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:

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:

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

The National Academies Press
PAPERBACK  $49
ISBN-10: 0-309-25639-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-309-25639-1

Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13396

 

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


Shahid Khan ---  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahid_Khan  

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

CFOs: Rates already low so even lower irrelevant

CFOs: Uncertainty and regulatory climate hurts investment

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 State’s Residents Live the Longest?
http://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/news/20120914/which-states-residents-live-longest

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

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