Tidbits on October 11, 2012
Bob Jensen? at Trinity University

Set 4 of My Favorite Foliage Photographs (2012)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Foliage/Set14/FoliageSet03.htm

 

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

 

 

Tidbits on October 11, 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

CPA, CPA, CPA --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXaVOkv_tyA&feature=share 

Peter Sellers Gives a Quick Demonstration of British Accents ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/peter_sellers_gives_a_quick_demonstration_of_british_accents.html

How to Make Better Decisions, a Thought-Provoking Documentary by the BBC --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/ihow_to_make_better_decisionsi_a_thought-provoking_documentary_by_the_bbc.html

Neil Armstrong’s Parents Appear on the Classic American TV Show “I’ve Got a Secret,1962" ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/neil_armstrongs_parents_appear_on_the_classic_american_tv_show_ive_got_a_secret_1962.html
Hint:  This isn't connected to the joke that "we'll have oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon" ---
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mrgorsky.asp

NPR Video on Pacioli:  The Accountant Who Changed The World ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/10/04/162296423/the-accountant-who-changed-the-world

Jensen Comment
It's never been clear how much the mathematician Pacioli changed the accounting world since his brand of double entry accounting was here long before he was born and long after he died. He did reduce it to s set of equations, but did this change the world?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory

 


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

An Unusual Rendition of the U.S. National Anthem --- http://www.starspangledbannerchallenge.com/

Flash-mob Ode to Joy --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbJcQYVtZMo
Thank you Aaron Konstam for the heads up.

James Cagney and Bob Hope --- http://videos2view.net/Hope-Cagney.htm

Sean Connery Reads C.P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Ithaca,” Set to the Music of Vangelis  --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/sean_connery_reads_cp_cavafys_epic_poem_ithaca_set_to_the_music_of_vangelis.html 

Tango Flamenco (Guitar) ---  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWCmubP5h9c&feature=related

Tango Viena 2012 --- https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=wd5xaPT2I9M

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

3D Panorama Videos Cities all over the World --- http://www.360cities.net/map#lat=45&lng=19&zoom=2

What an Astronaut’s Camera Sees (and What a Geographer Learns About Our Planet) from the ISS --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/what_an_astronauts_camera_sees_at_night.html

Photographs of Wonderful Places Around the World --- http://www.airpano.com/360Degree-VirtualTour.php?3D=Victoria-Falls-Zambia-Zimbabwe

NSSN Virginia Class Attack Submarine, United States of America --- http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/nssn/

Dwell (interior building designs) --- http://www.dwell.com/

Queen Elisabeth Morphing --- http://www.flixxy.com/queen-elisabeth-morphing.htm#.UGh7HWcsGN8

Noah's Ark in Hong Kong --- http://www.noahsark.com.hk/eng/index.php

Art Lovers Rejoice! New Goya and Rembrandt Databases Now Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/art_lovers_rejoice_new_goya_and_rembrandt_databases_now_online.html

Incredible Finger Drawings by Judith Braun --- http://www.boredpanda.com/finger-paintings-judith-braun/

Transcontinental Railroad Pictures and Exhibits --- http://cprr.org/Museum/Exhibits.html

Steamtown National Historic Site (steam locomotives) ---  http://www.nps.gov/stea/index.htm

American Railroad Journal --- http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=home;c=arj

Railroad Picture Archives --- http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/

American Railroad Journal --- http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=home;c=arj

The Countryside Transformed: The Railroad and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, 1870-1935 ---
http://eshore.vcdh.virginia.edu/index.php

City of Chicago Landmarks --- http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/landmarksweb/web/home.htm

Picture Chicago --- http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/chicago/index.asp

Historical Society of Michigan --- http://www.hsmichigan.org/

Joel Halpern in Macedonia Photographs (anthropology) --- http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/galleries/halpern.htm

Ward Morgan Photography, Southwest Michigan 1939-1980 ---
http://cdm16259.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p124301coll2

Dementia: The Self-Portraits of William Utermohlen:  When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen, an American artist living in London, immediately began work on an ambitious series of self-portraits --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/photogallery/429486/dementia-the-self-portraits-of-william-utermohlen/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121005

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

LibriVox (audio books) --- http://librivox.org/

LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain. There are several options for listening. The first step is to get the mp3 or ogg files into your own computer:

Would you like to record chapters of books in the public domain? It's easy to volunteer. All you need is a computer, some free recording software, and your own voice.

Bob Jensen's links to audio versions of books and poems --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Audio

Choices Reading Lists --- http://www.reading.org/resources/booklists.aspx

Moby Dick Big Read (audio version) --- http://www.mobydickbigread.com/

Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged

Sean Connery Reads C.P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Ithaca,” Set to the Music of Vangelis  --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/sean_connery_reads_cp_cavafys_epic_poem_ithaca_set_to_the_music_of_vangelis.html 

Vladimir Nabokov Makes Editorial Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novella The Metamorphosis --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/vladimir_nabokov_makes_editorial_tweaks_to_franz_kafkas_novella_ithe_metamorphosisi.html

Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Podcast --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/the_irejoycei_podcast_takes_you_through_james_joyces_iulyssesi_line_by_line_for_the_next_22_years.html


William Faulkner Tells His Post Office Boss to Stick It (1924)
Drinking with William Faulkner
William Faulkner Audio Archive Goes Online
William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying

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

Book--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookselling

Center for History of the Book --- http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/chb/

Find Books to Read

Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Best Selling Books --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_selling_books

"Amazon Lights the Fire With Free BooksL  Today, Amazon unveiled something radical: the Kindle Lending Library," by David Pogue, The New York Times, November 2, 2011 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/amazon-lights-the-fire-with-free-books/ 

Especially for Children --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Children

Choices Reading Lists --- http://www.reading.org/resources/booklists.aspx

Goodreads --- http://www.goodreads.com/

The Book Cover Archive --- http://bookcoverarchive.com/

Lesson Planet: Poetry Lesson Plans --- http://www.lessonplanet.com/search?keywords=poetry&media=lesson

Reading Rockets: Literary Resources for Teachers --- http://www.readingrockets.org/audience/teachers/

Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged

The Harvard Classics: A Free, Digital Collection --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/the_harvard_classics_a_free_digital_collection.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The University of Michigan Digital Humanities Series ---
 http://www.digitalculture.org/books/book-series/digital-humanities-series/

Free eBooks
"How to Download Free Ebooks With just a little searching, you can find and download free, legal ebooks for your e-reader, smartphone, or tablet," by Michael King, PC World,  Oct 15, 2011 ---
http://www.pcworld.com/article/241717/how_to_download_free_ebooks.html#tk.nl_wbx_t_crawl2

Digital Public Library of America --- http://dp.la/

Google Book Search --- http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html

"Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars," by Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Hundreds of Other links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author --- http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/

"QuickWire: Top 10 Trends in Academic Libraries," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-top-10-trends-in-academic-libraries/31796?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

eBook Readers --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ebooks.htm

 




Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on October 11, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations101112.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

"Who is Telling the Truth?  The Fact Wars:  ," as written on the Cover of Time Magazine

Jensen Comment
Both U.S. presidential candidates are spending tends of millions of dollars to spread lies and deceptions.
Both are alleged Christian gentlemen, a faith where big lies are sins jeopardizing the immortal soul.
The race boils down to the sad fact that the biggest Christian liar will win the race for the presidency in November 2012.

"Who is Telling the Truth?  The Fact Wars:  ," as written on the Cover of Time Magazine
"Blue Truth-Red Truth: Both candidates say White House hopefuls should talk straight with voters. Here's why neither man is ready to take his own advice ,"
by Michael Scherer (and Alex Altma), Time Magazine Cover Story, October 15, 2012, pp. 24-30 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/PresidentialCampaignLies2012.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Rotten to the Core ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

 




Center for Financial Services Innovation --- http://cfsinnovation.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers


Think of a dubious tactic of doubling tuition and then giving all student prospects 50% scholarships to attract more applicants

"Net-Price Calculators Get the Kayak Treatment," by Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 9, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/net-price-calculators-get-the-kayak-treatment/32238?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Remember when net-price calculators were going to be the next U.S. News & World Report rankings? That’s the comparison that staff members at Maguire Associates, a consulting firm, made a couple of years ago in a paper explaining what the calculators could mean for admissions.

But the calculators, which allow students to estimate what they would pay at a particular college after grants and scholarships, don’t seem to have gained much traction yet. While colleges have been required to post the calculators on their Web sites for nearly a year now, early evidence shows that only about a third of prospective students have tried one out.

The Maguire Associates paper predicted that online aggregators would spring up to allow students to compare their net prices at different colleges, much as Kayak.com lets travelers compare air fares. The prediction has come true: A new Web site, College Abacus, lets students do just that.

Whether this new comparison tool will encourage more prospective students to use the calculators, though, remains to be seen.

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


Sukuk --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukuk

Islamic Bond Excitement in Financial Markets
"Interested in buying sukuk? by Sabine Vollmer, CGMA Magazine, October 5, 2012 ---
http://www.cgma.org/magazine/news/pages/20126503.aspx

Following financial crises in the US and Europe, investors are increasingly attracted to raising funds for investments through Islamic bonds called “sukuk.”

Sukuk are an alternative to conventional bonds that governments and companies sell regularly to raise funds. They comply with sharia law, the moral code of conduct based on the Quran, which prohibits charging interest and trading in debt.

Ernst & Young’s Global Islamic Banking Centre of Excellence projects that global demand for sukuk is likely to triple to $900 billion in 2017. Here are a few reasons for the surge:

“Would the growth be the same if the US and the European market weren’t in crisis? Perhaps yes, but not at the rate you see now,” said Rizwan Kanji, a lawyer who specialises in sukuk transactions in the Dubai office of the law firm King & Spalding. “… The growth of sukuk will continue while the Western markets recover.”

Establishing a global standardised sukuk trading platform that is open to all financial institutions would go a long way toward spurring more supply, according to Ashar Nazim, E&Y’s MENA Islamic finance services leader.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
CGMA Magazine seems to be getting more and more innovative ---
http://www.cgma.org/magazine/Pages/MagazineHome.aspx

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

 


Tenure Track Versus Non-Tenure Track Versus ??????

"A New Faculty Path," by Adrianna Kezar, Susan Albertine and Dan Maxey, Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/10/02/essay-new-effort-rethink-faculty-roles-and-treatment-adjuncts

With all the recent discussions about disruptive technologies and ways to increase completion rates, too little attention has been paid to the roles of faculty members in the emerging new academy. What kinds of faculty do we need to ensure the success of today’s "new majority" students who are older, attend multiple institutions, come from families whose members have not attended college, and who have increased need for remediation and attention from faculty ? Who is currently carrying the biggest load in teaching these students, especially at the introductory levels, where far too many students drop out of college? How will faculty roles evolve in this new environment? To answer these questions, we need to take a hard look at the current status of college faculty — including the large percentage of those not tenured nor on the tenure track.

Today, more than 70 percent of all faculty members responsible for instruction at not-for-profit institutions serve in non-tenure-track (NTT) positions. The numbers are startling, but numbers alone do not capture the essence of this problem. Many of our colleagues among this growing category of non-tenure-track faculty experience poor working conditions and a lack of support. Not only is it difficult for them to provide for themselves and their families, but their working conditions also interfere with their ability to offer the best educational experience for their students.

Emerging research demonstrates that increases in the numbers of non-tenure-track faculty, particularly part-time faculty, and the lack of support they receive have adverse effects on our most important goals for student learning. For example, studies connect rising contingency to diminished graduation rates, fewer transfers from two- to four-year institutions, and lower grade-point averages. Other studies have found that non-tenure-track faculty make less frequent use of high-impact practices and collaborative, creative teaching techniques that we know are associated with deeper learning. They may not utilize innovative pedagogies for fear of poor student evaluations that might jeopardize their reappointment; they may have been excluded from professional development intended to hone faculty skills; they may be driving long distances to accumulate courses in several institutions. And to be clear, it is non-tenure-track faculty’s working conditions, exclusion from campus life, and lack of support that accounts for these findings. (A summary of all this research may be
found here.)

Even after years of urging and mounting calls for change, few institutions have developed policies and practices to support non-tenure-track faculty members or include them more completely in the life of our campuses. They remain "adjunct" to the institution -- something supplemental and perhaps not treated as an essential part of the whole. A growing number of educators agree this situation cannot continue if we are to have any success in improving the quality of student learning -- the core of our mission and the source of our collective future well-being.

Seeing so little action toward change, advocates for these faculty members from among the various stakeholder groups, ourselves included, are growing frustrated by what is not being done. However, where many see willful neglect, we see complicated systemic problems and compelling numbers of well-intentioned educators who simply do not know how to address what they know to be a problem. Important efforts by academic unions and disciplinary societies have increased awareness of the problem and offered new professional standards to respond to the inequities in contingent employment. However, no group working alone has been able to make meaningful progress.

So, we are stuck. It is for this reason that we started the
Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success in partnership with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. We sought to do something that has never been done before, to convene a broad range of key stakeholders interested in the changing faculty and student success to seek a better understanding of these issues in our time and develop strategies to address contingency and a vision for the new faculty together.

In using a Delphi approach, key stakeholders or experts on an issue are first surveyed on a complex policy issue; these stakeholders are then convened in person to discuss the issue – including their points of consensus and divergence – and to develop thoughtfully conceived solutions. We invited leaders from national associations such as the American Council on Education and the American Association of Community Colleges. Policy groups such as the Education Commission of the States and Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education joined the project. In addition to these groups, we invited the leaders of accreditation agencies, disciplinary societies, academic unions, faculty researchers, and academic leaders such as presidents, representatives of governing boards, deans and provosts. We also included advocacy organizations for NTT faculty, such as New Faculty Majority.

In May, we came together outside Washington.
A report from our deliberations is now available on the project website, as are several resources that were prepared for the meeting to frame participants’ understanding of the research that has been conducted on non-tenure track faculty and national trend data about their growth in numbers over 40 years. The end result of the meeting was the formation of two major, parallel strategies for moving forward:

The first strategy will engage higher education organizations and stakeholders in reconceptualizing the professoriate, including redefined faculty roles (beyond existing tenure or non-tenure-track faculty), rewards, and professional standards. A second strategy will lead to the creation of data and resource tool kits for use by campus stakeholders including faculty task forces, administrators, and governing boards, as well as accrediting agencies. The tool kits will draw upon existing knowledge and data, providing a blueprint for promoting greater awareness of non-tenure-track faculty issues. They will also provide examples of positive practices to support non-tenure-track faculty and show how policy change is possible among different types of institutions.

Undergirding all of our discussions was a shared acknowledgement that the academy lacks the information, data, shared awareness, and models necessary for supporting non-tenure-track faculty and achieving a vision for the future of the professoriate — even as the pace of change in higher education accelerates. Throughout our efforts, we have been attentive to the vast heterogeneity of non-tenure-track faculty as a group and the idea that the character of higher education institutions is extremely diverse. We have worked from a common understanding that any set of recommendations must be attuned to this heterogeneity and diversity.

Key insights and ways to begin addressing this problem include:

1. Collective action: No one group can effectively solve this problem alone. Collective action is needed to address its many complicated parts – the growing expenses of providing a high-quality college education amid declining state support, a lack of good faculty data, the scarcity of campus staffing plans, minimal access to best practices or effective models, the potential overproduction of Ph.D.s, and a tendency for prestige-seeking and mission drift by colleges and universities, to name only a few. The multifaceted and complicated nature of the problem is the reason why it persists and has endured so long. In coming together, we have to understand the priorities that connect us and the serious implications of inaction.

2. Perspective: Bringing together stakeholders with diverse perspectives helped us to identify all of the aspects of the problem so that they could be addressed in new ways. Perspective-taking is helpful. Coming to see the issue through the point of view of other stakeholders, many participants began to understand the issues differently and to see their role in creating solutions.

3. Common ground: There are many more common perspectives than would be expected among such a diverse group of stakeholders. Project participants generally agreed that the current three-tiered system (tenure-track, full-time non-tenure-track and part-time non-tenure track) is broken, that student success is being compromised, and that better data systems and greater awareness can promote movement toward better policies and practices to support non-tenure-track faculty.

4. The future professoriate: While we could not come to full agreement about what the nature of the future professoriate should be, we did agree to many common principles. They include the importance of academic freedom, shared governance, a livable wage, and greater job security for non-tenure-track faculty (in the form of multiyear contracts). There was also agreement that teaching and scholarship cannot be fully unbundled, that institutional roles should differ by institutional type, and that above all other goals, student success should be the primary focus of any faculty work. As we continue our work, we will refine these ideas into a workable vision for our future.

5. Trust: We need to learn to trust each other in order to address this problem. Unfortunately, trust in higher education has worn thin following the decline of shared governance, the rise in unilateral decision-making, and the apparent protectionism of narrow interests among the various stakeholders.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on tenure-track versus non-tenure track faculty ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#TenurePQ


Above all, Mr. Silver urges forecasters to become Bayesians. The English mathematician Thomas Bayes used a mathematical rule to adjust a base probability number in light of new evidence

Book Review of The Signal and the Noise
by Nate Silver
Price:  16.44 at Barnes and Noble
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-signal-and-the-noise-nate-silver/1111307421?ean=9781594204111

 

"Telling Lies From Statistics:  Forecasters must avoid overconfidence—and recognize the degree of uncertainty that attends even the most careful predictions," by Burton G. Malkiel, The Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2012 --- 
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444554704577644031670158646.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno64-wsj

It is almost a parlor game, especially as elections approach—not only the little matter of who will win but also: by how much? For Nate Silver, however, prediction is more than a game. It is a science, or something like a science anyway. Mr. Silver is a well-known forecaster and the founder of the New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight.com, which accurately predicted the outcome of the last presidential election. Before he was a Times blogger, he was known as a careful analyst of (often widely unreliable) public-opinion polls and, not least, as the man who hit upon an innovative system for forecasting the performance of Major League Baseball players. In "The Signal and the Noise," he takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the success and failure of predictions in a wide variety of fields and offers advice about how we might all improve our forecasting skill.

Mr. Silver reminds us that we live in an era of "Big Data," with "2.5 quintillion bytes" generated each day. But he strongly disagrees with the view that the sheer volume of data will make predicting easier. "Numbers don't speak for themselves," he notes. In fact, we imbue numbers with meaning, depending on our approach. We often find patterns that are simply random noise, and many of our predictions fail: "Unless we become aware of the biases we introduce, the returns to additional information may be minimal—or diminishing." The trick is to extract the correct signal from the noisy data. "The signal is the truth," Mr. Silver writes. "The noise is the distraction."

The first half of Mr. Silver's analysis looks closely at the success and failure of predictions in clusters of fields ranging from baseball to politics, poker to chess, epidemiology to stock markets, and hurricanes to earthquakes. We do well, for example, with weather forecasts and political predictions but very badly with earthquakes. Part of the problem is that earthquakes, unlike hurricanes, often occur without warning. Half of major earthquakes are preceded by no discernible foreshocks, and periods of increased seismic activity often never result in a major tremor—a classic example of "noise." Mr. Silver observes that we can make helpful forecasts of future performance of baseball's position players—relying principally on "on-base percentage" and "wins above replacement player"—but we completely missed the 2008 financial crisis. And we have made egregious errors in predicting the spread of infectious diseases such as the flu.

In the second half of his analysis, Mr. Silver suggests a number of methods by which we can improve our ability. The key, for him, is less a particular mathematical model than a temperament or "framing" idea. First, he says, it is important to avoid overconfidence, to recognize the degree of uncertainty that attends even the most careful forecasts. The best forecasts don't contain specific numerical expectations but define the future in terms of ranges (the hurricane should pass somewhere between Tampa and 350 miles west) and probabilities (there is a 70% chance of rain this evening).

Above all, Mr. Silver urges forecasters to become Bayesians. The English mathematician Thomas Bayes used a mathematical rule to adjust a base probability number in light of new evidence. To take a canonical medical example, 1% of 40-year-old women have breast cancer: Bayes's rule tells us how to factor in new information, such as a breast-cancer screening test. Studies of such tests reveal that 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammograms, and 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammograms (so-called false positives). What is the probability that a woman who gets a positive mammogram will in fact have breast cancer? Most people, including many doctors, greatly overestimate the probability that the test will give an accurate diagnosis. The right answer is less than 8%. The result seems counterintuitive unless you realize that a large number of (40-year-old) women without breast cancer will get a positive reading. Ignoring the false positives that always exist with any noisy data set will lead to an inaccurate estimate of the true probability.

This example and many others are neatly presented in "The Signal and the Noise." Mr. Silver's breezy style makes even the most difficult statistical material accessible. What is more, his arguments and examples are painstakingly researched—the book has 56 pages of densely printed footnotes. That is not to say that one must always agree with Mr. Silver's conclusions, however.

Continued in article

Bayesian Probability --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability

Bayesian Inference --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference

How to Make Better Decisions, a Thought-Provoking Documentary by the BBC --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/ihow_to_make_better_decisionsi_a_thought-provoking_documentary_by_the_bbc.html

The Cult of Statistical Significance: How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
Thank you Jagdish Gangolly for the heads up.

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


"Hydrogen Cars: A Dream That Won't Die:  Better technology and high battery costs have revived interest in hydrogen-guzzling vehicles," by Peter Fairley, MIT's Technology Review, October 8, 2012 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429495/hydrogen-cars-a-dream-that-wont-die/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121008

Jensen Comment
It might be an interesting student project to have students investigate what the price of hydrogen would have to become to make the prototype hydrogen automobile models competitive with hybrids on the road today.


The race, class, gender swindle

Eugene D. Genovese --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Genovese

Eugene Dominic Genovese (born May 19, 1930 – September 26, 2012) was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He has been noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the Left and Marxism, and embraced traditionalist conservatism.

. . .

Starting in the 1990s, Genovese turned his attention to the history of conservatism in the South, a tradition which Genovese came to celebrate and adopt. In his study, The Southern Tradition: the Achievements and Limitations of an American Conservatism, he examined the Southern Agrarians. In the 1930s, these critics and poets collectively wrote I'll Take My Stand, their critique of Enlightenment humanism. Genovese concluded that by recognizing human sinfulness and limitation, the critics more accurately described human nature than did other thinkers. The Southern Agrarians, he noted, also posed a challenge to modern American conservatives, with their mistaken belief in market capitalism's compatibility with traditional social values and family structures. Genovese agreed with the Agrarians in concluding that capitalism destroyed those institutions.

In his personal views, Genovese also moved to the right. Where he once denounced liberalism from a radical left perspective, in this later phase he did so as a traditionalist conservative. His change in thinking included converting to Roman Catholicism in December 1996. His wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese had also shifted her thinking and had already converted.

Continued in article

The author of the most influential body of Marxist historiography in the United States from the past half-century turned into one more curmudgeon denouncing “the race, class, gender swindle.”

"Left to Right & Wrong Both Ways," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, October 3, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/10/03/essay-death-eugene-genovese 

An ancient and corny joke of the American left tells of a comrade who was surprised to learn that the German radical theorist Kautsky’s first name was Karl and not, in fact, “Renegade.” He’d seen Lenin’s polemical booklet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky but only just gotten around to reading it.

Eavesdropping on some young Marxist academics via Facebook in the week following the historian Eugene Genovese’s death on September 26, I’ve come to suspect that there is a pamphlet out there somewhere about the Renegade Genovese. Lots of people have made the trek from the left to the right over the past couple of centuries, of course, but no major American intellectual of as much substance has, in recent memory, apart from Genovese. People may throw out a couple of names to challenge this statement, but the operative term here is “substance.” Genovese published landmark studies like Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) and – with the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, his wife -- Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, not score-settling memoirs and suchlike.

As for the term “renegade,” well… The author of the most influential body of Marxist historiography in the United States from the past half-century turned into one more curmudgeon denouncing “the race, class, gender swindle.” And at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee, no less. The scholar who did path-breaking work on the political culture of the antebellum South -- developing a Gramscian analysis of how slaves and masters understood one another, at a time when Gramsci himself was little more than an intriguing rumor within the American left – ended up referring to the events of 1861-65 as “the War of Southern Independence.”

Harsher words might apply, but “renegade” will do.

He is listed as “Genovese, Gene” in the index to the great British historian’s Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (2002). Actually, now I have to change that to “the late, great British historian” Hobsbawm, rather: he died on October 1.

The two of them belonged to an extremely small and now virtually extinct species: the cohort of left-wing intellectuals who pledged their allegiance to the Soviet Union and other so-called “socialist” countries, right up to that system’s very end. How they managed to exhibit such critical intelligence in their scholarship and so little in their politics is an enigma defying rational explanation. But they did: Hobsbawm remained a dues-paying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until it closed up shop in 1991.

The case of Genovese is a little more complicated. He was expelled from the American CP in 1950, at the age of 20, but remained close to its politics long after that. In the mid-1960s, as a professor of history at Rutgers University, he declared his enthusiasm for a Vietcong victory. It angered Richard Nixon at the time, and I recall it being mentioned with horror by conservatives well into the 1980s. What really took the cake was that he’d become the president of the Organization of American Historians in 1978-79. Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover had to be spinning in their graves.

When such a sinner repents, the angels do a dance. With Eric Hobsbawm, they didn’t have much occasion to celebrate. Though he wrote off the Russian Revolution and all that followed in its wake as more or less regrettable when not utterly disastrous, he didn’t treat the movement he’d supported as a God that failed. He could accept the mixture of noble spirits and outright thugs, of democratic impulses and dictatorial consequences, that made up the history he'd played a small part in; he exhibited no need to make either excuses or accusations.

Genovese followed a different course, as shown in  in the landmark statement of his change in political outlook, an article called  “The Question” that appeared in the social-democratic journal Dissent in 1994. The title referred to the challenge of one disillusioned communist to another: “What did you know and when did you know it?" Genovese never got around to answering that question about himself, oddly enough. But he was anything but reluctant  He was much less reluctant about accusing more or less everybody who’d ever identified as a leftist or a progressive of systematically avoiding criticism of the Soviets. He kept saying that “we” had condoned this or that atrocity, or were complicit with one bloodbath or another, but in his hands “we” was a very strange pronoun, for some reason meaning chiefly meaning “you.”

Continued in article


"Research Misconduct on the Rise, Study Finds," Inside Higher Ed, October 3, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/10/03/research-misconduct-rise-study-finds

 

Jensen Comment
Whew! To date there is not one reported research misconduct incident in accountics science. Or is it that lack of replication and commentary simply leads to a fantasy that there's never any research misconduct in accountics science?

Bob Jensen's threads on professors who plagiarized and/or cheated in other ways ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

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

Gaming for Tenure as an Accounting Professor ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems from Linda Kidwell)


EdX --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdX

Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITx) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Innovation_%26_Technology_Exchange

MIT versus MITx --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

"5 Ways That edX Could Change Education," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/5-Ways-That-edX-Could-Change/134672/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Since MIT and Harvard started edX, their joint experiment with free online courses, the venture has attracted enormous attention for opening the ivory tower to the world.

But in the process, the world will become part of an expensive and ambitious experiment testing some of the most interesting—and difficult—questions in digital education.

Can community-college students benefit from a new form of hybrid learning, based on a mix of local instruction and edX content? Can colleges tap alumni as teaching volunteers? Can labs be reinvented in the style of online video games?

EdX and its collaborators are developing tools and teaching models to answer those questions. And they view the project as a means to study even deeper problems, like understanding how people forget—and creating strategies to prevent it.

"It's a live laboratory for studying how people learn, how the mind works, and how to improve education, both residential and online," says Piotr Mitros, edX's chief scientist.

That laboratory remains a work in progress. When a Chronicle reporter visited edX's offices here, in a low-slung brick building on the edge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, the front entrance lacked even a sign, and staffers had engineered a conference table and bookcase from empty cardboard boxes. But with a $60-million investment announced in May and seven courses going live this fall, things are kicking into high gear. What follows, based on interviews with more than a dozen people affiliated with edX, is a closer look at what that could mean for students, scholars, and other colleges.

Engaging Alumni in New Ways

Robert C. Miller had a problem.

His students were writing so much code that the teaching staff lacked time to read it all and give fast feedback. So Mr. Miller, an MIT associate professor who teaches software engineering and human-computer interaction, decided to try a new tactic: crowdsourcing. His work may help solve a challenge facing massive online courses: how to provide human feedback to thousands of students.

Under Mr. Miller's model, Web-based software called Caesar breaks homework submissions into chunks. A mix of teaching staff, fellow students, and alumni volunteers evaluates the code, which is also automatically tested by a computer. Students then revise and resubmit their work. The human review is essential, Mr. Miller explains, because people can detect things that computers can't, like hidden bugs or poor design.

"The future of online grading is going to be a mix of automated approaches ... and human eyeballs," says Mr. Miller. The class that has deployed Caesar is expected to go on edX as it expands.

His project is one of several that highlight how technology can tap the altruism—and self-interest—of graduates. MIT alumni "are strongly motivated to find great programming talent," Mr. Miller says. By helping to review code, they could both spot that talent and expose students to their companies. Caesar, used on the campus for the past year, has attracted MIT graduates working at companies like Facebook and Google.

Across the Charles River, at Harvard's School of Public Health, E. Francis Cook Jr. and Marcello Pagano are working on a similar idea. The veteran professors will teach a class on epidemiology and biostatistics this fall, one of Harvard's first on edX. Details are still being worked out, but they hope to entice alumni to participate, possibly by moderating online forums or, for those based abroad, leading discussions for local students. Mr. Cook sees those graduates as an "untapped resource."

"We draw people into this program who want to improve the health of the world," he says. "I'm hoping we'll get a huge buy-in from our alums."

Reinventing Hybrid Teaching

In March, Tony Hyun Kim moved to the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator, where he spent three months teaching high-school students a spinoff of the first edX course. The adventure made the young MIT graduate one of the first to blend edX's content with face-to-face teaching. His hybrid model is one that many American students may experience as edX presses one of its toughest goals: to reimagine campus learning.

On his own initiative, Mr. Kim brought over lab gear and mentored about 20 teenagers through the circuits-and-electronics class, which is based on a course normally taken by MIT sophomores. The edX version features video snippets and interactive exercises, and Mr. Kim used the free online content to teach in a style known as the "flipped classroom." Students watched edX content at home. At school, Mr. Kim spent hours each day reviewing material and apprenticing them through labs and problems.

The results were remarkable. Roughly 12 students earned certificates of completion. One 15-year-old, Battushig, aced the course, one of 320 students worldwide to do so. EdX ended up hiring Mr. Kim, who hopes to start a related project at the university level in Mongolia.

EdX is now preparing a bigger experiment that is expected to test the flipped-classroom model at a community college, combining MOOC content with campus instruction. Two-year colleges have struggled with insufficient funds and large demand; they also have "trouble attracting top talent and teachers," says Anant Agarwal, who taught the circuits class and is president of edX. The question is how MOOC's might help community colleges, and how the courses would have to change to work for their students.

"MOOC's have yet to prove their value from an educational perspective," says Josh Jarrett, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which backs the community-college project. "We currently know very little about how much learning is happening within MOOC's, particularly for novice learners."

Gamifying Labs

As edX tries fresh teaching models, it's also engaging the math muscle of MIT to push the boundaries of simulations.

When MIT students take the circuits class, they sit at a lab workbench and build with tools. Lab equipment can cost a fortune: An oscilloscope may run $20,000.

Offering a comparable experience online is an engineering challenge. It must be fast, sufficiently open-ended, and simple enough to use without consulting "telephone-book-size manuals," as Mr. Agarwal puts it. Mr. Agarwal, a former director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has worked on this problem for years. "To me, the big hurdle to online learning was, How do we mimic the lab experience?"

Continued in article

Gamification --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification

"Why Gamification is Really Powerful," by Karen Lee, Stanford Graduate School of Business, September 2012
http://stanfordbusiness.tumblr.com/post/32317645424/why-gamification-is-really-powerful
Karen Lee is the Social Web Strategist at the Stanford GSB

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


Gamification --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification

"Why Gamification is Really Powerful," by Karen Lee, Stanford Graduate School of Business, September 2012
http://stanfordbusiness.tumblr.com/post/32317645424/why-gamification-is-really-powerful
Karen Lee is the Social Web Strategist at the Stanford GSB

Last week, Stanford GSB’s Social Web Strategist Karen Lee attended a Week 0 course called “How Neuroscience Influences Human Behavior,” co-taught by Marketing Professor Baba Shiv and Lecturer Nir Eyal. Each post focuses on an interesting insight from class. 

In my last post, I explained how desire is a fundament driver of habits and how companies can leverage Nir Eyal’s “Desire Engine” framework to build engaging, habit-forming products. 

After two days of learning the fundamentals of how our brain functions and influences human behavior, our co-instructors Nir Eyal and Baba Shiv invited Managing Director of Mayfield Fund Tim Chang (Stanford MBA ’01) and Founder of Gamification Co. Gabe Zichermann to provide our class a real-world perspective on the applications and implications of habitual behavior for customers, businesses and future generations. They both addressed gamification, which is defined as the process of using game thinking and mechanics to engage users.

Gamification has become somewhat a polarizing topic for people, as its grown from a niche technique used in the gaming industry, popularized largely due to social games like Farmville, to a popularized approach to engage customers across different industries. Tim Chang explained that gamification is largely misunderstood because of the implied meanings in the word “game” itself. People think of gamification in two extremes, either a hardcore competition or something casual, frivolous and shallow. The definition of game is actually much wider in scope. A game is defined by these 3 core elements: 

  1. Goal or objective: system or user defined
  2. Score: usually in real-time, explicit feedback after every action or decision
  3. Rules: to influence score, boundaries for play

Through this lens, there are many goals in life that are like a game. Dating. Landing a job. Hitting a sales goal. Driving a car. Gabe Zichermann shared how the automobile industry has embraced gamification to encourage fuel efficiency and engage drivers in a more meaningful way.

Ford rolled out with a new dashboard for their their 2010 Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan hybrid models. The “SmartGauge with EcoGuide” dashboard displays 4 types of data screens based on what you’re interested in, ranging from the basics of fuel level and battery charge status to more complex information like your driving performance and fuel efficiency.

The game objective Ford creates for the driver is driving efficiency. The driver’s score is comprised of several different data points (e.g., hills, air conditioning, braking style) and is presented in the dashboard with multiple displays in real-time . . . .

. . .

The system’s real-time feedback acts as personal driving coach on how to maximize fuel efficiency, so the driver learns overtime how to change the way they drive to improve their score.

In a slightly different but related game objective of achieving long-term fuel efficiency, Ford took gamification a step further by displaying on the right hand side “Efficiency Leaves,” which is a visual representation of the driver’s efficiency in the form of growing or wilting leaves and vines.  The more efficient a driver is, the more lush and beautiful the leaves are. It works the other way as well.

Continued in article

Video:  How Indie Video Game Makers Are Changing the Game ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/how_indie_video_game_makers_are_changing_the_game.html

Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment


Ethics Learning Games

Hi Mark,

I've not had first-hand experience with ethics games. But here are a few ideas (not all are accounting games):.

Ethics Games and Puzzles (and other ethics learning resources) --- http://www.ethics.org/resource/ethics-games-and-puzzles

Putting Yourself in Somebody Else's Shoes --- http://thinkingethics.typepad.com/thinking_ethics/games/

Situation Ethics Games --- http://www.rsrevision.com/games/alevel/situationethics.htm

Scruples Game --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scruples_%28game%29

Ethics Training Games --- http://www.ehow.com/info_8028940_ethics-training-games-ideas.html
This has a "brainstorming category."
Concept Mapping is a type of brainstorming --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#ConceptMaps
There's a good brainstorming accountics science paper in
"Auditors’ Use of Brainstorming in the Consideration of Fraud: Reports from the Field," The Accounting Review, 2010, Vol 85, No. 4

John A. Schatzel at Stonehill College does research on simulation games for teaching auditing, some of which entail ethics ---
You must have access to the AAA Commons for the above link.
John posts to the AECM on occasion. Maybe he will read this and help us out.

You might consider easy-to-use software for making your own games
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/41dab78f88
 

"Games in the Classroom (part 3)," by Anastasia Salter, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 30, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/games-in-the-classroom-part-3/36217?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The challenge of finding a game for the classroom can be difficult, particularly when the games you’ve imagined doesn’t exist. And if you wait for a particular challenge or topic to make its way into game form, it might be a while. Educational games and “serious” games haven’t always kept up with the rest of video gaming, in part because there’s no high return. Modern game development tends towards large teams and impressive budgets, and these resources are rarely used on explicitly educational productions. While efforts like the STEM Video Game Challenge provide incentives for new learning games, and commercial titles can often be adapted for the classroom, there’s still more potential than games have yet reached.

But if you have a new concept for playful learning, you can still bring it to life for your classroom. There are two ways to start thinking about making games in the classroom: the first is to build a game yourself, and the second is to engage students in making games as a way to express their own understanding.

You’re probably not a game designer, although there’s a game for that: Gamestar Mechanic can help you “level up” from player to designer. But it’s also important to remember building games rarely happens alone: as with digital humanities projects, games lend themselves to collaboration. If you have a game design program (or even a single course) at your university or a neighboring school, there might be an opportunity to partner your students with them towards creating valuable content-based educational games. Similarly, there may be other faculty who are interested in collaborating on grant-funded projects to build new educational experiences, or collective and expanding projects like Reacting to the Past (which many readers cited as a classroom game system of choice). You might also find collaborators, inspiration and games in progress through communities such as Gameful, a “secret HQ for making world-changing games”–and community manager Nathan Maton has a few things to say about building serious games for education.

There’s also a difference between making a game or asking your students to make a game as an expression of content for pedagogical purposes and making a game in the industry. Even a flawed game can provide an opportunity for learning and discussion. And your students will often bring a wealth of their own experiences with games to the process, offering them a chance to make new connections with your course material.

Ready to try making games? Here are a few tools for getting started.

 

September 30, 2012 reply from John A. Schatzel

Thanks Bob,

I do receive the posts from this group in archive mode, saw your suggestion, and hope that I can add something helpful to Mark, yourself, and others. My recent research has turned to introducing an ethics audit simulation to accounting education. I recently created such a game and am dedicating it to the advancement of international business ethics research. It is my fifth auditing simulation and although the others (as you noted in your post) address ethics to various degrees, the latest one is focused primary on doing an ethics audit using either a Triple Bottom Line or international ethics auditing standards approach.

The newest game involves doing an audit using SA8000 by Social Accountability International, which includes ethics management and several other ethics areas. The game was made using interactive multimedia technologies and is played online. The initial prototypes have been tested successfully in accounting systems and business ethics courses and the student feedback has been, on balance, very positive.

From Mark's perspective, the game would allow students to be assigned to groups and then play the game competitively using the internal scoring system. The scoring system is based on the one I originally created for the Real Audit(tm) financial auditing simulation and then adapted to the Swanson Interactive Internal Control Simulation, which involves a role-playing adventure doing a COSO internal control evaluation (including ethical values). The scores from Swanson and the new Ethics Audit Simulation are posted to a web-based performance reporting system that faculty can access, but are not reported in the game to students. I kept the scores private because I didn't feel the scoring system was refined enough at present.

One possible research study would be to examine the effect of introducing a game-based scoring system to students on the learning process or on learning outcomes (if that were possible). Regardless, I believe that there are many studies that could be performed with the new ethics audit simulation while students are being encouraged to think at the higher end of Bloom's intellectual scale. If Mark or anyone else is interested in using the software for teaching/ research purposes, they can contact me directly and I will get them a demo set up as well as accounts for their students. I hope this helps!

John A. Schatzel, Ph.D., CPA
Professor of Accounting
Stonehill College

jschatzel@stonehill.edu

 


Book--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookselling

Center for History of the Book --- http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/chb/

Find Books to Read

Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Best Selling Books --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_selling_books

"Amazon Lights the Fire With Free BooksL  Today, Amazon unveiled something radical: the Kindle Lending Library," by David Pogue, The New York Times, November 2, 2011 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/amazon-lights-the-fire-with-free-books/ 

Especially for Children --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Children

Choices Reading Lists --- http://www.reading.org/resources/booklists.aspx

Goodreads --- http://www.goodreads.com/

The Book Cover Archive --- http://bookcoverarchive.com/

Lesson Planet: Poetry Lesson Plans --- http://www.lessonplanet.com/search?keywords=poetry&media=lesson

Reading Rockets: Literary Resources for Teachers --- http://www.readingrockets.org/audience/teachers/

Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged

The Harvard Classics: A Free, Digital Collection --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/the_harvard_classics_a_free_digital_collection.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The University of Michigan Digital Humanities Series ---
 http://www.digitalculture.org/books/book-series/digital-humanities-series/

Free eBooks
"How to Download Free Ebooks With just a little searching, you can find and download free, legal ebooks for your e-reader, smartphone, or tablet," by Michael King, PC World,  Oct 15, 2011 ---

http://www.pcworld.com/article/241717/how_to_download_free_ebooks.html#tk.nl_wbx_t_crawl2

Digital Public Library of America --- http://dp.la/

Google Book Search --- http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html

"Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars," by Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Hundreds of Other links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author --- http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/

"QuickWire: Top 10 Trends in Academic Libraries," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-top-10-trends-in-academic-libraries/31796?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

eBook Readers --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ebooks.htm


Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged
Note the "Statistics" link --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/stats

The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) receives reports from libraries, schools, and the media on attempts to ban books in communities across the country. We compile lists of challenged books in order to inform the public about censorship efforts that affect libraries and schools. Explore the 30 Years of Liberating Literature timeline, Banned/Challenged Classics, Frequently Challenged Books of the 21st Century, 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books by Decade, and the Most Frequently Challenged Authors pages of the 21st Century. The ALA condemns censorship and works to ensure free access to information. For more information on ALA's efforts to raise awareness of censorship and promote the freedom to read, please explore Banned Books Week.

We do not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges as research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five that go unreported. In addition, OIF has only been collecting data about banned banned books since 1990, so we do not have any lists of frequently challenged books or authors before that date.

How is the list of most challenged books tabulated?

The Office for Intellectual Freedom collects information from two sources: newspapers and reports submitted by individuals, some of whom use the Challenge Reporting Form. All challenges are compiled into a database. Reports of challenges culled from newspapers across the country are compiled in the bimonthly Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom (published by the ALA, $50 per year for a digital subscription); those reports are then compiled in the Banned Books Week Resource Guide. Challenges reported to the ALA by individuals are kept confidential. In these cases, ALA will release only the title of the book being challenged, the state and the type of institution (school, public library). The name of the institution and its town will not be disclosed.

Where can you find more information on why a particular book was banned?

If the information you need is not listed in the links to the left, please feel free to contact the Office for Intellectual Freedom at (800) 545-2433, ext. 4220, or oif@ala.org.

Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm


New Effort to Sell (successful) MBA Application Essays ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/10/02/new-effort-sell-mba-application-essays

Bob Jensen's threads on the Market for Admissions Test Questions and Essay "Consulting" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#AdmissionsEssays

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

Jensen Comment
I wonder how many buyers are faculty members?


"One Business School Is Itself a Case Study in the Economics of Online Education," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Case-Study-the-Economics-of/134668/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Distance education has been very good for the business school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. More precisely, the revenue-generating online M.B.A. program has been good for the school.

The 11-year-old online program accounts for just over a quarter of the enrollment at UMass's Isenberg School of Management, yet revenues from the program cover about 40 percent of the school's $25-million annual budget. And that's after UMass Online, the in-house marketing agency, as well as a few other arms of the university have taken their cuts.

The business school's experience helps to illustrate the economics of distance education and the way one college with a marketable offering is using online education to help its bottom line.

With a total of about 4,830 undergraduate and graduate students and a faculty of 105, the Isenberg school spends an average of about $5,175 per student. The online M.B.A. program, with 1,250 students, generates about $10-million in net revenue, or about $8,000 per student. Looking at it one way, that's nearly double the per-student revenue that the school generates from all other sources of income for the rest of its enrollment, which comprises about 3,400 undergraduates, 100 full-time, on-campus M.B.A. students, and 80 doctoral candidates.

Mark A. Fuller, the dean, says the profitability of the online program has little to do with any inherent cost savings from offering courses via technology, but quite a bit to do with the high student demand for M.B.A.'s offered by a brand-name public institution in a format and on a schedule made possible by the technology.

The key, he says, is that it's a new educational product, for which the school commands a premium price. The online M.B.A. costs $750 per credit hour (although the business school gets only 60 percent of that), and students take 39 credits; the price equivalent for the 55-credit face-to-face M.B.A. is $482 per credit hour.

Aside from not having the expense of providing the classroom and keeping it heated or cooled, a college doesn't necessarily save money providing a course online rather than in a classroom. In some cases, other costs associated with an online course, for technology and student support, can equal and even exceed those savings.

But institutions do have ways to make their online classes more profitable. With no physical-space limitations, they can pack more students into the distance-education courses, so each class generates more revenue. Or they can hire part-time faculty members to teach a packaged curriculum for lower pay. They can also go cheap on the learning-management system or support services for distant students.

The Isenberg school has a single faculty for all its courses; the online-class sizes aren't any larger than the other ones; and, with few exceptions, all professors teach a mix of undergraduate and graduate courses, including the online ones. "We try to create the same experience" for all students, Mr. Fuller says. (Most students take the M.B.A. online, but they have the option of taking some of their credits at sites in Massachusetts.)

Mr. Fuller says the price is in line with or less expensive than that charged by other public universities offering online M.B.A.'s.

Under this approach, he says, the entire business school participates in the online program, and the entire school benefits.

The online business model takes into account other costs as well. Ten percent of the gross revenues goes to UMass Online, a systemwide organization that helps market online courses and provides the learning-management system that delivers them. The Amherst campus also takes a few other bites, including a charge for overhead and a payment to the provost's office for other universitywide projects.

In the end, the Isenberg school keeps 60 percent of revenue generated by the program. Still, Mr. Fuller considers it a financial boon for the school. "It opens up new markets, particularly for high-quality students with work experience who are placebound," he says. About 20 percent of the students are doctors or other health professionals, with a good number of lawyers and engineers enrolled as well—"all the people you would expect who can't quit their job" and move to Amherst, says Mr. Fuller.

Continued in article

 

Jensen Comment
There are obvious cost savings of distance education delivery that avoids the needs for land, buildings, classrooms, and dorms (although dorms generally are self-funding). However, not all distance education programs avoid such costs. For example, in the past it was common to pipe live classrooms into dorms and homes. This still entailed having classrooms.

Faculty costs may be greater or lower for distance education relative to onsite education. Very intense distance education programs with small classes and top faculty don't necessarily save on faculty costs ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm

The fact of the matter is that distance education really offers a much wider range of alternatives from low cost to very high cost per student. Also tuition charged may vary with distance education. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee often teaches the same course online and onsite but charges higher tuition for the online version, thereby treating the online courses as cash cows.

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education cost considerations ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/distcost.htm


Top 100 MBA Programs (beauty is in the eye of the beholder)

This is some good news for Chicago and New Hampshire
"2012 Full time MBA ranking," The Economist, 2012 ---
http://www.economist.com/whichmba/full-time-mba-ranking
Alternate link --- http://www.economist.com/whichmba

1 Chicago, University of - Booth School of Business United States
2 Dartmouth College - Tuck School of Business United States
3 Virginia, University of - Darden Graduate School of Business Administration United States
4 Harvard Business School United States
5 Columbia Business School United States
6 California at Berkeley, University of - Haas School of Business United States
7 Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT Sloan School of Management United States
8 Stanford Graduate School of Business United States
9 IESE Business School - University of Navarra Spain
10 IMD - International Institute for Management Development Switzerland
11 New York University – Leonard N Stern School of Business United States
12 London Business School United Kingdom
13 Pennsylvania, University of – Wharton School United States
14 HEC School of Management, Paris France
15 Cornell University – Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management United States
16 York University – Schulich School of Business Canada
17 Carnegie Mellon University – The Tepper School of Business United States
18 ESADE Business School Spain
19 INSEAD France
20 Northwestern University – Kellogg School of Management United States
21 Emory University – Goizueta Business School United States
22 IE Business School Spain
23 UCLA Anderson School of Management United States
24 Michigan, University of – Stephen M. Ross School of Business United States
25 Bath, University of – School of Management United Kingdom
26 Yale School of Management United States
27 Queensland, University of – Business School Australia
28 Texas at Austin, University of – McCombs School of Business United States
29 Duke University – Fuqua School of Business United States
30 City University – Cass Business School United Kingdom
31 Hult International Business School United States
32 Vanderbilt University – Owen Graduate School of Management United States
33 Ohio State University – Fisher College of Business United States
34 Washington, University of – Foster School of Business United States
35 Georgetown University – Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business United States
36 Mannheim Business School Germany
37 Cranfield School of Management United Kingdom
38 Melbourne Business School – University of Melbourne Australia
39 Rice University – Jesse H Jones Graduate School of Business United States
40 North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of – Kenan-Flagler Business School United States
41 Hong Kong, University of – Faculty of Business and Economics Hong Kong
42 Henley Business School United Kingdom
43 Southern California, University of – Marshall School of Business United States
44 Indiana University – Kelley School of Business United States
45 Cambridge, University of – Judge Business School United Kingdom
46 Curtin Graduate School of Business Australia
47 Washington University in St Louis – Olin Business School United States
48 Oxford, University of – Saïd Business School United Kingdom
49 Notre Dame, University of – Mendoza College of Business United States
50 Wake Forest University Schools of Business United States
51 Wisconsin School of Business United States
52 EDHEC Business School France
53 Maryland, University of – Robert H Smith School of Business United States
54 Strathclyde, University of – Business School United Kingdom
55 Boston University School of Management United States
56 Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad India
57 EMLYON France
58 Minnesota, University of – Carlson School of Management United States
59 Arizona State University – W. P. Carey School of Business United States
60 Warwick Business School United Kingdom
61 Macquarie Graduate School of Management Australia
62 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – School of Business and Management Hong Kong
63 University College Dublin – Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business Ireland
64 Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Netherlands
65 Iowa, University of – Henry B Tippie School of Management United States
66 Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School Belgium
67 California at Davis, University of-Graduate School of Management United States
68 Pennsylvania State University – Smeal College of Business United States
69 Grenoble Graduate School of Business France
70 SDA Bocconi School of Management Italy
71 Texas Christian University – Neeley School of Business United States
72 Nanyang Business School – Nanyang Technological University Singapore
73 George Washington University – School of Business United States
74 Durham Business School United Kingdom
75 McGill University – Desautels Faculty of Management Canada
76 Audencia Nantes School of Management France
77 Temple University – Fox School of Business United States
78 Concordia University – John Molson School of Business Canada
79 International University of Japan – Graduate School of International Management  
80 Lancaster University Management School United Kingdom
81 University of St. Gallen Switzerland
82 Southern Methodist University – Cox School of Business United States
83 Yonsei University School of Business Republic of Korea
84 Birmingham, University of – Birmingham Business School United Kingdom
85 China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) China
86 Nottingham University Business School United Kingdom
87 WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management Germany
88 Aston Business School United Kingdom
89 Rochester, University of – William E Simon Graduate School of Business United States
90 Purdue University – Krannert Graduate School of Management United States
91 British Columbia, University of – Sauder School of Business Canada
92 National University of Singapore – The NUS Business School Singapore
93 HEC Montréal Canada
94 Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong
95 Calgary, University of – Haskayne School of Business Canada
96 Copenhagen Business School Denmark
97 International University of Monaco  
98 University of Georgia – Terry College of Business United States
99 Pittsburgh, University of – Katz Graduate School of Business United States
100 Case Western Reserve University – Weatherhead School of Management United States

You can read the comments to this article at
http://www.economist.com/whichmba/which-mba-top-25#comments

One comment reads that The Economist's rankings are more accurate because The Economist magazine is more "trustworthy" that other media sources that rank MBA programs. This comment seems to overlook the fact that different media sources use different types of people to do the rankings. There are different strokes for different folks even if the ranking outcomes were trustworthy from other sources. Even if the ranking sources are trustworthy, there are huge sources of possible (honest) error.

And the rankings can be quite misleading for prospects who do not do their own in-depth homework relative to their needs and wants. For example, most MBA programs are no longer good sources for preparing students for careers in CPA firms. There are some exceptions, and students wanting accounting careers might be badly mislead by any of the MBA ranking sources below.
Who are the people who do the rankings?

The U.S. News rankings are influenced very heavy by research reputations of business graduate schools. The WSJ rankings are influenced heavily by "best buys" in the sense that the top ranked MBA program may be more of a diamond in the rough where you don't have to pay quite as much to get an outstanding graduate. The Business Week rankings are influenced heavily by the varying quality and effort of alumni initiatives and organizations. It would seem that current students might be the most variable group of evaluators and the most difficult to predict year-to-year. The criterion that probably is very important with students is placement in their most desired career tracks.

Bob Jensen's threads on rankings controversies and rankings by by other media sources ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings


Disaster for Dodd Frank --- Lawyers are Litigating

"Courts taking up opposition to Dodd-Frank," Dina ElBoghdady, The Washington Post, October 5, 2012 --- Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/courts-taking-up-opposition-to-dodd-frank/2012/10/05/ebeb1874-0e27-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html

After failing to scuttle the landmark legislation in Congress, critics of the Dodd-Frank Act overhauling financial regulations are trying to chisel away at it in the courts — with some initial success.

Twice, federal regulators have lost in court trying to defend the rules, which were put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. On Friday, they were back in court again, fighting for yet another regulation they say is linked to Dodd-Frank.

Each time, the challenge came from a lawyer with a prominent legal pedigree: Eugene Scalia, son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The legal battles raise an urgent question that’s likely to surface again and again about how much deference the courts are willing to grant the agencies that police corporate America.

“After all the lobbying in Congress to tear down Dodd-Frank, there’s now a second stage in the war: the courts,” said Donald Langevoort, a Georgetown Law securities professor. “The judges seem more than willing to say that the rules adopted in the aftermath of the financial crisis simply can’t be enforced because of procedural defects.”

In the case Friday, a federal judge heard a challenge to a rule that requires mutual funds that invest in certain financial instruments to register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Last week, the same court struck down a regulation designed to rein in speculative commodities trading. And about a year ago, an appeals court blocked a rule that would have made it easier for shareholders to oust members of corporate boards.

In each case, Scalia’s team at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher argued that the regulators failed to justify the rules they crafted or fully consider their economic impact.

“The agencies gave reasons that didn’t add up, contradicted themselves or failed to respond to significant criticisms raised by the public,” Scalia said in an interview. “Any one of those things is going to result in a rule getting thrown out by any court at any time.”

In the case argued Friday, the CFTC said that the financial overhaul bill gave it authority to set the new rules for mutual funds. But the plaintiffs said the rule is unrelated to the Dodd-Frank law, and that the agency is using that law “to change the subject” because the regulation is neither necessary nor justified by economic analysis.

Similar arguments prevailed in the two cases decided by the courts so far.

In the commodities trading decision last week, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Wilkins told the CFTC to justify the need for a regulation that would limit how many contracts a trader can obtain for the future delivery of 28 commodities, including natural gas and oil. The rule also would have applied to certain financial instruments known as swaps, a form of derivative.

The agency said it was acting under a Dodd-Frank mandate designed to reduce excessive speculation in the commodities market so that no one trader could control such a large percentage of the market that it skews prices.

Continued in article

Rotten to the Core --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm


David M. Walker --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Walker_%28U.S._Comptroller_General%29

Career as Comptroller General

Walker served as Comptroller General of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from 1998 to 2008. Appointed by President Bill Clinton, his tenure as the federal government's chief auditor spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations. While at the GAO, Walker embarked on a Fiscal Wake-up Tour,[1] partnering with the Brookings Institution, the Concord Coalition, and the Heritage Foundation to alert Americans to wasteful government spending.[2] Walker left the GAO to head the Peterson Foundation on March 12, 2008.[3] Labor-management relations became fractious during Walker's nine-year tenure as comptroller general. On September 19, 2007, GAO analysts voted by a margin of two to one (897–445), in a 75% turnout, to establish the first union in GAO's 86-year history.

Peter G. Peterson Foundation

In 2008, Walker was personally recruited by Peter G. Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, and former Secretary of Commerce under Richard Nixon, to lead his new foundation. The Foundation distributed the documentary film, I.O.U.S.A. which follows Walker and Robert Bixby, director of the Concord Coalition, around the nation, as they engage Americans in town-hall style meetings, along with luminaries such as Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin.

Peterson was cited by the New York Times as one of the foremost "philanthropists whose foundations are spending increasing amounts and raising their voices to influence public policy."[5] In philanthropy, Walker has advocated a more action-based approach to the traditional foundation: “I do believe, however, that foundations have been very cautious and somewhat conservative about whether and to what extent they want to get involved in advocacy.”[5] David Walker stepped down as President and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation on October 15, 2010 to establish his own venture, the Comeback America Initiative

Campaign for fiscal responsibility

Walker has compared the present-day United States to the Roman Empire in its decline, saying the U.S. government is on a "burning platform" of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, expensive overcommitments to government provided health care, swelling Medicare and Social Security costs, the enormous expense of a prospective universal health care system, and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon]

Walker has also taken the position that there will be no technological change that will mitigate health care and social security problems into 2050 despite ongoing discoveries.

In the national press, Walker has been a vocal critic of profligate spending at the federal level. In Fortune magazine, he recently warned that "from Washington, we'll need leadership rather than laggardship." in another op-ed in the Financial Times, he argued that the credit crunch could portend a far greater fiscal crisis;[11] and on CNN, he said that the United States is "underwater to the tune of $50 trillion" in long-term obligations.

He favorably compares the thrift of Revolutionary-era Americans, who, if excessively in debt, would "merit time in debtors' prison", with modern times, where "we now have something closer to debtors' pardons, and that's not good."

Other responsibilities

Prior to his appointment to the GAO, Walker served as a partner and global managing director of Arthur Andersen LLP and in several government leadership positions, including as a Public Trustee for Social Security and Medicare from 1990 to 1995 and as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Pension and Welfare Benefit Programs during the Reagan administration. Before his time at Arthur Andersen, Walker worked for Source Finance, a personnel agency, and before that was in Human Resources at accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand.

Continued in article

In 2010 David Walker was admitted to the Accounting Hall of Fame --- Click Here
http://fisher.osu.edu/departments/accounting-and-mis/the-accounting-hall-of-fame/membership-in-hall/david-michael-walker/

"Former comptroller general urges fiscally responsible reforms," by Ken Tysiac, Journal of Accountancy, October 6, 2012 ---
http://journalofaccountancy.com/News/20126578.htm

The giant red digits on the “U.S. Burden Barometer” outside the auditorium where David Walker spoke Friday provided the numbers behind this prominent CPA’s message: The United States urgently needs significant government financial reform.

Counting upward at a feverish pace, the barometer represented an estimate of what Walker, a former U.S. comptroller general, calls the “federal financial sinkhole,” combining explicit liabilities, commitments and contingencies, and obligations to Social Security and Medicare.

Shortly before Walker began his presentation, the number stood at $70,821,389,917,073.

“It’s 70.8 trillion dollars, going up 10 million a minute, a hundred billion a week,” Walker told an audience consisting primarily of CPAs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “So the federal financial sinkhole is much bigger than the politicians admit. It’s growing rapidly by them doing nothing, and they’ve become very adept at doing nothing. And something has got to be done.”

Walker, a political independent, headed the U.S. Government Accountability Office from 1998 to 2008. As CEO of the not-for-profit Comeback America Initiative, he is promoting fiscal responsibility and seeking solutions to federal, state, and local fiscal imbalances in the United States.

His tour, which is barnstorming 16 states in 34 days, ends Tuesday and positions Walker as one of the leading sentinels in a growing chorus of concern over the economic direction of the United States at an important time. With a presidential election closing in on its final days, one of the most persistent questions both candidates face is how they will handle the economy, taxes, and the federal deficit.

Educating the public about the deficit and the important, difficult, disciplined action that could bring it under control is Walker’s passion. He warns of the impending “fiscal cliff” the nation faces in January 2013 as the result of the scheduled expiration of various tax provisions, and says a U.S. debt crisis is possible within two years.

He comes armed on his tour with statistics that demonstrate the financial peril that government spending and deficits have brought for the United States. His PowerPoint slides show that:

  • Federal spending as a percentage of GDP has grown from 2% in 1912 to 24% in 2012.
  • Total government debt in the U.S. is estimated to be 137.8% of the economy, when intra-governmental holdings are included, in 2012.
  • Publicly held federal debt as a percentage of GDP is projected to grow to 185% by 2035, according to one scenario in the Congressional Budget Office’s long-term outlook.


“The federal government has grown too big, promised too much, lost control of the budget, waited too long to restructure, and it needs fundamental restructuring,” Walker said during an interview before the event. “Not nip and tuck. Radical reconstructive surgery done in installments over a period of time.”

Walker showed that defense spending in the United States in 2010 exceeded the combined total spent by 15 other nations, including China, Russia, France, the U.K., Japan, Saudi Arabia, India, and Germany. And he showed that U.S. per capita health care costs ($7,960) were more than double the OECD average ($3,361) and far outpaced those of Canada ($4,363) and Germany ($4,218).

He wants to reform budgeting, Social Security, health care, Medicare and Medicaid, defense spending, and the tax code.

He envisions measures that tie debt to GDP targets as needed reforms of federal budget controls. He advocates suspending the pay of members of Congress if they fail to pass a budget. With regard to Social Security, he would raise the taxable wage base cap, gradually raise the retirement eligibility ages, and revise the benefit structure based on income.

Walker would guarantee a basic level of health coverage for all citizens, revise payment practices to be evidence based, and phase out the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance, which he says estimates show will cost the federal government a total of more than $650 billion from 2010 to 2014. He would impose an annual budget for Medicare and Medicaid spending, and make Medicare premium subsidies more needs based.

He would reform the military by requiring cost consideration in defense planning, “right-sizing” bases and force structure, and modernizing purchasing and compensation practices. He also would reform individual and corporate federal income taxes, increasing the effective tax paid by the wealthy and decreasing the number of citizens who pay no income tax.

At an event whose sponsors included the AICPA, the North Carolina Association of Certified Public Accountants, and the N.C. Chamber of Commerce, Walker said CPAs have an important role to play in bringing about these changes.

“I believe that CPAs have a disproportionate opportunity and an obligation to be informed and involved here,” Walker said. “They’re good with numbers. They’re respected by the public. And I think that our profession, really, ought to be leaders in this area.”

The AICPA has long been a leading advocate for comprehensive reform that would simplify tax laws without reducing the productive capacity of the economy. In addition, the AICPA works as a proponent of personal financial literacy and fiscal responsibility through efforts such as 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy and What’s at Stake.”

Anthony Pugliese, AICPA senior vice president–Finance, Operations and Member Value, said Walker’s message was on point with the Institute’s initiatives promoting financial literacy and responsibility at the consumer, business, and government levels.

“We hope our members can make a difference. We know they can make a difference with the clients they serve and small business owners around the country and individual consumers,” Pugliese said. “We hope this message is spread, and I think we have a vital role to play in this.”

Walker said that political changes need to be made in order to bring about all these other transformations that would put the United States on a better fiscal path. He encourages development of a strategic framework for the federal government and creation of a government transformation task force. He calls for Congressional redistricting reform, integrated and open primaries, campaign finance reform, and term limits.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the pending economic collapse of the United States ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm

 


The Wandering Path From Knowledge Portals to MOOCs

You can read about the early knowledge portal experiment at Columbia University that offered great hopes by failed early on.
Fathom was one of the early on initiatives to create an academic knowledge portal somewhat similar to Wikipedia, although Columbia and its prestigious university partners were taking on responsibility for content rather than users. Fathom was not a Wiki.

Bob Jensen's threads on Fathom and Other Knowledge Portals ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm
Note that this page was written before Columbia and its partners abandoned the costly effort.

Fathom Partners



"A Pioneer in Online Education Tries a MOOC," by Ann Kirschner, Chronicle of Higher Ed, October 1, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Pioneer-in-Online-Education/134662/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

MOOOOOOOOC! Surely "massive open online course" has one of the ugliest acronyms of recent years, lacking the deliberate playfulness of Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) or the droll shoulder shrug suggested by the word "snafu" (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up).

I'm not a complete neophyte to online learning. Back in 1999, I led the start-up team for Fathom, one of the earliest knowledge networks, in partnership with Columbia University and other institutions here and abroad, and I'm a board member of the Apollo Group. So I was understandably curious about these MOOC's. With fond memories of a thrilling virtual trip a dozen years ago to Ephesus, Turkey, via a multimedia-rich, self-paced course created by a professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, I decided to check out a MOOC for myself.

Coursera, a new company that offers free online courses through some of the world's best-known universities, had the widest and most impressive selection. I blocked my ears to the siren call of science fiction, poetry, and history and opted for something sober: "Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act." It's taught by the Emanuel brother who isn't the Chicago mayor or the Hollywood superagent—Ezekiel Emanuel, an M.D. and Ph.D. who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. For the next eight weeks, I was part of a noisy, active, earnest, often contentious, and usually interesting group of students. There didn't seem to be any way to gauge the number enrolled, but I learned about the students from a discussion group. There were quite a few lawyers, doctors, and other health-care professionals. Some were struggling with personal health disasters and wanted tools to predict how the health-care act would affect their futures. Some were international researchers doing comparative studies. Others were higher-education folks like me, testing the MOOC waters.

The quality and format of the discussions were immediate disappointments. A teaching assistant provided some adult supervision, but too many of the postings were at the dismal level of most anonymous Internet comments: nasty, brutish, and long. The reliance on old-fashioned threaded message groups made it impossible to distinguish online jerks from potential geniuses. I kept wishing for a way to break the large group into small cohorts self-selected by background or interests—health-care professionals, for instance, or those particularly interested in the economics of health care. There was no way to build a discussion, no equivalent to the hush that comes over the classroom when the smart kid raises his or her hand.

If you believe the sage's advice that we learn much from our teachers and colleagues but most of all from our students, MOOC's will be far more effective when we are able to learn from one another.

Not surprisingly, enterprising MOOCsters are already organizing themselves outside the online classroom, using social-media tools like Google Hangouts and Facebook. In New York, students schedule meetings in Starbucks; in Katmandu, a group relies on Meetup to get together. Some course providers are facilitating external interaction: Udacity has offered Global Meetup Day with Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford University computer scientist (and Udacity co-founder) known for his course on artificial intelligence. Coursera threw a giant barbecue in Menlo Park, Calif., complete with volleyball and beanbag tossing.

Of course, peer learning takes you only so far: At some point, somebody has to know something about the subject. Professor Emanuel was a presence only in videos, but these were uniformly excellent. The cameras caught him walking briskly around an actual lecture hall, and I liked the presence of shadowy classmates sitting in Philadelphia, as if this were happening in real time. The videos were pleasantly peppered with pop-up quizzes. No embarrassment for the wrong answer, and I was ridiculously pleased at correctly guessing that the proportion of health-care costs in the United States that goes to prescription drugs is only 10 percent. For those in a rush, watching at twice normal speed is sort of fun— don't you secretly wish you could sit through some meetings at double speed?

I was a faithful student for a few weeks, until I fell prey to my worst undergraduate habit, procrastination—only now my excuses were far more sophisticated. I have to finish a manuscript! I have a board meeting! I have to meet my mother's new cardiologist!

In a MOOC, nobody can hear you scream.

I might have abandoned the charming Professor Emanuel altogether had the Supreme Court's decision to uphold President Obama's health-care program not injected the spice of real-time action into the discussion and refreshed my interest.

Somewhere between the videos and the readings and the occasional dip into the discussion groups, I found myself actually learning. I was particularly interested in how malpractice contributes to health-care costs but was instructed by my professor that the potential savings there amounted to mere "pencil dust." And who knew about the proposed National Medical Error Disclosure and Compensation Act of 2005, which would have reduced the number of malpractice cases, accelerated their resolution, and lowered costs by two-thirds?

To earn a certificate, I would have had to submit several essays for a grade, and I stopped short of that (see excuses above). Essays are peer-graded, and it won't surprise anybody who has ever taught undergraduates to hear that the student evaluations can be fierce. On the discussion boards, there was considerable discussion of grade deflation, plagiarism, and cheating. Alas, academic sins do follow us into the land of MOOC's, despite a nicely written honor code. Bad behavior in any classroom, real or virtual, should be no more surprising than gambling in Casablanca. In fact, brace yourself for a breathtaking new form of voluntary identity sharing: Your fake student avatar, now available for a small fee, will take your class for you.

Looking back, I suppose Fathom was a proto-MOOC, and I confess to some surprise that the Coursera format has evolved little beyond our pioneering effort of a decade ago. Yet when it came time to assess the course, I found myself rating it pretty highly, and concluded that aside from the format, the failings were mostly mine, for lack of focus. Like many MOOC students, I didn't completely "finish" the course. However, the final evaluations seemed mostly enthusiastic. From the comments, most of the students seemed to find the course long on substance: "comprehensive," "a good balance between the law, policy, and economics," "rich with multiple perspectives on health-policy issues."

Now, I could have read a book or done this on my own. But you could say the same thing about most education. A course is not a book but a journey, led by an expert, and taken in the company of fellow travelers on a common quest for knowledge. My MOOC had those elements, albeit in a pretty crude form.

You'd have to live under a rock not to know that crushing student debt, declining state support, and disruptive technologies have made it imperative to look at new models for teaching. The competitive landscape for higher education is changing every day. China recently declared the goal of bringing half a million foreign students to its shores by 2020, and is investing in programs friendly to Americans and other international students. American MOOC's may point the way to retaining the best students and faculty in the world, while adding the lively and collaborative components of technology-enhanced teaching and learning.

It is true that nobody yet has a reasonable business plan for these courses, and there is concern over completion rates and whether colleges are "giving away the farm," as a recent MIT alumni-magazine article put it. It is not hard to anticipate the end of free and the start of the next stage: fee-based certificate programs built around MOOC's. But for now, the colleges leading those efforts are making relatively modest—and rare—investments in research and development. Their faculty members are excited about the opportunity to experiment. Let's give this explosion of pent-up innovation in higher education a chance to mature before we rush to the bottom line.

Continued in article

"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 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

"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

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

Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm


Update on the Roaring Online Nonprofit Western Governors University (WGU) founded in 1997 by the governors of 19 states
A competency-based university where instructors don't assign the grades --- grades are based upon competency testing
WGU does not admit foreign students
WGU now has over 30,000 students from sponsoring states for this nonprofit, private university

Western Governors University (WGU) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGU

Competency-Based Learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

The article below is about WGU-Texas which was "founded" in 2011 when Texas joined the WGU system
"Reflections on the First Year of a New-Model University," by Mark David Milliron, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Reflections-on-the-First-Year/134670/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Western Governors University Texas, where I am chancellor, is not an easy institution to describe to your mother—or even your hip sister. It just doesn't fit the profile of most traditional universities, even the newer for-profit and online ones. It brings the work of a national, online, nonprofit university into a state, and it embraces a competency-based education model that is rarely found on an institutionwide level.

Even for seasoned educators, WGU Texas feels different. And in a year that has seen flat or declining enrollments at many traditional colleges, reports critical of for-profit institutions, and continuing debate over the perils and promise of online learning, our story, and our growth, has been unique. As we hit our one-year anniversary, it's worth taking a few moments to reflect on the ups, downs, challenges, and champions of this newest state model. I'd offer three key reflections on lessons we've learned:

Building a strong foundation. Western Governors was founded as a private, multistate online university 15 years ago by governors of Western states. Texas is only the third state model within the system, following WGU Indiana and WGU Washington. Before our opening, leaders of Western Governors took time to make sure the idea of this state university made sense for Texas. The intent was to add high-quality, affordable capacity to the state's higher-education system, particularly for adult learners, and to localize it for Texans and their employers.

This outpost was poised to "go big" in one of the biggest of states, offering more than 50 bachelor's and master's degrees in high-demand fields in business, education, information technology, and health professions. WGU's online-learning model allows students to progress by demonstrating what they know and can do rather than by logging time in class accumulating credit hours.

In meetings across the state, the idea of WGU Texas gained the support of the state's political, legislative, and higher-education leaders, as well as the Texas Workforce Commission and the Texas Association of Community Colleges. Rushing to roll out was not the goal; entering the education ecosystem with solid support of the model was.

I came on board as chancellor in December 2011. Having served on WGU's Board of Trustees for six years, I knew the model, and having graduated from and worked for the University of Texas at Austin, I knew Texas.

In the past six months, we have hired key staff and faculty, formed a state advisory board, opened a main office and training center in downtown Austin, launched our first wave of student outreach, begun working with employers in different metro regions, and started connecting online and on the ground with students. After absorbing WGU's 1,600 existing Texas students, WGU Texas grew by more than 60 percent in this first year, entering August 2012 with more than 3,000 students.

In about eight weeks, we'll hold our first commencement in Austin, celebrating the graduation of more than 400 students. We're moving quickly now, but it's the firm foundation of outreach, support, and systems that served us well as we took on the next two challenges:

Confronting conflation. WGU Texas is laser-focused on a student population that is typically underserved. We see ourselves as a good fit for adult learners who need an affordable, quality, and flexible learning model, particularly working students who want to attend full time. We are especially focused on the more than three million Texans who have some college and no credential—students like Jason Franklin, a striving adult learner in a high-demand IT field who had gone as far as he could in his career without a degree. He earned a bachelor's and a master's degree through Western Governors, and is now working on a master's degree from WGU Texas.

We'd like to help these students reach their goals and get on a solid career and lifelong-learning path.

However, in offering a new model like ours, you quickly find the conflation problem a challenge. Some assume that you're trying to compete for the fresh-from-high-school graduates who want a campus experience. Others assume that because you're online, you must be a for-profit university. Still others put all online education programs in the same bucket, not distinguishing at all between a traditional model online and a deeply personalized, competency-based learning model.

Fighting conflation by clearly differentiating and properly positioning our university has been essential. We've had to be clear—and to repeat often—that our approach is designed for adult learners who have some college and work experience. We're absolutely OK with telling prospective students, partner colleges, and state-policy leaders that for 18- to 20-year-olds looking to embark on their first college experience, we are probably not the right fit. In fact, first-time freshmen make up less than 5 percent of our student population.

The for-profit conflation has been even more interesting. Many people assume that any online university is for-profit. We are not. And even when we assure them that our nonprofit status keeps us deeply committed to low tuition—we have a flat-rate, six-month-term tuition averaging less than $3,000 for full-time students, which our national parent WGU has not raised for four years—they have a hard time getting their minds around it.

Others are sure we are nothing more than an online version of the traditional model, relying entirely on adjunct faculty. When we explain our history, learning model, and reliance on full-time faculty members who specialize in either mentoring or subject matter, it takes some time. But once people embrace the idea of a personal faculty mentor who takes a student from first contact to crossing the graduation stage, they warm quickly to the model.

Synching with the state's needs. While forming the foundation and fighting conflation are important, I'd say the key to WGU's state-model successes is the commitment to synching with the economic, educational, and student ecosystem of the state.

On the economic level, we've been able to work directly with employers eager to support our university, advance our competency-centered model, and hire our graduates. Educationally we have been fortunate to have smart and strategic partners that have guided our entry into the state. For example, our Finish to Go Further transfer program, in partnership with the Texas community-college association, motivates students to complete their associate degrees before transferring. This strategy supports the goal of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board of significantly improving postsecondary access and success in Texas.

Continued in article

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

Jensen Comment
WGU is neither a traditional university nor a MOOC. It started as an experiment to deliver a quality education without having the 19 states have to build and/or maintain physical campuses to deliver college education to more students. Admittedly, one of the main incentives was to expand learning opportunities without paying for the enormous costs of building and maintaining campuses. WGU was mostly an outreach program for non-traditional students who for one reason or another are unable to attend onsite campuses. But the primary goal of WGU was not and still is not confined to adult education.

WGU is not intended to take over onsite campus education alternatives. The founders of WGU are well aware that living and learning on an onsite campus brings many important components to education and maturation and socialization that WGU cannot offer online. For example, young students on campus enter a new phase of life living outside the homes and daily oversight of their parents. But the transition is less abrupt than living on the mean streets of real life. Students meet face-to-face on campus and are highly likely to become married or live with students they are attracted to on campus. Campus students can participate in athletics, music performances, theatre performances, dorm life, chapel life, etc.

But WGU is not a MOOC where 100,000 anonymous students may be taking an online course. Instead, WGU courses are relatively small with intimate communications 24/7 with instructors and other students in most of the courses. In many ways the learning communications may be much closer online in WGU than on campus at the University of Texas where classrooms often hold hundreds of students taking a course.

There are some types of learning that can take place in live classrooms that are almost impossible online.
For example, an onsite case analysis class (Harvard style) takes on a life of its own that case instructors cannot anticipate before class. Students are forced to speak out in front of other students. A student's unexpected idea may change the direction of the entire case discussion for the remainder of the class. I cannot imagine teaching many Harvard Business School cases online even though there are ways to draw out innovative ideas and discussions online. Physical presence is part and parcel to teaching many HBS cases.

Competency-based grading has advantages and disadvantages.
Competency-based grading removes incentives to brown nose instructors for better grades. It's unforgiving for lazy and unmotivated students. But these advantages can also be disadvantages. Some students become more motivated by hoping that their instructors will reward effort as well as performance. At unexpected points in life those rewards for effort may come at critical times just before a student is apt to give up and look for a full time McJob.

Some students are apt to become extremely bored learning about Shakespeare or Mozart. But in attempting to please instructors with added effort, the students may actually discover at some unexpected point something wonderful about Shakespeare or Mozart. Mathematics in particular is one of those subjects that can be a complete turn off until suddenly a light clicks and student discovers that math is not only interesting --- math can be easier once you hit a key point in the mathematics learning process. This definitely happened with me, and the light did not shine for me until I started a doctoral program. Quite suddenly I loved mathematics and made it the central component of my five years of full-time doctoral studies at Stanford University.

Thus WGU and the University of Texas should not be considered competitors. They are different alternatives that have some of the same goals (such as competency in learning content) and some different goals (such as living with other students and participating in extracurricular activities).

I wish WGU well and hope it thrives alongside the traditional state-supported campuses. WGU in some ways was a precursor to MOOC education, but WGU is not a MOOC in the sense that classes are small and can be highly interactive with other students and with instructor. In a MOOC, students have to be more motivated to learn on their own and master the material without much outside help from other students or instructors.

There are many ways to teach and many ways to learn. WGU found its niche. There's no one-size-fits-all to living and learning.

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


Note that this is a book available for about $15 or less for used copies
FORTUNE The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time: How Apple, Ford, IBM, Zappos, and others made radical choices that changed the course of business --- Click Here
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fortune-the-greatest-business-decisions-of-all-time-fortune-magazine-editors/1113015377?cm_mmc=affiliates-_-linkshare-_-bhxbhyulyvm-_-10%3a1&ean=9781603200592&r=1

Jensen Comment
I also find it interesting out some of the same companies making the "greatest decisions of all time" also make the worst decisions of all time. For example, IBM invented the PC but let it slip away to Microsoft and Apple because IBM considered the PC that it invented to be just a toy.

Apple gave Bill Gates and Paul Allen an opening by refusing to make the Mac operating system an open source for other hardware manufacturers of portable computers. If Apple has made the Mac an open source platform, Bill Gates may have had no alternative other than becoming a used car salesman or a programmer for Apple.

In its earliest years, Ford carried the assembly line mentality to a fault by keeping the product lines too narrow and standardized for the common man, thereby giving rise to General Motors and other manufacturers for innovative and less standardized (sometimes luxury) alternatives like Packards.


"U. of South Carolina Crafts an Online Degree That Students Can Afford," by Alina Mogilyanskaya, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-South-Carolina-Crafts-an/134566/

Mark E. Pittman is in many ways the quintessential student for the University of South Carolina's new Palmetto College. At 47, he is a former Navy man, a husband, a father of three, and the principal breadwinner in his family. More than a decade after leaving behind his studies at South Carolina, he has re-enrolled—and if all goes well, he will soon become the first person in his family to earn a bachelor's degree.

Mr. Pittman recently began studying in the university's new Back to Carolina program, an online degree-completion option for adults who are 25 or older and previously earned at least 60 academic credits at the university. Back to Carolina is a pilot program for Palmetto College, the first offering in a much broader distance-learning effort set to begin in the fall of 2013.

With Palmetto, the first program of its kind in the state, the university sees itself as filling a gap in the availability of affordable bachelor's degrees for South Carolinians, as well as contributing to the state's educational-attainment and work-force goals.

More than that, the university is positioning itself to compete with for-profit institutions.

Palmetto College will offer online bachelor's-completion programs in a variety of vocational fields, including business, criminal justice, education, and nursing, which students can pursue on their own time. It will enroll students who already hold at least 60 credits from one of the system's largely two-year "regional" colleges, a South Carolina technical college, or an out-of-state institution, and who, for whatever reason, are unable to relocate to a four-year, or "senior," campus to complete a baccalaureate degree.

The South Carolina system has four regional colleges, and about 500 students per year transfer to one of the four senior campuses to continue toward bachelor's degrees. "How many are not able to relocate, that's a different story," says Michael D. Amiridis, the university's provost. "That's what we will be testing with the Palmetto College."

"We always think of the dropout as someone who couldn't make it, but by far the predominant reason is that someone had economic challenges or married or needed to take a job. And so we want these people to come back to the university and to complete their bachelor's degrees," says Harris Pastides, president of the university.

Mr. Pittman, for example, lives in Kershaw, S.C., a town of about 1,800 people. The majority of Kershaw's workers commute out of town to their jobs, and the only site of higher education there is an off-campus center of York Technical College.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Pittman was majoring in biology at the university, first taking courses at the Lancaster campus, about a half-hour's drive from his home, and then at the main campus, in Columbia, an hour away. After two and a half years, the pressures of studying, along with those of providing for and being able to spend time with his wife and young children, became too much, and Mr. Pittman left the university for the work force.

For the past four years he has been working at home, in order to cut out the time he spent commuting to his job at Bank of America, in Charlotte, N.C.—63 miles each way—and to spend more time with his family. Now he is also studying at home, evenings and weekends, to earn a B.A. in liberal studies, the degree that Back to Carolina is piloting this year.

"It's certainly added to my plateful," Mr. Pittman says. "But I'm not complaining. It's a great opportunity, and I'm going to leverage it and take advantage of it as much as I can."

Competitive Pricing

One of the "guiding principles" of Palmetto College is that its programs are "positioned to compete with for-profit institutions," says a February progress report compiled by Huron Consulting Group, which worked with the university to develop the Palmetto College concept. By offering competitively priced online degrees backed by the resources of a large public institution and the university's brand, officials hope to attract the demographic that for-profits often claim as their main market.

While for-profit colleges have been criticized for their low online-degree-completion rates, Mr. Amiridis anticipates that there won't be a "huge discrepancy" between the graduation rates of South Carolina's traditional campuses and those of Palmetto College. Attributing his expectation of student success to the hybrid nature of the program—the first 60 credits of study will be completed at a traditional campus and the last 60 online—he emphasizes that students will already have an academic history before enrolling in online courses.

That history will not only prepare them to perform academically but also aid in the admissions process. "We are selective, and we're careful in the way that we select people to make sure that they have a reasonable chance of success," Mr. Amiridis says. "I view this as an ethical responsibility, quite frankly."

Apart from distinguishing itself through this admissions standard, Palmetto College will focus on a more specific population than that of the for-profits, he says.

"The populations that we're trying to serve, they know us. They know the University of South Carolina. In many cases they aspire to receive a degree from the University of South Carolina," Mr. Amiridis says. "We're not competing with for-profit institutions. We're not trying to take this and go nationally."

The provost's comments parallel the marketing principle put forward by the Huron report, which states that "techniques should be used to differentiate USC from the for-profit institutions that are heavily marketed."

The consultants' report is also explicit about Palmetto College's role, concluding that at a price of $367 per credit hour, the college will become "a significant competitor to the for-profit institutions that have recently become major players in the South Carolina higher-education marketplace."

A study done in conjunction with Huron two years ago showed that at that sample price, Palmetto College courses for students with 60 credits would cost less than 40 percent of a comparable course offered by a for-profit in the state, Mr. Amiridis says. Ultimately, administrators decided that Palmetto tuition would be comparable to that for the system's two- and four-year campuses.

Despite its focus on former University of South Carolina students, the new college may end up competing with for-profits more directly.

"One of the things that's going to happen is that at some point in time, Palmetto will exhaust that population," says Bruce N. Chaloux, chief executive of the Sloan Consortium, which promotes online learning in higher education.

While the consortium recommends that institutions engage in adult degree-completion programs those previously enrolled students who had left without degrees, Mr. Chaloux says that transplants to the state or holders of credits from other universities would also be interested.

'Catching Fire'

The creation of Palmetto College is also a move to leverage South Carolina's regional campuses while streamlining the university system. The four regional colleges will be consolidated under the administrative umbrella of Palmetto College, which will be led by a new chancellor. Some of the colleges' operations, like financial aid, human resources, and budget and finance will be centralized, and additional advisers will be hired to serve Palmetto students.

No staffing cuts have been announced, although Mr. Amiridis says the move may lead to "an optimization of the staffing needs."

Ann C. Carmichael, dean of the regional campus at Salkehatchie, says the centralization of resources and personnel will empower the university's regional colleges by allowing for "collective decision making" and leading to "more efficient use of scarce dollars."

Palmetto College is an expansion of Palmetto Programs, an option that has allowed students at regional colleges to complete baccalaureate degrees in liberal arts or organizational leadership "synchronously," or by attending live broadcasts of lectures held on other campuses.

"It's almost like a natural evolution of what's been happening," says Sandra J. Kelly, chair of the university's Faculty Senate. Faculty in both the senior and regional colleges have been converting courses into a synchronous online format for Palmetto Programs; those who are interested are now crafting "asynchronous classes," or ones that students can take on their own time, for Palmetto College.

Continued in article

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


A Billion Here, A Billion There:  Sometimes it's not real money
"Harvard Endowment Lost Money in Last Fiscal Year," Inside Higher Ed,  September 27, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/09/27/harvard-endowment-lost-money-last-fiscal-year 

Harvard University's endowment lost about $1 billion in the 12 months through June, Bloomberg reported. The fund, still the largest university endowment in the world, ended up at $30.7 billion, down about 0.05 percent. Harvard, like many other universities, saw major losses the year that the recession started, but many other universities have been posting gains more recently. Harvard officials said that their losses were due to investments in publicly traded non-U.S. companies and in "emerging market" shares.

Things are worse for most other universities
"One-Third of Colleges Are on Financially 'Unsustainable' Path, Bain Study Finds," by Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/One-Third-of-Colleges-Are-on/133095/


Book Review
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN-13: 9780394703176
1964 Pultzer Prize Winner for Non-fiction

by Richard Hofstadter
The paperback price new is $15 and used copies are available for less than a third of the new price
Reviewed by Michael Dirda
September 24, 2012
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Library-Without-Walls/Anti-Intellectualism-in-American-Life/ba-p/8967

October 1, 2012 reply from Richard Sansing

For a more recent book on the same theme, I recommend Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400096383/ref=cm_li_v_cs_d?tag=linkedin-20 

Richard Sansing

 


Steve Keen in Australia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Keen

They're Great!!!
Steve Keen: Behavioral Finance Lectures 2012  --- Click Here
http://www.valueinvestingworld.com/2012/09/steve-keen-behavioral-finance-lectures.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ValueInvestingWorld+%28Value+Investing+World%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

I’ve just uploaded the first 8 lectures in my Behavioral Finance class for 2012. The first few lectures are very similar to last year’s, but the content changes substantially by about lecture 5 when I start to focus more on Schumpeter’s approach to endogenous money ---
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/23/behavioral-finance-lectures/

Related book: Debunking Economics

Jensen Comment
These are quite good slide show lectures.

 
"Video:  Behavioral Finance from PBS Nova," by Jim Mahar, Finance Professor Blog, March 27, 2011---
 http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/behavioarl-finance-from-pbs-nova.html

Bob Jensen's Threads on Behavioral and Cultural Economics and Finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#Behavioral

Bob Jensen's threads on tutorials, lectures, videos and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/23/behavioral-finance-lectures/

Bob Jensen's threads on tutorials, lectures, videos and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/23/behavioral-finance-lectures/


From the TaxProf Blog by Paul Caron on October 2, 2012

Raj Chetty Named 2012 MacArthur Fellow

Raj Chetty (Harvard University, Department of Economics) has been named a 2012 MacArthur Fellow:

Raj Chetty is an economist whose rigorous theoretical and empirical studies are informing the design of effective government policy.  His initial work focused on resolving inconsistencies in earlier theories of specific questions in public finance, such as how dividend tax cuts affect corporate behavior and how unemployment insurance affects job-seeking behavior.  More recently, he and colleagues designed novel empirical tests to gauge the impact of sales taxes on demand.  In a study at a large supermarket chain, they demonstrated that, although most customers were well-informed about the retail sales tax rates, consumers purchased less of a product when posted prices indicated the associated sales tax than when the tax was simply added to the product’s base price at checkout.  This observation, suggesting that the way in which a tax is perceived can have as much or more impact on consumer decision making as the tax itself, is an important contribution to the emerging field of behavioral public finance.  Using large administrative databases drawn from tax and social security records in the United States and Europe, Chetty currently is exploring a range of other questions, such as the effect of tax policy on how much people work, the extent to which tax deductions for retirement savings stimulate individual savings, and key aspects of early childhood education.  In a study on teacher quality using these data sets and information gleaned from school district databases, Chetty and colleagues found that, adjusting for other factors, students who by chance were assigned to talented teachers in elementary school had significantly higher incomes as adults and better future life outcomes more generally.  By asking simple, penetrating questions and developing rigorous theoretical and empirical tests, Chetty’s timely, often surprising, findings in applied economics are illuminating key policy issues of our time.

 


Ask your grocer when he will have a special on black swans:  Tax consequences of the widespread drought

How Do Market Failures Justify Interventions in Rural Credit Markets?
Author: Timothy Besley
Source: The World Bank Research Observer, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 27-47
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/39865

Jensen Comment
This article discusses how failures of credit markets in the 1990s led to branch banking in small farm towns in order to make farm lending more effective and efficient, where bankers could become closer with both the needs of their farm customers and the risks of lending to farmers for their crops and livestock feeding operations.

One of the problems is the inefficiency of national and world credit markets for local lending to farmers. Whereas there are vast markets for collateralized loans in such things as home mortgages, there is almost no market for the loans made to farmers for crops, livestock, and farm equipment. Banks that lend to these farmers carry the loans on their own books unless the banks themselves go under, in which case the FDIC has to move in, manage the bank through a crisis, and in some cases pick up the bank receivables that cannot be sold in credit markets ---
http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/388783-christopher-menkin/857961-oldest-bank-fails-in-missouri

In the U.S. many of these "branch banks" were former locally-owned banks that were gobbled up by banking chains that now operate them as branch banks. In other parts of the world, the larger banks had to establish new branch banks to make farm lending more effective and efficient.


Implications of the S&L banking crisis in the 1980s on rural banks
"Deteriorating Farm Finances Affect Rural Banks and Communities," by Daniel L. Milkove, Patrick J. Sullivan, and James J. Mikeseil,
http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/IND87013364/PDF

Financial problems in the agricultural sector are eventually transmitted to farm lenders. As cash flow problems cause farmers and farm-related businesses to fall behind on loan payments, the quality of lenders' loan portfolios deteriorates. Lenders must set aside reserves to cover actual and anticipated loan losses. These and other adjustments by agricultural lenders to cope with their problem loans can affect credit availability for the community at large.

Bank financial problems caused 69 agricultural banks to fail last year, and some predict even more agricultural bank failures this year. While bank failures dramatically portray the problems of farm lenders, the failures generally are not as devastating to local banking services as many fear. In the past, most failed rural banks reopened almost immediately under new ownership.

A more widespread problem for rural areas may be the growing number of agricultural banks with serious financial problems. As banks adjust their lending decisions to deal with weaknesses identified by bank regulators, "marginally qualified" borrowers are likely to be denied credit. This may force some farmers into bankruptcy, but it will also reduce credit to nonfarm businesses, putting rural communities in agricultural areas of the country at a disadvantage in attracting new businesses and holding existing firms. Depending on the size and structure of the local banking system, less credit availability could dampen the growth potential of the local nonfarm economy, just when off-farm employment is needed by members of foundering family farms and by people displaced from agriculture.

Agricultural communities in unit-banking and limited-branching States have local banking systems heavily involved in agricultural loans. Furthermore, since small agricultural banks depend on local borrowers, these banks will likely make every effort to service the credit needs of farmers despite their cash flow problems. This may help some farmers who would otherwise be denied credit, but could depress the community's economy if local banks support agriculture at the expense of the nonfarm sector.

Continued in article

But most rural banks weathered the S&L crisis because there were no weather-related black swans.

A leading cause of the Great Depression of the 1930s was weather related, but the combination of causes was far more complicated.


Black Swan --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory 

The widespread 2012 drought in the Midwest could well become the Black Swan of rural banks that are mostly dependent upon farm lending.
"Drought brings local farmers on the brink," by Jacob Barker, The Columbia Daily Tribune, July 14, 2012 ---
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2012/jul/14/drought-brings-local-farmers-brink/?business

Also see http://droughtresources.unl.edu/

Tax Consequences of Drought --- http://droughtresources.unl.edu/web/cattleproduction/taxconsequences-drought

It’s been a few years since we’ve had to deal with the drought related tax laws, but with the recent drought conditions across the Midwest, it’s a good time to review them.

Jensen Comment
It's too soon to know whether climate changes will be black swan events in the banking industry. There will be some rural bank failures due to the 2012 drought in the Midwest, South, and West. However, the real danger of a black swan event lurks if there is a 2013 drought as large or larger than the 2012 drought.

In 2012 farmers will dig deep into savings to keep going and be forced to borrow more for their 2013 crop hopes.

But for livestock farmers (ranch, feeder lots, and containment feeding operations) the widespread drought of 2012 is leading to the slaughtering of herds and shutting down of feeding businesses. The reason is that demand for meat is highly price elastic. Livestock farmers cannot simply save themselves by passing along feed price increases to their customers. Compounding this is the rising price of fuel that affects distribution costs to supermarkets and restaurants.

Ask your grocer when he will have a special on black swans.

 


Review of a Movie
"Harvard EdCast: Won’t Back Down," by Matt Weber, Harvard Graduate School of Education, September 28, 2012 ---
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/2012/09/harvard-edcast-wont-back-down/ 

On September 20, the Ed School cosponsored a screening of the new about education reform, Won’t Back Down. The movie, which opens nationally today, stars Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal as two mothers determined to transform their children’s failing inner city school.

, director of the film, reflects on why writing and directing a movie about education was just a perfect fit.

"Education Reform Gets a Hollywood Boost In 'Won't Back Down,' Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis play a mother and teacher trying to save a failing school," by Bruno V. Manno, The Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444712904578024231221060770.html?mg=reno-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t 

With Friday's release of "Won't Back Down," Hollywood has brought to theaters the real-life struggle of millions of parents. The movie features Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis as a parent-and-teacher duo who team up to turn around a chronically failing public school. Rather than acquiesce to the certainty of a subpar education for the children, they fight back—rallying other parents and teachers to the cause of wrestling control of their school from the local school board and putting it in the hands of devoted educators.

It isn't fantasy. The movie is based on new "parent-trigger" laws, a very real policy solution that—depending on the state—gives parents and others the power to reform failing schools; close them; or, in some states, transform them into charter schools. The first parent-trigger law was passed by California in 2010, with bipartisan support in a Democratic legislature.

Today, across six states, parents of more than 14 million students can trigger the turnaround of their local school if it is failing. The laws vary, but in general once a school has been on a state's list of underperforming schools for a specified period, a majority vote by parents and others specified by law can trigger the reform process.

Whether they have a trigger law in their state or not, parents and educators everywhere can identify with the sense of powerlessness felt by the mother and the teacher in "Won't Back Down." More than 12% of the nation's high schools are dropout factories, with fewer than six of every 10 freshmen completing their senior year. The majority of students enrolled in these schools are minority and low-income, with little- or no-better educational options.

It has been this way for too many years. Parents, particularly those without the means to send their child to private school or to exercise "real-estate choice" by moving to a neighborhood with better public schools, are often left with only one designated public school for their child. If it is bad, they and their child are out of luck.

Continued in article

 

"SAT Scores Drop Again," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, September 25, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/25/sat-scores-are-down-and-racial-gaps-remain

The average scores on the SAT fell two points this year, losing one point each in critical reading and in writing, while staying level in mathematics. The drops are smaller than the six-point decrease last year. For several years prior to that, scores had been relatively flat.

The College Board's annual report on the data stressed the continuation of patterns in which most American students aren't taking the high school courses that would prepare them to do well in college. The data released by the board show the continuation of substantial gaps in the average scores (and levels of preparation for college) by members of different racial and ethnic groups, and those from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Average scores on the ACT were flat this year, and both the SAT and ACT saw growth in the number of test-takers. But the ACT grew at a faster pace and overtook the SAT this year in the number of test-takers (although the margin was quite small, about 2,000 students, with both exams attracting more than 1.66 million test-takers). The ACT was once seen primarily as a test for those seeking to attend Midwestern and Southern colleges, but has over the years attracted more students in other parts of the country, even as the SAT is still dominant in regions such as the Northeast.

Here are the scores on the three parts of the SAT since 2006, when the writing test was added as part of a major overhaul of the test

Average SAT Scores, 2006-2012

Year Reading Mathematics Writing
2006 503 518 497
2007 501 514 493
2008 500 514 493
2009 499 514 492
2010 500 515 491
2011 497 514 489
2012 496 514 488

College Board officials have long cautioned against reading too much into a one-point gain or one-point drop in a given year, but over the years since the new SAT was introduced, the average total score has fallen by 20 points, and scores have fallen in all three categories.

Of particular interest to many college officials are the continued gaps in the average scores of members of different racial and ethnic groups. An analysis prepared by FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing (a longstanding critic of the SAT and other standardized tests) showed that during the years since the new SAT was unveiled, the average score (adding all three sections) of Asian-American applicants has gone up by 41 points, while the averages of all other groups have fallen, with white students falling only 4 points, and all other groups falling between 15 and 22 points.

Bob Schaeffer, public education director of the organization, said that these growing gaps showed that the testing-based education reforms that have been popular in recent years are not narrowing the divides among various ethnic and racial groups, as testing advocates have argued that they would.

Average SAT Scores, by Race and Ethnicity, 2012

Group Reading Mathematics Writing
American Indian 482 489 462
Asian American 518 595 528
Black 428 428 417
Mexican American 448 465 443
Puerto Rican 452 452 442
Other Latino 447 461 442
White 527 536 515

The report issued by the College Board drew attention to the characteristics of students who tend to do well on the SAT, namely those who complete recommended college preparatory courses. There are distinct patterns, as noted in the above table, on average scores by race and ethnic group, and by family income (with wealthier students, on average, performing better). But as the College Board materials noted, there are also distinct patterns in which groups are most likely to have completed the recommended high school curriculum or other measures of advanced academic preparation:

  • 80 percent of white students who took the SAT completed the core curriculum, as did 73 percent of Asian students, but only 69 percent of Latino and 65 percent of black students did.
  • 84 percent of those who took the SAT from families with at least $200,000 in family income completed the core curriculum, but only 65 percent of those with family income under $20,000 did so.
  • In mathematics, where there is the largest gap between Asian Americans and other groups in SAT scores, 47 percent of Asian Americans who took the SAT reported taking Advanced Placement and/or honors mathematics, compared to 40 percent of white students, 31 percent of Latino students and 25 percent of black students.

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

Jensen Comment
Last night, CBS News asserted that over half of the students entering college first need remedial reading to have much hope for eventual graduation.

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


How the NCAA Misleads With Statistics
"Gaps in Grad Rates for Atletes," by Allie Grasgreen, Inside Higher Ed, September 25, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/25/report-finds-football-players-graduate-rates-lower-full-time-student-peers

The National Collegiate Athletic Association likes to boast that athletes graduate at rates higher than non-athletes – in some cases, significantly higher. But the tool the NCAA uses to make that assertion -- the Graduation Success Rate, or GSR -- follows a unique formula that factors out athletes who transfer in good academic standing, instead counting them as graduates.

That is not the case with the Federal Graduation Rate, an older measurement required by the government (which is why the NCAA developed the GSR in the first place). But the federal rate counts only full-time, first-time students who graduate from the institution where they began. That means that students who go part-time or take breaks bring down an institution's graduation rate, again making it a less-than-ideal benchmark for comparison, given that all athletes (unlike other students) are required to maintain full course loads.

Enter the Adjusted Graduation Gap, a model that compares athletes’ graduation rates by conference and sport directly to the rates of their non-athlete peers by factoring out part-time students. The annual installment looking at the adjusted gaps for football players was released today by the Collegiate Sport Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“We know that part-time students graduate at a much lower rate, and one of the reasons that we know affects that is that they’re working,” said Richard Southall, an associate professor of sport administration and coordinator of UNC’s Graduate Sport Administration Program. “Instead of saying, ‘Well, athletes graduate at a rate that’s better,’ instead of making just short sound bites, let’s look at the situation and say, ‘Athletes from different sports are different.’ It’s like students at different colleges are different.”

And using the AGG model does paint a different picture. In most athletic conferences, athletes graduate at rates lower than non-athletes; the gap is widest (for the third year in a row) in the Pacific 12 Conference, where football players graduated at rates 27 percentage points lower (in other words, an AGG of -27) compared to full-time male students at those institutions in the 2004-10 cohort, the latest data available.

For the most part, the gaps are largest in the conferences that are most successful athletically. Rounding out the “bottom five” with the starkest rate differences are the Atlantic Coast Conference (-22), the Big Ten Conference (-20), the Western Athletic Conference (-19), and the Southeastern Conference (-18).

The smallest differences were found in the Mountain West Conference and Conference USA, both of which had gaps of -13.

And with this, the third installment of the AGG football report, Southall included averages since the report’s inception. “We see that things aren’t changing significantly one way or another,” he said. While some conference figures have shifted somewhat, he said, that could be the result of realignment.

Adjusted Graduation Gap by Athletic Conference
Football Bowl Series 2012 Adjusted
Graduation Gap
Three-year
Average AGG
Conference USA -13 -14
Mountain West Conference -13 -18
Big 12 Conference -14 -16
Mid-Atlantic Conference -14 -13
Sun Belt Conference -15 -15
Big East Conference -15 -14
Southeastern Conference -18 -18
Western Athletic Conference -19 -19
Big Ten Conference -20 -21
Atlantic Coast Conference -22 -21
Pacific-12 Conference -27 -28
Mean -17 -19
Football Championship Series    
Southwestern Athletic Conference +10 +7
Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference +1 +1
Big South Conference -4 -3
Southern Conference -5 -5
Missouri Valley Conference -9 -11
Patriot League -10 -11
Northeast Conference -10 -10
Colonial Athletic Association -11 -11
Ohio Valley Conference -14 -17
Southland Conference -16 -13
Big Sky Conference -17 -19
Mean -8 -9

The only conferences with positive AGGs were the Southwestern Athletic Conference (+10) and the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, both of which are made up of historically black colleges in their respective regions.

For the first time, the report also compared AGGs of black and white football players at Division I institutions. The gaps range from +10 and +7 for black and white players, respectively, in the SWAC, to -34 and -17 in the Pac-12.

“It’s three times more likely that black football players [in the Football Bowl Series conferences] don’t graduate at that same rate” as black non-athletes, Southall said. “We haven’t done enough long-term research to be able to say why this is occurring. All we know is you can see the gaps are much larger at high-performing conferences.”

The NCAA said in a statement that "there is no evidence that any part-time bias exists in graduation rates, and this approach does not account for the wide variety of campuses and types of students at those campuses."

"This so-called study is simply a hypothetical exercise. The only fair comparison is with actual full-time students," the statement said. "Both the NCAA Graduation Success Rate and the federal graduation rate count actual students and already allow for part-time behavior with their six-year graduation windows. Adjustment for student demographics and incoming academic characteristics would be more realistic and useful. An even better approach would be for the federal graduation rate to track transfer students, like the NCAA GSR, because the GSR includes 35 percent more students in its calculation and is more accurate."

Southall doesn’t believe one graduate rate measurement tool is superior to any other – they measure different things, he says. But he argues that this more direct comparison to the general student population’s graduation rates raises a number of questions regarding NCAA and institutional policies.

Continued in article

"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

Athletics Controversies in Colleges ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics


A Dumb Idea:  How to make local news an international media item
"College Asks Student Paper Not to Report Professor's Arrest," Inside Higher Ed, September 27, 2012 --- 
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/09/27/college-asks-student-paper-not-report-professors-arrest


Gee:  Living High on the Buckeye at Ohio State University
"Gordon Gee, the Teflon President, Weathers Another Storm Over Expenses," by Jack Stripling, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Gordon-Gee-the-Teflon/134694/

It has been said that the only survivors of a nuclear holocaust will be cockroaches and Cher. At this point, it might seem reasonable to add E. Gordon Gee to that list.

At a time when college leaders are being tossed out at the very first whiff of a scandal, the Ohio State University president appears impervious to controversy.

Over the course of his decades-long career in higher education, Mr. Gee has weathered athletics scandal, spending probes, and even jokes about his ex-wife's smoking pot in the president's residence at Vanderbilt University.

Through it all, the unflappable Mr. Gee, 68, has never seemed to stop smiling.

Continued in article

Why do they hate us? 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Hate


"Are Middle Eastern Businessmen Less Sexist than Europeans?" by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, Harvard Business Review Blog, October 4, 2012 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/are_middle_eastern_businessmen_less_sexist.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Jensen Comment
It's interesting how women in the some Middle Eastern nations can graduate from college and hold full-time jobs but not drive a car, shop alone in public, and face spectacle of being stoned to death in public (rare). Maybe times are changing faster where it's least expected and publicized for women. It will be interesting to see what happens for women in Afghanistan when the U.S. hands it back to the Taliban.

The gender war at Harvard ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Harvard

 


Carnage in 2012 Law School Enrollments ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2012/09/carnage-.html

Bob Jensen's threads on Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools

 


Fair Use --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Note that Fair Use safe harbors that apply to the U.S. generally do not apply to other countries. However, other countries may also be more lax in enforcement of copyright laws.

"Let's Spread the Word About Fair Use," by Zick Rubin, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Lets-Spread-the-Word-About/134544/

Last month, as college students across the country prepared to head back to campuses, my fax machine coughed out my annual "Request for Permission" from the Copyright Clearance Center, the corporation that is one of the world's largest brokers of licenses to copy other people's work.

As in past years, the center asked me how much I wanted to charge to permit Middle Earth College to include a copy of Chapter 5 of my book, Liking and Loving: An Invitation to Social Psychology, in a course pack for the 18 students enrolled in Professor McClain's Management 710 this fall. (I've changed the names of the college, the professor, and the course.)

If past experience were a guide, I could name my price, out of which the Copyright Clearance Center would take its 15-percent commission. Given how oppressively high college tuitions have become these days, I doubted that the students would notice the extra three or four dollars that I could ask each of them to pony up for the right to have his or her own copy of Chapter 5. The form had blanks to check for "fee for page," "fee per copy," and "flat fee," but not for "no fee."

I was delighted that Professor McClain wanted to use my chapter again, especially given the hefty permission fees I have charged in past years. It's true that Liking and Loving was published 39 years ago and has long been out of print. Some of the timely examples in Chapter 5­—such as the public events of Vida Blue's rookie season for the Oakland Athletics, in 1971—are not quite so timely anymore. But I think it still holds up pretty well.

Yes, I knew that licensing fees had driven up the price of some course packs to $100 or more, to the dismay of colleges and students. Once a great innovation, allowing professors to create their own reasonably priced books of readings for their courses, the course pack was in danger of foundering. High licensing costs were also stretching college-­library budgets for the course pack's digital offspring, the electronic version placed on reserve for students enrolled in a course.

On the other hand, we want American students to have the best possible educational resources, don't we? And since Liking and Loving was going to enter the public domain awfully soon­­—in 2068—I figured I had better make the most of my copyright while I still could. There was just one problem, and, as a copyright lawyer, I couldn't ignore it. Under current copyright law, Middle Earth College probably doesn't need my permission—or anyone else's—to include my chapter in the course pack. The university and its bookstore have a right to make copies of the chapter for enrolled students without even asking, under the copyright doctrine of fair use.

If this was fuzzy before, it's clearer now, from the careful opinion issued in May by the federal judge Orinda Evans in the test case brought by publishers—and paid for in part by the Copyright Clearance Center itself—against Georgia State University. After a two-week trial in Atlanta, Judge Evans ruled that Georgia State had the right to make available to enrolled students up to one chapter of a 10-chapter book without permission or payment, as a matter of fair use. That's because the constitutionally prescribed purpose of copyright is not to enrich authors or publishers but rather to encourage the progress of knowledge.

Under Judge Evans's opinion, in an instance like the Middle Earth request, three of the four determining factors for fair use come out in the "fair" direction: First, Professor McClain is assigning my chapter for nonprofit educational purposes, not for commercial gain; second, although some have said that Liking and Loving reads like a novel, it is a factual and—ahem!—scientific work; third, the portion that is being copied is only one chapter out of 10 and makes up only a small proportion of the book's pages.

The only factor that tilts in the "unfair" direction is the fact that, thanks mainly to the work of the copyright center, there is a readily available licensing market for photocopying excerpts of my book. In 3-to-1 cases like this one, Judge Evans determined that Georgia State's copying was fair use and required no permission at all. Out of some 75 instances that the court considered, the judge found only five to be infringements—and each of them involved the use of two or more chapters of a book. Although the Georgia State case involved electronic course reserves, not photocopies, the same fair-use calculus applies.

Copyright law is admittedly amorphous—in the first fair-use case, back in 1841, Justice Joseph Story called it "the metaphysics of the law"—and the publishers have filed an appeal. So it's possible that the law will change.

But, in the meantime, Judge Evans's decision is the leading case on this issue, and the Copyright Clearance Center, having supported the test case against Georgia State, should respect the court's decision. At the least, it should inform copyright owners of the decision and give them another choice: a blank for "this looks like fair use to me." That's what I faxed back to the center this year, even though I had to write it in.

Continued in article

In landmark ruling, federal judge rejects most arguments made by publishers in suit against Georgia State over e-reserves. But she also imposes some rules that could complicate life for librarians and professors.
"Some Leeway, Some Limits," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, May 14, 2012
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/14/court-rejects-many-publishers-arguments-e-reserves 

Bob Jensen's threads on fair use and the dreaded DMCA ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright


A Slide Show from the Tax Foundation (Click the arrows on the right side of the screen)
"Putting a Face on America's Tax Returns: A Chartbook September 24, 2012," by Scott A. Hodge William McBride, Tax Foundation, September 24, 2012
http://taxfoundation.org/slideshow/putting-face-americas-tax-returns
Thank you Caleb Newquist for the heads up.

You can get the above content in PDF format at
http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/putting_a_face_on_americas_tax_returns_a_chartbook.pdf

Jensen Comment
This slide show focuses heavily on inequality.

Case Studies in Gaming the Income Tax Laws ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm


Question
Is this PhD Guide explicitly sexist?
Just kidding of course.

"The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.," Open Culture, September 26th, 2012 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/the_illustrated_guide_to_a_phd-redux.html

More serious question
How does this guide apply or not apply to alternatives for an accounting Ph.D.?

Hint
Note that the question focuses on alternatives rather than the bounds of accountics science?

My answer is that most academic disciplines have doctoral programs covering nearly all areas of that discipline. For example, in psychology a student can get an experimental science Ph.D. in psychology. But another student can get a Ph.D. in the various branches of clinical psychology.

There are no branches of clinical accountancy (professional practice issues) where a student can get a Ph.D. in a North American university ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms


 

When government internal controls are a sick joke
"Wisconsin: 3 relatives suspected of cashing dead mother's Social Security checks for 30 years," by Dinesh Ramde, TwinCities.com, September 25, 2012 ---
http://www.twincities.com/wisconsin/ci_21627111/wisconsin-checks-still-cashed-dead-mom

Three Portage County residents are accused of cashing Social Security checks of a relative who has been missing for 30 years and is presumed dead, and authorities are investigating to see whether her remains are buried on her wooded property.

If Marie Jost is still alive she'd be 100 years old. But authorities now suspect she died in about 1982, and they're accusing her son, daughter and son-in-law of continuing to cash her government checks in her absence.

Investigators believe Jost might be buried on her Amherst property. Sheriff's Capt. Dale O'Kray said Tuesday that cadaver dogs have hit upon the scent of human remains, and authorities are using heavy machinery to explore the property and dig for evidence.

"There's no indication she's been seen in the last 25 years and we have to have a starting point for where she might be," O'Kray said.

Charles T. Jost, 66; Delores M. Disher, 69; and Ronald Disher, 71, each face four felony charges including being party to the crimes of theft and mail fraud. The charges carry a maximum combined penalty of 68 years in prison and a $310,000 fine.

The Social Security Administration had sent three letters to Jost's home to verify she was still alive. After the third letter was sent, a man who identified himself as her son called to say Jost wasn't available.

The agency then contacted Portage County authorities last month asking that deputies check on her. Deputies went to her property where Charles Jost allegedly told them Marie Jost and his 74-year-old brother Theodore "were riding in a vehicle someplace," according to the criminal complaint.

When a deputy asked for permission to search the property, Charles Jost allegedly grew agitated and asked them to leave. The deputy then asked whether Marie Jost was still alive, and Charles Jost said he would talk to his lawyer and ended the conversation, the complaint said.

Authorities obtained a search warrant and gathered evidence, but they haven't found anything to indicate whether Marie Jost is alive or dead, O'Kray said.

There's not a real house on the 3-acre property. Charles Jost lives in a tarp-covered shack there, and four to five sheds are filled with years' worth of garbage, O'Kray said.

"It's basically a 'Hoarders' episode gone bad," he said. "We have about 400 garbage bags of junk we had to remove to search the living areas."

During an initial court appearance Monday a judge ordered that Charles Jost undergo a competency evaluation. A message left for Jost's defense attorney Tuesday was not immediately returned.

Neighbors told authorities they had never seen an elderly woman at Charles Jost's home.

A Social Security agent said Marie Jost had not used her Medicare benefits since 1980 when she had a stroke. The agent said Jost had been sent Social Security payments of more than $175,000 since she had made a Medicaid claim.

Prosecutors say the Social Security checks were endorsed with an X, along with the printed names of Charles and Theodore Jost.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I wonder if she also voted over the past 30 years?

The Sad State of Governmental Accounting and Accountability ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting

 


September 25, 2012 message from Roger Collins

"Although Apple swept the North American and European markets as the leading smartphone brand, the company ranked seventh by market share in China during the first six months of this year, behind Samsung Electronics Co and many domestic mobile phone manufacturers.

Apple had shipped 5.2 million smartphones to China as of June, according to a report issued by information and analysis provider IHS. This accounted for a 7.5 percent share of the total smartphone market in China, and was only about one-third of the share held by market leader Samsung.

However, the figure does not mean many Chinese people dislike Apple devices. On Aug 10, nine people were put on trial in Central China's Hunan province on charges of illegal organ trade. A 17-year-old high school student voluntarily sold one of his kidneys for 22,000 yuan ($3,480) so he could buy an iPhone and an iPad."

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-09/24/content_15777127.htm 

Regards,

Roger

Roger Collins
Associate Professor
OM1275 TRU School of Business & Economics

 


From the Scout Report on September 21, 2012

Croak.It --- http://croak.it/ 

The namesake of this application is Marty the Frog, who comments thusly on the homepage: "Imagine a world where you can share your thoughts without boundaries, halfway across the world." With Croak.It this is possible, and visitors just need to "Push.Speak.Share." When visitors "Push to croak" on the homepage, they can send out audio clips via any number of social media networks. Also, visitors can use the Watch area to view a video on how to get started as well. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


Dropboxifier --- http://dropboxifier.codeplex.com/ 

Dropboxifier makes it it easy to share application data and other files between computers, which can be quite helpful. This application creates symbolic links so that visitors can just click on a link to access different files. The best part is that Dropboxifier allows users to do this on more than one computer. This mean that all of these devices will read and write to the same data source, which is useful. This version is compatible with computers running Windows Vista and newer.

 

From the Scout Report on September 28, 2012

Writer --- https://writer.bighugelabs.com/ 

Sometimes you just want the world to go away so you can concentrate on the things that matter. For writers, finding a quiet place of one's own can be a tremendous challenge. Writer cuts away all the details and distractions and allows writers to write. The basic black and green screen allows visitors the option to save their work, check on the word count, create a PDF, or print it out. It's simple in its design, and that's the point. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


Picisto --- http://www.picisto.com/

Picisto is a great way to modify, edit and create wonderful photo collages. Visitors can choose a layout, add text and shapes, and even buy prints of their creations if they so desire. First-time users may wish to check out the Create Collage link to get a feel for how the application works. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


Rising olive oil prices present opportunities for growers and certain concerns for consumers

Olive-oil prices: Drizzle and drought http://www.economist.com/node/21563304 

Olive oil prices to soar after Spanish drought devastates crop http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/23/olive-oil-prices-soar-spain?newsfeed=true

Council Establishes Olive Oil Price "Observatory"
http://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-oil-business/europe/council-establishes-olive-oil-price-observatory/28529 

Letter from Italy: Slippery Business http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mueller 

Olive Oil's Dark Side http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/02/the-exchange-tom-mueller.html 

Preserving Olive Oil Culture in Adatepe http://www.oliveoiltimes.com/features/olive-oil-museum-adatepe-turkey/4748

 


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


Education Tutorials

LibriVox (audio books) --- http://librivox.org/

LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain. There are several options for listening. The first step is to get the mp3 or ogg files into your own computer:

Would you like to record chapters of books in the public domain? It's easy to volunteer. All you need is a computer, some free recording software, and your own voice.

Bob Jensen's links to audio versions of books and poems --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Audio

Choices Reading Lists --- http://www.reading.org/resources/booklists.aspx

Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged

The 25 Best Pinterest Boards in EdTech --- http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2012/09/the-25-best-pinterest-boards-edtech/
Thank you Richard Campbell for the heads up.

September 25, 2012 reply from Scott Bonacker

Found this through Pinterest –--
http://www.visualnews.com/category/visualization-2/

Hadn’t really looked at it before –--

http://www.visualnews.com/2012/06/19/how-much-data-created-every-minute/

http://www.visualnews.com/2012/08/13/deceitful-aisles/..

Thanks Richard.

Scott Bonacker CPA - McCullough and Associates LLC - Springfield, MO

 

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Smithsonian Science --- http://smithsonianscience.org/

University of Oklahoma: History of Science Collections --- http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/homescience.php

National Science Foundation: Nanoscience --- http://www.nsf.gov/news/overviews/nano/index.jsp

Nanotechnology Center for Teaching and Learning --- http://community.nsee.us/ 

Environmental Health Risk Assessment --- http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/healthrisk/index.html

Buffalo Architecture Foundation Building Stories Collection --- http://ubdigit.buffalo.edu/cdm/search/collection/LIB-APL001

Dwell (interior building designs) --- http://www.dwell.com/

Center for Ocean Solutions --- http://centerforoceansolutions.org/

Teaching the Ocean System: Resources for Educators --- http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/ocean/ 

How to Make Better Decisions, a Thought-Provoking Documentary by the BBC --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/ihow_to_make_better_decisionsi_a_thought-provoking_documentary_by_the_bbc.html
Thank you Jagdish Gangolly for the heads up.

Herpetological Conservation & Biology --- http://www.herpconbio.org/

Minnesota Geological Survey --- http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/708

Steamtown National Historic Site (steam locomotives) ---  http://www.nps.gov/stea/index.htm

Tech News Collection (history of the Illinois Institute of Technology) ---
http://archives.iit.edu/technews/
Blast From the Past April Fools Issue --- http://archives.iit.edu/technews/volume128/tnvol128no8.pdf#page=2
Search on the word "Fools" for other interesting links

Dementia: The Self-Portraits of William Utermohlen:  When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen, an American artist living in London, immediately began work on an ambitious series of self-portraits --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/photogallery/429486/dementia-the-self-portraits-of-william-utermohlen/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121005

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

Foreign Policy: The Cuban Missile Crises --- http://www.foreignpolicy.com/cubanmissilecrisis

The Wisconsin Oneida Language Preservation Project --- http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/Oneida

Environmental Health Risk Assessment --- http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/healthrisk/index.html

Center for Financial Services Innovation --- http://cfsinnovation.com/

Steve Keen in Australia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Keen

Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering --- http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/

Steve Keen: Behavioral Finance Lectures 2012  --- Click Here
http://www.valueinvestingworld.com/2012/09/steve-keen-behavioral-finance-lectures.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ValueInvestingWorld+%28Value+Investing+World%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

I’ve just uploaded the first 8 lectures in my Behavioral Finance class for 2012. The first few lectures are very similar to last year’s, but the content changes substantially by about lecture 5 when I start to focus more on Schumpeter’s approach to endogenous money ---
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/23/behavioral-finance-lectures/

Related book: Debunking Economics

Jensen Comment
These are quite good slide show lectures.

Bob Jensen's threads on tutorials, lectures, videos and course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/23/behavioral-finance-lectures/

 

 

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

The History of Disabilities in the United States ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/09/26/review-kim-e-nielsen-disability-history-united-states

Seattle University Law Review --- http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/

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


Math Tutorials

How to Make Better Decisions, a Thought-Provoking Documentary by the BBC --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/ihow_to_make_better_decisionsi_a_thought-provoking_documentary_by_the_bbc.html
Thank you Jagdish Gangolly for the heads up

Geometry --- http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/Geometry.html 

Episodes in the History of Geometry through Models in Dynamic Geometry---
http://mathdl.maa.org/convergence/1/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=1679

Learning Geometry in Georgian England --- 
http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/46/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=3930

Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s to 1970s ---  http://www.lacma.org/beyondgeometry/index.html

Exploratorium: Geometry Playground --- http://www.exploratorium.edu/geometryplayground/

N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, the Most Prolific Mathematician of the 20th Century ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/n_is_a_number_a_portrait_of_paul_erdos_.html

Breaking the Code, Featuring Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/alan_turing_ibreaking_the_codei.html

Mathematics in Movies: Harvard Prof Curates 150+ Scenes ---
http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/mathematics_in_movies.html

Hollywood Videos Featuring Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#HollywoodVideos

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

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


History Tutorials

Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged

3D Panorama Videos Cities all over the World --- http://www.360cities.net/map#lat=45&lng=19&zoom=2

Queen Elisabeth Morphing --- http://www.flixxy.com/queen-elisabeth-morphing.htm#.UGh7HWcsGN8

The CD Player Turns 30 --- http://www.techhive.com/article/2010810/the-cd-player-turns-30.html#tk.nl_play

The History of Disabilities in the United States ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/09/26/review-kim-e-nielsen-disability-history-united-states

Foreign Policy: The Cuban Missile Crises --- http://www.foreignpolicy.com/cubanmissilecrisis

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum --- http://www.jfklibrary.org/

Calisphere: Themed Collections (California History) ---  http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/themed_collections/

Steamtown National Historic Site (steam locomotives) ---  http://www.nps.gov/stea/index.htm

City of Chicago Landmarks --- http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/landmarksweb/web/home.htm

Picture Chicago --- http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/chicago/index.asp

Historical Society of Michigan --- http://www.hsmichigan.org/

Joel Halpern in Macedonia Photographs (anthropology) --- http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/galleries/halpern.htm

Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology: Delphi Collections Browser --- http://pahma.berkeley.edu/delphi/ 

Ward Morgan Photography, Southwest Michigan 1939-1980 ---
http://cdm16259.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p124301coll2

Episodes in the History of Geometry through Models in Dynamic Geometry---
http://mathdl.maa.org/convergence/1/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=1679

Learning Geometry in Georgian England --- 
http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/46/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=3930

Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s to 1970s ---  http://www.lacma.org/beyondgeometry/index.html

Exploratorium: Geometry Playground --- http://www.exploratorium.edu/geometryplayground/

National Gallery of Victoria --- http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/

Vermont Historical Society --- http://www.vermonthistory.org/

Long Trail Photographs (the Green Mountains of Vermont) http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?title=Long%20Trail%20Photographs 
Oldest Long Distance Hiking Trail in the United States

Photographs of Vergennes (Vermont) http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?pid=bixby

The Wisconsin Oneida Language Preservation Project --- http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/Oneida

Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic --- http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/fireandice/index.html

University of Oklahoma: History of Science Collections --- http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/homescience.php

Andrew McCormick Maps and Prints (Canada) ---  http://digitalcollections.library.ubc.ca/cdm/landingpage/collection/mccormick

Tech News Collection (history of the Illinois Institute of Technology) ---
http://archives.iit.edu/technews/
Blast From the Past April Fools Issue --- http://archives.iit.edu/technews/volume128/tnvol128no8.pdf#page=2
Search on the word "Fools" for other interesting links

Art Lovers Rejoice! New Goya and Rembrandt Databases Now Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/art_lovers_rejoice_new_goya_and_rembrandt_databases_now_online.html

Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Podcast --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/the_irejoycei_podcast_takes_you_through_james_joyces_iulyssesi_line_by_line_for_the_next_22_years.html

William Faulkner Tells His Post Office Boss to Stick It (1924)
Drinking with William Faulkner
William Faulkner Audio Archive Goes Online
William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying

NPR Video on Pacioli:  The Accountant Who Changed The World ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/10/04/162296423/the-accountant-who-changed-the-world

Jensen Comment
It's never been clear how much the mathematician Pacioli changed the accounting world since his brand of double entry accounting was here long before he was born and long after he died. He did reduce it to s set of equations, but did this change the world?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory

"A Brief History of Double Entry Book-keeping (10 Episodes) ," BBC Radio ---
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r401p
Thanks to Len Steenkamp for the heads up

Jolyon Jenkins investigates how accountants shaped the modern world. They sit in boardrooms, audit schools, make government policy and pull the plug on failing companies. And most of us have our performance measured. The history of accounting and book-keeping is largely the history of civilisation.

Jolyon asks how this came about and traces the religious roots of some accounting practices.

 

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

The Wisconsin Oneida Language Preservation Project --- http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/Oneida

Peter Sellers Gives a Quick Demonstration of British Accents ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/peter_sellers_gives_a_quick_demonstration_of_british_accents.html

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


Music Tutorials

 

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

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


Writing Tutorials

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


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

September 26, 2012

September 27, 2012

September 29, 2012

October 1, 2012

October 2, 2012

October 3, 2012

October 4, 2012

October 5, 2012

October 8, 2012

October 10, 2012

 


Adding Pain to Misery in Medicare Funding of the Future
"The Dementia Plague:  As the world's population of older people rapidly grows in the coming years, Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia will become a health-care disaster," by Stephen S. Hall, MIT's Technology Review, October 5, 2012 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/429494/the-dementia-plague/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121005

Dementia: The Self-Portraits of William Utermohlen:  When he learned in 1995 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, William Utermohlen, an American artist living in London, immediately began work on an ambitious series of self-portraits --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/photogallery/429486/dementia-the-self-portraits-of-william-utermohlen/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121005

Bob Jensen's threads on health care funding ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm


Environmental Health Risk Assessment --- http://serc.carleton.edu/research_education/healthrisk/index.html


Let's Move --- http://www.letsmove.gov/
Let's Move! is the U.S government website that supports First Lady Michelle Obama's goal to "solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation.

From the Scout Report on January 27, 2012

In an effort to provide healthier dining options for schoolchildren, the United States Department of Agriculture unveils new lunchroom dietary standards Students to see healthier school lunches under new USDA rules
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/25/10234671-students-to-see-healthier-school-lunches-under-new-usda-rules  

USDA To Require Healthier Meals In Schools With Updated Nutrition Standards
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/01/25/145836942/usda-to-require-healthier-meals-in-schools-with-updated-nutrition-standards 

Nation's schools could learn something from Chicago's early lunch trials
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/food/stew/chi-school-lunch-standards-overhaul-presents-a-challenge-for-districts-20120125,0,3988807.story 

USDA Unveils Historic Improvements to Meals Served in America's Schools
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2012/01/0023.xml&contentidonly=true 

The Food Timeline: School Lunch History http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodschools.html 

Household arts and School Lunches
http://books.google.com/books?id=RNpEAAAAIAAJ&dq=school%20lunch%20menu&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=school%20lunch%20menu&f=false

 

From the Scout Report on September 21, 2012

Rural living could be an obesity risk factor
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-rural-living-could-be-an-obesity-risk-factor-20120914,0,478740.story 

Obesity higher in rural America than in urban parts of the country, UF researchers, colleagues find. ---
http://news.ufl.edu/2012/09/14/rural-obesity/ 

CDC: Obesity and Overweight http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html 

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Childhood Obesity --- http://www.rwjf.org/childhoodobesity/index.jsp

Obesity Society --- http://www.obesity.org/ 

Boston Nutrition Obesity Research Center --- http://bnorc.org/

 


DisabilityInfo.gov http://www.disabilityinfo.gov/

Ouch:  It's a Disabilities Thing --- http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/ 

The History of Disabilities in the United States ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/09/26/review-kim-e-nielsen-disability-history-united-states

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

Bob Jensen's threads on Technology Aids for the Handicapped and Learning Challenged ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped




Humor

Peter Sellers Gives a Quick Demonstration of British Accents ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/09/peter_sellers_gives_a_quick_demonstration_of_british_accents.html

The Cut My Britches Off --- http://www.coolestone.com/media/4288/They-Cut-My-Britches-Off/


CFO = Chief Finalizing Officer

"CFO Accused of Murder-for-Hire on His Employer's Dime," by Teresa Ambord, AccountingWeb, September 18, 2012 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/cfo-accused-murder-hire-his-employers-dime/219868?source=education

German Waterbed --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/9wm-Ge8LL7o?rel=0




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