Tidbits on November 13, 2012
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
My
Favorite Annuals in My Gardens --- New Guinea Impatiens
Life Cycle from Seedlings to Death Every Summe
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Impatiens/ImpatiensSet03/ImpatiensSet03.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
White
Mountain News ---
http://www.whitemtnews.com/
Tidbits on November 13, 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
Romancing the Wind ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=nr9KrqN_lIg
Caught Mapping: A Cinematic Ride Through the
Nitty Gritty World of Vintage Cartography ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/icaught_mappingia_cinematic_ride_through_the_nitty_gritty_world_of_vintage_cartography.html
Watch the Great Russian Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff in Home
Movies ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/sergei_rachmaninoff_home_movies_.html
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Taps (beautiful) ---
http://www.flixxy.com/trumpet-solo-melissa-venema.htm
Romancing the Wind ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=nr9KrqN_lIg
Music flashmob (Verdi, La Traviata) ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/XAXAs03xsI8?rel=0
Gidon Kremer's Bach Makeover ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/10/30/163881196/gidon-kremers-bach-makeover
Lula Belle and Scotty Wiseman Home Movies ---
http://mirc.sc.edu/fedora/repository/usc-test%3A170
Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman and
Catherine Keener try to make beautiful music (classical) ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/11/07/164602359/a-late-quartet-melodrama-with-a-pounding-musical-heart
Brubeck Oral History Project
http://www.pacific.edu/Library/Find/Holt-Atherton-Special-Collections/Digital-Collections/Brubeck-Oral-History-Project.html
Russell Brand and Tracey Ullman Sing the Wonders
of “Asstrology” in Eric Idle’s What About Dick? ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/russell_brand_and_tracey_ullman_sing_the_wonders_of_asstrology_in_eric_idles_iwhat_about_dicki.html
FolkStreams Presents a Big Film Archive on
American Folk Art and Music ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/folkstreams.html
I Remember It Well ☆ Maurice Chevalier & Hermione
Gingold ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQxM5rJ-uiY
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
The History of Western Architecture in 39 Free
Video Lectures ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/the_history_of_western_architecture_in_39_free_lectures_.html
Illustrated Classics of Engineering from the
William Barclay Parsons Collection and Others ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=industry&col_id=168
Hurricane Sandy Seen from Outer Space, in
Timelapse Motion ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/hurricane_sandy_seen_from_outer_space_in_timelapse_motion.html
The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces
Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/rijksmuseum_puts_125000_masterpieces_online.html
The Oswegonian (student newspaper of SUNY at
Oswego)
http://news2.nnyln.net/oswegonian/search.html
The Douglas Oliver Collection (Hawaii People) ---
http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/oliver/index.php?c=1
Arts of Citizenship ---
http://artsofcitizenship.umich.edu/
Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures
of Kenwood House, London ---
http://mam.org/rembrandt-van-dyck-gainsborough/
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam ---
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/index.jsp
Florida Documents Collection (from Miami University) ---
http://merrick.library.miami.edu/specialCollections/asm0567/
Miami Metropolitan Archive ---
http://miami.fiu.edu/index.htm
University of Miami Libraries Digital Collections:
University of Miami Archives (over 500,000 photographs) ---
http://merrick.library.miami.edu/digitalprojects/photographs.php
International Architecture Database ---
http://eng.archinform.net/index.htm
The Art of African Exploration ---
http://www.sil.si.edu/Exhibitions/ArtofAfricanExploration/
National Museum of African Art: Webcasts ---
http://af
Lalla Essaydi Revisions: Introduction (African Art) ---
http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/revisions/index.h
Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art
http://www.nmafa.si.edu/exhibits/grassroots/index.html
Virginia Emigrants to Liberia ---
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia/index.php?page=Virginia Emigrants
To Liberia
Benin-Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from
Nigeria (video) ---
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/benin/index
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
University of San Francisco: Gleeson Library Digital
Collections (Literature History) ---
http://digitalcollections.usfca.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p264101coll8
"A History of Reading," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings,
October 26, 2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/26/a-history-of-reading/
"Our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows"
For Sylvia Plath’s 80th Birthday, Hear Her Read ‘A Birthday Present’ ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/for_sylvia_plaths_80th_birthday_hear_her_read_a_birthday_present.html
Find more blog posts full of comic existential angst
over at The New Yorker, and then, if you want to get serious and bone up on
Jean-Paul
Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, check out these fine resources:
Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche: Three Philosophers in Three Hours
Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre
(1960)
55 Free Philosophy Courses from Great Universities
Sartre’s famous lecture
Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) that otherwise appears in our collection
of Free eBooks.
Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sartre Discovered
is a post from: Open
Culture.
Pacifica Radio Archives (American Literature and Politics) ---
http://archive.org/details/pacifica_radio_archives
"The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs," by Maria Popova, Brain
Pickings, November 7, 2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/07/the-big-new-yorker-book-of-dogs/
Free Electronic Literature ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on November 13, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations111312.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/
My Political Quotations and Commentaries Directory and Log
---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Political/PoliticalQuotationsCommentaries.htm
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
View and/or Print Windows 8 for Dummies (147 Pages)
Dummies can access for free, at least for the time being
http://media.wiley.com/assets/7077/60/9781118554951_custom.pdf
This site is absolutely unbelievable in providing pictures of homes,
businesses, and government offices around the world ---
http://showmystreet.com/
It often does not zero in precisely on the address, including my address.
However, with use of the arrow buttons you can easily find the address your are
seeking.
What I find interesting is that my home images seem to be taken at street
level rather than aerial views. This is more like the views you get when driving
by car to a site. I'm told that not everybody gets a street view. Perhaps aerial
views are used in more congested urban areas.
When you are in a city and going to take a taxi to some address, it might
help you and the taxi driver if you become familiar in advance of the buildings
on the block where you're headed.
If you know a phone number, first Google that phone number to get the
address. Then use showmystreet.com to see the buildings around that address.
College campuses and other complexes of buildings having only one mailing
address are more difficult in terms of drilling down to a particular building in
the complex.
I'm not certain how frequently the database is updated. For example, we have
daughter in a new subdivision in a rural area of Wisconsin. I've not yet found,
after several years, a mapping service that can zero in on her address.
Showmystreet.com, however, gets into the general vicinity and shows us a bunch
of trees and corn and lake shoreline.
November 15, 2012 reply from Patricia Doherty
This really is cool – my
husband has tried the Google views before and says this one is better
than any he's seen. By the way, ours is an aerial view.
Patricia
A. Doherty
Senior
Lecturer in Accounting
Coordinator, Managerial Accounting
Boston
University School of Management
595
Commonwealth Ave.
Room 524A
Boston, MA
02215
November 15, 2012 reply from Wes Lavin
Try this site for maps instead. You can be more specific with your
search.
http://www.bing.com/maps/?FORM=HDRSC4
Make sure you click on the Birds Eye tab.
Wes
Jensen Comment
I use Bing for maps, but I like picture resolution and global coverage of
ShowMyStreet to get the feel of what the neighborhood really looks like.
Thanks,
Bob
When I see all those Sandy-victims complaining about FEMA on TV, I wonder if
they haven't applied for their $30,000 payments for alternative housing. Perhaps
they're just afraid of losing what what's left of their homes and contents.
I do understand that in almost any part of the U.S. there's a genuine risk of
being vandalized if victims leave what's left of their home and home contents
when they move to hotels and apartments elsewhere using housing payments from
FEMA. It was so refreshing to see that after the Japanese tsunami disaster there
was virtually no looting of vacant homes and homeowner property. Why do we have
such a criminal culture that exploits disaster victims?
In addition to FEMA Flood Insurance FEMA provides substantial assistance to
disaster victims who were not insured ---
http://www.fema.gov/disaster-assistance-available-fema
Other FEMA grants and assistance programs ---
http://www.fema.gov/grants-assistance-programs-individuals
Hi Pat,
Interestingly, a few weeks ago we could feel a very, very rare earthquake that
was centered in Maine's mountains. There was no damage but it most definitely
shook us up!
Whether I would accept a $60,000+ FEMA grant for Erika and me to move into a
remote hotel would depend entirely on the extent of the damage to our cottage
and the temperature during an anticipated long-term power outage.
If the cottage was still livable and we were not going to freeze to death I
would prefer to stay our damaged cottage just to discourage looters who would
race up from Boston just for the pickings, including the copper wiring
throughout the cottage.
But Erika and I do not have school children living in our cottage. If we had
children and expected their schools to be knocked out for a year we would take
our Katrina grant and move to a hotel where our children could continued
schooling.
Even before Katrina, New Orleans K-12 public schools were arguably the worst in
the nation.
Using FEMA grants, thousands of Katrina victims poured into hotels in
Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. One of the heart-warming thing I
witnessed is how Texas schools reacted instantly to admit Katrina's children.
School buses even added stops in front of the hotels.
One of the major reasons so many Katrina victims stayed on in Texas after all
these years was to avoid returning to those awful New Orleans schools.
Of course Katrina was far worse than Sandy. Katrina had many more victims that
were totally wiped out. Medical, schooling, and other services were knocked out
in the entire city of New Orleans for months on end. Whereas some Sandy victims
are staying behind to keep their jobs, Katrina victims had no jobs left to keep
them in New Orleans.
Here's a module that I published in Bob Jensen's Tidbits on September 5,
2012 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2005/tidbits050912.htm
Bravo America: Where are the Katrina victims now (September 2005)?
86% are outside the State of Louisiana.
"A Look at the Refugee Situation Around the Country," TBO, September 10, 2005
---
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBFOQPDFDE.html
An estimated 377,700 Hurricane Katrina refugees are
in shelters, hotels, homes and other housing in 33 states and Washington,
D.C., according to the Red Cross and state officials:
TEXAS: An estimated 205,000 in shelters and homes
LOUISIANA: About 54,000 in 240 shelters, 659 in
special needs shelters
ARKANSAS: About 50,000 in shelters, motels and
homes
TENNESSEE: 15,500
MISSISSIPPI: 13,262 in 104 Red Cross shelters
MISSOURI: Nearly 6,100 in homes, hotels and church
camps
FLORIDA: 3,472 in 48 shelters
ALABAMA: 2,183 in shelters; 660 in hotels; 116 in
state parks; more in homes
KENTUCKY: 116 at Murray camp in western Kentucky,
plus estimated 3,100 statewide
OKLAHOMA: 2,352 in four shelters
INDIANA: At least 70 in two shelters; more than
2,000 statewide
ILLINOIS: More than 2,000
MARYLAND: About 2,000 seeking Red Cross or local
assistance
VIRGINIA: 1,841
NORTH CAROLINA: 450 in shelters, at least 1,381 in
other housing
GEORGIA: 1,384 staying in 11 Red Cross shelters
OHIO: About 20 in two Red Cross shelters, at least
1,357 staying in hotels and with family and friends
MINNESOTA: 1,000, plus 54 families with Red Cross
chapters
COLORADO: About 350 in one Red Cross shelter, plus
more than 700
SOUTH CAROLINA: 239 in one shelter, 800 in hotels,
228 in Charleston hotels
CALIFORNIA: 807 families in hotels and one Red
Cross shelter
KANSAS: About 800, mostly in hotels and homes.
MICHIGAN: 216 at Fort Custer Training Center, Red
Cross assisting 300 families
NEW MEXICO: 28 at the Albuquerque Convention
Center, more than 450 statewide
NEW JERSEY: About 400 staying with relatives or in
motels.
UTAH: About 300 people at Utah Army National
Guard's Camp Williams
ARIZONA: 347 in two shelters
WEST VIRGINIA: 308 at National Guard Camp Dawson
NEW YORK: 303 cases in Red Cross shelters
MASSACHUSETTS: 209 at Camp Edwards, plus more than
40 families
PENNSYLVANIA: At least 200 in homes, shelters,
other locations
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA: About 200 people at a Red
Cross shelter
WISCONSIN: 200 people in one shelter
RHODE ISLAND: 106 in Navy housing, 75 in hotels and
homes
The United States is a very caring nation.
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
Question
When asked about the meaning of life, how should Siri reply?
One the AECM I recently asked Barry Rice what happens when he asks Siri about
the meaning of life ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_%28software%29
Siri's answer was too superficial.
Now there is a Website that should probably programmed by Apple into Siri
software.
"Scientists and Philosophers Answer Kids’ Most Pressing Questions About
How the World Works"" by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, November 5,
2015 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/05/big-questions-from-little-people/
“If you wish to make an apple pie from
scratch,”
Carl Sagan famously observed in
Cosmos, “you must first invent the
universe.” The questions children ask are
often so simple, so basic, that they turn unwittingly yet profoundly
philosophical in requiring apple-pie-from-scratch type of answers. To
explore this fertile intersection of simplicity and expansiveness,
Gemma Elwin Harris asked thousands of primary school children
between the ages of four and twelve to send in their most restless
questions, then invited some of today’s most prominent scientists,
philosophers, and writers to answer them. The result is
Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds
(public
library) — a compendium of fascinating
explanations of deceptively simple everyday phenomena, featuring such
modern-day icons as Mary Roach, Noam Chomsky,
Philip Pullman, Richard Dawkins, and many
more, with a good chunk of the proceeds being donated to
Save the Children.
Big Questions from Little People ---
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Questions-Little-People-Answers/dp/0062223224/ref=sr_1_3?tag=braipick-20
One child's question I might ask is why used copies cost a penny more than new
copies as of November 12, 2012?
Bob Jensen's links to the meaning of life ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
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Question
What is the difference between education and indoctrination?
Education ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education
Indoctrination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoctrination
Where many voices of education are silenced
Training ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training
"Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education," by Josh Jones,
Open Culture, November 2012 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/noam_chomsky_spells_out_the_purpose_of_education.html
E + ducere: “To lead or draw out.” The
etymological Latin roots of “education.” According to a former Jesuit
professor of mine, the fundamental sense of the word is to draw others out
of “darkness,” into a “more magnanimous view” (he’d say, his arms spread
wide). As inspirational as this speech was to a seminar group of budding
higher educators, it failed to specify the means by which this might be
done, or the reason. Lacking a Jesuit sense of mission, I had to figure out
for myself what the “darkness” was, what to lead people towards, and why. It
turned out to be simpler than I thought, in some respects, since I concluded
that it wasn’t my job to decide these things, but rather to present points
of view, a collection of methods—an intellectual toolkit, so to speak—and an
enthusiastic model. Then get out of the way. That’s all an educator can, and
should do, in my humble opinion. Anything more is not education, it’s
indoctrination. Seemed simple enough to me at first. If only it were so. Few
things, in fact, are more contentious (Google the term “assault on
education,” for example).
What is the difference between education and
indoctrination? This debate rages back hundreds, thousands, of years, and
will rage thousands more into the future. Every major philosopher has had
one answer or another, from Plato to Locke, Hegel and Rousseau to Dewey.
Continuing in that venerable tradition, linguist, political activist, and
academic generalist extraordinaire Noam Chomsky, one of our most
consistently compelling public intellectuals, has a lot to say in the video
above and elsewhere about education.
First, Chomsky defines his view of education in an
Enlightenment sense, in which the “highest goal in life is to inquire and
create. The purpose of education from that point of view is just to help
people to learn on their own. It’s you the learner who is going to achieve
in the course of education and it’s really up to you to determine how you’re
going to master and use it.” An essential part of this kind of education is
fostering the impulse to challenge authority, think critically, and create
alternatives to well-worn models. This is the pedagogy I ended up adopting,
and as a college instructor in the humanities, it’s one I rarely have to
justify.
Chomsky defines the opposing concept of education
as indoctrination, under which he subsumes vocational training, perhaps the
most benign form. Under this model, “People have the idea that, from
childhood, young people have to be placed into a framework where they’re
going to follow orders. This is often quite explicit.” (One of the entries
in the Oxford English Dictionary defines education as “the training
of an animal,” a sense perhaps not too distinct from what Chomsky means).
For Chomsky, this model of education imposes “a debt which traps students,
young people, into a life of conformity. That’s the exact opposite of what
traditionally comes out of the Enlightenment.” In the contest between these
two definitions—Athens vs. Sparta, one might say—is the question that
plagues educational reformers at the primary and secondary levels: “Do you
train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?”
Chomsky goes on to discuss the technological
changes in education occurring now, the focus of innumerable discussions and
debates about not only the purpose of education, but also the proper methods
(a subject this site is deeply invested in), including the current unease
over the
shift to online over traditional classroom ed or
the
value of a traditional degree versus a certificate.
Chomsky’s view is that technology is “basically
neutral,” like a hammer that can build a house or “crush someone’s skull.”
The difference is the frame of reference under which one uses the tool.
Again, massively contentious subject, and too much to cover here, but I’ll
let Chomsky explain. Whatever you think of his politics, his erudition and
experience as a researcher and educator make his views on the subject well
worth considering.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at
Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica /
A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Bob Jensen's threads on the liberal bias of the major media and higher
education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Ann Coulter ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Coulter
Michael Moore ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moore
I'm not a huge Ann Coulter fan, and I seriously do not recall ever quoting
her on the AECM or on my Website. However, the article below illustrates another
way progressives on campus in the past are silencing conservative voices on
campus. It's not just that the conservatism speakers that are being silenced,
it's a message to conservative students that they should not be advocating
conservatism.
It's OK to invite Michael Moore but not Ann Coulter.
It's not so much that both Coulter and Moore often violate the principles
of good scholarship. The point is why is Moore so easily invited by liberal
students on campus and Coulter repelled so often by faculty and administration
on college campuses?
"A Different Ann Coulter Debate," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher
Ed, November 12, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/12/fordham-declines-ban-ann-coulter-her-invitation-rescinded
"Moving Further to the Left," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
October 24, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/24/survey-finds-professors-already-liberal-have-moved-further-left
Academics, on average, lean
to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving
even more in that direction.
Among full-time faculty members at four-year
colleges and universities, the percentage identifying as "far left" or
liberal has increased notably in the last three years, while the percentage
identifying in three other political categories has declined. The data come
from the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research
Institute, which surveys faculty members nationwide every three years on a
range of attitudes.
Here are the data for the new survey and
the prior survey:
|
2010-11 |
2007-8 |
Far left |
12.4% |
8.8% |
Liberal |
50.3% |
47.0% |
Middle of the road |
25.4% |
28.4% |
Conservative |
11.5% |
15.2% |
Far right |
0.4% |
0.7% |
Gauging how gradual or abrupt this shift is
complicated because of changes in the UCLA survey's methodology; before
2007-8, the survey included community college faculty members, who have been
excluded since. But for those years, examining only four-year college and
university faculty members, the numbers are similar to those of 2007-8.
Going back further, one can see an evolution away from the center.
In the 1998-9 survey, more than 35 percent of
faculty members identified themselves as middle of the road, and less than
half (47.5 percent) identified as liberal or far left. In the new data, 62.7
percent identify as liberal or far left. (Most surveys that have included
community college faculty members have found them to inhabit political space
to the right of faculty members at four-year institutions.)
The new data differ from some recent studies by
groups other than the UCLA center that have found that professors (while
more likely to lean left than right) in fact were
doing so from more of a centrist position.
A major study in 2007, for example, found that
professors were more likely to be centrist than liberal, and that many on
the left identified themselves as "slightly liberal." (That study and the
new one use different scales, making exact comparisons impossible.)
In looking at the new data, there is notable
variation by sector. Private research universities are the most left-leaning,
with 16.2 percent of faculty members identifying as far left, and 0.1
percent as far right. (If one combines far left and liberal, however,
private, four-year, non-religious colleges top private universities, 58.6
percent to 57.7 percent.) The largest conservative contingent can be found
at religious, non-Roman Catholic four-year colleges, where 23.0 percent
identify as conservative and another 0.6 percent say that they are far
right.
Professors' Political Identification,
2010-11, by Sector
|
Far left |
Liberal |
Middle of the Road |
Conservative |
Far right |
Public universities |
13.3% |
52.4% |
24.7% |
9.2% |
0.3% |
Private universities |
16.2% |
51.5% |
22.3% |
9.8% |
0.1% |
Public, 4-year
colleges |
8.8% |
47.1% |
28.7% |
14.7% |
0.7% |
Private, 4-year,
nonsectarian |
14.0% |
54.6% |
22.6% |
8.6% |
0.3% |
Private, 4-year,
Catholic |
7.8% |
48.0% |
30.7% |
13.3% |
0.3% |
Private, 4-year, other
religious |
7.4% |
40.0% |
29.1% |
23.0% |
0.6% |
The study found some differences by gender, with
women further to the left than men. Among women, 12.6 percent identified as
far left and 54.9 percent as liberal. Among men, the figures were 12.2
percent and 47.2 percent, respectively.
When it comes to the three tenure-track ranks,
assistant professors were the most likely to be far left, but full
professors were more likely than others to be liberal.
Professors' Political Identification,
2010-11, by Tenure Rank
|
Far left |
Liberal |
Middle of the Road |
Conservative |
Far right |
Full professors |
11.8% |
54.9% |
23.4% |
9.7% |
0.2% |
Associate professors |
13.8% |
50.4% |
24.0% |
11.5% |
0.4% |
Assistant professors |
13.9% |
48.7% |
25.9% |
11.2% |
0.4% |
So what do these data mean?
Sylvia Hurtado, professor of education at UCLA and
director of the Higher Education Research Institute, said that she didn't
know what to make of the surge to the left by faculty members. She said that
she suspects age may be a factor, as the full-time professoriate is aging,
but said that this is just a theory. Hurtado said that these figures always
attract a lot of attention, but she thinks that the emphasis may be
misplaced because of a series of studies showing no evidence that left-leaning
faculty members are somehow shifting the views of their students or
enforcing any kind of political requirement.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on liberal biases in the media and academe ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
Hi again Tom,
CBS Sixty Minutes on November 11, 2012 had an interesting module noting that
with 20 million people in the U.S. unemployed or underemployed there are 3
million jobs that are chronically unfilled because of a shortage of skilled
labor --- Click
Here
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57547342/three-million-open-jobs-in-u.s-but-whos-qualified/?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
Sometimes these skills require college education, but in most cases the jobs
require only technical training by workers who will then be dedicated to their
craft. An example, is a dashboard mechanic who sometimes now commands $100 per
hour. New vehicles are terribly complicated behind the dashboard.
Three million open jobs in U.S., but who's qualified?
The balance of power in Washington didn't change
this week as President Obama and most members of Congress kept their jobs.
They'll go back to work and face an unemployment problem that also hasn't
changed very much. Every month since January 2009, more than 20 million
Americans have been either out of work or underemployed. Yet despite that
staggering number, there are more than three million job openings in the
U.S. Just in manufacturing, there are as many as 500,000 jobs that aren't
being filled because employers say they can't find qualified workers.
It's called "the skills gap." How could that be, we
wondered, at a time like this with so many people out of work? No place is
the question more pressing than in Nevada. The state with the highest
unemployment rate in the country. A place where there are jobs waiting to be
filled.
Karl Hutter: Yeah, we hear way too much about the
United States manufacturing, we don't manufacture anything anymore. Not
true. Not true.
Byron Pitts: Sure, it's Mexico, it's in China--
Karl Hutter: Yeah, yeah, that all went to China,
that all went to Mexico. Not true, whatsoever.
Karl Hutter is the new chief operating officer of
Click Bond in Carson City, Nev., a company his parents started in 1969.
Karl Hutter: We're still technically a small
business, but we're growing quickly.
Byron Pitts: So, you're hiring?
Karl Hutter: We are hiring. We're hiring and we
need to find good people. And that's really what the challenge is these
days.
Three hundred and twenty-five people work at Click
Bond, making fasteners that hold cables, panels and pretty much everything
else inside today's planes, ships and trains. Their customers include the
Defense Department. The F-35 has 30,000 Click Bond fasteners.
The workhorses in this factory may look old, but
they're computer controlled machines that make precision parts, accurate to
a thousandth of an inch; the thickness of a piece of paper. Click Bond needs
employees who can program the computers, operate the machines, fix them and
then check to make sure the results are up to spec.
Ryan Costella: If you look at the real significant
human achievements in this country a lot of them have to do with
manufacturing or making something.
Ryan Costella is head of Strategic Initiatives at
Click Bond. That's another way of saying he's looking ahead to both
opportunities and problems facing the company.
Byron Pitts: Sure. So the skill gap, is it across
the board? Is it at all levels? Or is it the entry level?
Ryan Costella: I would honestly say it's probably
an entry level problem. It's those basic skill sets. Show up on time, you
know, read, write, do math, problem solve. I can't tell you how many people
even coming out of higher ed with degrees who can't put a sentence together
without a major grammatical error. It's a problem. If you can't do the
resume properly to get the job, you can't come work for us. We're in the
business of making fasteners that hold systems together that protect people
in the air when they're flying. We're in the business of perfection. .
Costella says Click Bond ran into trouble when it
expanded production and went to buy these machines from a factory in
Watertown, Conn. The company didn't have enough skilled labor back home in
Nevada to run them, so it bought the entire factory just to get the
qualified employees and kept the plant running in Connecticut.
[Conn. worker: You just have to be careful that you
don't hit the side.]
Nationwide, manufacturers say the lack of skilled
workers is the reason for hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs; a number
Ryan Costella says is about to get bigger.
Continued at
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57547342/three-million-open-jobs-in-u.s-but-whos-qualified/?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
November 11, 2012 reply from Glen Gray
Somewhat related to this
discussion was an article that appeared in Monday's L.A. Times:
It says Basque area of
Spain is one of the bright spots in Europe. Spain (outside of Basque
area) encourages people to go to college--and the unemployment rate for
college graduates is 50%. In Basque, people are encouraged to learn a
trade via apprenticeships and unemployment is much lower. A major
business in Basque is making train cars that are sold all over the
world, including to Amtrak.
Jensen Comment
Today I had conversations with two skilled small business owners. One is a carpenter building a sunroom on my neighbor's house. The other is a
woman who is building a stone retaining wall around one of my flower gardens. Both are
very skilled at their craft.
I asked each one of them why they don't hire at least one laborer to help
them in these in their businesses. Both replied that they were sick and tired of
hiring workers who were unreliable about showing up for work and not good
workers when they did show up from work. There are various reasons lousy
workers, but even up here drug and alcohol abuse is one of the most common
problems among men and women laborers.
I think those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s are just not aware how
many of those 20 million unemployed really are not good workers. And yes I do
know that many of them are good workers who cannot find work suited for their
skills and geographic preferences.
Geographic preferences are an issue. For example, some rural teachers and
other workers who are laid off refuse to take on the living costs, crime risks,
traffic congestion, and other drawbacks of moving to large cities, especially if
the work compensation in urban settings is relatively low given the costs of
moving to and living in urban areas. Instead they prefer to draw unemployment
compensation followed by odd jobs and/or living on spousal income.
The Case Against College Educacation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CaseAgainst
"The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings,
November 7, 2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/07/the-big-new-yorker-book-of-dogs/
This is a Tidbit that I wrote earlier in the
year. When I stumbled upon it, it struck me as being useful to share with your
students and advisees who will eventually be seeking jobs or admission to
graduate schools.
I don't like Joe's question.
It's too simplistic and demands a complicated answer.
"What Is the Best Book You Ever Read?" by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog,
June 23, 2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/06/what-is-best-book-you-ever-read.html
Jensen Comment
Firstly I don't like this question because many readers who answer this
question, especially in public, will be trying to say something about themselves
instead of the book. To your Mom and your kids, the best book you ever read had
better be The Bible or The Quran.
To your blog audience the best book you ever read from cover to cover had
better be Toynbee's ten-volume set ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee
Secondly, such a question should be asked in one of a hundred or more
contexts. What is the best book you ever read in accounting history, financial
accounting, cost accounting, tax accounting, accounting information systems,
history of computing, learning and cognition, etc.
What is the best mystery novel you've ever read, the best romantic novel you
ever read, the best biography you ever read, and on and on and on.
Beware of those oral interviews when applying for a job or college admission
or membership in an exclusive club. Be prepared for those trick questions such
as the examples given below:
- What is your all-time favorite book?
- What are the best three books you ever read? (don't overlook the
autobiography of the founder of the company or university)
- If you could've had an intimate dinner with three people, living or dead
who would you choose and why? (this demands creative thought)
- Who was your favorite K-12 teacher and why?
- Who was your favorite athletic coach and why?
- Who was your was your favorite college professor and why?
- Who was your least favorite college professor and why?
- Who is your favorite active in an academic blog and why?
- Who is your favorite active in a non-academic blog and why?
- Who is your favorite blogger in the NYT, the WSJ, the New Yorker,
the Economist, MSNBC, CNBC, the Nation, and on and on and on?
- If you have online debates, who is your favorite antagonist and why?
- If you have online debates, who is your favorite protagonist and why?
- Who is your favorite intellectual progressive?
- Who is your favorite intellectual conservative?
In the end the choices at the top and bottom of your lists on most any topic
are just too close together to rank. And your choices are not locked in time or
place.
Conclusion
Of course my favorite set of books is Toynbee's ten-volume set.
Oops! Sorry Mom, I overlooked The Bible.
Did you ever wonder how strange it is that
Microsoft years ago chose the name "Windows" for the most ubiquitous operating
system in the world?
The Future of Glass in Ubiquitous Computing
The future is not in HDTV or laptop, tablet, and even smart phone computers as
we know them today
Corning is betting that the future is in glass
Watch the Video ("A Day Made of Glass") ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38&vq=medium
Thanks to my Romanian friend Dan Gheorghe Somnea for the heads up
Jensen Comment
Let your imagination run wild. Imagine smart windows that can see in both
directions for surveillance and Webcams. Imagine windows that will adjust to
light conditions. And imagine having your main computer and cameras being built
into your eyeglasses with headphones on the frames. Imagine being able to watch
your student activities in learning labs around the world?
Imagine seeing exactly what your children are
seeing when they are miles from home.
Did you ever wonder how strange it is that
Microsoft years ago chose the name "Windows" for the most ubiquitous operating
system in the world?
Bob Jensen's Threads on
Invisible Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, Nanotechnology, and Microsoft.Net
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ubiquit.htm
Question
Why are accounting professors and medical school professors likely to receive
higher compensation in the Academy?
Hint
The answer is not the same in both of the above cases.
"Eating an Elite Education at McDonald's," by Jerry Dickens, Chronicle
of Higher Education, November 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Eating-an-Elite-Education-at/135578/
. . .
As I bite into my first Big Mac, all of that
resonates along with some intriguing and basic facts. I can readily obtain
the average salaries for academics at public universities across America. I
can categorize the salaries by field and university profile. I can
understand the metrics for pay in many cases. I can imagine why different
academics receive different salaries. I also can read my university's
extraordinary goals, lofty visions, and glossy brochures, filled with
crisply manufactured blurbs espousing greatness, several with exclamation
points. I can pull all the sticky tabs within this framework. I can even dig
deep into the garbage for more data.
However, no matter how one minces the patties, my
salary is significantly below average compared with those of commensurate
positions across public research universities, including in my state. Other
than a few good colleagues, who have assured me that they make slightly less
or slightly more than me, I have no direct information on how my salary
compares with other faculty members' pay at my university or other private
universities. What several of us know, however, is that we, at least in
earth science, make about 10 to 12 percent less than what's reported for
similar positions in our field at public universities.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I wonder if this article would've ever been written by an accounting professor
or a medical school professor at Rice?
I say this remembering that Emory recently dropped its Geology (Earth
Science) Program due to lack of majors to sustain advanced courses. In turn, the
program lacked majors due to a surplus of geology graduates at both the
undergraduate and graduate levels across the U.S.
I conclude that the article may well have been written by an accounting
professor or medical school professor even if they are on the high end of
compensation due to shortages of faculty to meet increase majors in those
programs. But for them it might be more of an academic exercise rather than
a total gut experience at McDonalds. You have to read the entire article to
really, really appreciate the McDonalds metaphor.
Question
Why do accounting professors and medical school professors probably make more
than geology professors on average for professors who are successful in research
and publication in their respective disciplines?
The answer varies after factoring out the necessary condition of having
rising student demand.
Medical school professors make more largely because they have so many
opportunities to make enormously higher salaries and benefits by going to work
in private practice.
Accounting professors make higher salaries because accounting Ph.D. programs
artificially restrain supply with length of time (over five years to graduate)
and by discouraging solid accountants from applying unless they are also
interested in becoming mathematicians and statisticians.
"Exploring Accounting Doctoral Program Decline: Variation and the Search
for Antecedents," by Timothy J. Fogarty and Anthony D. Holder, Issues in
Accounting Education, May 2012 ---
Not yet posted on June 18, 2012
ABSTRACT
The inadequate supply of new terminally qualified accounting faculty poses a
great concern for many accounting faculty and administrators. Although the
general downward trajectory has been well observed, more specific
information would offer potential insights about causes and continuation.
This paper examines change in accounting doctoral student production in the
U.S. since 1989 through the use of five-year moving verges. Aggregated on
this basis, the downward movement predominates, notwithstanding the schools
that began new programs or increased doctoral student production during this
time. The results show that larger declines occurred for middle prestige
schools, for larger universities, and for public schools. Schools that
periodically successfully compete in M.B.A.. program rankings also more
likely have diminished in size. of their accounting Ph.D. programs. Despite
a recent increase in graduations, data on the population of current doctoral
students suggest the continuation of the problems associated with the supply
and demand imbalance that exists in this sector of the U.S. academy.
September 5, 2012 reply from Dan Stone
This is very sad and very true.
Tim Fogarthy talks about the "ghettoization" of
accounting education in some of his work and talks. The message that faculty
get, and give, is that if a project has no chance for publication in a top X
journal, then it is a waste of time. Not many schools are able to stand
their ground, and value accounting education, in the face of its absence in
any of the "top" accounting journals.
The paradox and irony is that accounting faculty
devalue and degrade the very thing that most of them spend the most time
doing. We seem to follow a variant of Woody Allen's maxim, "I would never
join a club that would have me as a member." Here, it is, "I would never
accept a paper for publication that concerns what I do with most of my
time."
As Pogo said, "we have met the enemy and they is
us."
Dan Stone
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of accountancy doctoral programs in
North America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Freeman Dyson ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
Jensen Comment
When I taught First Year Seminar (not accounting), one of the assigned readings
I selected was Dyson's Phi Beta Kappa Lecture.
"Has Philosophy Really Lost Its Bite?" by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle
of Higher Education, October 24, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/has-philosophy-really-lost-its-bite/31406?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
I was not aware, until I saw a link in the above article, that Freeman Dyson (a
physicist) is a climate warming denier, although climate change is not at the
heart of the "Philosophy Lost Its Bite" article.
Question
Why do Islamic cultures vary so with respect to wanting women to be ignorant
versus highly educated?
"The path through the fields: Bangladesh has dysfunctional politics
and a stunted private sector. Yet it has been surprisingly good at improving the
lives of its poor,"
by Dhaka and Shibaloy, Manikaganj District
The Economist, November 3-9, pp. 23-26 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565617-bangladesh-has-dysfunctional-politics-and-stunted-private-sector-yet-it-has-been-surprisingly
. . .
In some ways, those who doubted Bangladesh’s
potential were right. Economic growth since the 1970s has been poor; the
country’s politics have been unremittingly wretched. Yet over the past 20
years, Bangladesh has made some of the biggest gains in the basic condition
of people’s lives ever seen anywhere. Between 1990 and 2010 life expectancy
rose by 10 years, from 59 to 69 (see chart 1). Bangladeshis now have a life
expectancy four years longer than Indians, despite the Indians being, on
average, twice as rich. Even more remarkably, the improvement in life
expectancy has been as great among the poor as the rich.
Bangladesh has also made huge gains in education
and health.
More than 90% of girls enrolled in primary school in 2005, slightly more
than boys. That was twice the female enrolment rate in 2000. Infant
mortality has more than halved, from 97 deaths per thousand live births in
1990 to 37 per thousand in 2010 (see table). Over the same period child
mortality fell by two-thirds and maternal mortality fell by three-quarters.
It now stands at 194 deaths per 100,000 births. In 1990 women could expect
to live a year less than men; now they can expect to live two years more.
The most dramatic period of improvement in human
health in history is often taken to be that of late-19th-century Japan,
during the remarkable modernisation of the Meiji transition. Bangladesh’s
record on child and maternal mortality has been comparable in scale.
These improvements are not a simple result of
increases in people’s income. Bangladesh remains a poor country, with a GDP
per head of $1,900 at purchasing-power parity.
For the first decades of its independent history
Bangladesh’s economy grew by a paltry 2% a year. Since 1990 its GDP has been
rising at a more respectable 5% a year, in real terms. That has helped
reduce the percentage of people below the poverty line from 49% in 2000 to
32% in 2010. Still, Bangladeshi growth has been slower than India’s, which
for most of the past 20 years grew at around 8% a year. Nevertheless the
gains in its development have been greater. The belief that growth brings
development with it—the “Washington consensus”—is often criticised on the
basis that some countries have had good growth but little poverty reduction.
Bangladesh embodies the inverse of that: it has had disproportionate poverty
reduction for its amount of growth.
How has it done it?
Four main factors explain this surprising success.
First, family planning has empowered women. If you leave aside city states,
Bangladesh is the world’s most densely populated country. At independence,
its leaders decided that they had to restrain further population growth
(China’s one-child policy and India’s forced sterilisation both date from
roughly the same time). Fortunately, Bangladesh’s new government lacked the
power to be coercive. Instead, birth control was made free and government
workers and volunteers fanned out across the country to distribute pills and
advice. In 1975, 8% of women of child-bearing age were using contraception
(or had partners who were); in 2010 the number was over 60% (see chart 2).
In 1975 the total fertility rate (the average
number of children a woman can expect to have during her lifetime) was 6.3.
In 1993 it was 3.4. After stalling, it resumed its fall in 2000. After one
of the steepest declines in history the fertility rate is now just 2.3,
slightly above the “replacement level” at which the population stabilises in
the long term. When Bangladesh and Pakistan split in 1971, they each had a
population of 65m or so. Bangladesh’s is now around 150m; Pakistan’s is
almost 180m.
Because of this Bangladesh is about to reap a
“demographic dividend”; the number of people entering adulthood will
handsomely exceed the number of children being born, increasing the share of
the total population that works.
Continued in articl
So why do Islamic cultures vary so with respect to wanting women to be
ignorant versus highly educated?
I don't have a clue other than to say ignorance often breeds ignorance. Those
cultures wanting women to be forever ignorant probably have been more isolated
in the evolution of mankind.
"A Sincere Question About LinkedIn," by George Williams, Chronicle
of Higher Education, November 9, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/a-sincere-question-about-linkedin/44100#disqus_thread
Here's the reply Bob Jensen posted to the Chronicle for this article.
Do you want your college's students to leave campus
without knowledge of what is, according to Forbes Magazine, "the most
advantageous social networking tool available to job seekers and business
professionals today?"
Linked in may not be useful to you if you're not
interested in seeking a job in a non-academic career or in seeking
professional employees for your business or government agency, but that's no
excuse for not letting your graduates and alumni know about this important
site.
Bob Jensen
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen...
November 11, 2012 reply from Scott Dell
Hi Bob,
Agree with you!
VERY Powerful. Not only
does LinkedIn act as an online Rolodex (though my students under 22 have
no idea what that is...), it is an incredibly valuable tool for my
students who want to get a job or for me to help keep in touch with
fellow professionals. Useful applications of LinkedIn include:
1. Researching backgrounds
of interviewers at companies. Most HR professionals, and many business
professionals, are frequent users and post their own resumes. Gaining
insight about who you will be talking to is part of your due diligence
in researching an organization/company when interviewing.
2. Groups, personal and
professional, offer a terrific opportunity to stay current on what is
happening in the world - from my Harley group, to my Wharton Alumni
group to my Big 4 group, it is nice to keep tabs on your industries and
areas of interest, not to mention a student will get exposure to the
latest trends in their area of choice that YOU might be quite aware of,
but is new news to them.
3. I urge my students to
have their LinkedIn reference on their resume, in the same place as
their email and phone number, as recruiters, even if they don't check
out the page directly (though most will), will know that you are
connected to the professional social media world. I suspect that
sending recruiters to their Facebook page, which they check anyway, is
not where they would want recruiters using as a primary source of
information. And yes, I also include the reference in my signature
block on ALL emails.
4. Although as a matter of
personal policy, I will NOT friend students through Facebook, I will
without hesitation or reservation (ok, military background showing
through), Link via LinkedIn.
5. I have used LinkedIn as
a recruiting tool for adjuncts - with which I have had amazing responses
from people inside and outside my network, as requests have been
forwarded to contacts that were not directly part of my professional
contacts, but were friends of friends. I have also used LinkedIn to
recruit volunteers for charitable activities. Additionally, it has also
given me the excuse to occasionally refer information and connect to
folks that I have not really been in touch with for a LONG time.
6. It is also a quick way
to maintain email addresses and other contact information (a la Rolodex)
in a central source, and if traveling nationally or abroad, can quickly
sort who in my network might be nearby.
Would be happy to link with
any of my fellow professionals that find this of interest or value:
Scott Dell, CPA, MBA
Assistant Professor
Accounting Program Director
School of Business & Public
Safety
Marian University
45 South National Ave
Fond du Lac, WI 54935
SDell18@MarianUniversity.edu
“Great is Study for it
leads to Action”
The Talmud-Kiddushin
Bob Jensen's threads on social networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
What critics don't realize that one of the selling points of carrots is that
they allegedly improve vision in a movie theater.
Anybody want a carrot? In Spain, carrots are being
sold in place of theater tickets as a way to avoid a 21 percent tax on the
tickets. Many Spaniards say the "Carrot Rebellion" is a creative response to the
country's unpopular austerity measures, but some simply call it tax evasion.
WGBH Television News, November 12, 2012 ---
http://www.wgbh.org/News/Articles/2012/11/12/To_Get_Around_Tax_Hike_Spanish_Theater_Sells_Carrots_Not_Tickets.cfm
I have the same criticism of Dan Ariely and President Obama --- they both
suffer from overexposure in the media. They have good messages, but sometimes we
tire hearing about it. A psychology top researcher friend of mine also
criticizes Dan Ariely of conducting some research that seems to be more
replication of earlier studies in the social sciences, particularly psychology.
This would be great except that Professor Ariely purportedly does not always
cite those earlier studies.
Be that as it may, Dan Ariely is certainly value added to our Academy.
Dan Ariely Presents “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior” in
Upcoming MOOC, Open Culture, November 12, 2012 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/a_beginners_guide_to_irrational_behavior.html
Here’s one thing you can look forward to early next
year.
Dan
Ariely, a well-known professor
of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke
University, will present
A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior as
a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). If you’ve been with
us for a while, you’re already familiar with Ariely’s
work. You’ve seen his videos explaining
why well-intentioned people lie,
or why
CEOs repeatedly get outsized bonuses that defy logic.
And you know that economics, when
looked at closely, is a much messier affair than many
rational choice theorists
might care to admit.
Now
is your chance to delve into Ariely’s research and
discover precisely how emotion shapes economic decisions
in financial and labor markets, and in our everyday
lives. The six-week course (described
in more detail here) doesn’t
begin until March 25th, but you can
reserve your seat today.
It’s all free. And keep in mind that students who master
the materials covered in the class will receive a
certificate at the end of the course.
Other potentially
interesting
MOOCs coming early next year include:
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, MITx, and EdX courses available from
prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Bob Jensen's threads on behavioral and cultural economics and finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#Behavioral
"The UK's Most Disturbing Number: Total Unfunded Pension Obligations =
321% Of GDP," by Tyler Derden, Zero Hedge, November 12, 2012 ---
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-12/uks-most-disturbing-number-total-unfunded-pension-obligations-321-gdp
Can Illinois and California be far behind?
"Is Britain the Next Greece? The U.K. debt plight is worse than the worst.
And there’s nothing that politicians or John Maynard Keynes can do about it,"
by Andrew Sawers, cfo.com, November 7, 2012 ---
http://www3.cfo.com/article/2012/11/the-economy_john-maynard-keynes-general-theory-debt-britain-greece
The great economist John Maynard Keynes is a
much-misunderstood man. More than that, Keynes himself didn’t understand how
international economies work, and he took far too optimistic a view about
the ambitions of those in government. The result? Highly indebted countries
are pursuing to their detriment what they mistakenly believe to be Keynesian
policies.
That’s the argument recently put forward by Guy
Fraser-Sampson, a former investment manager at the largest sovereign wealth
fund in the world, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and now an investment
and economics consultant who teaches at Cass Business School in London.
Speaking at the recent Finance Directors’ Forum,
Fraser-Sampson told an audience of CFOs and other senior business executives
that “there is a deep and instinctive view that something has gone horribly
wrong. A lot of people are very frustrated that they know something has gone
wrong but are not really sure how or why or when.”
Fraser-Sampson said that since the Second World
War, politicians have been adopting what he called a “bastard Keynesian”
model. Keynes himself took the view that, in times of recession, governments
should, indeed, intervene in the economy by running budget deficits: “They
should boost public spending and that public spending will lift the economy
out of recession,” Fraser-Sampson explained.
But what most people apparently don’t know is that
Keynes called such deficits “abnormal spending.”
Such spending isn’t something “he envisaged
governments doing all the time. It was something he envisaged them doing
occasionally. As soon as good times returned, they would make good that
money by running a surplus in the good years,” said Fraser-Sampson.
But what nation can actually do that? In the United
Kingdom, he said, a structural surplus has been recorded only five times
since 1945, “and if you talk about a real surplus — a surplus that actually
reduces the amount of public debt outstanding — that’s only happened once:
right at the very end of the [1979–1990] Thatcher era.”
Keynes, said Fraser-Sampson, “was a warm, wonderful
generous human being and he made the classic mistake of believing that
everyone else was the same as he was. He thought politicians were
essentially fine, good, upstanding public-spirited people who went into
public office for the good that they could do for the country, and that it
was perfectly OK to trust them with running a budget deficit. As we’ve seen,
he was tragically misguided.”
The world Keynes inhabited was quite different in
other ways, too. It was a world of fixed exchange rates, and where most
currencies were linked at least indirectly to gold. It was also a world in
which there just wasn’t anywhere near as much reliance on international
trade as there is today. “Keynes, himself, in [his major work] The General
Theory, quite candidly admits that he doesn’t know how to model the effect
of international trade — and therefore he’s left it out.”
Where all of this leads to is that a fundamental
plank of Keynes’s theory starts to fall apart. He developed the idea of the
income multiplier: money spent becomes income in someone else’s hands; he
then spends some of that income, which in turn becomes income for others,
and so on. But, said Fraser-Sampson, research suggests that in open,
international economies where there are floating exchange rates and the
burden of net debt is greater than 60% of GDP, the income multiplier is
actually negative over the medium term.
What does this mean? “If you are a heavily indebted
government in a modern environment and you try to spend your way out of
recession, you will actually make things worse rather than better,”
Fraser-Sampson said.
That doesn’t prevent many from trying. Look at the
euro zone, he said: “We see lots of phony growth that’s been pumped in, and
now the day of reckoning is at hand. You have to have very dramatic economic
contraction such as you’re seeing in Greece and soon in Spain to try to
squeeze all that out [of] the system.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It's just not true that there's nothing the U.K. can do about its debt. The
U.K., unlike Greece, can simply print more money to pay its bills following the
lead of the Weimar
Republic,
Zimbabwe, and the Federal Reserve of the United States under Bernanke. If a
country prints its own currency there's really no longer a need to tax or
borrow.
Here's how the U.S. printed over $2 trillion with the Fed's Quantitative
Easing program ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
Countries still trying to tax or borrow are just ignorant of Quantitative
Easing.
"How to Keep Electronics Going With No Power," by David Pogue, The
New York Times, November 1, 2012 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/how-to-keep-electronics-going-with-no-power/
Jensen Comment
A few of my neighbors have those generators about the size of wheel barrows that
they pull out from their garages, plug into an outlet, pour in gasoline, and run
a few hours each day to charge computer batteries, run refrigerators, and heat a
little food. And if temperatures are really cold, they have to run them many
more hours each day and hope they can buy enough gasoline in nearby towns still
having power. Most village power outages up here are locally caused by trees
falling on power lines.
The real drawback of the portable generator solution is that you have to be
home to tend the generator. Your house is in deep trouble up here if the power
goes out, and you're getting a suntan in Florida while the temperature in the
White Mountains plunges below zero. One of my neighbors with a beautiful
finished basement discovered what a pipe freeze leak can do to carpets,
furniture, and wall paper.
As for me, I went for a larger automatic generator system costing around
$16,000. I could head south in the winter without a care in the world other than
having somebody check on the cottage three or four times each week. But travel
is difficult for Erika, so we mostly take our trips to England on Netflix these
days. I don't mind. As the saying goes: "Been there, done that."
Besides. What would the AECM do without me?
November 8, 2012 message from Bob Jensen
Hi Pat,
Bring on the snow. I hated last winter because we had so little of the white
stuff after December.
The problem last winter was that the jet stream hung far south and brought
unusually heavy snows south of us. It's very unusual for us to get so little
snow in the north.
With the price of heating oil I'm more
concerned with temperatures. Since moving here we seem to be experiencing
some regional warming. The first year I lived here I recall winter days
where temperatures plunged to almost 40 below zero. Natives did not consider
that unusual. Here's a weather report sent to the AECM after we bought the
cottage in 2003 (the former owner rented from us for a time since I was
still teaching in Texas):
Wednesday, January 22, 2003 |
|
Are we
nuts? Next year we will be viewing Mt Washington from our new
home--- |
|
Conditions at 5:00 a.m. on
January 22, 2003 |
|
|
|
Weather: Blowing snow
and freezing fog |
|
|
Temperature: -34° |
Visibility: 100 feet |
|
|
Wind Chill Index: -79°F |
Relative Humidity: 100% |
|
|
Wind: Northwest at 117 gusting
to 142 MPH |
Station Pressure: 22.80" and
falling |
|
|
Average snowfall: 40
inches per month |
|
Where are
the palm trees? |
What caught my attention was the wind chill
of -79F degrees.
In the past five years it's been rare to have the temperature drop below
-10F at the cottage, and wind chills below -20F are also rare. Mostly
our winter days fluctuate between 0F and +30F. Until 2012, however, we
enjoyed very deep snow, romantic blizzards, and NetFlix. When you're
retired you don't have to leave home unless there are nice days.
For the forthcoming Winter 2013 I'm hoping for warm days and deep snow.
In Winter 2012 the nearby Sunset Hill House Hotel suffered badly from
poor cross country ski conditions. The religious owners are literally
praying for deep snow in 2013.
Snowfall does not have such an impact on the down hill skiing operations
like those at Cannon Mountain, Mt. Washington, Loon Mountain, and scores
of other downhill ski resorts in the White Mountains of NH and the Green
Mountains of Vermont. Virtually all of them make their own snow.
For example, from my desk I can see skiers (really tiny black dots)
moving down the slopes of Cannon. The State of NH runs this operation
and pumps over a million gallons from Echo lake on some days to make
snow. The amazing thing is that taking all that water from this deep
mountain lake never seems to lower the surface by even an inch.
I attached a picture taken from my desk while I watched snow making on
one of the 60 ski trails on Cannon. The plumes of snow are from the ski
guns throwing new snow from water pumped up from Echo Lake.
I also attached a picture of my snow thrower. It's fun to be a mountain
man in deep snow and relatively warm sun.
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
Question
Why do even prestigious colleges universities
fudge upward when reporting where new students ranked in their high school or
undergraduate classes?
Hint
It has to do with media rankings of universities and Lake Woebegone
"Another Rankings Fabrication," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
November 9, 2012, ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/09/george-washington-u-admits-submitting-false-data-class-rank
George Washington University on Thursday became the
third private university this year
to admit that it has been reporting incorrect information about its new
students -- both on the university's website and
in information provided to U.S. News & World Report for rankings.
In the case of GW, the university -- for at least a
decade -- has been submitting incorrect data on the class rank of new
students. For the most recent class of new students, George Washington
reported that 78 percent of new students were in the top 10 percent of their
high school classes. The actual proportion of such students is 58 percent.
According to the university, the problem was
identified over the summer when a new provost reorganized admissions
functions, and reviewed admissions statistics. The university found that for
applicants whose high schools don't calculate ranks (a growing trend among
high schools), the university estimated the class rank, based on grades and
other factors. That policy is not permitted by U.S. News. After
finding out what had been going on with class rank, the university had an
outside audit done of all admissions data that is reported (including SAT
scores) and found no other problems.
George Washington's announcement follows the news
this year that
Claremont McKenna College and
Emory University also reported incorrect data for
years.
The guide that U.S. News sends to colleges
specifically states that the institutions -- in calculating the percentage
of students in the top 10 percent of their classes -- should include only
students for whom the information is supplied by high schools.
In an interview, Forrest Maltzman, the senior vice
provost who has been overseeing admissions since July, said that the
university believes that the submission of incorrect class rank scores
started more than a decade ago. but that the impact of this approach was
minimal at first. Over the last 10 years, more high schools have stopped
producing class ranks. Further, as GW has become more competitive in
admissions, so more admitted students would have had high class ranks (or
the grades that would have led GW to estimate that they were in the top 10
percent of their classes).
Continued in article
'U.S. News' Moves George Washington U. to 'Unranked' Category,"
Inside Higher Ed, November 15, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/11/15/us-news-moves-george-washington-u-unranked-category
Presumably some college applicants are more dubious about colleges and
universities that are in the "Unranked" category.
Bob Jensen's threads about media rankings of colleges and universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Another Lake Woebegone Issue
"Is Grade Integrity a Fairness Issue?" by Jane Robbins, Inside Higher
Ed, November 8, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/sounding-board/grade-integrity-fairness-issue
A few weeks ago I received a survey invitation
through an association listserve asking for information on faculty
experiences with and responses to student requests for special treatment.
Beyond a raw request for a grade change, many other types of request would
affect grades: requests for extra credit, do-overs, late
submissions, and so on that are outside of stated course policy. Some
survey questions asked about institutional attitudes toward offering/denying
student requests.
I was glad to see this because its emphasis on
policy and behavior—student, faculty, and institution—highlights that grades
(and grade
inflation) may be grounded in decisions that have
little do with student performance or a belief in grading systems as a set
of standards for differentiation. We’ve all heard anecdotal stories about
adjuncts who give good grades to get good evaluations, or of an
administrator changing a professor’s grade for a complaining student (or
parent) who made no headway with the professor; there are several studies
and
books that provide
support for these stories. Many schools allow students to “appeal” their
grade, as if a grade is a punishment or a clear wrong to be righted (a not
impossible, but likely rare, occurrence). At the extreme, law schools have
retroactively raised grades for all students—or
softened their grading parameters—in an effort to make students from their
schools look, hmm, what? As good as those from less rigorous schools? The
remarkable thing in this form of grade inflation is the sense that they
“had” to do this to make students more competitive—that students were at an
“unfair” disadvantage without easier grades.
Some schools, like Princeton,
Cornell, and
University of Minnesota, have made efforts in the
opposite direction to try to curb grade inflation. Within these efforts is
recognition of some of the many pressures, internal and external, that
affect grades. You may have others to add, but at a minimum they include
related pressure to:
- attract paying students
- retain paying students
- increase completion rates
- maintain a student’s eligibility for an
extra-curricular role
- compensate for diverse levels of preparedness
- get good evaluations—for self-satisfaction,
self-protection (avoid retaliation for not raising grades), or job
retention
- make students look more attractive to
employers
- please people in a position to affect one’s
welfare: funders, parents, students, politicians, colleagues
- minimize time and energy to uphold standards
Resisting pressure to let go of values is at the
heart of all challenges to integrity. It can seem like more trouble than
it’s worth, especially when the “cost” seems small (a B+ to an A-?) and the
return seems high. Or it can seem like an insurmountable effort: many
challenges to integrity, including to grade integrity, can look like no-win
collective action problems when they are placed in the context of the
larger, competitive environment. So it is helpful to come back to the
question, is it fair?
Of course, fair to whom? Or, put another way, does
grade integrity matter?
It seems that when we stop looking at our own
(internal) interests for raising grades—and this would include all the
pressures listed above—it becomes harder to justify grade inflation because
the benefits to us become a cost to others. If we lower the bar so that our
students are in a more competitive position, does that make it unfair to
those who earned the higher grades, or who went to schools that maintain
higher standards? To employers who can no longer rely on us for an
authentic—fair—representation of relative student achievement? To funders or
policymakers who want graduates not merely in name? To students who will be
left with an unrealistic sense of accomplishment, an arrogant sense of
entitlement, or both, which may be a barrier to them in the future? To
faculty themselves, who may feel coerced by the pressures to be lenient?
Behavior is the measure of integrity. We can say we
have high standards, or the best students, but if we cheat on that for own
interest, and don’t defend our standards, then our behavior conflicts with
our espoused values, and is bound to harm others. Eventually, we may harm
ourselves, in the form of lost trust from those who count on us for the very
things we are set up—and claim—to do.
Continued in article
A Professor Asks Former Students to Pump Up His RateMyProfessor Scores
"UNC Law Prof Sends a ‘Rather Embarrassing’ Request, Asks Former Students to
Help His Online Rating," by Christopher Danzig, Above the Law, February
23, 2012 ---
http://abovethelaw.com/2012/02/unc-law-prof-sends-a-rather-embarrassing-request-asks-former-students-to-help-his-online-rating/
With the proliferation of online rating sites, an
aggrieved consumer of pretty much anything has a surprising range of avenues
to express his or her discontent.
Whether you have a complaint about your
neighborhood coffee shop or an
allegedly unfaithful ex-boyfriend, the average Joe
has a surprising amount of power through these sites.
Rating sites apparently even have the power to
bring a well-known
UNC Law
professor to his electronic knees.
It’s not every day that a torts
professor
sends his former students a “rather embarrassing
request” to repair his online reputation. It’s also certainly not every day
that the students respond en masse….
On Tuesday, Professor
Michael Corrado sent the following email to 2Ls
who took his torts class last year, basically pleading for their help (the
entire email is reprinted on the next page):
Continued in article
RateMyProfessor Site ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/
The Number One Scandal in Higher Education is Grade Inflation
And RateMyProfessor is one of the main causes of grade inflation
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
November 1, 2012 Respondus message from Richard Campbell
Is the student taking your class the same one who is taking your exams??
Keep an eye on
www.respondus.com
Bob Jensen's threads about online cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#OnlineCheating
Software for online examinations and quizzes ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#Examinations
November 9, 2012 Popcorn message from Richard Campbell
The video demo is intriguing, but only works in
Firefox.
http://mozillapopcorn.org/
Richard
Slide Show From Bloomberg Business Week, November 2012
Top B-Schools With the Highest-Paid MBAs ---
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2012-11-01/top-b-schools-with-the-highest-paid-mbas
Jensen Comment
This is one of those reports where it pays to look at the variance and kurtosis
as well as a measure of central tendency (mean or median).
Also it's not clear how variable compensation (sales commissions and bonuses)
are factored in with fixed portions of salaries. For example, many of the best
entry-level jobs on Wall Street are variable, performance-based compensation
jobs.
And how are benefits factored into the study?
For example, some employees who travel most of the time don't make big
sacrifices for personal housing. I know one, for example, who uses her parent's
address for "home" since she's almost never home. In reality, she lives most of
the year in luxury hotels at the expense of her employer and dines in the finest
restaurants. Is this added "compensation?"
And note that if your NYC employer sends you to London or Los Angeles for a
long-term consulting engagement, your luxury hotel bill may be paid for seven
days a week even if you only work five days a week. This is because paying taxi
and travel expenses to bring you back to NYC every week end is more expensive
than paying your luxury hotel bill for those days when your not on the job.
Best and Worst 2012 MBA Job Placement - Job Offers Abundant, for Most -
Business Week
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2012-11-01/best-and-worst-2012-mba-job-placemen
Jensen Comment
Placement data can be somewhat misleading, especially for very small programs.
For example, before Trinity University dropped its MBA program a significant
proportion of the graduates were full-time military employees. At the time San
Antonio's major employers were five military bases, two of which like Lackland
and Kelly were enormous, although many of our MBA students were medical military
from the Brooke Army Hospital. But placement of other graduates was really
problematic. Also the MBA program did not coincide with Trinity's goal of having
only full-time students in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Enrollments
and placements of full-time MBA students were weak, and the MBA program was
dropped. Later a MS program in accountancy was added after Texas passed the
150-credit rule.
The above Bloomberg Business Week link has a somewhat dubious
advertisement from Thunderbird. In that advertisement, Thunderbird rightly
claims to be the Number 1 School for Global Business in various
international-specialty rankings ---
http://www.thunderbird.edu/about-thunderbird/rankings
But Thunderbird does not even make the Top 30 in terms of the above MBA
placement rankings where Thunderbird advertises itself as being Number 1.
Bob Jensen's threads on business school rankings by Bloomberg Business
Week, US News, the WSJ, The Economist, Financial Times, etc. ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
"S.C. taxpayers’ Social Security numbers, credit cards hacked," by
Paul Bonner, Journal of Accountancy, November 1, 2012 ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/News/20126778.htm
"My Adviser Stole My Research," by Stacy Patton, Chronicle of
Higher Education, November 11, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/My-Adviser-Stole-My-Research/135694/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Much of the conversation about plagiarism in
academe focuses on professors who steal from their scholarly equals. But
growing pressures to publish, particularly in the sciences, can also
increase the temptation for professors to defraud their graduate students,
some scholars say.
Graduate students and their advisers spend long,
intense stretches of time working together on research experiments and
publications. But those collaborations sometimes disintegrate into
competition over intellectual property, and the resulting disputes can be as
murky as the student-adviser relationship itself.
Universities' research-misconduct processes may not
protect vulnerable graduate students from retaliation, but the systems can
also be ill-equipped to protect faculty from disgruntled advisees. Since
discussions between students and their advisers are often private, it can be
hard to judge who originated an idea. And courts and juries often fail to
understand the nuances of graduate student-faculty relationships.
John M. Braxton, one of the authors of
Professors Behaving Badly (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), says
advisers have sometimes plagiarized student dissertations and lab notes to
support their own articles, grant proposals, and applications for lucrative
patents. He has seen cases where professors remove students' names from
research projects when they begin to show innovative results, or publish
articles without offering co-authorship to a student who has made
substantial conceptual or methodological contributions.
Padmapriya Ashokkumar and Mazdak Taghioskoui are
two former graduate students who say that happened to them. And they have
both found themselves in precarious positions after accusing their advisers
of plagiarizing their research projects. Both are suing their former
universities and are hopeful that the courts will help compensate them for
how their allegations derailed their academic ambitions, they say.
Ms. Ashokkumar, who studied computer science and is
from India, attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Mr. Taghioskoui,
who studied electrical engineering and is from Iran, attended George
Washington University and got his Ph.D. there.
Ms. Ashokkumar first became concerned about an
adviser stealing her work in January of 2007, when she Googled her own name.
She wanted to see how many Web sites had picked up two papers she'd written
with Scott Henninger, then an associate professor at Nebraska, who had been
her adviser. Together, they had developed a tool to help software engineers
create user-friendly Web sites for consumers.
As she scrolled down the computer screen, she saw
that an article she'd written with Mr. Henninger
for a university publication in 2005 had,
unbeknownst to her, been presented by him a year later at a conference
workshop in Georgia. On the site, she saw that her name had been removed as
a co-author. Instead, she was listed in an acknowledgments section. Only a
small portion of the original article, she says, had been revised.
Mr. Henninger, she says, had once told her that the
co-authored research wasn't good enough to publish off campus or present at
conferences.
"For him to tell me that the work was not good
enough, then turn around and submit it without my name, was a stab in the
back," she says.
Ms. Ashokkumar and Mr. Henninger already had a
rocky relationship; she had changed advisers before making her Web
discovery. After she saw the reference to her research without her name on
it, she complained to the graduate chair and then to the department chair,
who reviewed the evidence and advised her to file a formal complaint with
the university's research-integrity officer.
Ms. Ashokkumar says that after Mr. Henninger was
informed that the university was investigating him for misconduct, he
accused her of plagiarizing his work in another paper. He did so, she says,
when he discovered that she and her new advisers intended to present that
paper for an international software-engineering symposium. According to
court documents provided by the university, the paper was based on a
research topic that Mr. Henninger and Ms. Ashokkumar had proposed, and that
he had previously written about alone.
"My future was under question," she says. "He told
me, 'I have the power to make sure you are thrown out of the university.'"
The university's research-misconduct committee
finished its investigation in April 2007 and upheld Ms. Ashokkumar's
plagiarism complaint against her former adviser. The committee also
dismissed his complaint against her.
In the wake of the dispute, the university proposed
calming the turmoil surrounding Ms. Ashokkumar in her department by asking
her to allow Mr. Henninger to serve on her dissertation committee. She
refused.
The two advisers she had been working with refused
to continue with her, she says. She tried to find a new adviser, but no
other faculty member agreed to take her on.
"I was seen as somebody who was difficult to work
with and created trouble," she says, "because I stood up for my rights."
When she couldn't find a new adviser, she says she was told she would have
to start a new dissertation project, despite five years of work. In limbo,
with no adviser or committee, she was dropped from her program, she says.
A spokeswoman for the university said officials
there could not comment on a matter that involved pending litigation.
"The university had an obligation to restore her to
the department," says Gene Summerlin, Ms. Ashokkumar's lawyer. "Padma got
caught in an academic turf war, and the university put the professor's
interests ahead of the graduate student."
Ms. Ashokkumar, who now works as a software
engineer for a company in Austin, Tex., is seeking $150,000 in damages,
which she says represents the difference in pay she would have received with
a Ph.D. and what she now earns without one. She also wants the university to
provide her with an adviser and committee so she can return to her program
and earn a doctorate.
Mr. Henninger, who resigned from his position in
July 2008, according to court documents, could not be reached for comment.
The university has argued in briefs it filed in the case that Ms.
Ashokkumar's allegations of retaliation contain false and defamatory
statements against Mr. Henninger, and that he was "denied fundamental
due-process rights by not being fully informed of the charges and evidence
against him in order to be able to identify and effectively present
rebutting evidence."
'Known to Break
Legs'
When graduate students say an adviser stole their
work, it can be hard for universities to decipher right from wrong, says
Barbara A. Lee, a labor-relations professor at Rutgers University.
"It can be very difficult for an institution to
determine whether the faculty member had the idea and the student developed
it, or the student developed the idea and shared it with the faculty member
and the faculty member improved it," Ms. Lee says.
Allegations of retaliation can also be hard to sort
out. There may be good reasons, she adds, why a student who has had a
problem with an adviser can't find a new one.
Jensen Comment
One of my former colleagues, a professor of business and department chair, was
called back by one of the most prestigious universities in the United States to
give reason why his PhD should not be revoked due to plagiarism, in his thesis,
of published works of an accounting professor at that prestigious institution.
My colleague was totally shocked and confused. During the hearings on this
matter it became evident that the accounting professor had instead plagiarized
my friend's dissertation and not vice versa.
It's important to note that the university was prepared to punish the student
severely by revoking his PhD degree. But in the case of the cheating faculty
member there was no punishment. I know this professor and know that he continued
to teach for that institution as a tenured professor. Perhaps punishment for
cheating only works in one direction.
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who plagiarize or otherwise cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
The Chronicle’s annual Diversity in Academe
supplement examines the range of gender issues existing on college campuses.
Not long ago, women were the focus of most
discussions of gender in academe. But now it's more complicated, with each
sex drawing attention for different reasons. In this special report, we look
beyond the data and explore gender issues among undergraduates, graduate
students, and faculty members on campuses across the country.
Also in this report:
- The vastly different ways that men and women
are participating in campus life.
- A look at whether biology is just another
"pink-collar" profession.
- How some colleges are drawing more female
students to computer science.
- A former convict’s story shedding light on the
"school to prison" pipeline and other misconceptions about academe’s
black gender gap.
- Data on who’s studying what and a table
showing the race, ethnicity, and gender of students at 1,505 colleges.
- A prominent scientist’s response to the
argument that efforts to increase women in STEM fields amount to social
engineering.
- A case for why diversity leads to better
science.
"A History of Reading," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings,
October 26, 2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/26/a-history-of-reading/
"Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong," The
Atlantic, November 1, 2012 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/?single_page=true
. . .
People tend to study what you know how to study, I
mean that makes sense. You have certain experimental techniques, you have
certain level of understanding, you try to push the envelope -- which is
okay, I mean, it's not a criticism, but people do what you can do. On the
other hand, it's worth thinking whether you're aiming in the right
direction. And it could be that if you take roughly the Marr-Gallistel point
of view, which personally I'm sympathetic to, you would work differently,
look for different kind of experiments.
Continued in article
"A.I. Gone Awry The Futile Quest for Artificial Intelligence,"
by Peter Kassan, Skeptic, June 2010 ---
http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n02_AI_gone_awry.html
Thanks to Roger Collins for the Heads Up
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm
Flat World Knowledge will no longer publish versions of its textbooks at
no charge ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/05/flat-worlds-shift-gears-and-what-it-means-open-textbook-publishing
Jensen Comment
At $19.95 a Flat World book may sound like a real deal compared with a
competitor's $180 alternative. But keep in mind that the higher priced textbook
may be more current and have much better exhibits, end-of-chapter material, and
multimedia supplements. As a rule the more expensive versions have value added
unless there are some unfair marketing tactics employed (such as giving
instructors 20 free copies that they can sell in the lucrative cash market
offered by the sleazy guys prowling around faculty offices).
Also keep in mind that students may sell the $180 textbooks back to campus
bookstores for as much as $90. There's not much a used book market for books
published by Flat World.
"Textbooks for Tightwads: As classes start, business students are in
for a shock: Textbook prices are higher than ever. A word to the wise: It pays
to shop around," by Rachel Z. Arndt, Business Week, August 26, 2009
---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/aug2009/bs20090826_069900.htm?link_position=link1
Shopping for textbooks can be burdensome at best,
painful at worst. And it's no different for business students. By the time
students get to B-school, they're probably well-versed in the tricks of the
textbook trade. They need to be, with some books required at top B-schools
retailing for well over $200.
Although textbook shopping is as inevitable as
picking classes or group projects, spending tons of money on books doesn't
have to be part of the process. The catch is knowing what you're doing,
which isn't as obvious as it sounds, even for students with top-of-the-line
spreadsheet skills. Of course, you can still look for the least beat-up copy
in the campus bookstore, but that should be just the beginning.
The Web is overflowing with sites claiming to offer
the cheapest textbooks around. So, with book prices rising, the cost of
higher education higher than ever, and a dreary economy to boot, it'll
certainly pay off to spend some time shopping around. Publishers may be
resourceful, but students are, too.
An Oligopoly
To say they have to be is an understatement. The General Accounting Office
says textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation since
1986. And today, students spend on average about $700 per year on required
course materials, according to a 2008 survey by the National Association of
College Stores (NACS).
Part of the problem is rising production costs, but
the textbook market itself plays a role. The industry is an oligopoly, says
James V. Koch, president of Old Dominion University, in a 2006 report by the
U.S. Education Dept. Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.
According to Koch, five publishers—Thomson, Wiley, Houghton-Mifflin,
Pearson, and The McGraw-Hill Companies (Businessweek's parent)—control the
market, putting out about 80% of all college texts.
What's more, Koch says, the textbook market is
unique. Unlike markets for most consumer products, where demand is generated
by consumers themselves, textbook demand is created by another group: the
faculty choosing texts for their classes. That makes it possible for
publishers to introduce higher prices without much&mdashlif any—loss in
revenue.
Publishers can also introduce "bundled" versions of
books—books sealed with additional CD-ROMs or other materials—for higher
prices. This means, even if just the book itself is required, students are
stuck buying a more expensive version.
Tricks of the Trade
But the situation for students isn't as dire as it sounds. First of all, as
some economists point out, students are smart and know how to consume. Yes,
textbooks are expensive. But they are expensive at list price—usually the
highest price a student can find. The prices charged by most bookstores,
online retailers, and even online trading posts are well under this
publisher-set price.
As BusinessWeek found out, those retail prices can
vary wildly, which is why it pays to shop around. One of the easiest and
fastest ways to find the best prices is to use a site that aggregates prices
from many retailers. Booksprice.com and allbookstores.com are good places to
start. They both list prices from the most popular Web retailers, such as
alibris.com, half.com, bookbyte.com, and even Amazon.com. If aggregated
searches aren't turning up the results you want, you can go to individual
retailers' sites. Make sure to know the edition, author, and publisher of
the book you're looking for—some books, on topics such as microeconomics,
share the same title for completely different products.
Expect some surprises. Sometimes a retailer will
sell the new version of a textbook for much less than a used copy. Abebooks,
for example, charges $69.99 for a new copy of Jonathan Berk's and Peter
DeMarzo's Corporate Finance and $120.54 for a used one. It's unclear why
this happens, but one possibility might be that the owners of the used books
simply overpriced their product.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Keep in mind that the campus bookstore probably will buy back a book that they
did not sell originally.
Bob Jensen's threads on textbooks and cases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#BooksAndCases
"Adjuncts Look for Strength in Numbers: The new majority generates a
shift in academic culture," by Audrey Williams June, Chronicle of Higher
Education, November 5, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Adjuncts-Build-Strength-in/135520/
Caroline W. Meline stood at the front of her
classroom one day last month and began reading from a red paperback,
Karl Marx: Selected Writings. A few sentences in, she paused and closed
her eyes.
"I just have to catch my breath," she told her
students.
She was 15 minutes into a philosophy class at Saint
Joseph's University. "This is my third class of the day. I need to regroup
my energy."
The breakneck pace that drove Ms. Meline to take
the brief respite is, for her, the cost of being an adjunct here, where
two-thirds of the faculty is now off the tenure track.
In the philosophy department, adjunct faculty are
teaching close to half of the 82 class sections offered this semester. "We
do a lot of teaching," says Ms. Meline, who earned her Ph.D. in philosophy
from Temple University in 2004 and has taught at Saint Joseph's for eight
and a half years. "That's just the way it is in our department."
That's the way it is in many departments at Saint
Joseph's, where Ms. Meline is one of more than 400 part-time faculty
members. At the private, Jesuit institution, the number of nontenure-track
faculty members has more than doubled over the past decade. Ten years ago,
less than half of the university's faculty was off the tenure track.
Across the nation, colleges have undergone similar
shifts in whom they employ to teach students. About 70 percent of the
instructional faculty at all colleges is off the tenure track, whether as
part-timers or full-timers, a proportion that has crept higher over the past
decade.
Change has occurred more rapidly on some campuses,
particularly at regionally oriented public institutions and mid-tier private
universities like Saint Joseph's.
Community colleges have traditionally relied
heavily on nontenure-track faculty, with 85 percent of their instructors in
2010 not eligible for tenure, according to the most recent federal data
available. But the trend has been increasingly evident at four-year
institutions, where nearly 64 percent of the instructional faculty isn't
eligible for tenure.
At places like Eastern Washington University and
Oakland University, part-time faculty and professors who worked full time
but off the tenure track made up less than half of the instructional faculty
a decade ago. Now nontenure-track faculty make up roughly 55 percent at both
institutions.
The University of San Francisco saw the proportion
of its nontenure-track faculty rise to 67 percent from 57 percent. At Kean
University, nontenure-track professors now account for 78 percent of the
faculty, up from 63 percent.
Not Sustainable
When professors in positions that offer no chance
of earning tenure begin to stack the faculty, campus dynamics start to
change. Growing numbers of adjuncts make themselves more visible. They push
for roles in governance, better pay and working conditions, and recognition
for work well done. And they do so at institutions where tenured faculty,
although now in the minority, are still the power brokers.
The changing nature of the professoriate affects
tenured and tenure-track faculty, too. Having more adjuncts doesn't provide
the help they need to run their departments, leaving them with more service
work and seats on more committees at the same time that research
requirements, for some, have also increased.
At many institutions with graduate programs, a
shrinking number of tenured and tenure-track faculty members are left to
advise graduate students—a task that typically does not fall to adjuncts.
The shift can also affect students. Studies show
that they suffer when they are taught by adjuncts, many of whom are good
teachers but aren't supported on the job in the ways that their tenured
colleagues are. Many adjuncts don't have office space, which means they have
no place on campus to meet privately with students.
And some adjuncts themselves say their fears about
job security can make them reluctant to push students hard academically. If
students retaliate by giving them bad evaluations, their jobs could be in
jeopardy.
Many adjuncts are also cautious about what they say
in the classroom, an attitude that limits the ways they might engage
students in critical thinking and rigorous discussion.
"I think the tipping point is now," says Ms. Meline.
She is among those adjuncts pressing for higher pay and a voice in
governance at Saint Joseph's. "What they're doing is not sustainable."
Elsewhere, Patricia W. Cummins, a professor of
world and international studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, is
worried about the sustainability of her university's growing use of
adjuncts.
When she arrived, in 2000, about three-quarters of
the faculty in the foreign languages were tenured or on the tenure track,
with one-quarter teaching part time or in nontenure-track full-time
positions. Now the percentages have flipped, much as they have in
foreign-language departments nationwide.
In French, her discipline, there are four tenured
professors and eight who work off the tenure track, all but one of them part
time.
Ms. Cummins says administrators have big ambitions
for Virginia Commonwealth, which is striving to be a top research
university. But it will be nearly impossible to achieve that goal, she
argues, without reversing the trend of adding adjuncts to the payroll at
every turn.
"If we want to solve the world's problems, we can't
do that with adjunct faculty, who, however competent they may be, are just
keeping body and soul together," says Ms. Cummins, who coordinates the
French program. "Virtually everything they want to accomplish with our
strategic plan requires tenured and tenure-track faculty members. I
definitely think the president is on the right track, but we have a long way
to go."
Full-time faculty members who are not on the tenure
track at Virginia Commonwealth constitute 54 percent of the faculty, which a
decade ago was the proportion of tenured and tenure-track professors. Taking
part-timers into account, the share of non-tenure-track faculty at the
institution is 70 percent.
The dwindling number of professors with tenure or
who are on the tenure track has forced Ms. Cummins's colleagues to widen the
circle of faculty who take part in certain service work. Faculty off the
tenure track are usually paid only for their teaching, but many do service
work because they're committed to their jobs.
In the foreign-languages department, says Ms.
Cummins, they have also stepped up to work on grants with tenured faculty,
direct the university's annual Arab Film Festival, and play host to various
events for foreign-language students and nearby residents.
"They do all kinds of things," Ms. Cummins says.
"But these are not the kinds of things you can expect somebody to do if
you've asked them to come in and teach a three-hour French class." Most
part-time faculty in the humanities at Virginia Commonwealth earn about
$2,500 per course, Ms. Cummins says.
Even as part-timers play an integral role in their
programs and departments, they often feel that their continued employment as
instructors requires maintaining a low profile. In fact, several adjunct
professors in the School of World Studies who were contacted for this
article didn't respond to requests for an interview.
Robert L. Andrews, an associate professor in the
department of management at Virginia Commonwealth, says he can understand
their fear. "They're not in the position to be raising their voices," he
says. "I would like to see that change."
Research and
Mentoring
Michael Rao, Virginia Commonwealth's president,
says he has made clear that he wants to stem the growing use of adjuncts
there.
Not long after he arrived, in 2009, Mr. Rao
increased tuition by 24 percent and used the new revenue, in part, to hire
nearly 100 tenured and tenure-track faculty. Thirty more professors have
joined the institution since then.
He plans to add a total of 560 professors, a figure
he came up with, he says, by looking at the proportion of tenured and
tenure-track at the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech.
"What I saw when I came was a research university
that had 33,000 students and way too few, in comparison to peers, faculty
members on the tenure track," Mr. Rao says. "We need those people to do
research and to do a lot of the mentoring of students at all levels."
Virginia Commonwealth's full-time, nontenure-track
faculty and part-time professors are "incredible resources to the
university," the president says. "A lot of them, on their own, are doing a
lot of the mentoring of students. You don't want to count on that forever."
What's likely to remain the same at Virginia
Commonwealth, and other institutions, is the way adjuncts are used to teach
high-demand courses in some disciplines, such as English composition and
introductory courses in biology and math.
"One of the things that is important to students is
the ability to get classes," Mr. Rao says. "That's correlated with the
number of faculty you have to teach them.
"When you have required courses that everyone has
to take, can you front-load those courses with all regular faculty members?"
he asks. "No, you can't. But can you make some progress along those lines?
Certainly."
Some colleges have made progress in improving the
work life of adjuncts.
At Colorado State University at Fort Collins,
nontenure-track English faculty members have gained representation on the
literature committee, the composition committee, and the committee that
hires faculty who work off the tenure track.
"We have representation on pretty much everything
that doesn't involve the promotion and tenure and periodic performance view
of tenured and tenure-track faculty," says Laura Thomas, who is an
instructor in upper-division composition, a salaried position that comes
with a course release that allows her to lead workshops for other writing
instructors and provide them with additional professional-development
opportunities.
Colorado State's English department has 47
full-time faculty members who aren't on the tenure track. Nearly all of them
teach four courses a semester, and they outnumber the tenured and
tenure-track faculty by more than a dozen. Almost 20 years ago, the number
of nontenure-track faculty in English was in the low single digits.
Adjuncts who work in departments with a long
history of using nontenure-track faculty can sometimes see the resulting
connections lead to better working conditions and pay—more so than when
adjuncts try to use their large numbers as leverage, says Adrianna Kezar, an
associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern
California who studies adjuncts.
Expanding
Adjuncts' Role
"English departments on a lot of campuses are
likely to be leaders for broader changes, since they have used nontenure-track
faculty for such a long time. There are relationships there," she says.
"Sometimes large numbers of adjuncts can create a
negative dynamic. The tenured professors could see this as a threat and
instead of saying, Why don't you join us in governance?, they might dig in
and actively campaign against them having a voice."
Ms. Thomas says "there is still plenty of work to
do" on the university level when it comes to expanding adjuncts' role in
governance. Contingent faculty can serve on an advisory committee of the
Faculty Council at Colorado State, but they are not allowed to vote and they
can't serve on the council itself.
Sue Doe, an assistant professor of English at
Colorado State, is an ally of adjunct faculty like Ms. Thomas. Ms. Doe
worked as an adjunct for more than 20 years, mostly as she followed her
husband, an Army officer, around the country. After he retired, she earned a
Ph.D. at the university in 2001, and became a tenure-track faculty member in
2007.
She helped write a report on a universitywide
survey of contingent faculty at Colorado State. The findings shed new light
on the sometimes-tense dynamics between the different sectors of the
faculty, she says.
"At the end of the day, we all have to realize that
we're working side by side, and in order for our units to work effectively,
we have to be respectful of one another," Ms. Doe says. "Instead of having
this sort of underlying mistrust of what the other group is up to, I think
we're at the place where we need to get past that."
Ms. Meline, of Saint Joseph's, doesn't know how far
the good will of administrators can take adjuncts like her.
Last year, complaining of low pay and a lack of job
security and health benefits, contingent faculty at the university formed an
adjunct association. The group, whose executive committee includes Ms.
Meline, met with the provost, Brice R. Wachterhauser, to talk about their
concerns.
The association was able to get raises for adjuncts
this academic year—highest for new hires, who will now start at $3,230 per
course—plus a total of $6,000 in grant money, in 30 parcels of $200 each, to
tap if they need financial assistance to go to a conference to present a
paper.
"The provost, so far, has been extremely
accommodating," but what he did isn't enough, Ms. Meline says. "Now we're
looking to go forward from this platform and negotiate something better."
Forming a union, members of the group say, is a
possibility. "People are realizing just what a majority we are," says Ms.
Meline.
The group's membership, however, still comprises
only about one-third of the adjuncts on the campus. Their lack of job
security, Ms. Meline and other adjuncts say, keeps many from being advocates
for their own cause. That fear bleeds over into the classroom, they say, to
the detriment of students.
"If almost 70 percent of the faculty at an
expensive private university is watching what they say in the classrooms
because they don't want to be controversial in any way, is that university
really promoting critical thinking?" says Eva-Maria Swidler, who earned a
Ph.D. in history eight years ago and now teaches semester by semester at
Saint Joseph's.
"Adjuncts are not going to teach controversial
courses," she added. "They are looking to fly beneath the radar so they can
be renewed next semester."
Ms. Swidler, who along with Ms. Meline is among the
most outspoken leaders of the adjunct association, isn't worried herself
about repercussions.
She expects her career at St. Joseph's will end
this semester. The course she teaches, an evening survey course about
Western civilization, is being phased out under the university's new
general-education requirements.
Continued in article
"One-Third of Colleges Are on Financially
'Unsustainable' Path, Bain Study Finds," by Goldie Blumenstyk, The
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/One-Third-of-Colleges-Are-on/133095/
An analysis of nearly 1,700 public and private
nonprofit colleges being unveiled this week by Bain & Company finds that
one-third of the institutions have been on an "unsustainable financial path"
in recent years, and an additional 28 percent are "at risk of slipping into
an unsustainable condition."
At a surprising number of colleges, "operating
expenses are getting higher" and "they're running out of cash to cover it,"
says Jeff Denneen, a Bain partner who heads the consulting firm's American
higher-education practice.
Bain and Sterling Partners, a private-equity firm,
collaborated on the project. They have published their findings on a
publicly available
interactive Web site that allows users to type in
the name of a college and see where it falls on the analysts' nine-part
matrix.
The methodology is based on just two financial
ratios, and they produce some findings that may seem incongruous with
conventional views on colleges' financial standing. The tool classifies
wealthy institutions such as Cornell, Harvard, and Princeton Universities as
being on an "unsustainable path" alongside tuition-dependent institutions
like Central Bible College, in Missouri. But the very public nature of the
findings is sure to bring some attention to the analysis. Bain and Sterling
provided advance copies of the analysis and the tool to The Wall Street
Journal and The Chronicle.
Overly Alarmist?
Mr. Denneen allows that the analysis may be skewed,
particularly for the wealthiest institutions, because the period studied,
2005 through 2010, concludes with a fiscal year in which endowments were hit
with record losses. One of the two ratios used in the analysis, called the
"equity ratio," is based on the change in value of an institution's assets,
including its endowment, relative to its liabilities. Since 2010 the value
of many endowments has rebounded. The other, the "expense ratio," looks at
changes in expenses as a percentage of revenue.
Still, Bain and Sterling maintain the analysis
sends a sobering signal, even if some might see the findings as overly
alarmist and self-serving. "Financial statements have gotten significantly
weaker in a very short period of time," says Tom Dretler, an executive in
residence at Sterling, a firm that is a major investor in Laureate Education
Inc. and other educational companies.
Besides the credit ratings and reports produced by
bond-rating agencies and the Education Department's controversial annual
listing of colleges'
financial-responsibility scores, there are few
public sources of information on colleges' financial health.
The new analytic tool classifies colleges based on
whether their expense ratios increased or their equity ratios decreased,
giving the harshest rankings to those with changes of more than 5 percent,
moderate rankings to those with changes of 0 to 5 percent, and good rankings
to those where expense ratios didn't increase and equity ratios didn't
decrease.
For example, it lists Bennington and Rollins
Colleges along with California State University-Channel Islands and Georgia
Southwestern State University as being on an unsustainable financial path
for several years because their ratios of expenses relative to revenues
spiked up while their equity ratios fell. (For all four, the expense ratio
increased by 25 percent or more.) Hundreds of other colleges were classified
with that same designation if only one of the ratios changed by more than 5
percent.Higher-education leaders who say the Education Department's scores
can be a flawed way of measuring a college's health say the Bain-Sterling
analysis may suffer the same weaknesses.
"Places that are viewed by some as having an
unsustainable way of operating may not be," says Richard H. Ekman, president
of the Council of Independent Colleges. Analyses like this, which rely on
data from a particular period of time, he says, "may not tell the full
story."
Susan M. Menditto, an expert on accounting matters
at the National Association of College and University Business Officers,
notes that even the way colleges account for their endowments—in some cases
counting restricted gifts, in other cases not—might not be reflected in the
analysis.
Mr. Denneen says the simple tool serves a different
purpose than does a report on the creditworthiness of an institution from
Moody's Investors Service, which uses 36 criteria to formulate its ratings.
"This does provide a useful lens," he says. "This is really a guidepost for
how hard you ought to be thinking about pushing on your financial model."
Disconcerting
Trends
Along with the tool, Bain and Sterling are
publishing a paper, "The Financially Sustainable University." It is their
take on what they view as several disconcerting trends in spending, and it
puts the two firms among an ever-growing list of analysts, pundits, and
policy makers who have been calling on higher-education leaders to rethink
how colleges are administered. (Jeffrey J. Selingo, The Chronicle's
vice president and editorial director, contributed to the paper.)
The paper covers familiar ground, although some of
the fresher recommendations and findings could resonate with the college
administrators, campus leaders, and trustees who are its intended audience.
Most notably, it suggests that colleges tap into their real estate, energy
plants, and other capital assets more creatively to generate revenue for new
academic investments, and it concludes that colleges have too many middle
managers.
While it fails to make distinctions between
different kinds of colleges, as do other respected analyses such as those of
the Delta Project on College Costs, the Bain-Sterling paper shows that, over
all, the growth in colleges' debt and the rate of spending on interest
payments and on plant, property, and equipment rose far faster than did
spending on instruction from 2002 to 2008 for the colleges studied.
It says long-term debt increased by 11.7 percent,
interest expenses by 9.2 percent, and property, plant, and equipment
expenses by 6.6 percent. Meanwhile, instruction expenses increased by just
4.8 percent.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"The Idiocy of Promotion-and-Tenure Letters," by Don M. Chance,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Idiocy-of/135740/
Ah, autumn. The falling of leaves. A new batch of
excited freshmen and graduate students. Some different faces among
colleagues, perhaps. The roar of a football crowd. And alas, the reading and
writing of promotion-and-tenure letters.
For some fortunate reason, I have none to write
this year, which must be a first, but unfortunately, I have 11 to read. And
after many years of serving on promotion-and-tenure committees, I have
finally come to the conclusion that these letters are nearly worthless. The
ones I read and the ones I have written.
Think about it. We hardly need letters to evaluate
candidates within our own discipline. We are capable of evaluating their
research. Letters are strictly for the members of collegewide and
universitywide committees, who, through lack of discipline-specific
knowledge but mostly lack of time, cannot evaluate the research of
candidates outside of their fields. So we call on experts, those renowned
scholars from distinguished and preferably higher-ranked institutions, who
can vouch for the quality of the candidate's record. They have, for lack of
a better term, letterhead value.
And they write so well and so cogently. Today I
have read the expressions "highly commendable," "groundbreaking,"
"impeccably rigorous," "carefully designed," and "recognized nationally"—all
phrases I wish I could think of when I am the writer. Instead, I come up
with "doing good work," "interesting," and "innovative." At least I didn't
say "cool."
This process is absurd. Consider that the
evaluators are selected by the candidate's department, sometimes with input
from the candidate. They are not a random sampling of experts. Indeed, they
are far from random and are often biased, whether subtly or blatantly. The
most egregious cases of bias involve choosing the candidate's former
professors or the department head's former colleagues and friends, but
other, subtler forms exist as well.
Suppose the candidate has an article accepted for
publication in the most prestigious journal in her field. Her department
head asks the journal's editor to write a letter on her behalf. The editor,
of course, believes that the paper he accepted is excellent. What else would
he think? Is he going to change his mind and say he made a mistake in
accepting the paper? Ideally the editor would look at the candidate's entire
corpus of work, but that is too much trouble. The editor, after all, has
numerous letter requests, not to mention many manuscripts, awaiting his
attention. So in addition to a few casual observations about the candidate's
other research, he writes a detailed review of the paper he accepted,
heaping dollops of laudation, knowing that any future success of the paper
is a shared success. Kind of like having your kid get into Harvard when you
went to a third-tier state university. You, too, get credit.
I once read a letter from a journal editor
concerning a candidate up for promotion to full professor who had published
four articles in that journal and was on its editorial board. The editor
noted that the journal was A-level (in fact it was clearly B-level), and
that the candidate had done an extensive amount of refereeing for the
editor. Naturally the letter was favorable. Naturally I wanted to transfer
it into the "stuff that should never have been written" folder, also known
as my recycle bin.
Not only are external letters nearly useless, but
the whole process is flawed.
At least half of all academics are exposed to the
scientific method of research: stating a testable hypothesis, collecting
data, analyzing those data, and drawing a conclusion with the admission that
we could be wrong. That process is widely accepted as the correct way to
investigate an issue.
In the promotion-and-tenure process, we try to do
the same thing. Whereas a scientist might hypothesize that a drug has no
positive benefit, we might hypothesize that someone should not be promoted.
Whereas the scientist goes about collecting data, we do the same thing in
gathering information about the candidate's research record. Whereas the
scientist, upon obtaining statistical evidence that admits only a small
possibility of error, concludes perhaps that a drug is effective, we often
likewise analyze the data and conclude that the candidate should be
promoted. In our case, there is no admission of a margin of error.
The scientist does it correctly. We do not. Our
margin of error in evaluating tenure candidates is pretty high, because our
sample is not random and far too small. Nonetheless, on that basis, we make
a case to the higher authorities that this candidate should be promoted.
If we conducted our research like that, we would be
laughed out of the profession.
What we ought to do is make the process more
random. For example, each department could compile an extensive list of
experts, perhaps at least 100. It could then randomly choose a set. A random
sample of experts would at least attempt to remove the subtle biases.
Naturally, I cannot tell you what percentage of
letters I have read that are favorable, but my estimate is more than 90
percent. Random letters would very likely produce favorable percentages a
good bit lower. Would that result in a smaller percentage of candidates
being tenured? Possibly, but after all, tenure is a lifetime contract. The
hurdle should be high.
If promotion to full professor is not granted, it
is not the end of the world for the candidate. Could a good candidate get
three or four negative letters simply because the luck of the draw chose
some hard-nosed experts? It could. I suspect that four letters is not
enough. Frankly, I would prefer to see six to 10. I cannot imagine a
deserving candidate's being denied promotion with 10 letters.
Perhaps there are other solutions, and I would like
to hear some. I just know that we are trying to answer an important
question, and doing it poorly.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Not only do I agree with this article, I think that tenure has become
dysfunctional to long-term teaching and research performance. It's like the
newlywed thinking about sex: "Now that I'm married I won't have to do that
anymore, at least not as often or as enthusiastically."
When I participated in a study (Jean Heck and Phil Cooley) of top accounting
journals, rates of publication tumbled dramatically after tenure. There are of
course exceptions, but all too often accounting professors game the tenure
system and then back off the game after tenure.
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)
Teaching Excellence Secondary to Research for
Promotion, Tenure, and Pay
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#TeachingVsResearch
Bob Jensen's threads on Rethinking Tenure ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
MathGrapher ---
http://www.mathgrapher.com/
The mathematical graphing tool for students,
scientists and engineers. Draw and analyse Functions and Data in 2D and 3D.
Draw surface graphs, contour plots and cross-sections through contour plots.
Includes linear and nonlinear curve fitting, integration and analysis of
coupled ordinary differential equations, iteration and analysis of
multi-dimensional maps, matrix operations, Lindenmayer systems and soms
cellalar automata.
Mathgrapher contains many demonstrations covering
most of the things you can do with it. Just start a demonstration, lean back
and see what Mathgrapher can do for you
Wolfram Alpha (one of my all-time favorite
sites) ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Some Things You Might Want to Know About the Wolfram Alpha (WA) Search
Engine: The Good and The Evil
as Applied to Learning Curves (Cumulative Average vs. Incremental Unit)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on learning resources in mathematics and statistics
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
"Harvard Grad Starts Math Museum Helped by Google, Hedge Funder," by
Patrick Cole, Bloomberg Business Week, November 1, 2011 --- http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-01/harvard-grad-starts-math-museum-helped-by-google-hedge-funder.html
Question
What is "deep research-based learning for MOOCs" ala Carnegie-Mellon
University?
Carnegie Mellon Takes Online Courses to Another Level with Its Open Learning
Initiative ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/carnegie_mellon_takes_online_courses_to_another_level_with_its_iopen_learning_initiativei.html
Open
online courses—massive
or otherwise—are revolutionizing
higher education by making learning more and more
accessible.
Carnegie Mellon University has taken
online
courses to another level,
offering virtual classroom environments based on deep
research into how adults learn.
The courses are free. Carnegie Mellon’s
Open
Learning Initiative currently
offers 15 courses through a platform that provides
targeted progress feedback to students.
The
program doesn’t offer course credit or certificates but
the courses are sophisticated. CMU spent anywhere from
$500,000 to $1 million for each course to write the
software, which includes a course builder program for
instructors and a system of feedback loops that send
student learning data to the instructor, the student and
the course design team.
More
than 10,000 students enrolled in OLI courses last year.
So far CMU promotes OLI courses as supplementary to
traditional classroom instruction. But the courses are
certainly rich enough to be enjoyed by anyone. They’re
mostly in the sciences but include a few language and
social science classes too.
The list of currently-available courses appears below.
We also have them listed in our complete list of
Massive Open Online Courses from Great Universities (many
of which happen to offer certificates too):
Kate Rix writes
about digital media and education. Read more of her work
on thenifty.blogspot.com and katerixwriter.com.
Experiment in Ultra Learning (some amazing stories) ---
Click Here
http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/10/26/mastering-linear-algebra-in-10-days-astounding-experiments-in-ultra-learning/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StudyHacks+%28Study+Hacks%29
MITx, EdX, and MOOCs
Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, tutorials, video, and course materials
from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Techmeme Technology News Site from Carnegie Mellon University ---
http://www.techmeme.com/
Thank you Rick Lillie for pointing to this site on the AAA Commons
The site is more extensive in terms of computing news than is MIT's
Technology Review, but TR is carries more science news. Also TR sends me
email summaries.
Bob Jensen's threads on blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Apple paid 1.9% income tax on $36.8 billion in 2012 (fiscal-year) profits
outside the U.S., down from the 2.5% paid in 2011 ---
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000119312512444068/d411355d10k.htm
Virtually all those iPhones are made in China, and Macs are made in such
places as tax-friendly Ireland. In order not to rile Congress too much, some
parts are expensively made in the United States.
Eliminating the Corporate income tax in the U.S. probably would not bring all
those jobs back to the U.S. due to wage differentials and unions in the U.S.
The president of Ohio State University tries hard to be a man of the people.
But he lives higher on the hog than most aristocrats in history ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Survivor-the-Ohio-State/135530/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Drake Tax Software ---
http://www.drakesoftware.com/site/
Download a free copy of this software for individuals and businesses
(registration required) ---
http://www.drakesoftware.com/site/Products/TrialSoftware.aspx/?kme=IA&km_subcategory=CPALD&km_id=DRS-2475
Bob Jensen's taxation helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
"As GM Volt Sales Increase, That Doesn't Mean It's Successful (sales
of the car have improved, but not enough to turn the tide for advanced battery
factories)," by Kevin Bullis, MIT's Technology Review, November 2, 2012
---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/506836/volt-sales-october-2012/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121105
Sales figures for the Chevrolet Volt electric
vehicle are in for October, and once again sales figures have increased
dramatically compared to last year. Chevrolet sold 2,961 of the cars,
compared to just 1,108 last October.
The Chevrolet Volt is interesting in part because
anticipated sales of the car helped justify a massive,
more-than-$2-billion-dollar push by the U.S. government to help companies
build advanced lithium ion battery factories in the United States. But the
companies that built those plants are struggling, in part because of lower
than expected sales of cars like the Volt. A123 Systems recently declared
bankruptcy (see, “A123’s Technology Just Wasn’t Good Enough” and “What
Happened to A123?”). Dow said it would take an accounting charge because of
a drop in value of its advanced battery venture, Dow Kokam. And LG Chem—which
currently supplies battery cells for the Volt from a factory in Korea--has
furloughed workers and hasn’t yet started building battery cells at a new
factory in Holland, Michigan (see, “Too Many Battery Factories, Too Few
Electric Cars”).
By some measures, the car is now doing well. About
half of Chevrolet’s models sold more than the Volt, and about half sold
less. It outsold the Corvette (1,167), for example. Sales accelerated this
year after GM started offering attractive lease rates ($199 a month).
But the Volt far undersold the Cruze (19,121), a
sedan about the size of the Volt. And GM isn’t coming close to a goal, set
at the end of last year, to sell 60,000 Volts this year.
And most crucially, the factory LG Chem built to
make batteries for the Volt in Holland, Michigan, still isn’t making
batteries.
Yet it’s too early to write off plug-in hybrids and
electric cars. Many automakers have just started to introduce
battery-powered cars. Toyota’s Prius also had a slow start, and now it’s
become a centerpiece of Toyota’s strategy—and a profitable car.
Continued in article
Jensen Question
And what other car model gives $7,500 of taxpayer cash to each buyer to boost
sales?
Many of us agree with Keynesians Paul Krugman and Alan Blinder that there are
some benefits to massive government spending at the start of a severe economic
crash. But the trouble with most Keynesians these days is that they don't know
when to stop. There's now a perpetual excuse that the economy is just too
fragile to stop printing money to pay government's bills. Confiscating the
wealth of the 1% won't make a dent in the weak economy. And hence the money
presses just keep rolling and rolling until one morning you wake up and guess
what? You're in Zimbabwe that is now printing million dollar bills, two of which
it takes to by one chicken egg.
In the media, Peter Schiff is the best-known financial analyst who
publically predicted the economic collapse of 2008 long before it happened,
including his predictions of the bursting of the real estate bubble. He did not,
however, make as many millions on his predictions as several others who quietly
gambled on the crash. Some of those heavily leveraged winnings, however,
might've been due more to luck than the deep analysis of Peter Schiff ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schiff
I might note that "Quantitative Easing" QE1-QE3 in the U.S. is short hand for
when the Fed cranks up printing presses for money so the U.S. Government can pay
its bills without having to either tax or borrow. Sounds like a good idea since
these have been trillions of dollars that do not add to the trillion-dollar
deficit or National Debt or rile taxpayers ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
I might also note that I personally think the government is now lying about
inflation since with a wave of the magic wand it took fuel, food, and other
consumer items out of the calculation of inflation. The current calculation of
inflation is also distorted by the crash in the housing market that does not
reflect the rising costs of materials going into new and rebuilt homes. For
your students, when you want to illustrate how to lie with statistics show them
how inflation is calculated by the government.
"When Infinite Inflation Isn't Enough," by Peter Schiff, Townhall,
November 9, 2012 ---
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/peterschiff/2012/11/08/when_infinite_inflation_isnt_enough
If no one seems to care
that the Titanic is filling with water, why not drill another hole in it?
That seems to be the M.O. of the Bernanke Federal Reserve. After the
announcement of QE3 (also dubbed "QE Infinity") created yet another round of
media chatter about a recovery, the Fed's Open Market Committee has decided
to push infinity a little bit further. The latest move involves the rolling
over of long-term Treasuries purchased as part of Operation Twist, thereby
more than doubling QE3 to a monthly influx of $85 billion in phony money
starting in December. I call it "QE3 Plus" - now with more inflation!
Inflation By Any Other Name
In case you've lost track of all the different ways the Fed has connived to
distort the economy, here's a refresher on Operation Twist: the Fed sells
Treasury notes with maturity dates of three years or less, and uses the cash
to buy long-term Treasury bonds. This "twisting" of its portfolio is
supposed to bring down long-term interest rates to make the US economy
appear stronger and inflation appear lower than is actually the case.
The Fed claims operation twist is inflation-neutral as the size of its
balance sheet remains constant. However, the process continues to send false
signals to market participants, who can now borrow more cheaply to fund
long-term projects for which there is no legitimate support. I said it last
year when Operation Twist was announced, and I'll continue to say it: low
interests rates are part of the problem, not the solution.
Interventions Are Never Neutral
Just as the Fed used its interest-rate-fixing power to make dot-coms and
then housing appear to be viable long-term investments, they are now using
QE3 Plus to conceal the fiscal cliff facing the US government in the near
future.
As the Fed extends the average maturity of its portfolio, it is locking in
the inflation created in the wake of the '08 credit crisis. Back then, we
were promised that the Fed would unwind this new cash infusion when the time
was right. Longer maturities lower the quality and liquidity of the Fed's
balance sheet, making the promised "soft landing" that much harder to
achieve.
The Fed cannot keep
printing indefinitely without consumer prices going wild. In many ways, this
has already begun. Take a look at the gas pump or the cost of a hamburger.
If the Fed ever hopes to control these prices, the day will inevitably come
when the Fed needs to sell its portfolio of long-term bonds. While
short-term paper can be easily sold or even allowed to mature even in tough
economic conditions, long-term bonds will have to be sold at a steep
discount, which will have devastating effects across the yield curve.
It won't be an even trade of slightly lower interest rates now for slightly
higher rates in the future. Meanwhile, in the intervening time, the
government and private sectors will have made a bunch of additional wasteful
spending. When are Bernanke & Co. going to decide is the right time to prove
that the United States is fundamentally insolvent? Clearly this plan lays
down an even stronger incentive to continue suppressing interest rates until
a mega-crisis forces their hands.
Also, when interest rates
rise - the increase made even sharper by the Fed's selling - the Fed will
incur huge losses on its portfolio, which, thanks to a new federal law, will
become a direct obligation of the US Treasury, i.e. you, the taxpayer!
Of course, the Fed refuses
to accept this reality. Even though a painful correction is necessary,
nobody in power wants it to happen while they're in the driver's seat. So
Bernanke will stick with his well-rehearsed lines: the money will flow until
there is "substantial improvement" in unemployment.
Does Bernanke Even Believe It?
Even Bernanke must have a hunch that there isn't going to be any
"substantial improvement" in the near term. I suggested before QE3 was
announced that a new round of stimulus might be Bernanke's way of securing
his job, but recent speculation is that he may step down when his current
term as Fed Chairman expires. Perhaps he is cleverer than I thought. He'll
be leaving a brick on the accelerator of an economy careening towards a
fiscal cliff, and bailing before it goes over the edge. Whoever takes his
place will have to pick up the pieces and accept the blame for the crisis
that Bernanke and his predecessor inflamed.
Don't Gamble Your Savings on Politics
For investors looking to find a safe haven for their money, QE3 Plus is a
strong signal that the price of gold and silver are a long way from their
peaks. Gold hit an eleven-month high at the beginning of October after the
announcement of QE3, but the response to the Fed's latest meeting was
lackluster. When the Fed officially announces its commitment to QE3 Plus in
December, I wouldn't be surprised to see a much bigger rally. For that
matter, many are keeping an eye on the election outcome before making a move
on precious metals.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Many of us agree with Keynesians Paul Krugman and Alan Blinder that there are
some benefits to massive government spending at the start of a severe economic
crash. But the trouble with most Keynesians these days is that they don't know
when to stop. There's now a perpetual excuse that the economy is just too
fragile to stop printing money to pay government's bills. Confiscating the
wealth of the 1% won't make a dent in the weak economy. And hence the money
presses just keep rolling and rolling until one morning you wake up and guess
what? You're in Zimbabwe that is now printing million dollar bills, two of which
it takes to by one chicken egg.
"A Billion People in the Dark: Solar-Powered Micro Grids Could Bring
Power to Millions of the World's Poorest," by Kevin Bullis, MIT's
Technology Review, October 24, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429529/a-billion-people-in-the-dark/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121029
The village of Tanjung Batu Laut seems to grow out
of a mangrove swamp on an island off the coast of Malaysian Borneo. The
houses, propped up over the water on stilts, are cobbled together from old
plywood, corrugated steel, and rusted chicken wire. But walk inland and you
reach a clearing covered with an array of a hundred solar panels mounted
atop bright new metal frames. Thick cables transmit power from the panels
into a sturdy building with new doors and windows. Step inside and the heavy
humidity gives way to cool, dry air. Fluorescent lights illuminate a row of
steel cabinets holding flashing lights and computer displays.
The building is the control center for a small,
two-year-old power-generating facility that provides electricity to the
approximately 200 people in the village. Computers manage power coming from
the solar panels and from diesel generators, storing some of it in large
lead-acid batteries and dispatching the rest to meet the growing local
demand. Before the tiny plant was installed, the village had no access to
reliable electricity, though a few families had small diesel generators. Now
all the residents have virtually unlimited power 24 hours a day.
Many of the corrugated-steel roofs in the village
incongruously bear television satellite dishes. Some homes, with sagging
roofs and crude holes in the walls for windows, contain flat-screen
televisions, ceiling fans, power-hungry appliances like irons and rice
cookers, and devices that need to run day and night, like freezers. On a
Saturday afternoon this summer, kids roamed around with cool wedges of
watermelon they'd bought from Tenggiri Bawal, the owner of a tiny store
located off one of the most unstable parts of the elevated wooden walkways
that link the houses. Three days before, she'd taken delivery of a
refrigerator, where she now keeps watermelon, sodas, and other goods. Bawal
smiled as the children clustered outside her store and said, in her limited
English, "Business is good.
Continued in article
Jensen Question
Will this also become a giant market for specially-designed MOOC courses?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Go International ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/massive_open_online_courses_moocs_go_international.html
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Samsung Galaxy Smartphone ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_III
"Samsung’s Galaxy S III tops 30 million sales, adding 10 million in less
than two months," The Next Web, November 3, 2012 ---
http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/11/03/samsungs-galaxy-s-iii-tops-30-million-sales-adding-10-million-in-less-than-two-months/
Samsung predicted that its Galaxy S III flagship
would pass 30 million sales by the end of 2012, and with November and
December still largely ahead of it, the Korean manufacturer has reached that
milestone, seeing more than 10 million sales in less than two months.
In a tweet posted to its Polish account (via
GSMArena), Samsung shared that it had passed the 30 million sales mark,
attaching a congratulatory photo showing various employees jumping for joy
on an athletics track (embedded below).
Back in September, Samsung announced that the
Galaxy S III had surpassed 20 million sales, with the company’s IT and
Mobile chief Shin Jong-kyun stating: “The Galaxy S3 is expected to sell more
than 30 million units within this year.”
Shin also commented on the launch of the new Galaxy
Note 2 (a device unveiled last month at IFA 2012 in Berlin), believing the
smartphone-cum-tablet will double the sales of its predecessor — which has
sold more than 10 million units. Just this week, Samsung said that the
Galaxy Note 2 had already sold more than 3 million units in less than 40
days.
It’s been a hugely successful year for Samsung,
with the Korean vendor posting record profits in its last quarter. The
Galaxy S III is still set to add to its huge sales tally as the holiday
season approaches, where smartphone sales get an anticipated boost.
Home Ownership Rate Nearly Half of What it Was in 2004 Even With Mortgage
Rates Now Under 3%
Some readers have been asking how one can reconcile positive signs in the
housing market with declining rates of homeownership. Indeed, homeownership is
falling at an even faster pace than during the 08-10 period (look at the chart).
Sober Look, November 18, 2012 ---
http://soberlook.com/2012/11/falling-homeownership-rate-and-housing.html
Student Loans Financed at Low Interest Rates Directly by the U.S. Government
---
http://soberlook.com/2012/11/direct-government-student-loans-exceed.html
When I see all those Sandy-victims complaining about FEMA on TV, I wonder if
they haven't applied for their $30,000 payments for alternative housing. Perhaps
they're just afraid of losing what what's left of their homes and contents.
I do understand that in almost any part of the U.S. there's a genuine risk of
being vandalized if victims leave what's left of their home and home contents
when they move to hotels and apartments elsewhere using housing payments from
FEMA. It was so refreshing to see that after the Japanese tsunami disaster there
was virtually no looting of vacant homes and homeowner property. Why do we have
such a criminal culture that exploits disaster victims?
In addition to FEMA Flood Insurance FEMA provides substantial assistance to
disaster victims who were not insured ---
http://www.fema.gov/disaster-assistance-available-fema
Other FEMA grants and assistance programs ---
http://www.fema.gov/grants-assistance-programs-individuals
How the Federal Government takes care of many property owners (for of
business property and homes) following natural disasters?
"Sandy-Struck Companies Can Seek FEMA Buyouts: Business owners with
heavy damage located in flood plains may want to consider an option that has
worked for homeowners," by Caroline McDonald, CFO.com, November
6, 2012 ---
http://www3.cfo.com/article/2012/11/risk-management_fema-hmgp-flood-plain-property-damage-gilinsky-anderson-kill-olick
Homeowners with homes devastated by superstorm
Sandy can take advantage of a decades-old FEMA grant program that buys
damaged property in flood-ravaged areas. Yet although corporate executives
and business owners may not know it, their companies may be eligible too.
FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP)
indeed may be the way to go, rather than pursuing insurance claims under the
National Flood Insurance Program. The HMGP is commonly called a “buyout”
program because a mix of federal and other funds are used to buy the damaged
property from the home or business owner, demolish it, and return the land
to its natural state.
That takes the damaged structure out of the
flood plain and eliminates the risk of future personal injury or property
damage. The property owner can take the
money from the sale, use it to pay off the mortgage, and relocate
elsewhere—usually on higher ground. (According to Title 44 of the Code of
Federal Regulations, a flood plain is "any land area susceptible to being
inundated by water from any source.)
Marshall Gilinsky, an insurance-recovery attorney
at Anderson, Kill, & Olick who represented some Vermont homeowners after
Hurricane Irene, says the program may be a good option for businesses of all
sizes that suffered extensive damage from Sandy and are located in a flood
plain.
“I don’t know historically how many businesses have
availed themselves of it. But I bet there will be a number of businesses for
whom this might be their best option from an economic perspective,” he says,
adding that it is a “business judgment. It all comes down to the relocation
and the displacement associated with that.”
Businesses that have relatively low limits of
coverage under their flood insurance policies – coverage inadequate to the
task of rebuilding – may find it a viable solution. The key is whether the
damaged structure qualifies, Gilinsky says. The simplest determinations are
whether the property is located in a flood plain, and that the cost to
repair or replace the existing damage is at least 50% of the pre-storm fair
market value of the structure.
After Hurricane Irene, he says, he worked with
homeowners having difficulty collecting in full on their flood insurance
policies, and looking at homes badly damaged by flood. Moreover, the flood
recovery from the National Flood Insurance Program would have left them with
a house that they were unable to repair to the extent they would have liked.
The grant option, on the other hand, afforded them a way to buy a new house
in a better location, he says.
Small or large businesses alike may qualify under
this standard, depending on the extent of the damage, he adds. In general,
the worse the damage is, the more likely it is that the business owner will
want to relocate and qualify.
For those businesses that want to use the HMGP to
relocate, another consideration may be the time it takes to get the grant
money. “It has been over a year since Irene and grant money is only now on
the verge of being disbursed,” the lawyer says. Business owners interested
in pursuing the option must approach officials of the town where the company
is located, because it's the town or city, rather than the business owner
that applies for the grant.
To apply, the business owner fills out a grant
application with the town or city, which signs off on the plan. The town
buys the property from the owner, pays for the transaction using grant
money—which tends to be 75% from FEMA and 25% from matching, non-government
grants, such as community development grants. The town then agrees not to
rebuild on the property. Transaction costs, including site investigations
for hazardous materials and demolition and closing fees are included in the
grant money.
Jensen Comment
It occurs to me that this is somewhat of a problem for condo owners. Suppose
there are 30 condos in a destroyed building. Presumably there's a majority rule
regarding disaster buyouts unless there's a contract to the contrary. Hence a
minority number of condo owners may be forced into or out of a buyout contrary
to their personal interests.
Note the clause:
That takes the damaged structure out of the flood plain and eliminates the risk
of future personal injury or property damage
The fact that this happens so seldom for vacation home owners that keep
rebuilding after each and every hurricane indicates that they may be hard core
refusniks when it comes to FEMA buyouts.
Labor unions and construction companies must despise these buyouts.
If these questions wasted your time, blame me since I just made them up
watching the sun set on the White Mountains (that are now powdered with white
snow that looks pink at sunset.
Bob Jensen
Microsoft's Surface Tablet ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface
Video on Use of the Surface ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfzjcCzdtCk
Love that USB Port
"Mysteries and Clues from a Microsoft Surface Teardown: The Surface
tablet is not exactly DIY-friendly.," by David Zaz, MIT's Technology
Review, October 29, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/506516/mysteries-and-clues-from-a-microsoft-surface-teardown/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121030
Imagine you’re a surgeon who spends all day cutting
up bodies and sewing them back up. Then one day, you open up a patient to
find--a kidney up near the shoulder.
That extremely imprecise analogy is a little bit
like what iFixit
found when they tore up a Microsoft Surface. Among
other things, they found a small “speaker-looking thing” next to the display
in the Surface’s front case. Since there’s no direct path from the speaker-y
thing to the Surface’s surface, iFixit wasn’t sure what the doohickey does
exactly. Perhaps it makes the muted faux-clicking noises of the Touch Cover,
they speculate.
That was just one of several curious findings in
iFixit’s teardown of the Microsoft tablet. The DIY-friendly site calls the
device “a
quirky cat.”
Mainly, though, iFixit wasn’t excavating in search
of hidden treasure. The site’s main aim was to figure out how easy the
device would be to fix on your own, if you were so inclined. The answer? Not
that easy. (Though a tad easier than comparable Apple products.)
iFixit ultimately gives the device a
“repairability” rating of a 4 out of 10, where 10 is super-repairable. To
begin with, it’s just really difficult to get elements of the Surface apart.
“You’ll have to use a heat gun and lots of patience to gain access to the
glass and LCD,” iFixit writes at one point. To give you some context, the
Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire scored 7’s out of 10. iFixit’s score puts Microsoft
much closer to Apple’s strategy of tightly locking down their gear: the
latest iPad earned a measly 2 for iFixit. In a way, the Surface’s non-DIY-friendliness
is another instance of Microsoft nudging it’s way towards a more Apple-like
strategy, generally (see “Beyond
the Surface: Microsoft Goes Apple.”)
The fact that that Surface is not friendly to
makers will only affect a small majority of us--but in a sense, that’s the
larger problem. We live in a generation that is increasingly happy not to
think about how our devices are made or function, a generation that is happy
to think of its computing devices as magic black boxes. This is one of the
ideas behind the
Raspberry Pi computing device: a clear casing
exposes its guts, and it compels a level of elementary understanding of how
the device works in order to use it. In a sense, it’s not surprising that
the Surface should be difficult to open--since by anointing an in-house
tablet as a standard-bearer for the next generation of Windows software,
Microsoft becomes a competitor with its longstanding hardware partners. This
is an era of decreasing openness in hardware, in many senses.
"Dirty money cost China $3.8 trillion 2000-2011: report," Reuters,
October 25, 2012 ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/25/us-china-dirtymoney-idUSBRE89O1RW20121025
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 (TrustLaw) - China has lost
$3.79 trillion over the past decade in money smuggled out of the country, a
massive amount that could weaken its economy and create instability,
according to a new report.
And the outflow - much of it from corruption, crime
or tax evasion - is accelerating. China lost $472 billion in 2011,
equivalent to 8.3 percent of its gross domestic product, up from $204.7
billion in 2000, Global Financial Integrity, a research and advocacy group
that campaigns to limit illegal flows, said in a report on Thursday.
"The magnitude of illicit money flowing out of
China is astonishing," said GFI director Raymond Baker. "There is no other
developing or emerging country that comes even close to suffering as much in
illicit financial flows."
The lost funds between 2000 and 2011 significantly
exceeded the amount of money flowing into China as foreign direct
investment. The International Monetary Fund calculated FDI inflows at
roughly $310 billion between 1998 and 2011.
Illicit capital flows rob a government of tax
revenues and potential investment funds. Capital flight on this scale can be
politically destabilizing by allowing the rich to get richer through tax
evasion, GFI said.
China has a low level of tax collection given
the size of its economy, according to the IMF. Beijing has recognized
that corruption and bribery is a significant problem, an issue brought into
sharp focus recently by the Bo Xilai scandal. The country has announced a
major crackdown as it prepares for its once in a decade leadership
transition.
GFI calculates how much money leaks out of a
country unchecked by analyzing discrepancies in data filed with the IMF on
import and export prices between trade partners and calculating
discrepancies in a country's balance sheet.
The developing world overall lost $903 billion in
illicit outflows in 2009, with China, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia in
that order showing the largest losses, it said.
Trade mispricing was the major method of smuggling
money out of China, accounting for 86.2 percent of lost funds, the GFI
report found. This scheme involves importers reporting inflated prices for
goods or services purchased. The payments are transferred out and the excess
amounts are deposited into overseas bank accounts.
Trade mispricing is most common for nuclear
reactors, boilers, machinery and electrical equipment, the report said.
The bulk of the money ends up in tax havens - on
average, 52.4 percent between 2005 and 2011. Much of this money eventually
makes its way back to China as foreign direct investment for a double hit to
the economy.
FDI benefits from special tax breaks and subsidies,
essentially setting up an elaborate form of money laundering for Chinese
businesses, GFI added.
Jensen Comment
Would this be as serious in the U.S. under the Ben Bernanke/PaulKrugman/AlanBlinder
Keynesian Theory of Economics where, like Zimbabwe, we just print trillions of
more dollars at virtually zero cost?
"Cliff Confusions," by Paul Krugman, The New York Times,
October 29, 2012 ---
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/29/cliff-confusions/
While I have access, let me point you to an
excellent
post by Suzy Khimm making a point I should have
made: the only reason to worry about the fiscal cliff is if you’re a
Keynesian, who thinks that bringing down the budget deficit when the economy
is already depressed makes the depression deeper. And the same logic
actually says that we should not just avoid spending cuts, we should raise
spending right now.
What Khimm doesn’t mention is that a lot of the
Very Serious People don’t seem to get that. As
Jon Chait pointed out, finance bigwigs published
an utterly ludicrous letter claiming that the risk from the fiscal cliff is
that interest rates might spike — which is completely off base. The only way
I can make sense of that letter is cognitive dissonance — they’re so wedded
to the notion that the danger is that the invisible bond vigilantes will
scare off the confidence fairy that they can’t admit, even to themselves,
that what’s really worrying them right now is straight Keynesian concerns.
And the supposed deficit hawks, who should be
celebrating the prospect of such a big move in their direction, aren’t. Why?
As Khimm suggests, this isn’t the deficit reduction they wanted — it was
supposed to involve hurting the working class, not raising tax rates at the
top (which were supposed to be cut!).
Jensen Comment
I wonder if Professor Krugman continues to support this unlimited Keynesian
spending for Greece --- a nation that cannot seem to enforce its own tax laws
and would have almost no government spending discipline without
externally-imposed austerity pressures from the EU?
The Keynesian spending approach of unrestrained spending is more worrisome
for nations and states (like Illinois and California) that have almost no
government spending disciplines unless such disciplines are applied from the
outside. Both California and Illinois have very nearly the highest tax rates in
the United States. How high can they keep going up and up and up to support
progressive spending in those states and their unfunded public pension funds?
The problem is that Greece, Illinois, and California cannot print their own
currencies.
There's no such spending restraint under the Bernanke/Krugman/Blinder
Keynesian Theory of Economics for nations like the U.S. and China that can crank
up the currency printing presses.
And more good news for China
"Jeep, an Obama favorite, looks to shift production to China,"
Washington Examiner, October 25, 2012 ---
http://washingtonexaminer.com/jeep-an-obama-favorite-looks-to-shift-production-to-china/article/2511703#.UI_Gge_Aut_
. . .
Well it appears that the taxpayer bailed-out
Chrysler is looking back and now considering cutting costs by shifting
production of all Jeeps to China, which has a strong desire for Jeeps.
In a Bloomberg interview, Jeep's president said the
automaker plans to restore Jeep production in China, suspended in 2009, and
is considering making all Jeeps in China. "Fiat SpA, majority owner of
Chrysler Group LLC, plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually
make all of its models in that country, according to the head of both
automakers' operations in the region," reported the business wire service.
Mike Manley, chief operating officer of Fiat and
Chrysler in Asia and president of the Jeep brand, told Bloomberg, "We're
reviewing the opportunities within existing capacity" as well as "should we
be localizing the entire Jeep portfolio or some of the Jeep portfolio" to
China.
Chrysler builds Jeep SUV models at plants in
Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Manley said the firm is in talks with China's
Guangzhou Automobile Group Co.
Having, with the help of Penn State, found himself
fully aware inside of a whorehouse, Feeney now proposes that we do a sort of Las
Vegas, a sort of Italy, on big-time college sports.
"Kentucky is the ugly truth the NCAA wants to hide, and Duke is the
hysterical lie they hide it with," Inside Higher Ed, November 12,
2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-diaries/ugly-truth-hysterical-lie
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics scandals in colleges and universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
What a surprise. I thought she could gallop faster than the posse.
"U.S. Attorney: Ex-Dixon comptroller to plead guilty," Chicago Tribune, November
13, 2012 ---
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-us-atorney-exdixon-comptroller-to-plead-guilty-20121113,0,227018.story
Former Dixon comptroller Rita Crundwell plans to
plead guilty Wednesday to a federal fraud charge that alleges she siphoned
more than $53 million from the small northwestern Illinois city’s coffers,
according to the U.S. Attorney's office.
The office released a statement saying Crundwell
will change her plea to guilty at a hearing Wednesday morning before U.S.
District Judge Philip G. Reinhard in federal court in Rockford.
It was unclear from the release how Crundwell’s
guilty plea to the federal charge will impact separate state charges she
faces for the same wrongdoing. She also faces 60 counts of theft tied to her
alleged embezzlement from the city's accounts.
Crundwell is accused of stealing the money over two
decades and using it to sustain a lavish lifestyle and a nationally renowned
horse-breeding operation.
Federal authorities have auctioned off about 400
horses and a luxury motor home that Crundwell allegedly bought with the
stolen city funds. If Crundwell is convicted, much of the money will be
returned to Dixon – after the federal government takes its cut for caring
for the horses for months.
How true can you get?
As (Commissioner) Bridgeman left office last year, he praised (Controller) Rita
Crundwell for being an asset to the city and said she "looks
after every tax dollar as if it were her own,"
according to meeting minutes.
As quoted by Caleb Newquest on April 27, 2012 ---
http://goingconcern.com/post/heres-ominous-statement-former-dixon-city-finance-commissioner-made-about-accused-embezzler
She was mostly just horsing around
"Somehow the City of Dixon, Illinois Just Noticed (after six years) That $30
Million Was Missing," Going Concern, April 19, 2012 ---
http://goingconcern.com/post/somehow-city-dixon-illinois-just-noticed-30-million-was-missing
"Why using cash may not protect your privacy in the future–game theory," Mind
Your Decisions, November 11, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2012/11/13/why-using-cash-may-not-protect-your-privacy-in-the-future-game-theory/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mindyourdecisions+%28Mind+Your+Decisions%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Jensen's Comment
This stretches the point to fit into a game theory context. For example, I use
cash in restaurants and gas stations. I figure that in those places the odds are
quite high of geting a credit card number stolen. Using cash protects my
privacy.
But I use a credit card for Amazon, but I do use a credit card with a
relatively low credit ceiling.
I think using cash protects my privacy except in places where I cannot do
business without a credit card such as for rental cars, hotels, 800 numbers
(Erika), and Amazon (me).
Surprise Victory of Business Over Government
Canadian "Supreme Court backs Glaxo in transfer-pricing dispute," by Jeff
Gray, Globe and Mail, October 18, 2012 ---
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/supreme-court-backs-glaxo-in-transfer-pricing-dispute/article4620345/
The Supreme Court of Canada has sided with
GlaxoSmithKline PLC in a lengthy tax fight the drug giant has been waging
with the federal government, in a ruling that some say expands the ability
of multinationals to use a technique known as “transfer pricing” to shift
profits outside of Canada’s borders.
The court, weighing in for the first time on
transfer pricing, handed a defeat to the Canada Revenue Agency in its battle
with Glaxo over the way multinationals account for the profits they report
to Canada’s taxman and those they send to other, often lower-tax,
jurisdictions.
Queen’s University law professor Art Cockfield said
Thursday’s ruling could embolden companies that use transfer pricing: “They
can take a more aggressive stance, and create these sorts of structures that
shift profits to countries like tax havens.”
But Prof. Cockfield and other tax law experts also
acknowledge that the decision largely reinforces practices already used by
multinationals, while beating back a CRA attempt to much more narrowly
interpret the rules.
“This does not give taxpayers carte blanche, at
all,” said Claire Kennedy, a tax lawyer with Bennett Jones LLP in Toronto.
“... It’s not as though it’s creating a huge opening in terms of transfer
pricing.”
Multinationals with local subsidiaries that sell
their imported products in Canada must set a price, for tax purposes, that
the subsidiary pays its parent for those goods. If the multinational wants
to move more of its profits out of Canada, it can increase this “transfer
price” that it charges its own subsidiary.
But according to tax laws in Canada and other
countries, the prices subsidiaries pay must be equal to the “reasonable”
cost an arm’s-length business would pay. At the centre of the Glaxo fight
was just how this should be defined.
From 1990 to 1993, the Canadian subsidiary of
British-based Glaxo Group Ltd. told Ottawa it had paid a Swiss affiliate
$1,512 and $1,651 a kilogram for the ingredient ranitidine, which it
packaged as the stomach ulcer drug Zantac.
That price was five times the cost paid by generic
producers for the same drug. This difference attracted Ottawa’s attention,
and it reassessed the company for $51-million in unpaid taxes, starting a
complex and lengthy legal battle. Glaxo beat back the reassessment at the
Federal Court of Appeal, and the government took it before the Supreme Court
in January.
Glaxo argued the price made business sense, since
it was dictated by a licensing agreement that gave its Canadian subsidiary
access to all of its other drugs and the right to sell brand-name Zantac for
a much higher price. The local subsidiary was still making, and declaring, a
60-per-cent profit margin, the company said.
But lawyers for the Canadian government argued that
tax laws mean only the comparable generic price should be taken into
account.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court
disagreed, saying other factors, such as licensing agreements, should be
considered when determining a reasonable arm’s- length price. But it
declined Glaxo’s request to actually decide whether the price its Canadian
subsidiary paid was fair, referring that question back to the Tax Court of
Canada.
Continued in article
In 2012, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek Magazine,
and scores of other print media have take life-threatening hits on loss of
subscription and advertising revenue. Newsweek is phasing out of hard
copy printing. The New York Times is laying off people while having no
business plan for the future. The WaPo took a double whammy in 2012 and
is now considering diversification into health care.
"Will Buying a Hospice Keep the Washington Post Co. Off Life
Support?" Knowledge@Wharton, October 24, 2012 ---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3102
The Washington Post was an icon during the heyday
of print journalism. Whether it was stories based on the Pentagon Papers or
its investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal, the Post was a
powerful national voice. Over the last decade, however, the newspaper has
been buffeted by the same brutal forces besetting its print competitors:
declining ad revenues and a shrinking subscriber base.
These days, the Washington Post Co., owner of the
Post, is struggling to find a new direction as print continues to wither
and its education business, Kaplan, shrinks in the wake of questions about
the business practices of for-profit universities. The company's recent
deal to acquire a hospice company may have left some observers scratching
their heads. But the move was clearly a signal that the firm is looking for
new sources of growth as its two core businesses decline.
"Clearly the print-to-digital shift is a major
cataclysmic event across the board," says Wharton management professor
Daniel Levinthal. "But the real challenge isn't just a technological shift.
The problem is that the business model in that industry is changing. How you
can profit from the original content that the Post and others were created
to develop is now problematic." Among the casualties in that shift: Newsweek
magazine, once owned by the Washington Post Co., which announced on October
18 that it will shutter its print operation at the end of the year and move
to an all-digital format.
The magnitude of the challenge facing the
Washington Post Co. is evident in its stock price. Five years ago, shares in
the firm, which is controlled by the Graham family and led by CEO Donald
Graham, were at $850. Today, the stock trades at just over $360. The
precipitous drop reflects the double whammy of the falloff in revenues at
the newspaper and setbacks at the once highly profitable Kaplan education
division. In 2011, the company posted net income of $116 million, a 58%
decline from the previous year.
The ongoing headaches in print have caused the
Washington Post Co.'s newspaper publishing operation, which includes
WashingtonPost.com and Slate, to rack up steady losses in recent years. For
the first six months of 2012, the newspaper division's operating loss was
$38 million. As advertising spending has shifted to the web and as readers
have increasingly found other sources for news, the Post and other regional
papers have contracted. "[Newspapers] were like local monopolists,"
Levinthal notes. "There was a certain amount of local advertising, and some
went to television, radio and print -- [newspapers] were guaranteed some of
that. But the web blew up those geographic boundaries and there went the
economic model."
Wharton professor of business economics and public
policy Michael Sinkinson says the challenge facing journalism outlets like
the Post is exacerbated by the tendency of readers to favor news sources
that reflect their personal opinions. Research by Sinkinson and others has
shown that "people like reading news that conforms to their own views," he
notes. And with the growth of digital media, "now there is a huge variety of
viewpoints online, and consumers can seek out a source that matches their
own perspective."
The Post has had some digital successes, including
its popular Social Reader application that allows users to share what they
are reading on Facebook. But critics argue that the Post failed to exploit
the brand equity the paper built up during its glory days. While digital
advertising was up 8% in the most recent quarter to $26.3 million, Bradley
Safalow, founder and CEO of PAA Research based in New York City, says that
it is still a small slice -- about 17% -- of the newspaper division's total
revenues. "They didn't take advantage of their brand awareness 10 or 12
years ago. Politico, The Hill and Huffington Post have taken tremendous
mindshare in terms of where people go for political information. I would
argue that [these media outlets are] really who the Post competes with." Ken
Doctor, a Santa, Cruz, Calif.-based media industry analyst for Outsell and
Newsonomics, agrees that the Post should have been more aggressive about
staking out its turf when it comes to online information about politics. "I
think they missed a big opportunity," he states.
According to Wharton management professor Daniel
Raff, online retailer Amazon is a great example of a company that has
successfully capitalized on its brand equity. "There are ways for newspapers
to generate revenue that are not confined to [charging readers for access to
the site]," Raff says. "Amazon started out selling books and got itself in
the position of being the most prominent address on the web. They then ...
started renting that address and became a mall in which they owned some of
the stores, but also leased space to others." While that approach may not
translate directly to journalism, it clearly suggests that the key to
survival for the Post and other media outlets is to think beyond the model
as it existed in print, Raff notes. "The question is, 'Are there new ways of
taking advantage of their brand equity in this setting?'"
As readers shift to the web, the Post has faced a
critical decision on whether to join The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal in charging for access to its content. So far, the paper has
declined to do that. Doctor says the Post has resisted out of fear that it
will lose too many national readers, losses that would hurt online ad
revenues. This concern, he adds, reflects an even bigger problem -- the Post
remains a regional publication. "The Post is not benefitting from the same
economies of scale as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and New York
Times," Doctor points out. "Those [outlets] can monetize national and global
audiences through advertising and digital subscriptions. But the Post is
focused on the Washington, D.C., metro area so there is a relatively small
digital upside it can wring out of that market. It is a regional paper with
national ambitions." PAA Research's Safalow contends that the Post would
have difficulty charging for access to its site. "Are they bringing anything
to the market that is truly differentiated?" he asks. "The answer is 'no.'"
A Two-way Conversation
As suggested above, and echoed in a recent
Knowledge@Wharton interview with Raju Narisetti, managing director of The
Wall Street Journal Digital Network and deputy managing editor of The Wall
Street Journal, the print-to-digital shift is changing the ways that content
is reported and presented. "The interplay of technology and content is
becoming more and more critical because in The New York Times, The
Washington Post, WSJ, Financial Times, and USA Today, 70% to 80% of what we
write and what we cover is fairly common," says Narisetti, who formerly was
managing editor of The Washington Post, where his responsibilities included
mobile and tablet initiatives. "In the newspaper world, we had a
geographically captive audience. In some sense, they did not have much of a
choice if they lived in Washington but to read The Washington Post in
print."
But when it comes to digital, he says, "there is
immense portability of your reader. And they have become more promiscuous in
where they can go and what they can sample. So the only way you're going to
be competitive, the only way you're going to build engagement and loyalty,
is if you take your great journalism and create an amazing experience around
it. By that I mean give readers a much more visual experience, whether it's
video or galleries or audio, or the ability to engage with your content,
co-create content, or use the databases more effectively. None of this could
be done in print. That whole experience is what will bring them back to you
versus going to another site. And I think that requires journalism to be
hand in glove with technology. That hasn't been the case all these years in
most media houses."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In the meantime, the common stock of The New York Times plunged from
$10.87 before Halloween to a close of $8.19 on Friday --- scary! The NYT pins
its hopes on downsizing and its new electronic subscriptions plan. But the
future of electronic subscriptions is scary given all the free electronic news
services, including those that make Associate Press articles free to the public.
From London to New York: Go West young textbook, go West!
"Supreme Court Hears Case Involving Textbook Pricing," Inside Higher
Ed, October 30, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/10/30/supreme-court-hears-case-involving-textbook-pricing
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday heard oral arguments
in a case that explores whether re-sellers can hawk cheaper versions of
textbooks, produced for students overseas, to U.S. students at a discount.
The case, the second the court has heard in two years involving what is
known as the "first sale" doctrine, could have major implications for how
much publishers charge for their textbooks, both in the United States and
abroad. Accounts in
The New York Times and
Wall Street Journal of the court's hearing in
Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. described justices divided
over the arguments made by publishers and by the former graduate student
whose resale of foreign-made textbooks earned him $1 million in a year and
brought the wrath of the publishers.
"Episode 100: How Colleges Talk About (Tech) Reinvention," by Jeffrey
R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 31, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/techtherapy/2012/10/31/episode-100-how-colleges-talk-about-reinvention/
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Fulbright Fellowships, Including the Fulbright-Hays Program ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulbright_Program
"Fulbright Tries Out Short-Term Fellowships," by Ian Wilhelm,
Chronicle of Higher Education, October 28, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Fulbright-Tries-Short-Term/135420/
After more than 60 years of sending American
scholars overseas, the U.S. State Department's Fulbright International
Educational Exchange Program is getting a tune-up. To better accommodate the
workloads of today's scholars and respond to changes in how research is
conducted, the department is experimenting with new types of awards.
The program sends some 1,100 academics outside the
United States annually to teach, do research, or serve as advisers to
faculty and officials at foreign universities. They are a small but
significant portion of the 8,000 Fulbright awards each year, which also
support international exchanges of students, artists, elementary and
secondary schoolteachers, and other professionals.
Traditionally, Fulbright has sent American scholars
abroad for a semester or an academic year. The majority of the grants will
continue to do that, but the department is looking at new approaches, says
Meghann Curtis, deputy assistant secretary for academic programs in the
department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
"We're constantly having to look at our program and
the various options within it," she says. "We ask ourselves: Is this
feasible for an academic on an American college campus these days, whether
they're an adjunct, a postdoc, or a tenured faculty member?"
A few years ago, the department began the Fulbright
Specialist Program, which sends academics for two to six weeks to provide
assistance on curriculum development or other educational projects at
foreign institutions.
The department is also starting to offer a small
number of "serial grants." They allow a scholar to travel between home and
abroad several times for short stints over three years. When the
international-exchange program started in the 1940s, such an approach would
not have worked, says Ms. Curtis, but now, with online tools like Skype, a
Fulbright winner can stay in touch with overseas partners while at home.
"While you aren't physically there, you can continue to be in very close
contact," she says.
While both newer programs lack the cultural
immersion of the traditional program, they give more options to scholars,
who face ever-increasing demands on their personal and professional lives,
says Ms. Curtis.
She also hopes the new flexibility appeals to
colleges and universities, where some deans and department leaders frown on
giving a professor an extended leave of absence, even for an award as
prestigious as the Fulbright.
"That's the direction we're moving in: to make it
more feasible for your typical academic and frankly also to make it more
appealing for U.S. universities to endorse their faculty to go."
The department also wants to respond to changes in
how research is conducted. In the future, it may provide awards to
international teams of scientists to facilitate travel among their
countries, a shift meant to appeal in part to engineers and others in the
STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, fields. "We'd
love to bring together cohorts so folks from the U.S. and, say, India,
China, and Thailand, would be working together on a team," says Ms. Curtis.
Continued in article
Top 20 Destinations for Fulbright Scholars 2012-2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Fulbright-Tries-Short-Term/135420/
Most GMAT critical reasoning questions contain hidden assumptions, and
learning how to recognize them is key
"GMAT Tip: Loaded Questions," Bloomberg Business Week, October
24, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-24/gmat-tip-loaded-questions
The GMAT Tip of the Week is a weekly
column that includes advice on taking the Graduate Management Admission
Test, which is required for admission to most business schools. Every week
an instructor from a top test-prep company will share suggestions for
improving your GMAT score. This week’s tip comes from Andrew Mitchell,
director of prebusiness programs and GMAT instructor at
Kaplan Test Prep.
As the U.S. presidential election continues, the
world around us teems with “arguments.” Arguments conveyed through TV ads,
debates, stump speeches, and newspaper editorials attempt to persuade us to
subscribe to a particular world view, vote for a certain candidate, even
donate money to a specific campaign. That’s what all arguments are: attempts
to convince. In real life, arguments make this attempt using a variety of
tactics, some more honorable than others. While some arguments are based on
solid evidence and reasoning, others rely on appeals to emotion or distorted
facts.
Fortunately for GMAT test takers, the arguments
found in questions that appear in the test’s Critical Reasoning section
follow a specific pattern. Keep these things in mind as you evaluate GMAT
arguments:
• All GMAT arguments contain evidence, which is
used to support a conclusion.
• On the GMAT, all evidence is accepted as true. No
exceptions, no “fact checkers.”
• All GMAT arguments are designed to contain a key
point of vulnerability: a gap between the evidence and the conclusion, which
must be bridged by an assumption.
• An assumption is defined as “something the author
doesn’t state but that must be true in order for the argument to hold.”
Finding the assumption is the key to Critical
Reasoning success. Questions can ask you to identify the central assumption,
point out a flaw in the argument (by showing why the assumption is
unreasonable), or recognize potential facts that would strengthen or weaken
the argument (by supporting or undermining the assumption, respectively).
Practice identifying assumptions as you listen to
the candidates’ arguments. Consider this one: “My administration would
create more jobs, since my policies will cut taxes on corporate profits.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Note that the GMAT was among the first certification examinations to have
computers grade essay questions ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ComputerBasedAssessment
Sociology professor designs SAGrader software for grading student essays
Student essays always seem to be riddled with the same
sorts of flaws. So sociology professor Ed Brent decided to hand the work off to
a computer. Students in Brent's Introduction to Sociology course at the
University of Missouri-Columbia now submit drafts through the SAGrader software
he designed. It counts the number of points he wanted his students to include
and analyzes how well concepts are explained. And within seconds, students have
a score. It used to be the students who looked for shortcuts, shopping for
papers online or pilfering parts of an assignment with a simple Google search.
Now, teachers and professors are realizing that they, too, can tap technology
for a facet of academia long reserved for a teacher alone with a red pen.
Software now scores everything from routine assignments in high school English
classes to an essay on the GMAT, the standardized test for business school
admission. (The essay section just added to the Scholastic Aptitude Test for the
college-bound is graded by humans). Though Brent and his two teaching assistants
still handle final papers and grades students are encouraged to use SAGrader for
a better shot at an "A."
"Computers Now Grading Students' Writing," ABC News, May 8, 2005 ---
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=737451
Jensen Comment: Aside from some of the obvious advantages such as grammar
checking, students should have a more difficult time protesting that the grading
is subjective and unfair in terms of the teacher's alleged favored versus
less-favored students. Actually computers have been used for some time in
grading essays, including the GMAT graduate admission test ---
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=723
References to computer grading of essays ---
http://coeweb.fiu.edu/webassessment/references.htm
You can read about PEG at
http://snipurl.com/PEGgrade
Bob Jensen's threads on the CPA and CMA examinations are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010303CPAExam
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Make Your Own Computer Games
Invent with Python (make your own computer games) ---
http://inventwithpython.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
"In Disaster Relief, Bigger Government Isn't Always Better: FEMA
spent $878 million on prefabricated homes after Hurricane Katrina. Thousands
were left to rot," by Michael Tanner, The Wall Street Journal,
November 2, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204846304578090873245350506.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno64-wsj
Jensen Comment
I disagree with writers like Tanner that each of the 50 states should take over
responsibility for disaster relief. That in itself is a disaster if the states
have to raise their own funding from taxation or borrowing. It's better to have
the Federal government pay for FEMA disaster relief since the Federal government
under Bernanke learned out to simply crank up the money printing presses to
generate revenue without have to tax or borrow. When the government prints
trillions of dollars to help pay its bills there's no reason to become efficient
about a spending discipline. Bring on the greenbacks with the blessings of
Keynesian theorists Paul Krugman and Alan Blinder.
What's most important for future generations is to stop rebuilding in high
risk flooding zones. If you believe the global warming scientists the ocean
levels are going to rise two feet in a few decades and storms will be more
ferocious (even
if we're presently in what oceanic scientists call a drought of hurricanes
relative to years past). Should we really rebuild all those houses on the
outer banks of New Jersey and North Carolina and rebuild their beaches time and
time again? When will we learn to turn lowlands into wild wetlands once again?
Is cost-efficient to rebuild all of Staten Island or New Orleans with
ever-higher dikes?
Instead we should use Staten Island more efficiently --- as a landfill for
New York and New Jersey trash. If done properly, in 100 years Staten Island will
be a mountain where we can safely build luxury condos with fabulous views of
hurricanes down below. I'm serious here. Bangor, Maine and many other towns are
building what I consider to be outstanding mountains built on landfills. As soon
as there is an efficient way to capture the underground methane these mountains
will one day be outstanding building sites and ski resorts.
Free PSAT Practice Exams ---
http://www.testpreppractice.net/PSAT/Default.aspx
"SAT Prep on the Web: : A) a Game; B) Online Chat; C) All of the
Above," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal,
November 3, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704462704575590383273883818.html
This Saturday, high-school students around
the country will sit for hours of silent testing that will determine
some portion of their future: That's right, it's SAT time. For both
parents and kids, the preparation for taking the standardized test
is stressful and expensive, often involving hours of studying and
several hundreds of dollars spent on classes, workbooks and tutors.
And many kids will take these tests more than once.
So this week I tried a Web-based form of
test prep called Grockit that aims to make studying for the SAT,
ACT, GMAT, GRE or LSAT less expensive and more enjoyable.
Grockit.com offers lessons, group study and solo practice, and does
a nice job of feeling fun and educational, which isn't an easy
combination to pull off.
A free portion of the site includes group
study with a variety of questions and a limited number of solo test
questions, which are customized to each student's study needs. The
$100 Premium subscription includes full access to the online
platform with unlimited solo practice questions and personalized
performance analytics that track a student's progress. A new
offering called Grockit TV (grockit.com/tv) offers free eight-week
courses if students watch them streaming live twice a week.
Otherwise, a course can be downloaded for $100 during the course or
$150 afterward. Instructors hailing from the Princeton Review and
Kaplan, among other places, teach test preparation for the GMAT
business-school admissions test and SAT.
For the sake of testing, I focused on the
SAT and plunged back into the depths of reading, writing and (gulp)
math to get a sense of what students see and do on Grockit.com. In a
short period of time, I found myself wanting to go back to the site
to get better at certain sections or to earn more Experience Points,
which result in badges and unlock new levels of study, both of which
can be optionally posted to outside networks like Facebook or
Twitter. By default, everyone can see one another's points, which
invites healthy competition; these can also be hidden if you'd
rather keep them private.
I tested both the free version of
Grockit.com, which includes an SAT writing diagnostic test, and the
extra offerings of a $100 Premium account, including diagnostic
tests for writing, reading and math to evaluate my strengths and
weaknesses in taking the SAT. The free version had too many messages
that constantly notified me of what I could do with a paid account
and prompted me to upgrade.
Along with completing practice questions
with strangers and instructors, I got a friend of mine to also use
Grockit.com so we could compete together in Grockit's Speed
Challenge Games. These are included in the free portion and they
reward the fastest person who answers a question correctly—but also
display incorrect guesses, thus narrowing the possible answers for
those who don't answer first. It was more fun for me to play against
someone I knew, but I can imagine kids preferring the anonymity of
competing with strangers when they don't answer questions correctly.
In an introductory video, Grockit founder
and chief product officer Farb Nivi describes the site by saying,
"It's like having a complete multimedia textbook and workbook
online, at your fingertips." But for kids (and from my experience,
adults), the computer isn't an easy place to concentrate. On any
given PC, especially one used by a teenager, instant-message
indicators are chiming, Facebook updates and Twitter tweets are
waiting to be checked, music is playing in the background and emails
are flowing into inboxes. Plus, the Grockit site is just a tab away
from other websites and distractions. And the site has no way of
working in a distraction-free mode, like how the new Microsoft
Office for Mac offers Full Screen View, which quiets any alerts or
pop-up distractions.
It also isn't necessarily comfortable for
students to read extensive text (like in reading questions for the
SAT) on a vertical computer screen. The site will run on the iPad,
which can be held on a lap for more comfortable reading, but many
students don't own one of these.
Part of the way Grockit is made more fun is
by purposely incorporating social networking into the experience. As
people work on questions, they can instant message with one another
in a right-side panel about tips for answering questions or simply
for commiserating about studying. These IMs don't make indicator
sounds, so they aren't too intrusive, but they can't be fully
closed. I saw several chats among teens about nothing in particular,
as well as some test-taking tips from instructors and other
students.
Grockit encourages users to "be nice" in
chats because all conversations are logged; people can also flag one
another for offensive remarks. Chats are also archived on your page
so you can reread them for tips and study hints. If you find
someone's tip helpful or if you simply like a person, you can award
him or her with Grockit Points, which show up beside a name and
profile photo. Users' ages or last names aren't displayed.
Grockit offers one-on-one tutoring for a
fee of $50 an hour, and I tried one session for math. My instructor
and I used Skype to audio chat throughout the session and he took
advantage of a whiteboard in Grockit, where he could write out the
steps in an algebra problem to demonstrate how to solve for X.
Around 40 instructors are employed for
Grockit, but anyone can run a practice session, even other students.
I signed up for a scheduled practice session at 8 p.m. that I
assumed was run by an instructor, and later found out it was run by
a student. Grockit instructors can also pop into sessions at any
given time to help students, and one did during my session. Grockit
works on a system of transparency so users can evaluate all
teachers. My tutor had five-star rating and did a great job
reminding me of algebra rules.
If you're looking for an inexpensive and
more enjoyable way to study for big tests, Grockit is a viable and
easily accessible option. But its proximity to the rest of the Web
could prove much more distracting than the old SAT workbook.
—See a video with Katherine Boehret on
Web-based test-prep software at WSJ.com/PersonalTech.
Email her at
mossbergsolution@wsj.com
Dangers of Becoming Dependent Upon the Chinese Markets
Japan Plunges Into Deep Recession; GDP Shrinks 3.5% Annualized ---
Click Here
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/mikeshedlock/2012/11/13/japan_plunges_into_deep_recession_gdp_shrinks_35_annualized
"Which B-School Has the Most Global Student Body?" by Louis Lavelle,
Bloomberg Business Week, October 24, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-24/which-b-school-has-the-most-global-student-body
There’s growing recognition that today’s MBA
graduates, whatever path they take after commencement, will need a knowledge
of global business practices and cultures to operate effectively. And there
are few better ways to develop those skills than in a classroom surrounded
by students who are nothing like you—from the languages they speak to their
religious beliefs.
So it should come as no surprise that when judging
MBA programs, one of the factors many applicants examine is the student body
mix, paying particular attention to the percentage of students who hail from
foreign shores. In that spirit, Bloomberg Businessweek has
assembled a list of the schools with the most, and least, international
student bodies among more than 100 participating in Bloomberg
Businessweek’s 2012 ranking of the top full-time MBA programs,
scheduled for release on Nov. 15.
For an apples-to-apples comparison, we limited this
ranking to U.S. schools, where the share of students from abroad averaged
35.4 percent, a far cry from the 74.8 percent among international programs.
But for the record: The non-U.S. programs with the most international
students were
IMD in Lausanne,
Switzerland, and the
Hong Kong University of Science & Technology,
where 98 percent of MBA students are from somewhere else. The
Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus
University, at 97 percent, wasn’t far behind.
And the least “international” international
program? That would be the
Ivey School of Business at the University of
Western Ontario, where only 31 percent of the student body comes from
outside Canada. The
China-Europe International Business School, with a
student body that’s 42 percent international, came in second, with two
Canadian programs,
HEC Montreal and the
Queen’s School of Business, tied for third at 45
percent.
See table in article for the most international U.S. MBA Programs topped
by
- Syracuse University (68%),
- Purdue University (67%),
- Hofstra University (59%),
- Babson College (59%), and
- Thunderbird (55%).
Really?
Business Schools With the Best Teachers Are Not Necessarily the Highest Ranked
Domestic or International Business Schools
What hurts the top-ranked business schools in terms
of teaching reputations?
Hint: Think class size
But don't even mention the unthinkable:
Research stress does not always allow top-ranked business school teachers to
perform at their best in classrooms.
And don't even think the other unthinkable:
Having teachers who hate capitalism and business does not really help,
especially outside the U.S.
"B-Schools With Five-Star Teachers," by Louis Lavelle, Bloomberg
Business Week, November 12, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-12/b-schools-with-five-star-teachers#r=hpt-ls
What qualities make for a great teacher? Like
beauty, that’s very much in the eye of the beholder. But in business school,
students almost universally praise certain attributes: a compelling
classroom presence, an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject, easy
availability after class, and a research record second to none.
As part of Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2012
Best B-Schools ranking, scheduled for publication on Nov. 15, we asked
recent MBA graduates to judge the quality of their business school’s
faculty. When the ranking is published, we’ll award letter grades, from A+
to C, to each of the ranked schools based on how well each program fared in
this area. The letter grades are based on an actual numerical ranking, which
we used to create the ranking below.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this
list is that it doesn’t include any of the schools typically considered the
best of the best—including Chicago’s
Booth School of Business,
Harvard Business School, and
Wharton, which took the top three spots in our
2010 ranking. In fact, the highest-ranked school
on the “best” list is Virginia’s
Darden School of Business, which ranked 11th in
2010 and came in at No. 3 for teaching. It’s possible that Booth, Harvard,
and Wharton were the victims of high expectations. Their reputations for
excellence may be impossible to live up to. Very large classes probably
don’t help, either. All three have somewhat
crowded classrooms, with Harvard tipping the
scales at an average of 90 students in core courses.
The “worst” list is dominated by international
schools, including two
top 10 programs, No. 4
ESADE in Barcelona and No. 9 York’s Schulich
School of Business in Toronto. There does not appear to be a universal
explanation for this.
See the article itself for a ranking of business schools with the best
teachers.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-12/b-schools-with-five-star-teachers#r=hpt-ls
Jensen Question
If Indiana and Maryland universities have the best business school teachers, why
do highest GMAT applicants still prefer Chicago’s
Booth School of Business,
Harvard Business School, and
Wharton if they can swing the prices of these top ranked business schools?
- The historic halo reputations and media rankings of the universities
themselves are more important to applicants than teaching quality.
- Applicants assume that top-ranked schools have the best teachers without
really investigating such things as class size and faculty research
distractions before it's too late. And there are assorted outstanding
teachers in the top-ranked business schools.
- Classroom learning is only one component of what applicants want from a
university. Possibly even more important are the business and alumni
connections that are outstanding in the top-ranked business schools,
especially when seeking a first job or changing jobs.
- The top ranked business schools are sometimes noted for being hard work
accompanied by relatively easy grading. For example, we hear horror stories
about all the writing required each week by the Harvard Business School. But
we don't hear many complaints about the final course grades.
- Hand holding and close student-teacher relationships probably are more
important to students 18-years of age still seeking what to do with their
lives than top business school applicants averaging 27-years of age who
already have 4-5 years of college education plus experience on the mean
streets before they apply to Chicago’s
Booth School of Business,
Harvard Business School, and
Wharton.
Bob Jensen's threads on the media rankings of business schools and
accounting programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
A Health Cost Savings Idea from Two Tuck Graduate School of Business Professors
at Dartmouth
"Quality Health Care at 3% of the Cost," by Vijay Govindarajan and Anant
Sundaram, Harvard Business Review Blog, November 2, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/11/a_great_idea_for_lowering_cost.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Every so often, good ideas
to lower health care costs in the US will come from unlikely sources.
Consider organ
transplants. Approximately 30% of the world's 100,000 transplants
performed annually are done in the US. Nine out of 10 of these involve
kidney, liver, or pancreas.
One important
problem in organ transplantation is the immune system's adverse reaction
to foreign objects, leading to organ rejection. Transplant nephrologists
use
induction therapy to deal with this problem.
In this therapy, the physician
introduces antibodies (typically, polyclonal
as opposed to monoclonal) into the patient's system to help suppress
rejection.
The most common
process in the US involves induction using polyclonal antibodies
derived from rabbits. In a typical kidney
transplant, for example, therapy using rabbit-derived antibodies costs
up to $20,000 per patient.
Yet, evidence —
from a team of nephrologists led by Dr. K. S. Nayak at
Lazarus Hospitals
in Hyderabad, India — shows that use of an equine-derived antibody can
lower this cost to $600 to $800 per patient. This cost reduction is
achieved by using a product made by an Indian company,
Bharat Serums &
Vaccines Ltd., and switching to a
carefully-managed protocol that administers the equine-derived antibody
in a single dose, as opposed to a multiple-dose protocol common in the
US. (A smaller dose is given just prior to surgery since it aborts the
initiation of rejection, and predisposes the patient to fewer
post-surgical infections.) This approach has now been adopted in many
developing countries.
In
published research, Dr. Nayak and his team
show that success rates from the use of such a single-dose,
equine-derived, $600- $800 induction therapy are no different from those
from the $20,000 procedure. If adopted across the 30,000 transplants in
the US, this protocol could conceivably save hundreds of millions of US
health care dollars, annually.
Interestingly,
product development and testing of the equine-based product was
originally done decades ago by researchers at the University of
Minnesota, but
use of
the antibody failed to get FDA approval and its production stopped in
1994.
This raises two
nettlesome questions. First, why did it take a team from emerging
markets to adopt this US innovation? Second, why do cost-saving
innovations like these fail to get adopted in the US health care system?
Our take on the question
of why this was first adopted in an emerging market and not in the US?
Contrast per capita incomes in the US and India: The average American
earns $50,000 per year, while the average Indian earns one-thirtieth of
that. Indeed, incomes of the majority of Indians lie below that
already-low average. Add to that a lack of social safety nets or health
insurance. Such severe economic constraints can, counter-intuitively, be
an advantage in the innovation game. Why? Health care providers in
countries like India are forced to push the price-performance paradigm.
They are pressed to offer quality care at an ultra-low price.
But what might explain
the US health care system's inability to adopt and widely diffuse such
low-cost solutions? Is it the incentives inherent in a fee-for-service
system that compensates providers based on quantity rather than quality
of services? Is it the delinking of the consumption of health care from
price signals — i.e., providing a service to those who almost never have
to see a bill, let alone pay for it out-of-pocket? Is it the way in
which we train medical professionals, training that places no emphasis
on cost of care?
How can high quality-low
cost innovations be adopted in the US? What needs to change?
Jensen Comment
The above article illustrates how to mislead with aggregations. The above
article claims about 30% of the 100,000 global transplants are performed in the
U.S. However, if we delete the relatively simple kidney transplants from the
aggregation the proportion for the U.S. skyrockets, especially in terms of the
much more complicated heart and heart-liver transplants ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_transplantation
One of my good friends (an attorney) in Bangor, Maine has lived with a heart
transplant for over 30 years and is still doing very well in his retirement
years. I wonder how long he would've lived on the less expensive equine-derived
antibody therapy? One of the problems with major new cost cutting innovations in
the area of organ transplantation is that survival studies take many years.
The article does not mention the fact that Texas is prospering with the
simple cost saving idea of passing a constitutional amendment to cap punitive
damage awards in the State of Texas. The major heart transplantation center in
Houston benefits greatly from the resulting decline in malpractice insurance.
A major problem with transplantation is the shortage of donors having genetic
matches with patients awaiting transplants. This makes kidneys less of a problem
since a relative can donate a kidney and still live on with a full and happy
life. But awaiting a heart transplant often becomes futile. I think there should
be some kind of government program to significantly reward people while living
for agreeing to donate organs immediately after death. Perhaps there could also
be a program to reward their estates, although this presents some moral hazards
of terminating Uncle Joe before his time.
Bob Jensen's threads on health care ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
"Many Complaints of Faculty Bias Stem From Students' Poor Communicating,
Study Finds," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education,
October 29, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Many-Complaints-of-Faculty/135464/
College students would be less inclined to see
their instructors as politically biased and more inclined to deal well with
such bias if they were taught better communication and argumentation skills,
a new study has found.
How students communicate when confronted with
opposing viewpoints, the study found, has a lot to do with how likely they
are to see instructors as politically biased or to react to perceptions of
bias in ways that undermine their own learning. In a nutshell, students who
are predisposed to verbally attack people with other viewpoints are more
likely than others to perceive their instructors as ideologically biased.
Students who are predisposed to enjoy a good, reasoned argument are less
likely than others to react to perceptions of instructor bias by withdrawing
from classroom discussions or censoring themselves to hide their true
beliefs.
An
article on the study, scheduled to be published in
January in the journal Communication Education, argues that some
perceptions of classroom bias would decline, and students would benefit more
from exposure to opposing viewpoints, if colleges did more to teach
argumentation and debate skills.
Teaching undergraduates such skills "can help them
deal with ideological questions in the classroom and elsewhere in a civil
way, and in a way that can discriminate between when professors are
expressing a bias and when they are expressing a perspective that they may,
or may not, actually be advocating," said Darren L. Linvill, an assistant
professor of communication at Clemson University who is one of the article's
co-authors.
The study's findings, however, were criticized as
ideologically biased themselves by Peter W. Wood, president of the National
Association of Scholars, a group that has frequently accused colleges of
liberal or leftist indoctrination.
The article summarizing the study, Mr. Wood said on
Friday, "seems to me to have a flavor of 'blaming the victim,'" and appears
"intended to marginalize the complaints of students who have encountered
bias in the classroom."
'A Little
Backbone'
The study was conducted by Mr. Linvill and by
Joseph P. Mazer, also an assistant professor of communication at Clemson.
They based their analysis on the results of three separate surveys
administered to a total of 226 undergraduates—45 freshmen, 65 sophomores, 84
juniors, and 32 seniors—from a randomly generated list of students enrolled
at a large Southeastern university that the researchers do not name.
Although the students came from just one institution, Mr. Linvill said the
study's limited scope did not matter. The study does not make
generalizations about other institutions, but instead examines relationships
between variables, which presumably "would be the same no matter what group
of students we are looking at."
One of the three surveys measured a trait called
"argumentativeness," a tendency to seek out, rather than avoid, situations
where one can argue a point of view. The researchers characterized that
trait as generally positive. A second survey measured a trait called "verbal
aggression," which the researchers characterized as generally negative. That
trait was defined as a tendency to engage in ad hominem attacks or otherwise
attack the self-concept of people who hold opposing views. The third survey
measured how students perceive and respond to instructor bias, asking
questions related to students' general attitude toward the faculty as
opposed to their experience with particular instructors.
The researchers found a substantial correlation
between high scores for verbal aggressiveness and the likelihood that
students would see instructors as biased. The researchers found a
substantial negative correlation between high scores for argumentativeness
and the likelihood that students would respond to perceived instructor bias
by keeping quiet in class or offering only the answers they thought their
instructors wanted to hear.
Mr. Wood took issue with how the study had
characterized students. He argued that those who publicly accuse their
instructors of bias might not be exhibiting any negative trait so much as "a
little backbone." While agreeing with the two Clemson researchers' assertion
that colleges should better teach students how to argue and debate, he said
it is naïve to dismiss students' fears that they will suffer repercussions
for expressing views their instructors find objectionable.
"I uphold the principle of good, open discussion,
but it does not stop with the assertion that this is what we want," said Mr.
Wood, who added that he hears "virtually every day" from undergraduate or
graduate students who believe their grades suffered as a result of
instructors' biased responses to their classroom statements.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Instead of engaging a biased professor who is willing to have a public or
private debate, many students just fire off complaints to RateMyProfessors ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/
Seems sort of nasty and not in the spirit of the article above by Peter
Schmidt..
One example of a liberal role model is the Robert Jensen who still serves as a
Professor Of Journalism at the University of Texas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jensen
Read the many student comments about him on RateMyProfessor --- that I don't
generally trust for the numerical ratings since the sample is self-selected. But
sometimes the written comments are revealing. He appears to be an inspiring
teacher teaching absurdly easy courses. The most frequent opinions given by
students concern how easy the course is throughout the semester.
Here's a sampling of over 50 student comments:
He made his
entire class work on organizing a demonstration against the school, which I
thought was way out of line. On top of that, it turned out that the reason
behind all of this was so he could get media coverage at the demonstration,
which made him look good since it seemed like he had a lot of supporters. So
exploitative and opportunistic!!
He is likes to express his opinions in class..A LOT.
Great teacher. Holds interest level. Socialist? cool. whatever. liberal?
awesome. vegetarian? hell yes."
It's easy to tell which reviewers went to his class and which ones are just
angry conservatives who heard that there was a liberal professor in the
journalism dept (shocking!).
Nice enough guy, but so liberal he's practically a socialist. He likes to
preach (a.k.a. give people something to think about). I fell asleep in the
class almost every day, but it was interesting.
Jensen Comment
Yes I know the evidence above is anecdotal. But there is a vast amount of
anecdotal evidence of professors like the above UT Journalism professor.
So often we envision a biased professor shedding his/her biases outside the
classroom door, but this is probably a myth, especially if you take the entire
semester into account. There may be many classes where he/she leaves biases
outside the classroom door. But by the end of the term there are usually enough
slip ups that students generally know what kind of political and economic role
model taught the course.
By the way, one reason to search RateMyProfessor is for the laughs. Students
have so many ways of expressing their opinions that sometimes it's hilarious.
CyberEconomics (multimedia textbook) ---
http://ingrimayne.com/econ/
Best and Worst 2012 MBA Job Placement - Job Offers Abundant, for Most -
Business Week ---
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2012-11-01/best-and-worst-2012-mba-job-placemen
Jensen Comment
Placement data can be somewhat misleading, especially for very small programs.
For example, before Trinity University dropped its MBA program a significant
proportion of the graduates were full-time military employees. At the time San
Antonio's major employers were five military bases, two of which like Lackland
and Kelly were enormous, although many of our MBA students were medical military
from the Brooke Army Hospital. But placement of other graduates was really
problematic. Also the MBA program did not coincide with Trinity's goal of having
only full-time students in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Enrollments
and placements of full-time MBA students were weak, and the MBA program was
dropped. Later a MS program in accountancy was added after Texas passed the
150-credit rule.
The above Bloomberg Business Week link has a somewhat dubious
advertisement from Thunderbird. In that advertisement, Thunderbird rightly
claims to be the Number 1 School for Global Business in various
international-specialty rankings ---
http://www.thunderbird.edu/about-thunderbird/rankings
But Thunderbird does not even make the Top 30 in terms of the above MBA
placement rankings where Thunderbird advertises itself as being Number 1.
It's extremely rare for a business professor to be ranked Number 1 on
RateMyProfessor.
So for International Business Professor Andy Gold (Iona College) to be ranked
Number 1 is noteworthy ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/toplists/topLists.jsp
I might also note that the following are in the Top 25 among University
Professors:
- International Business Professor Andy Gold (Iona College)
- Marketing Professor Kevin Raiford (Southern Nevada)
- MIS Professor Paige Saltzen (University of Denver)
- Management Professor Randall Benfield (California State University at
Sacramento)
- Business Professor Linda Hickman (California State University at San
Marcos)
- Finance Professor Omar Al Nassar (University of Houston at Victoria)
"THE MISSING COMPONENT," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, October 11, 2012
---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/
College education has numerous critics these days.
I believe the recent fascination with MOOCs comes – at least in part – from
dissatisfaction with the perceived quality of the current educational
experience. We promise development of critical thinking skills in our
students but often appear to deliver little more than well-rehearsed
memorization. The argument then follows that we don’t need small classes and
individual attention simply to teach memorization. Massive online courses
can achieve that goal with much less cost.
In my spare time, I often ponder how modern college
education can become better. For example, is the education that a college
student gets today really superior in any way to the norm 40 years ago? Cars
get more miles per gallon of gas than they did back then. Computers run
thousands of times faster. But, has college education gotten better during
that same period? We are certainly able to teach more students but has the
average education actually improved in any significant way?
About 20 years ago, I read an article that I
remember well to this day. The article argued that society’s best teacher
was the drill sergeant in charge of new Marine recruits during their stay in
basic training. This officer gets paid a relatively small amount but will
work 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, for weeks on end to make sure the new
recruits are properly trained. The drill sergeant will push, cajole, and
drive each person toward success. At the end of that time, the recruit will
be basically a new person – gone are laziness and bad habits. The person is
now a well-trained soldier.
Why does the drill sergeant work so hard without
much real compensation? According to the article, the sergeant is training
each new recruit on how to stay alive during combat and other dangerous
situations. For the drill sergeant, the very life of the recruit is on the
line. A properly trained soldier stays alive whereas a poorly trained one
might not. Failure to teach the young soldier well can possibly lead to an
avoidable death. It is the urgency of the education that pushes the drill
sergeant to go all out, night and day, to train the recruit. The recruit
might actually hate the sergeant but also might owe his life to that
teacher.
I was reminded of this article recently. My wife
and our daughters occasionally watch a television show called “The Biggest
Loser.” I have never seen a complete episode but I will sometimes watch a
few minutes as I pass through the room. As you might know, a group of very
heavy contestants are chosen. These folks typically weigh between 280 to 500
pounds and their lives are in jeopardy simply because of their extreme
heaviness.
Over a period of weeks, these contestants eat less
and exercise so much that they often lose hundreds of pounds. They become
new people ready to resume more active rolls in society.
My favorite characters on this show are the
trainers who work with each of the contestants. I know that one of them is
named Jillian. Jillian will get in the contestant’s faces and push them
unmercifully to do their exercises. She will beg them; she will yell at
them; she will use whatever trick it takes to get them to work harder and
harder so that the excess weight is lost. From what I have seen, no one does
more than Jillian to get the results she wants. I often wonder what college
would be like if we had a few people like Jillian on our faculty.
By the end of the television season, these folks
have had their lives completely turned around. They might have weighed 390
pounds at the start of the competition but be down to 180 by the end.
Clearly, they do not like the amount of pushing
that Jillian does. The work can be incredibly hard. They are used to being
lazy; she wants them to do real work. They have always made excuses; she
won’t let them make any excuses. I am always expecting one of the
contestants to pick Jillian up one day and throw her out the window.
However, at the last week of each show, almost every contestant will hug
Jillian and tell her thanks. Thanks for not giving up on them. Thanks for
continuing to push them to get better and stronger. Thanks for guiding them
to lose so much weight. She is not their best buddy and doesn't want to be
but she has helped them to change their lives for the better.
Why does Jillian push these people so hard? Well,
like the drill sergeant, there is a real urgency present. Improvement is
needed and improvement is needed immediately. These people are so heavy that
they will likely die before their time if they don’t make a change right
now. Today. Each contestant is hundreds of pounds overweight and could have
a heart attack at any moment.
This is what I call “educational urgency.” The
teacher imparts an urgency that requires serious work and lots of it and all
of it right now. No procrastination. No laziness. No excuses. There is work
to be done and it needs to be done now.
How many teachers have you ever had that seemed to
indicate that there was any urgency at all in the learning of class
material? I have had dozens of teachers and I don't remember ever having any
urgency. I meandered forward at my own leisure.
Students are human beings (believe it or not). Ask
yourself this question: How much real work will they do without a sense of
urgency?
Most teachers want their students to learn and most
do become annoyed if the students don’t learn. But, is there ever any real
urgency? And, if there is not, why would in teacher expect a college student
to do the work or even care about the class?
I believe that one of the reasons college teaching
is under attack is that our classes often don’t ring with any urgency at
all. If the student learns the material, that is great but, if not, it is
really no big deal. In the end, it really doesn’t make much difference.
That's an attitude that can lead to general dissatisfaction.
Whether you teach Shakespeare or philosophy or
political science or, even, accounting, is there any urgency at all to the
learning process? If there is no urgency, why should your students really do
anything for you? Of course, there are always a few great students who love
the material and do the work because of that interest. Trust me, they are
not the problem. It is the other students we need to reach and spur on to
better habits and deeper thinking.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Is there grade inflation in the Marines by having recruits evaluate their
teaching drill sergeants?
Is there a RateMySergeant Website?
Grade Inflation and Dysfunctional Teaching
Evaluations (the biggest scandal in higher education) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
"A Windows 8 Cheat Sheet," by David Pogue, The New York Times,
October 25, 2012 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/a-windows-8-cheat-sheet/
In my
New York Times column on Thursday, I pointed out
that Microsoft’s new Windows 8 feels like two operating systems in one.
There’s the traditional desktop Windows, best for mouse and keyboard, and
the new TileWorld (as I call it), best for touch screens.
Why “best”? Because desktop Windows has tiny
buttons, menus and controls that are generally too small for finger
manipulation, and TileWorld is filled with gestures that make sense only on
touch screens.
¶If you install Windows 8, you’ll have to learn
both environments, like it or not; you can’t live in just one environment or
the other. So the question arises: how are you supposed to operate TileWorld
if you have a nontouch computer?
¶Answer: There are mouse and keyboard equivalents
for the touch gestures.
¶Surprisingly, you have to dig around a bit online
to find out what they are. So here, for the benefit of Windows 8 adopters,
is your centralized cheat sheet: all of the most important
touch/mouse/keyboard shortcuts for Windows 8.
¶Open the Start screen. The colorful rectangular
tiles that make up the new Start screen are easy to reach.
¶Touch screen: Swipe your finger into the screen
from the right border to make the Charms panel appear (described next); tap
Start.
¶Mouse: Point to the lower-left corner of the
screen; when the Start screen icon appears, click.
¶Keyboard: Press the Windows key.
¶Many new tablets and laptops have a dedicated
Windows-logo button under the screen. Pressing it also opens the Start
screen.
¶Open the Charms panel. The Charms menu is a thin
vertical panel of important icons like Search, Share, Start and Settings.
¶Touch screen: Swipe your finger into the screen
from the right border.
¶Mouse: Point to the top right corner of the
screen.
¶Keyboard: Press the Windows key+C.
¶You can also jump directly to one of the buttons
on the Charms panel.
¶Share button: Windows+H
¶Settings button: Windows+I
¶Devices button: Windows + K
¶Open the App menu. Programs designed for TileWorld
often have a few options, represented as icons in a hidden horizontal bar.
In Internet Explorer, for example, this bar shows all your open browser
tabs.
¶Touch screen: Swipe into the screen a short
distance from the top or bottom of the screen.
¶Mouse: Right click anywhere in the window.
¶Keyboard: Press the Windows key+Z.
¶Next app. Here’s how you jump from one TileWorld
app to the next. (The Desktop, and all of its own programs, are represented
as one jump.)
¶Touch screen: Swipe into the screen from the left
border.
¶Mouse: Point to the upper left corner of the
screen.
¶Keyboard: Press and release the Windows key+Tab.
¶App Switcher. In regular Windows, Alt+Tab (and
hold down the Alt key) shows you a little dashboard displaying the icons of
all open programs, so you can jump directly to the one you want.
¶Touch screen: Swipe into the screen from the left
border, then back out again. A vertical column of open app icons appears.
¶Mouse: Point to the lower left corner of the
screen.
¶Keyboard: Press Windows key+Tab, but keep the
Windows key pressed.
¶Or press Alt+Tab (hold down Alt) as you always
have. That brings up the traditional horizontal row of open-app icons. This
app switcher includes open desktop apps (traditional Windows apps).
¶Split the screen between two apps. This feature
made its debut with Windows 7; it lets you split your screen between two
programs’ windows.
¶Touch screen: Swipe your finger slowly into the
screen from the left or right border. Or swipe down from the top edge, then
to right or left.
¶Mouse: Drag a window’s title window to the left or
right side of the screen until its outline changes to a full-height,
half-width window. Release.
¶Keyboard: Press Windows key plus the left or right
arrow key.
¶Close an app. Here’s how to exit a program in
TileWorld.
¶Touch screen: Swipe down from the middle of the
top border, almost all the way down the screen.
¶Mouse: Point to the top of the window to make the
grabber handle appear; drag it all the way down the screen.
¶Keyboard: Press Alt+F4.
¶Right click. In Windows, right clicking an item
summons a shortcut menu — a short menu listing commands relevant only to the
object you clicked. In Windows 8, that menu takes the form of a horizontal
strip at the bottom of the Start screen, offering options like Uninstall and
Unpin (from the Start screen).
¶Touch screen: Swipe down from a tile on the Start
screen.
¶Mouse: Right click, of course.
¶Keyboard: Press the little menu key.
¶Zooming in or out. To magnify or shrink your view
of a photo, map or Web page, proceed like this:
¶Touch screen: Spread or pinch two fingers on the
screen, just as on an iPad.
¶Mouse: While pressing the Ctrl key, turn your
mouse’s scroll wheel.
¶Keyboard: Press Ctrl and the + or – key.
¶Zooming fully out. On the Start screen, you can
zoom out so far that your tiles become little icons; in this mode, you can
group them or move them en masse.
¶Touch screen: Pinch two fingers on the screen.
¶Mouse: While pressing the Ctrl key, turn your
scroll wheel. Or point to the bottom right, and then click the Summary View
icon that appears. (To zoom out again, click any blank area.)
¶Keyboard: Press Ctrl+the minus key.
¶Search for files or settings. The new TileWorld
Search command requires that you specify what you’re looking for: an app, a
file and so on. But there are shortcuts for file searches and settings
searches.
¶Touch screen: Swipe in from the right border; tap
Search; tap Files or Settings.
¶Mouse: Point to the top right corner of the
screen; tap Search; tap Files or Settings.
¶Keyboard: Press the Windows key+F for files,
Windows key+Q for settings.
¶Search for apps. This one’s really best with the
keyboard: you can jump to an app on the Start screen, even if it’s several
horizontal scroll-pages away.
¶Touch screen: Swipe in from the right border; tap
Search.
¶Mouse: Point to the top right corner of the
screen; tap Search.
¶Keyboard: At the Start screen, just start typing.
¶External monitor/projector options. Do you want
your main screen mirrored on the external screen, or extended onto it? You
can open a handy panel that lists your options.
¶Touch screen: Swipe in from the right border; tap
Devices; tap Second Screen.
¶Mouse: Point to the top right corner of the
screen; tap Devices; tap Second Screen.
"Windows Pushes Into the Tablet Age New-Style Apps and Touch Interface
Modernize Old-School Operating System," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall
Street Journal, October 18, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443675404578060603341778848.html?mg=reno64-wsj
Microsoft MSFT -2.29% is giving Windows its most
radical overhaul since 1995 and even its most devoted users won't recognize
the venerable computer operating system in this new incarnation, called
Windows 8, when it appears Oct. 26.
The minute you turn it on, the difference is
apparent. Instead of the familiar desktop, you see a handsome, modern, slick
world of large, scrolling tiles and simpler, full-screen apps best used on a
touch screen and inspired by tablets and smartphones.
This is called the Start screen and it replaces the
Start Menu every Windows user knows. But it's not just a menu, it's a whole
computing environment that takes over the entire display, with its own
separate apps and controls. The old desktop and old-style apps are still
there. But in Windows 8, the desktop is like another app—you tap or click on
a Start screen icon or button to use it.
This is a bold move and in my view, the new
tile-based environment works very well and is a welcome step. It feels
natural, especially on a touch screen, and brings Windows into the tablet
era. It may even mark the beginning of a long transition in which the new
design gradually displaces the old one, though that will depend on how fast
Microsoft can attract new-style apps.
Windows will now consist of two very different user
experiences bound into a single package. The idea is it's a
one-size-fits-all operating system, which can run on everything from older,
mouse-driven PCs to touch-controlled tablets without compromise. Everything
from a touch-based weather app to mouse-driven Excel will run on it. That's
a big contrast to Apple's approach, which uses separate operating systems
for its iPad tablets and more standard Mac computers. Potential for
Confusion
By adopting the dual-environment strategy,
Microsoft risks confusing traditional PC users, who will be jumping back and
forth between two ways of doing things. Both the new and old environments
can work via either touch or a mouse and keyboard, but the former works best
with touch, the latter best with the mouse or track pad.
There are even two different versions of Internet
Explorer. And many functions are different. For instance, Start-screen apps
typically lack the standard menus, toolbars, resizing and closing buttons at
the top that older apps do.
The company is gambling that the confusion will be
brief and will be offset by the ability, via the old desktop, to run
traditional productivity apps like Microsoft Office, which can't be run on
the iPad or its Android brethren. Different Versions and Abilities
But wait, there's even more potential for
confusion. Windows 8 will come in two versions, one for standard Intel-based
PCs and one, called RT, for tablets that run on the same type of processor
that powers competing smartphones and tablets.
. . .
Microsoft deserves credit for giving Windows a new,
modern, face. And the company will surely please existing users by
maintaining the old one and the ability to run older apps. But the
combination will require re-learning the most familiar computing system on
the planet.
—Find all of Walt Mossberg's columns and videos at
walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at
mossberg@wsj.com.
Jensen Comment
Walt Mossberg is one of the world's most independent commentators on technology.
While being one of Steve Job's best personal friends in life, Walt has always
shown his independence when reviewing Apple, Microsoft, and other technology
products.
MOOCs from Blackboard and Instructure CMS Providers
"Course-Management Companies Challenge MOOC Providers," by Alisha Azevedo,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/course-management-companies-challenge-mooc-providers/40734?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Two software companies that sell course-management
systems, Blackboard and Instructure, have entered the race to provide free
online courses for the masses.
On Thursday both companies plan to announce
partnerships with universities that will use their software to teach massive
open online courses, or MOOC’s. The companies hope to pull in their own
college clients to compete with online-education players like Udacity and
Coursera.
Instructure has released a new platform called
Canvas Network, which allows colleges and universities that already use the
company’s learning-management system to offer free courses. A dozen
institutions have already agreed to deliver courses on the platform,
including Brown University and the University of Washington.
The courses, which will begin in January, are a
“response to the MOOC phenomenon that’s been going on,” said Josh Coates,
chief executive of Instructure. The courses—20 of them, for starters—will
cover a wide range of topics, including one on college algebra and another
on gender in comic books that will be co-taught by Stan Lee, who helped
create Spider-Man and other characters.
“EdX and Coursera and some of the other MOOC
platforms are quite exclusive,” Mr. Coates said. “They only allow Ivy League
schools or research institutions to participate. We see this as a
democratization of MOOC’s—we want to allow anybody to participate in online
learning, and we also want them to do it their way.”
Some universities using Canvas have expressed
interest in charging tuition for the online courses in the future or
offering course credit for them, Mr. Coates said. The company may also
expand the new Canvas Network into secondary education.
Though Blackboard’s CourseSites platform has been
available for more than a year to individual instructors interested in
putting their courses online free, the company planned to announce on
Thursday that three universities had decided to designate Blackboard as
their “default option” for MOOC’s.
Unlike Instructure, Blackboard allows any
university to offer MOOC’s on its platform, even if the institutions are not
Blackboard clients. Arizona State University, the State University of New
York’s Buffalo State College, and the University of Illinois at Springfield
chose Blackboard after considering other MOOC providers.
Instructors may be drawn toward teaching MOOC’s on
those platforms rather than Udacity or Coursera because they are already
familiar with the companies’ course-management software.
Because the Springfield campus has used Blackboard
for years, instructors will be able to teach MOOC’s more comfortably, said
Ray Schroeder, associate vice chancellor for online learning and director of
the Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service. “There are plenty of
challenges with MOOC’s, aside from just the technical challenges,” he said.
“The different languages, the different cultures, serving thousands of
students at a time—this platform allows us to focus our energies on those
things instead.”
But some universities may decide instead to
experiment to see which platform works best for them. The University of
Washington and Brown University already offer MOOC’s through Coursera.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on MITx, EdX, and MOOCs from prestigious universities
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
"The Case for Blending the Liberal Arts with Professional Training,"
by William H. Weitzer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 30,
2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-mash/case-blending-liberal-arts-professional-training
I have a narrative to tell. It will sound familiar
to those of you who know the history of American higher education and who
are concerned about the challenges we face today and in the near future. In
the first three entries of this blog, I will establish my premise that
blending the liberal arts with professional training is one of the key
strategic directions in which many institutions of higher education should
go. To get to this point, I need to begin with some of the current
challenges that we face…
Much has been written about what is wrong with
higher education. The litany is familiar to all. We have lost our world-wide
advantage. Students are not learning. Faculty are not teaching. We have
accommodated student demand in a way that has watered down the education we
provide. Our costs have increased at a rate far beyond the inflation rate.
Institutions spend too much money on dormitories and fitness centers.
Students are leaving with far too much debt. The increased economic “value”
of higher education is not being realized by our graduates. We have
abandoned true education and are providing training for the professions.
While each of these critiques has some validity, it
is also true that American higher education continues to be valued and
revered. Perhaps the more accurate assessment is that American higher
education has earned its reputation, but serious challenges lie ahead.
As if the problems confronting traditional higher
education were not enough, the economic downturn in the first decade of the
century presents a significant new challenge. Criticism about the price of
higher education was already on the rise. With the economic crisis that
began in 2008, students are even more unsure of their ability to pay for
college, are worried about the debt that they and their families are
accruing, and are questioning the value of a college degree.
It appears that the “value proposition” in the
minds of prospective students and their families has shifted. There was a
time when families believed in the value of a college degree and would save
and sacrifice to have their students earn a degree at the “best” college.
With more constrained resources, consumers of higher education are
understandably concerned about price. Many are no longer looking for the
“best” college for their students, but instead looking for the “best
bargain” for marketable skills. While no one can be certain about where
higher education is headed, it is not likely that student choices will
return to the “value proposition” that existed prior to 2008.
* * * * * * * * * * *
How can higher education adapt? Often, the critics
of higher education fail to offer sufficient corrective measures or new
solutions. I offer a more positive approach: to identify the components of
an institution’s liberal arts and professional training programs and to take
the strategic actions necessary to “mash up” the liberal arts and
professional training. My basic premise is that rather than presenting
students with a choice between the liberal arts and professional training,
students would benefit greatly from a blend of the two approaches.
A liberal arts degree might prepare graduates for
life, but there is too little focus on the first job out of college. A
professional education may do a good job preparing graduates for their first
job, but that training is not likely to give the flexibility to prepare them
for their second and third jobs. A program that combines these two
approaches prepares graduates for the first job, their second job, and
beyond. Students (and the parents of traditional age students) who are
concerned about beginning their careers (and paying off their loans) should
find this combination to be an attractive option. Employers should also
prefer students who arrive as career-ready and prepared for life, in other
words, with important professional skills but who are also prepared to
advance in and contribute more to their businesses, institutions and
communities.
* * * * * * * * * * *
My research and observations are not meant to
promote one type of institution over another. Rather, I have been
identifying and examining “markers” that help strengthen efforts by
institutions to blend the liberal arts and professional training, for
example, interdisciplinary first-year seminars, service-learning courses,
electronic portfolios, community service, and capstone courses. I have also
visited institutions that demonstrate “best practices” around the confluence
of the liberal arts and professional education and I will be sharing my
experiences in future blog entries.
If one visualizes a continuum of institutions from
“pure” liberal arts at one end and concentrated professional training at the
other, a graph of these “markers” and “best practices” would approximate a
“normal curve.” To put it simply, the extreme tails of this continuum will
have fewer opportunities to blend the liberal arts and professional
training. The greatest confluence of these two approaches will occur at
colleges and universities whose missions are about blending the liberal arts
and professional training. I contend that based on student and employer
demands today and in the future, all types of institutions will need to
continually examine how their missions and programs support students both in
obtaining their first jobs and preparing them for life.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I'm a strong believer that the difference between training and education
concerns the breadth and depth of humanities and science in a professional
curriculum such as engineering, computer science, accounting, finance,
marketing, management, nursing, etc. I'm also became disheartened when virtually
all North American universities followed Harvard's trend of replacing a
relatively fixed general education core with a smorgasbord of hundreds of
courses such that it's no longer clear what a "core" really means in general
education. Sometimes I think the Harvarde smorgasbord is intended to protect
faculty turf more than provide a genuine education core.
I don’t have any answers to the liberal-core curriculum dilemma. At Trinity
we once had a Quest program where all first year students took the same overview
course on history, religion, philosophy, etc. That did not meet evolutionary
success and gave way to categories of courses in things like “Western
Civilization” and a number of other categories for qualified general education
courses. That is pretty much the system still in place, but it has become more
and more like a Harvard smorgasbord.
The trouble with smorgasbord humanities is that there’s literally no
consistency between graduates in terms of what they learned about humanities.
Another problem is the turf wars that go on between humanities departments. If
you don’t have any majors (e.g., Southern Mississippi has something like three
economics majors) then departments fight for survival by attracting general
education course enrollments. The Economics Department at Southern Mississippi
is currently on the chopping block. Really!
A two-year MBA program works quite well for students who do not take business
courses in the first two years. But an MBA program does not work well for
non-accounting students wanting to become CPAs due to the many undergraduate
pre-requisites for students to enter masters of accounting programs. Similarly,
engineering graduate programs do not work well for students who did not major in
engineering as undergraduates.
As a rule professional schools of accounting, business, engineering, and
nursing rely upon the general education core plus an allowance of upper division
electives (possibly even minors) for the humanities and science education
components of a curriculum.
A noteworthy Accounting Education Change Commission funded experiment took
place at North Texas State University where students could choose either
traditional accounting courses or non-traditional accounting courses team-taught
by humanities and accounting instructors. My informal feed back is that students
overwhelmingly preferred traditional accounting courses. The moral of the story
may be that when it comes to the professional courses in the curriculum,
students want the courses to be entirely devoted to professional content.
Similarly, when it comes to humanities and science courses those same students
might prefer more narrow focus on humanities and science (this was not part of
the NTSU experiment) ---
http://aaahq.org/AECC/changegrant/cover.htm
From the Scout Report on October 26, 2012
Crowdspottr ---
http://www.crowdspottr.com/
Looking for an application to keep tabs on your
social activities and related matters? Crowdspottr may be worth a look, as
it allows visitors to use existing social networking sites to find out who
is doing what, where, and when. Visitors can download the application and
check out the online tutorial to get started with their explorations. This
program is compatible with all operating systems.
Remote Desktop Organizer 1.4.4 ---
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Remote-Utils/Remote-Desktop-Organizer.shtml
If you are looking for a way to clean up your
desktop remotely, you'll want to give this handy desktop organizer a try.
This application allows users to move their files around and perform
important tasks like creating and modifying existing folders and other
functional tweaks for your system cleanup. This particular version is
compatible with computers running Windows 2000 and up.
From the Scout Report on November 2, 2012
QuicklyChat ---
http://www.quicklychat.com/
Are you looking to have a quick chat with a
coworker or other party? QuicklyChat can help you do that, as it features
fully customizable smart status updates and other bells and whistles. The
video linkup emphasizes quicker and more efficient communication; it does so
by detecting if the other party is currently available or not by detecting
one’s current system activity. This application is compatible with all
operating systems.
Streaming Audio Recorder ---
http://www.recordstreamingaudio.org/
The Streaming Audio Recorder application allows
users to record any type of streaming audio via their computers' speakers or
microphone. It's a simple way to record audio from sites such as
Grooveshark,YouTube, BBC and others. The program is compatible with
computers running Windows 2000 and newer.
Even in a digitized world, the importance of place continues
A sense of place
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21565007-geography-matters-much-ever-despite-digital-revolution-says-patrick-lane
Place Matters ---
http://www.placematters.org/
Place Matters: Joint Center Health Policy Institute ---
http://www.jointcenter.org/hpi/pages/place-matters
Project for Public Spaces ---
http://www.pps.org/
Toward a Cultural Economic Geography of Creative Industries and Urban
Development ---
http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/readers/full-text/26-2.pdf
Silicon Valley History ---
http://www.netvalley.com/silicon_valley_history.html
From the Scout Report on November 9, 2012
Retranstwitter
---
http://retranstwitter.com/en
The Retranswitter application gives users the
ability to automatically retweet posts from your Twitter stream according to
a set of rules that create. Users can elect to have tweets retreated by
author, hashtag, or a combination of both. This version of Retranstwitter is
compatible with all operating systems.
Track My Life ---
http://track-my-life.ceseros.de/
Where does all the time go? It's a good question,
and Track My Life can help you learn more about how and where your time is
spent. The application runs in the background of a user's phone and tracks
how much time they spend in any given location. At the end of each day,
users can look at a full report to see a breakdown of the places they were
and how long they spent in each location. This version is compatible with
iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, communities are asking questions
about their levees
Levee Rebuilding Questioned After Sandy Breach
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/04/164193857/levee-rebuilding-questioned-after-sandy-breach
In Flooded New Jersey, No Oversight for Levees
http://www.wbur.org/npr/164101955/in-flooded-new-jersey-no-oversight-for-levees
Sandy's Power Dwarfed by Katrina's Gutting of the Gulf
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-05/sandys-power-dwarfed-by-katrina-s-gutting-of-the-gulf
State of New Jersey: Hurricane Sandy Information Center
http://www.state.nj.us/nj/home/features/spotlight/hurricane_sandy.shtml
New Orleans Since Katrina: Before and After
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/new-orleans-since-katrina_n_1834696.html
National Hurricane Center
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Wiley Teams Up With TED to Create Lecture Materials for Big-Idea Videos ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/wiley-teams-up-with-ted-to-create-lecture-materials-for-big-idea-videos?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Jensen Warning: Watch out for some TED
speakers who know the difference between causation and correlation but don't
reveal what they know in the videos.
Many of these videos are more suited to debate seminars than lecture courses.
YouTube Education
Channels ---
http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400
An Absolute Must Read for Educators
One of the most exciting things I took away from the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings in
San Francisco is a hard copy handout entitled "Expanding Your Classroom with
Video Technology and Social Media," by Mark Holtzblatt and Norbert Tschakert.
Mark later sent me a copy of this handout and permission to serve it up to you
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Video-Expanding_Your_Classroom_CTLA_2010.pdf
Experiment in Ultra Learning (some amazing stories) ---
Click Here
http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/10/26/mastering-linear-algebra-in-10-days-astounding-experiments-in-ultra-learning/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StudyHacks+%28Study+Hacks%29
MITx, EdX, and MOOCs
Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, tutorials, video, and course materials
from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Arts at the Core ---
http://advocacy.collegeboard.org/preparation-access/arts-core
Invent with Python (make your own computer games) ---
http://inventwithpython.com/
Computer Science for Dummies
Computer Science Unplugged ---
http://www.youtube.com/csunplugged
According to Hoyle: Advice to Teachers
JOE'S TOP TWELVE LIST
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/11/joes-top-ten-list.html
"EDUCAUSE WEEK," by Tracy Mitrano, Inside Higher Ed, November
10, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/law-policy-and-it/educause-week-0
In addition to short summaries of leading presenters, you may want to just note
what speakers were given the great honor of speaking at plenary sessions. You
can then do Google and other searches on these speakers.
For example, look up Clay Shirky ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Santa Fe Institute ---
http://www.santafe.edu/
Principles of Complexity ---
http://www.santafe.edu/research/videos/play/?id=36aa0138-7141-4770-9f97-708f2fa09ac3
Free Course: Introduction to Complexity ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/santa-fe-institute%E2%80%99s-launches-free-on-line-courses-first-course-will-be-an-introduction-to-complexity/
Frank Potter's Science Gems (over 14,000 science resources) ---
http://www.sciencegems.com/
12 Mobile Learning Science Applications for the iPod Touch ---
http://www.teachscienceandmath.com/tag/digital-science-applications/
TeacherLink: NASA Instructional Units and Lesson Plans ---
http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/tlnasa/units/index.html
Green Chemistry Teaching Resources ---
Click Here
http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_SUPERARTICLE&node_id=1444&use_sec=false&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=f757ebdd-69fa-4e3c-9d4a-0eb6bcda7234
BioEd Online: Lessons - Safety and Lab Techniques (from the Baylor University
School of Medicine) ---
http://www.bioedonline.org/lessons/safetylab.cfm
Biofrontiers Institute (University of Colorado) ---
http://biofrontiers.colorado.edu/
Renal System Reading and Lab Activities ---
http://www.apsarchive.org/collection.cfm?collectionID=2185#resources
National Institutes of Health: Office of Science Education ---
http://science.education.nih.gov/home2.nsf/feature/index.htm
Shortest Paths, Soap Films, and Minimal Surfaces ---
http://www.maa.org/news/2012ch-dorff.html
Introduction to Electric Power Systems
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-061-introduction-to-electric-power-systems-spring-2011/
Transforming Cities With Transit ---
http://issuu.com/wburban/docs/transforming_cities_conf_edition?mode=window&viewMode=doublePage
K-Gray Engineering Pathway Digital Library: Higher Education Community
(encouraging students to study engineering) ---
http://engineeringpathway.org/engpath/ep/hEd/index.jsp
International Architecture Database ---
http://eng.archinform.net/index.htm
Dream, Design, Build: The UW Architecture Student Drawing Collection,
1914-1947 ---
http://content.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/dream-design-build/
The History of Western Architecture in 39 Free Video Lectures ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/the_history_of_western_architecture_in_39_free_lectures_.html
Buffalo Architecture Foundation Building Stories Collection ---
http://ubdigit.buffalo.edu/cdm/search/collection/LIB-APL001
The History of Western Architecture in 39 Free Video Lectures ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/the_history_of_western_architecture_in_39_free_lectures_.html
The Architecture Centre: Teaching Resources ---
http://www.architecturecentre.co.uk/education-teaching-resources
Building Inside/Studio Gang (Chicago Architecture) ---
http://extras.artic.edu/studiogang
Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, 1925-1970 (architecture) ---
http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz0008b9tw
Try Engineering ---
http://www.tryengineering.org
Illustrated Classics of Engineering from the William Barclay Parsons
Collection and Others ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=industry&col_id=168
American Society for Engineering Education: Blogs & Newsletters ---
http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/blogs-and-newsletters
Computer Science for Dummies
Computer Science Unplugged ---
http://www.youtube.com/csunplugged
MIT OpenCourseWare: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00sc-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-spring-2011
Computer Science Teachers Association ---
http://csta.acm.org/Resources/sub/HighlightedResources.html
Computational
Science Education Reference Desk ---
http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/
From the Scout Report on November 9, 2012
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, communities are asking questions
about their levees
Levee Rebuilding Questioned After Sandy Breach
http://www.npr.org/2012/11/04/164193857/levee-rebuilding-questioned-after-sandy-breach
In Flooded New Jersey, No Oversight for Levees
http://www.wbur.org/npr/164101955/in-flooded-new-jersey-no-oversight-for-levees
Sandy's Power Dwarfed by Katrina's Gutting of the Gulf
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-05/sandys-power-dwarfed-by-katrina-s-gutting-of-the-gulf
State of New Jersey: Hurricane Sandy Information Center
http://www.state.nj.us/nj/home/features/spotlight/hurricane_sandy.shtml
New Orleans Since Katrina: Before and After
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/new-orleans-since-katrina_n_1834696.html
National Hurricane Center
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
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
Arts of Citizenship ---
http://artsofcitizenship.umich.edu/
Better Data, Better Health ---
http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/newsroom/features-and-articles/better-data-better-health.html
Healthfinder.gov ---
http://www.healthfinder.gov/
Howard Hughes Medical Institute: 2011 Holiday Lectures
[Flash Player] ---
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/lectures
Internet Archive: TV News ---
http://archive.org/details/tv
People, Places and Planning in Boston ---
http://planningboston.org/
Boston's Latino Community History ---
http://archives.neu.edu/latinohistory
Latino Settlement in the New Century ---
http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/96.pdf
American Latino Heritage ---
http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/American_Latino_Heritage/
CyberEconomics (multimedia textbook) ---
http://ingrimayne.com/econ/
Transforming Cities With Transit ---
http://issuu.com/wburban/docs/transforming_cities_conf_edition?mode=window&viewMode=doublePage
Imagine the Unimaginable: Ending Genocide in the 21st Century ---
http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/endgenocide/
Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation ---
http://igcc.ucsd.edu/
Preventing Genocide [Flash Player]
http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/
Children and War ---
http://www.childrenandwar.org/
Pacifica Radio Archives (American Literature and Politics) ---
http://archive.org/details/pacifica_radio_archives
Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs ---
http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
Computer Science for Dummies
Computer Science Unplugged ---
http://www.youtube.com/csunplugged
Computer Science Teachers Association ---
http://csta.acm.org/Resources/sub/HighlightedResources.html
MIT OpenCourseWare: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00sc-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-spring-2011
Computational
Science Education Reference Desk ---
http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/
12 Mobile Learning Science Applications for the iPod Touch ---
http://www.teachscienceandmath.com/tag/digital-science-applications/
"Harvard Grad Starts Math Museum Helped by Google, Hedge Funder," by
Patrick Cole, Bloomberg Business Week, November 1, 2011 --- http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-01/harvard-grad-starts-math-museum-helped-by-google-hedge-funder.html
Transition Mathematics Project (between high school and college) ---
http://www.transitionmathproject.org/
Video on the Beauty of Mathematics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=h60r2HPsiuM&feature=youtube_gdata_player
MathGrapher ---
http://www.mathgrapher.com/
Wolfram Alpha (one of my all-time favorite
sites) ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Some Things You Might Want to Know About the Wolfram Alpha (WA) Search
Engine: The Good and The Evil
as Applied to Learning Curves (Cumulative Average vs. Incremental Unit)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm
Shortest Paths, Soap Films, and Minimal Surfaces ---
http://www.maa.org/news/2012ch-dorff.html
History of Computing
Internet Archive: Computers & Technology ---
http://archive.org/details/computersandtechvideos
The History of Computing ---
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/
Silicon Valley History ---
http://www.netvalley.com/silicon_valley_history.html
Steve Jobs at the Smithsonian ---
http://www.si.edu/Exhibitions/stevejobs
American University Computer History Museum ---
http://www.computinghistorymuseum.org/
The Apple (Computer) Museum ---
http://www.theapplemuseum.com/
A History of Microsoft Windows (slide show from Wired News)
---
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/pcs/multimedia/2007/01/wiredphotos31
Oldcomputers.com ---
http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
Aesthetics + Computation Group: MIT Media Laboratory ---
http://acg.media.mit.edu/projects/
National Museum of African Art: Webcasts ---
http://africa.si.edu/webcast.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
The History of Western Architecture in 39 Free Video Lectures ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/the_history_of_western_architecture_in_39_free_lectures_.html
University of San Francisco: Gleeson Library Digital Collections (Literature
History) ---
http://digitalcollections.usfca.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p264101coll8
"The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings,
November 7, 2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/07/the-big-new-yorker-book-of-dogs/
"Our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows"
For Sylvia Plath’s 80th Birthday, Hear Her Read ‘A Birthday Present’ ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/for_sylvia_plaths_80th_birthday_hear_her_read_a_birthday_present.html
Internet Archive: TV News ---
http://archive.org/details/tv
Caught Mapping: A Cinematic Ride Through the Nitty Gritty World of Vintage
Cartography ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/icaught_mappingia_cinematic_ride_through_the_nitty_gritty_world_of_vintage_cartography.html
Illustrated Classics of Engineering from the William Barclay Parsons
Collection and Others ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=industry&col_id=168
Women's World in Qajar Iran (1796-1926) ---
http://www.qajarwomen.org/
International Museum of Women ---
http://imow.org
History News Network ---
http://hnn.us/
Houston Area Digital Archives ---
http://digital.houstonlibrary.org/cdm/
Historic Houston Photographs ---
http://digital.lib.uh.edu/cdm4/about_collection.php?CISOROOT=/p15195coll2
The Douglas Oliver Collection (Hawaii People) ---
http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/oliver/index.php?c=1
Boston's Latino Community History ---
http://archives.neu.edu/latinohistory
American Latino Heritage ---
http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/American_Latino_Heritage/
Latino Settlement in the New Century ---
http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/96.pdf
Lula Belle and Scotty Wiseman Home Movies ---
http://mirc.sc.edu/fedora/repository/usc-test%3A170
The Art of African Exploration ---
http://www.sil.si.edu/Exhibitions/ArtofAfricanExploration/
National Museum of African Art: Webcasts ---
http://af
Lalla Essaydi Revisions: Introduction (African Art) ---
http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/revisions/index.h
Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art
http://www.nmafa.si.edu/exhibits/grassroots/index.html
Virginia Emigrants to Liberia ---
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia/index.php?page=Virginia Emigrants
To Liberia
Benin-Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from
Nigeria (video) ---
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/benin/index
The Oswegonian (student newspaper of SUNY at Oswego)
http://news2.nnyln.net/oswegonian/search.html
Florida Documents Collection (from Miami University) ---
http://merrick.library.miami.edu/specialCollections/asm0567/
University of Miami Libraries Digital Collections:
University of Miami Archives (over 500,000 photographs) ---
http://merrick.library.miami.edu/digitalprojects/photographs.php
Miami Metropolitan Archive ---
http://miami.fiu.edu/index.htm
Boston Public Library: Sound Archives ---
http://soundarchives.bpl.org/
Pacifica Radio Archives (American Literature and Politics) ---
http://archive.org/details/pacifica_radio_archives
Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs ---
http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu
Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London ---
http://mam.org/rembrandt-van-dyck-gainsborough/
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam ---
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/index.jsp
The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix
Its Art ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/rijksmuseum_puts_125000_masterpieces_online.html
Crace Collection of Maps of London ---
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/crace/index.html
The UT Theatre Playbills ---
http://diglib.lib.utk.edu/playbills/main.php
Personal Computer History
"Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer --- The PC's
back story involves a little-known Texas connection," by Lamont Wood,
Computer World, August 8, 2008 ---
Click Here
Steve Jobs at the Smithsonian ---
http://www.si.edu/Exhibitions/stevejobsputational Science Education Reference Desk ---
http://www.shodor.org/refdesk/
Timeline of Computing History ---
http://www.computer.org/computer/timeline/
Making the Macintosh ---
http://library.stanford.edu/mac/index.html
History of Computing
Internet Archive: Computers & Technology ---
http://archive.org/details/computersandtechvideos
"A History of Reading," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, October 26,
2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/26/a-history-of-reading/
History of Computing
Internet Archive: Computers & Technology ---
http://archive.org/details/computersandtechvideos
The History of Computing ---
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/
Silicon Valley History ---
http://www.netvalley.com/silicon_valley_history.html
Steve Jobs at the Smithsonian ---
http://www.si.edu/Exhibitions/stevejobs
American University Computer History Museum ---
http://www.computinghistorymuseum.org/
The Apple (Computer) Museum ---
http://www.theapplemuseum.com/
A History of Microsoft Windows (slide show from Wired News)
---
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/pcs/multimedia/2007/01/wiredphotos31
Oldcomputers.com ---
http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
Aesthetics + Computation Group: MIT Media Laboratory ---
http://acg.media.mit.edu/projects/
FolkStreams Presents a Big Film Archive on American Folk Art and Music ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/folkstreams.html
From the Scout Report on October 26, 2012
50 years after the Sino-Indian war, a reconsideration of the border
between India and China
India and China: Unsettled for a long time yet
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21564861-fifty-years-after-nasty-high-altitude-war-border-dispute-remains-unresolved
The Sino-Indian War: 50 Years Later, Will India and China Clash Again?
http://world.time.com/2012/10/21/the-sino-indian-war-50-years-later-will-india-and-china-clash-again/
China lauds Ratan Tat's 'positive' role in Sino-India ties
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/china-lauds-ratan-tata-positive-role-in-sino-india-ties/1/225587.html
Remembering the India-China border war
http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2012/10/22/Remembering-the-India-China-border-war.aspx
India's remote northeast: the road to Tawang
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/10/indias-remote-north-east
China and India, 2025
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1009.html
Existentialism ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
Existentialism is the philosophical and cultural
movement which holds that the starting point of philosophical thinking must
be the experiences of the individual. Moral and scientific thinking together
do not suffice to understand human existence, so a further set of
categories, governed by "authenticity", is necessary to understand human
existence. ("Authenticity", in the context of existentialism, is being true
to one's own personality, spirit, or character.)
Existentialism began in the mid-19th century as a
reaction against the then-dominant systematic philosophies, such as those
developed by Hegel and Kant. Søren Kierkegaard, generally considered to be
the first existentialist philosopher, posited that it is the individual who
is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and for living life
passionately and sincerely ("authentically"). Existentialism became popular
in the years following World War II and influenced a range of disciplines
besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and
psychology.
Existentialists generally regard traditional
systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too
abstract and remote from concrete human experience. Scholars generally
consider the views of existentialist philosophers to be profoundly different
from one another relative to those of other philosophies. Criticisms of
existentialist philosophers include the assertions that they confuse their
use of terminology and contradict themselves
Continued in article
Find more blog posts full of comic existential angst
over at The New Yorker, and then, if you want to get serious and bone up on
Jean-Paul
Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, check out these fine resources:
Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche: Three Philosophers in Three Hours
Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)
55 Free Philosophy Courses from Great Universities
Sartre’s famous lecture
Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) that otherwise appears in our collection
of Free eBooks.
Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sartre Discovered is a post from:
Open Culture.
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Brubeck Oral History Project
http://www.pacific.edu/Library/Find/Holt-Atherton-Special-Collections/Digital-Collections/Brubeck-Oral-History-Project.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
FolkStreams Presents a Big Film Archive on American Folk Art and Music ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/folkstreams.html
Watch the Great Russian Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff in Home Movies ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/sergei_rachmaninoff_home_movies_.html
It's Showtime! Sheet Music from Stage and Screen
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/songsinshows/songsinshows-home.html
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
"Joy Williams on Why Writers Write," by Maria
Popova, Brain Pickings, November 1, 2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/01/joy-williams-on-why-writers-write/
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
October 30, 2012
October 31, 2012
November 1, 2012
November 2-5 WebMD did not update its new links. Perhaps it was Sandy's
fault.
November 6, 2012
November 7, 2012
November 8, 2012
November 9, 2012
November 10, 2012
November 12, 2012
November 13, 2012
November 14, 2012
November 15, 2012
Stem Cells Help Md. Boy With Cerebral Palsy To Walk ---
http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2012/11/08/stem-cells-help-md-boy-with-cerebral-palsy-walk/
Question
What do your car battery and your heart pacemaker have in common?
Answer
An engine powered battery recharger (generator).
"A Heartbeat-Powered Pacemaker," by David Zax, MIT's Technology Review,
November 8, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/506956/a-heartbeat-powered-pacemaker/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121108
New study reveals that every single junk food meal damages your arteries ---
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-reveals-junk-food-meal-arteries.html
Better Data, Better Health ---
http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/newsroom/features-and-articles/better-data-better-health.html
Healthfinder.gov ---
http://www.healthfinder.gov/
Howard Hughes Medical Institute: 2011 Holiday Lectures
[Flash Player] ---
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/lectures
The Rain
It was a busy
Morning,
about 8:30, when an elderly
Gentleman
in his 80's arrived to have
Stitches
removed from his thumb.
He said he was in a hurry as he had an
Appointment
at 9:00 am.
I took his vital
Signs
and had him take a seat,
Knowing
it would be over an hour
Before
someone
Would
to able to see him.
I saw him looking at his watch and
Decided,
since I
Was
not busy with another patient,
I would evaluate his wound.
On exam, it was
Well
healed, so I talked to one of the
Doctors,
got the needed supplies to
Remove
his sutures and redress his wound.
While taking care of
His
wound, I asked him if he
Had
another doctor's appointment
This
morning, as
He
was in such a hurry.
The gentleman told me no, that he
Needed
to go to
The
nursing home to eat breakfast
With
his wife. I enquired as to her
Health.
He told me
that she
had been there
For
a while and that she
Was
a victim of Alzheimer's Disease.
As we
Talked,
I asked if she would be
Upset
if he was a bit late.
He
Replied
that she no longer knew
Who
he was, that she had not
Recognized
him in
Five
years now
I was surprised, and asked him,
'And you still go every
Morning,
even though she
Doesn't
know who you are?'
He smiled as
he
Patted
my hand and said,
'She doesn't
Know
me, but I still know who she is.'
I had to hold back
Tears
as he left, I had goose bumps
On
my arm, and thought,
'That is
The
kind of love I want in my life.'
True love is
Neither
physical, nor romantic.
True love is an
Acceptance
of all that is,
Has
been, will be, and will not
Be.
With all the jokes
And
fun that are in e-mails,
Sometimes
there is one that comes
Along
that has an
Important
message..
This one I thought I could share with you.
The
Happiest
people don't necessarily
Have
the best of everything;
They
just make
The
best of everything they have.
I hope you share this with someone you
Care
about. I just did.
"The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings,
November 7, 2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/07/the-big-new-yorker-book-of-dogs/
Question
Do you ignore those safety briefings between when you leave the gate and
before the airliner's wheels leave the ground?
Answer
Maybe, but not on Air New Zealand.
I don't know how the airline managed to get this sampling of new U.S. members of
Congress to cooperate for this video.
Russell Brand and Tracey Ullman Sing the Wonders of “Asstrology” in Eric
Idle’s What About Dick? ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/russell_brand_and_tracey_ullman_sing_the_wonders_of_asstrology_in_eric_idles_iwhat_about_dicki.html
Forwarded by Paula
The Arrogance of Authority
A DEA officer stopped at a ranch in Texas, and talked with an old rancher. He
told the rancher, "I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown drugs."
The rancher said, "Okay, but don't go in that field over there.....", as he
pointed out the location.
The DEA officer verbally exploded, saying, “Mister, I have the authority of
the Federal Government with me!"
Reaching into his rear pants pocket, he removed his badge and proudly
displayed it to the rancher.
"See this badge?! This badge means I am allowed to go wherever I wish.... On
any land!! No questions asked or answers given!! Have I made myself clear? Do
you understand?!!"
The old rancher nodded politely, apologized, and went about his chores.
A short time later, the old rancher heard loud screams, looked up, and saw
the DEA officer running for his life, being chased by the rancher's big Santa
Gertrudis bull.
With every step the bull was gaining ground on the officer, and it seemed
likely that he'd sure enough get gored before he reached safety. The officer was
clearly terrified.
The rancher threw down his tools, ran to the fence and yelled at the top of
his lungs.....
(I just love this part....)
"Your badge! Show him your BADGE!!"
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
The Cult of Statistical Significance:
How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
How Accountics Scientists Should Change:
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review
I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accounting and Taxation News Sites ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for
free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM
(Educators)
http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.
Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for
accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting
education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial
accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing,
doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics)
research, publication, replication, and validity testing.
|
CPAS-L
(Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ (Closed
Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo (Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB
and the International Accounting
Standards Board on this financial
reporting blog from Financial Executives
International. The site, updated daily,
compiles regulatory news, rulings and
statements, comment letters on
standards, and hot topics from the Web’s
largest business and accounting
publications and organizations. Look for
continuing coverage of SOX requirements,
fair value reporting and the Alternative
Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such
as the subprime mortgage crisis,
international convergence, and rules for
tax return preparers. |
|
|
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker
[lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as
well as a practicing CPA)
I found another listserve
that is exceptional -
CalCPA maintains
http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/
and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.
There are several highly
capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and
the answers are often in depth.
Scott
Scott forwarded the following message from Jim
Counts
Yes you may mention info on
your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any
CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is
possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not
have access to the files and other items posted.
Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in
top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and
in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I
will get the request to join.
Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage
people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then
via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in
your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the
inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.
We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in
California.... ]
Please encourage your members
to join our listserve.
If any questions let me know.
Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk
|
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's
Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
All
my online pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu