor elicit a stronger performance from an
orchestra? The Science of Conducting: Von Karajan was right
http://www.economist.com/node/21562182
Profiles: Alessandro --- D'Ausilio
http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/alessandro-dausilio/
Karajan Centrum
http://www.karajan.org/jart/prj3/karajan/main.jart?reserve-mode=active&rel=en
Herbert von Karajan: Rehearsal of Schumann's 4th Symphony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shc-4AZVaNk
Teaching the art of conducting an orchestra
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/03/12/conducting_an_orchestra/
Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra
http://listeningadventures.carnegiehall.org/ypgto/index.aspx
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
From the University of Chicago
Writing in College: A Short Guide to College Writing ---
http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/resources/collegewriting/
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
September 10, 2012
September 11, 2012
September 12, 2012
September 13, 2012
September 14, 2012
September 15, 2012
September 17, 2012
September 18, 2012
September 19, 2012
September 20, 2012
September 21, 2012
September 22, 2012
September 24, 2012
September 25, 2012
"Grad Student's Guide to Good Coffee," by Rob Gee, Inside
Higher Ed, September 23, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/grad-students-guide-good-coffee
"Genetic Study Divides Breast Cancer Into 4 Distinct Types," by Gina Kolata,
The New York Times, September 22, 2012 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/health/study-finds-variations-of-breast-cancer.html?hp
Which states have the biggest obesity disease problems?
http://philebersole.wordpress.com/tag/obesity-comparisons/
The Discovery and Early Development of Insulin ---
http://link.library.utoronto.ca/insulin/
You may remember Steve Bridges as the guy who imitated George Bush so well on
the Jay Leno Show. He has now started imitating Obama and REALLY does it really
well ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?feature=player_embedded&v=WH_a0cGVRmI
Forwarded by Auntie Bev
GETTING OLDER
A distraught senior citizen
phoned her doctor's office.
"Is it true," she wanted to know,
"that the medication
you prescribed has to be taken
for the rest of my life?"
"'Yes, I'm afraid so,"' the doctor told her.
There was a moment of silence
before the senior lady replied,
"I'm wondering, then,
just how serious is my condition
because this prescription is marked
'NO REFILLS'.."
***********************
An older gentleman was
on the operating table
awaiting surgery
and he insisted that his son,
a renowned surgeon,
perform the operation.
As he was about to get the anesthesia,
he asked to speak to his son.
"Yes, Dad , what is it?"
"Don't be nervous, son;
do your best,
and just remember,
if it doesn't go well,
if something happens to me,
your mother
is going to come and
live with you and your wife...."
(I LOVE IT!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Aging:
Eventually you will reach a point
when you stop lying about your age
and start bragging about it. This is so true. I love
to hear them say "you don't look that old."
---------------------------------
The older we get,
the fewer things
seem worth waiting in line for.
---------------------------------
Some people
try to turn back their odometers.
Not me!
I want people to know why
I look this way.
I've traveled a long way
and some of the roads weren't paved.
********************
When you are dissatisfied
and would like to go back to youth,
think of Algebra.
-------------------------------
One of the many things
no one tells you about aging
is that it is such a nice change
from being young.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Ah, being young is beautiful,
but being old is comfortable.
*********
First you forget names,
then you forget faces.
Then you forget to pull up your zipper...
it's worse when
you forget to pull it down.
````````````````
Two guys, one old, one young,
are pushing their carts aroundWal-Mart
when they collide.
The old guy says to the young guy,
"Sorry about that. I'm looking for my wife,
and I guess I wasn't paying attention
to where I was going."
The young guy says, "That's OK, it's a coincidence.
I'm looking for my wife, too...
I can't find her and I'm getting a little desperate."
The old guy says, "Well,
maybe I can help you find her...
what does she look like?"
The young guy says,
"Well, she is 27 yrs. old,tall,
with red hair,
blue eyes, is buxom...wearing no bra,
long legs,
and is wearing short shorts.
What does your wife look like?'
To which the old guy says,"Doesn't matter,
--- let's look for yours."
(ADORABLE)
*********************
(And this final one especially for me,)
"Lord,
keep Your arm around my shoulder
and Your hand over my mouth!"
Forwarded by Gene ande Joan
Mayonnaise Jar & Two Beers
When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in
a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 Beers.
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front
of him.
When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty
mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.
He then asked the students if the jar was full.
They agreed that it was.
The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the
jar. He shook the jar lightly.
The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.
He then asked the students again if the jar was full.
They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar.
Of course, the sand filled up everything else.
He asked once more if the jar was full..
The students responded with a unanimous 'yes.'
The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the
entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the
sand.
The students laughed..
'Now,' said the professor as the laughter subsided, 'I want you to
recognize that this jar represents your life.
The golf balls are the important things - your family, your children,
your health, your friends and your favorite passions - and if everything
else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.
The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house
and your car..
The sand is everything else - the small stuff.
'If you put the sand into the jar first,' he continued, 'there is no room
for the pebbles or the golf balls.
The same goes for life.
If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never
have room for the things that are important to you.
Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.
Spend time with your children.
Spend time with your parents.
Visit with grandparents. Visit with your Aunts.
Take your spouse out to dinner.
Play another 18.
There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal.
Take care of the golf balls first - the things that really matter.
Set your priorities.
The rest is just sand.
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer
represented.
The professor smiled and said, 'I'm glad you asked.'
The Beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem,
there's always room for a couple of Beers with a friend.
2012 Ig Nobel Prizes ---
http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/
The Darwin Awards ---
http://www.darwinawards.com/
Why did I walk into this room? (Toon) ---
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid67524056001?bckey=AQ~~%2cAAAAAjHM3KE~%2cue6IyhgccnQfCR9niUq7SpiGuvtClfZX&bclid=0&bctid=1799012627001
Forwarded by David Fordham
Compiled from various sources and embellished a little:
"As a tenured faculty member, you are long overdue for retirement if you can
check off more than five of the following:"
You have to refer to the campus map to find the new library they built in 2002.
While trying to figure out how to get the ceiling projector to work, you long
for your overhead on the cart -- the one with the rolled mylar, where all you
did was flip the switch and it came on.
Your research papers never cite any works since 2004, because you can't figure
out how to use the library's new on-line database search software.
You haven't taught a junior or senior level class in more than five years. The
department chair relegates you to small graduate seminars where he only has to
listen to five or ten students complain per semester, or 150-seat freshman
introductory classes where no one pays any attention anyway.
Your office still has a complete shelf taken up with back issues of a hardcopy
periodical.
Your email signature still contains a caustic quote from someone who has been
dead more than 100 years.
You go to the library, and are amazed to discover that, of the eight floors in
the building, only one actually still holds books.
You write letters to the editor of the campus newspaper criticizing the
Administration, and sign your OWN name.
Everyone who signed your diploma has been dead ... more than 10 years.
You can name more than three Greek philosophers, even though your field is not
Greek philosophy.
You even know what one of those Greek philosophers was famous for.
Although you learned a long time ago what the AAUP really is, you still go to
their meetings anyway.
Your alma mater is now naming buildings after your classmates.
You are invited to sit on the stand at convocation even though you aren't a
dean.
You used to go to university-wide faculty meetings to see your old friends from
the other side of campus. Now you go to the hospital to see them.
You still have a hand-held calculator... one that is just a calculator, and
ISN'T also a phone, a camera, a GPS device, etc.
You use words like "ergo", "vis-a-vis", and "et cetera" in your ORAL
communication.
You tell the accreditation team that you've "integrated critical thinking into
the curriculum", because you find it easier to write "B-... needs more
supporting details" on the cover sheet of a student's paper than to make -- and
then grade -- a real exam.
You still believe that bright students come to a university to "become
enlightened citizens" rather than to "get a decent job".
You can remember when psychedelic colors applied to clothing rather than hair.
And when the boys had all the tattoo's and the girls had all the piercings.
You've never experienced the thrill of REALLY, SERIOUSLY cursing a recent
computer software upgrade ... during your classroom presentation.
You are no longer sure what your department's tenure requirements are.
You still have a box under your desk containing your dissertation data. And
while you threw out the punched cards years ago, you still have the reports
printed on green-bar fan-fold paper.
Your file cabinet has folders containing mylar transparencies, even though your
institution has not had an overhead projector in a classroom for over a decade.
You think you are using "modern classroom presentation technology" because you
own a laser pointer and know how to work it.
You still have a bottle of White-Out in your desk.
You can remember the clickety-clickety-clickety sound of a running 16mm film
projector.
You still believe the faculty should be in control of curriculum matters.
You still believe the faculty ARE in control of curriculum matters.
In class one day, you are startled to discover that the young lady in the second
row with the perennial zit has actually been wearing a pearl nose stud all this
time.
You now complain more about the administration than you do about the campus
parking situation.
You still believe faculty should spend more time in a classroom than they spend
in committee meetings arguing with each other about “vision statements”,
“assessment rubrics”, and “outcome-based learning objectives”.
You tell junior faculty, "back when I was on the Faculty Senate, we were a
positive force on the academy", and your memory is so bad you actually believe
it.
You attend your discipline’s annual national meeting, even though you aren’t
presenting a paper.
You are a male, and: (1) have a ponytail even though your hair is gray; (2) your
sportscoats all have elbow patches; (3) wear sandals (with or without socks)
and/or (4) own more than one bow-tie.
You are a female and: (1) have never worn pants to class; (2) wear nylons that
don't go higher than your knees; (3) don't see a need for "Women's Studies" as a
major degree program; and/or (4) aren’t sure what a “glass ceiling” is.
No student has ever bothered asking you to put a pro-LGBT sticker on your door.
You aren't even sure what LGBT means.
One of your former students is the main commencement speaker.
The library moved the textbook that you authored from the general stacks to
"compact shelving".
You have never given an on-line exam. And don't even know how to make one.
You've never made a Camtasia video. Or used Centra Symposium. Or performed a
Captivate screen capture. And aren't even sure what these things are.
You actually remember seeing, at least once in your lifetime, and smelling, a
quiz that was "run off" on a "purple plague" spirit duplicator.
It surprises you to learn that there are more than three times as many "support"
buildings on campus as there are academic buildings.
Your syllabus does not contain any rules addressing the use of laptops, iPads,
or smartphones in class.
You still believe that holding a Ph.D. is a status symbol in the eyes of the
general public.
You do not have a Facebook account. Or a Twitter account. Or a MySpace
account. Or a Blog. And you aren't sure how to go about getting one.
You still have floppy disks in your office. Somewhere.
Regardless of the dozens and dozens of mandatory faculty seminars and training
sessions you've been forced to sit through addressing the Cleary Act, FERPA, and
the ADA's reasonable accommodations requirements, you still aren't sure what all
these things are.
While calling roll on the first day of class, you get to “Quentin Merriwether
Calabrisi, Jr.,” and the name seems familiar, except for the “junior” part.
You can remember when faculty could find a place to park within five minutes of
arriving on campus, regardless of the time of day.
You know what a “chalk chuck” is. In fact, you actually HAVE a chalk chuck in
your desk drawer.
You know what the word “Duotang” refers to. And you have actually seen a
filmstrip projector. With or without the record player.
You actually owned a dot-matrix printer. And still have it. Somewhere.
You know the origin of the term “Carriage Return”.
You know how to change the ribbon in a typewriter. And remember owning a
typewriter once. At least you think you did... perhaps... maybe....
Forwarded by Jim Kirk
WHY MEN ARE NEVER DEPRESSED:
Men Are Just Happier People --
What do you expect from such simple creatures?
Your last name stays put.
The garage is all yours.
Wedding plans take care of themselves.
Chocolate is just another snack...
You can be President.
You can never be pregnant.
You can wear a white T-shirt to a water park.
You can wear NO shirt to a water park.
Car mechanics tell you the truth.
The world is your urinal.
You never have to drive to another gas station restroom because this one is
just too icky.
You don't have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt.
Same work, more pay.
Wrinkles add character.
Wedding dress $5000. Tux rental-$100.
People never stare at your chest when you're talking to them.
New shoes don't cut, blister, or mangle your feet.
One mood all the time.
Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat.
You know stuff about tanks.
A five-day vacation requires only one suitcase.
You can open all your own jars.
You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness.
If someone forgets to invite you,
He or she can still be your friend.
Your underwear is $8.95 for a three-pack.
Three pairs of shoes are more than enough..
You almost never have strap problems in public.
You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes..
Everything on your face stays its original color.
The same hairstyle lasts for years, even decades.
You only have to shave your face and neck.
You can play with toys all your life.
One wallet and one pair of shoes -- one color for all seasons.
You can wear shorts no matter how your legs look.
You can 'do' your nails with a pocket knife.
You have freedom of choice concerning growing a mustache.
You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives
On December 24 in 25 minutes.
Husband and Wife Comedy Team (The Jovers, 1980) ---
http://biggeekdad.com/2012/05/the-jovers/
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