Tidbits on December 21, 2012
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Set 2 of My All Time Favorite
Photographs
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Favorites/Set02/FavoritesSet02.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
Tidbits on December 21, 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
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ---
http://plato.stanford.edu/
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
17 Animations of Classic Literary Works: From Plato and
Shakespeare, to Kafka, Hemingway and Gaiman ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/17_animations_of_classic_literary_works.html
Ohio State Trooper's Christmas ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxjZB5S_g7s&feature=youtu.be
Norway's, Atlantic Ocean Road ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/4T4vc1QqiPM
BBC Commercial (What a Wonderful World) ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/auSo1MyWf8g?rel=0
Crawl Inside a Cave to Tag a Hibernating Black Bear ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vJRDpTUIrJI&vq=medium
Goats at Christmas Time ---
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/b4_EdJ-XkUA?rel=0
Sweet Mama dog interacting with a Beautiful Downs Syndrome
Child.---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA8VJh0UJtg&sns=fb
Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on
Freud (1958) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/jean-paul_sartre_writes_a_script_for_john_hustons_film_on_freud_1958.html
What Makes Us Tick? Free Stanford Biology Course by Robert
Sapolsky Offers Answers ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/what_makes_us_tick_free_stanford_biology_course_by_robert_sapolsky_offers_answers.html
National Geographic Gives Us Intimate Moments with a Leopard
Seal ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/national_geographic_gives_us_intimate_moments_with_leopard_seal.html
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Beatboxing Bach’s Goldberg Variations ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/beatboxing_bachs_goldberg_variations.html
Andre Rieu On The Allure Of The Waltz ---
http://www.npr.org/2012/12/15/167294665/andre-rieu-on-the-allure-of-the-waltz
Gustavo Dudamel Leads The Simon Bolivar Symphony
At Carnegie Hall ---
http://www.npr.org/event/music/166188244/gustavo-dudamel-leads-the-simon-bolivar-symphony-at-carnegie-hall
Make Me Happy in this World ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=oXvJ8UquYoo&vq=large
With a bit of jitterbug if you watch long enough. Makes me wish I could have
danced like that even if I was young.
My Favorite Boogie Woogie
For Boogie Woogie Piano Dancers (GREAT!) ---
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=26579077
More free Boogie Woogie by Sylvan Zingg (on piano, Hit the
Play All Songs Button) ---
http://cdbaby.com/cd/zinggtrio
Other Boogie Woogie Sites (including free lesson sites) ---
http://www.boogiewoogiepiano.net/piano-jukebox/other-web-sites/other-websites.html
More free Boogie Woogie by Sylvan Zingg (on piano) ---
http://cdbaby.com/cd/zinggtrio While working on the computer, Bob Jensen
mostly listens to (free and without commercials) ---
http://www.slacker.com/
Bring Back the 50s (Carolyn) ---
http://carolynspreciousmemories.com/50s/sitemap.html
Kate Smith sings God Bless America ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?feature=player_embedded&v=TnQDW-NMaRs
Amazing Grace (10-year old Brazilian boy's
rendition) ---
http://www.youtube.com/user/strongtower27
Merry Christmas Comedy Video ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAckfn8yiAQ
Great Chinese State Circus (Swan Lake) ---
www.nzwide.com/swanlake.htm
The Best Illustrated Children’s Books and
Picturebooks of 2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/07/best-childrens-books-2012
Miles Davis and His ‘Second Great Quintet,’
Filmed Live in Europe, 1967 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/miles_davis_and_his_second_great_quintet_filmed_live_in_europe_1967.html
BBC Commercial (What a Wonderful World) ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/auSo1MyWf8g?rel=0
10 Great Performances From 10 Legendary Jazz
Artists: Django, Miles, Monk, Coltrane & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/10_great_performances_from_10_legendary_jazz_artists.html
Joni Mitchell: Singer, Songwriter, Artist,
Smoking Grandma ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/joni_mitchell_singer_songwriter_artist_smoking_grandma.html
Enthralled By Jazz, Joni Mitchell Sets New
Moods ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11460541
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
In 1942, Disney released “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” an
anti-Nazi propaganda movie that bolstered support for the war, and eventually
won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Then, a year later, came The
Spirit of ’43, which features Donald Duck helping Americans to understand why
they need to pay their taxes. Other wartime Disney shorts include Donald Gets
Drafted (1942), The Old Army Game (1943), and Commando Duck (1944) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/donald_ducks_bad_nazi_dream_and_others_disney_propaganda_cartoons.html
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 (with commercials)
---
http://www.slacker.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on nearly all types of free
music selections online ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm
Photographs and Art
From the Museum of Science and Industry
Christmas Trees from Around the World ---
http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/christmas-around-the-world/
National Geographic Best Pictures of 2012 ---
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/best-news-pictures-2012-most-popular/
Also see the Photography page at
http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/?source=NavPhoHome
The Wonder, Thrill & Meaning of Seeing Earth from
Space. Astronauts Reflect on The Big Blue Marble ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/the_wonder_thrill_meaning_of_seeing_earth_from_space_astronauts_reflect_on_the_big_blue_marble.html
Norway's, Atlantic Ocean Road ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/4T4vc1QqiPM
World War I Photographic History in a French
Village
Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt ---
http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/remember-me/
World War One ( World War I ) Color Photos ---
http://www.worldwaronecolorphotos.com/
BBC Commercial (What a Wonderful World) ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/auSo1MyWf8g?rel=0
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
The True Story of Rudolph
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
by Robert L. May and Denver Gillen
ISBN-10: 1557091390
ISBN-13: 978-1557091390
In 1939 Robert L. May, a copywriter
working at Chicago's Montgomery Ward & Co., wrote a holiday story at the
request of his employer. Almost two and a half million copies of the little
tale about a reindeer with a shiny red nose were given away to all the
children who visited Montgomery Ward stores that year. The rest is history.
Over seventy years later, the beloved classic is once again available in a
hardcover faithful facsimile of the 1939 Rudolph, with original text and
original Denver Gillen illustrations.
17 Animations of Classic Literary Works: From Plato and
Shakespeare, to Kafka, Hemingway and Gaiman ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/17_animations_of_classic_literary_works.html
The Best History Books of 2012 (not free) ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/10/best-history-books-2012/
A Crash Course in English Literature: A New Video Series by
Best-Selling Author John Green ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/a_crash_course_in_english_literature.html
Emily Dickenson ---
http://www.emilydickinson.org/
Watch an Animated Film of Emily Dickinson’s Poem ‘I
Started Early–Took My Dog’ ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/animated_film_of_emily_dickinsons_poem_i_started_early--took_my_dog.html
Bill Murray Reads Poetry at Construction Site ---
http://www.openculture.com/2010/05/bill_murray_reads_poetry_at_construction_site.html
The Guardian Books Podcast ---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/books
The Enduring Mystery of Dickens's 'Dear Girl' ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Enduring-Mystery-of/136267/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Told in a
Beautifully Animated Film by Piotr Dumala ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/watch_pbs_iamerican_mastersi_documentaries_including_scorseses_homage_to_kazan_free_online.html
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Now Free on the Kindle ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/the_complete_sherlock_holmes_now_free_on_the_kindle.html
THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES (includes drawings) ---
http://www.bakerstreet221b.de/canon/
The Chronicles of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ---
http://www.siracd.com/work_bell.shtml
Mystery Net ---
http://www.mysterynet.com/
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: His Life, All
His Works and More ---
http://sirconandoyle.com/index.php
A Study In Scarlet by Arthur
Conan Doyle (1859-1930) ---
Click Here
The Adventure Of The
Sussex Vampire by Arthur Conan Doyle ---
Click Here
The Adventures of
Gerard by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) ---
Click Here
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 December 21, 2012
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2012/TidbitsQuotations122112.htm
U.S. National Debt Clock ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Also see
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Peter G.
Peterson Website on Deficit/Debt Solutions ---
http://www.pgpf.org/
Bob Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
"Top 10 Myths About Mass Shootings," by James Alan Fox, Chronicle
of Higher Education, December 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2012/12/18/top-10-myths-about-mass-shootings/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Even before the death toll in last Friday’s school
massacre in Newtown, Conn., was determined, politicians, pundits, and
professors of varied disciplines were all over the news, pushing their
proposals for change. Some talked about the role of guns, others about
mental-health services, and still more about the need for better security in
schools and other public places. Whatever their agenda and the passion
behind it, those advocates made certain explicit or implied assumptions
about patterns in mass murder and the profile of the assailants.
Unfortunately, those assumptions do not always align with the facts.
Myth: Mass shootings are on the
rise.
Reality: Over the past three decades, there has been an
average of 20 mass shootings a year in the United States, each with at least
four victims killed by gunfire. Occasionally, and mostly by sheer
coincidence, several episodes have been clustered closely in time. Over all,
however, there has not been an upward trajectory. To the contrary, the real
growth has been in the style and pervasiveness of news-media coverage,
thanks in large part to technological advances in reporting.
Myth: Mass murderers snap and kill
indiscriminately.
Reality: Mass murderers typically plan their assaults for
days, weeks, or months. They are deliberate in preparing their missions and
determined to follow through, no matter what impediments are placed in their
path.
Myth: Enhanced background checks
will keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of these madmen.
Reality: Most mass murderers do not have criminal records
or a history of psychiatric hospitalization. They would not be disqualified
from purchasing their weapons legally. Certainly, people cannot be denied
their Second Amendment rights just because they look strange or act in an
odd manner. Besides, mass killers could always find an alternative way of
securing the needed weaponry, even if they had to steal from family members
or friends.
Myth: Restoring the federal ban on
assault weapons will prevent these horrible crimes.
Reality: The overwhelming majority of mass murderers use
firearms that would not be restricted by an assault-weapons ban. In fact,
semiautomatic handguns are far more prevalent in mass shootings. Of course,
limiting the size of ammunition clips would at least force a gunman to pause
to reload or switch weapons.
Myth: Greater attention and
response to the telltale warning signs will allow us to identify would-be
mass killers before they act.
Reality: While there are some common features in the
profile of a mass murderer (depression, resentment, social isolation,
tendency to blame others for their misfortunes, fascination with violence,
and interest in weaponry), those characteristics are all fairly prevalent in
the general population. Any attempt to predict would produce many false
positives. Actually, the telltale warning signs come into clear focus only
after the deadly deed.
Myth: Widening the availability of
mental-health services and reducing the stigma associated with mental
illness will allow unstable individuals to get the treatment they need.
Reality: With their tendency to externalize blame and see
themselves as victims of mistreatment, mass murderers perceive the problem
to be in others, not themselves. They would generally resist attempts to
encourage them to seek help. And, besides, our constant references to mass
murderers as “wackos” or “sickos” don’t do much to destigmatize the mentally
ill.
Myth: Increasing security in
schools and other places will deter mass murder.
Reality: Most security measures will serve only as a minor
inconvenience for those who are dead set on mass murder. If anything,
excessive security and a fortress-like environment serve as a constant
reminder of danger and vulnerability.
Myth: Students need to be prepared
for the worst by participating in lockdown drills.
Reality: Lockdown drills can be very traumatizing,
especially for young children. Also, it is questionable whether they would
recall those lessons amid the hysteria associated with an actual shooting.
The faculty and staff need to be adequately trained, and the kids just
advised to listen to instructions. Schools should take the same low-key
approach to the unlikely event of a shooting as the airlines do to the
unlikely event of a crash. Passengers aren’t drilled in evacuation
procedures but can assume the crew is sufficiently trained.
Myth: Expanding “right to carry”
provisions will deter mass killers or at least stop them in their tracks and
reduce the body counts.
Reality: Mass killers are often described by surviving
witnesses as being relaxed and calm during their rampages, owing to their
level of planning. In contrast, the rest of us are taken by surprise and
respond frantically. A sudden and wild shootout involving the assailant and
citizens armed with concealed weapons would potentially catch countless
innocent victims in the crossfire.
Myth: We just need to enforce
existing gun laws as well as increase the threat of the death penalty.
Reality: Mass killers typically expect to die, usually by
their own hand or else by first responders. Nothing in the way of
prosecution or punishment would divert them from their missions. They are
ready to leave their miserable existence, but want some payback first.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
As I walked my treadmill this morning I watched a friend of the Lanza family
surmise that Adam snapped when he learned that his mother was leaning toward
having him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
"Mother may have wanted Adam Lanza committed," by Teresa Priolo,
myfoxny, December 19, 2012 ---
http://www.myfoxny.com/story/20377536/report-lanzas-mother-may-have-wanted-to-send-him-away
As the days drag on details are emerging about the
life Adam Lanza led prior to his murderous spree at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Conn. While some may say "forget Adam, these details
can't bring his 27 victims back," but maybe they will help all of us
understand how to prevent something this horrific from happening again.
What made Lanza unhinge and mercilessly slaughter
20 innocent children and six adults? The answer may lie in his past, in the
relationship he had with his mother.
FoxNews.com reports exclusively that Adam
knew that his mother, Nancy Lanza, was planning to have him committed
to a psychiatric facility.
Adam, reportedly diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome
and suffering from mental health issues, lived with his single mother, who
was his primary caregiver.
A neighbor described as a family friend told Fox
that Adam knew Nancy was feeling overwhelmed and feared she could no longer
care for him so she began the process of petitioning the court for
conservatorship. Previous reports have suggested Nancy considered moving
with her son to Washington State so that he could attend a special school
that could address his issues.
She had the sole right to make these decisions as
part of her divorce agreement with Peter Lanza.
They both were only required to consult each other
on decisions related to Adam's care, but Nancy had final say.
Divorce paperwork suggests the Lanzas were required
to complete a parenting education class, which the decree shows she did.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I have a loaded pistol and shotgun in the house that have never been fired. I
don't like guns and would vote for banning sales of assault rifles and high
capacity shell magazines. I do support the right to carry, because I think this
strikes fear in many would-be rapists, muggers, robbers, kidnappers, car jackers,
and terrorists. It won't, however, be me doing the carrying.
In the wake of this tragedy, the new ploy by potentially violent young people
being medicated and treated as mental health outpatients might be threatening
terrorism if care givers don't give them exactly what they want in terms of
video games, sex, porn, and spending money. Could we possibly incarcerate them
even though only one in a million will actually carry out acts of terrorism on
innocent children? What do you do when neither Theory X nor Theory Y is working
on a troubled kid?
When it comes to allocating scarce resources, I think priority should be given
to very common crimes (e.g., child abuse, spousal abuse, sexual assault)
relative to very rare crimes except when those rare crimes might kill thousands
in a single incident.
"22 Stats That Prove That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With Young
Men In America," by Michael, The Economic Collapse Blog, December
17th, 2012 ---
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/22-stats-that-prove-that-there-is-something-seriously-wrong-with-young-men-in-america
. . .
So why is all of this happening?
Well, there are a whole host of reasons. But
certainly parents and our education system have to bear much of the blame.
In the old days, young men were taught what it means to "be a man", and
morality was taught to young men both by their parents and in the schools.
But today, most young men have very little understanding of what "manhood"
is, and our society has taught them that morality doesn't really matter.
Instead, television and movies constantly portray young men as sex-obsessed
slackers that just want to party all the time, so that is what many of our
young men have become.
How much better off would our society be if we had
trained this generation of young men to love, honor, protect and take care
of others?
How much better off would our society be if we had
nurtured the manhood of our young men instead of teaching them to be ashamed
of it?
How much better off would our society be if we had
disciplined our young men and taught them morality when they were getting
off track instead of just letting them do whatever they wanted?
The following are 22 stats that prove that there is
something seriously wrong with young men in America today...
#1 Males account for approximately
70 percent of all Ds and Fs in U.S. public schools.
#2 About two-thirds of all students in "special
education programs"
are boys.
#3 The average American girl spends
5 hours a week playing video games. The average American boy spends
13 hours a week playing video games.
#4 The average young American will spend
10,000 hours playing video games before the age of 21.
#5 One study discovered that
88 percent of all Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 play video
games, and that video game addiction is approximately four times as common
among boys as it is among girls.
#6 At this point, 15-year-olds that attend U.S. public
schools
do not even rank in the top half of all industrialized nations when it
comes to math or science literacy.
#7 In 2011, SAT scores for young men were the worst that
they had been
in 40 years.
#8 According to a survey conducted by the National
Geographic Society, only
37 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can find the
nation of Iraq on a map.
#9 According to the New York Times, approximately
57 percent of all young people enrolled at U.S. colleges are women.
#10 It is being projected that women will earn
60 percent of all Bachelor's degrees from U.S. universities by the year
2016.
#11 Even if they do graduate from college, most of our
young men still can't find a decent job. An astounding
53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor's degree under the age of 25
were either unemployed or underemployed during 2011.
#12 Pornography addiction is a major problem among our
young men. An astounding
30 percent of all Internet traffic now goes to pornography websites, and
one survey found that 25
percent of all employees that have Internet access in the United States
even visit sex websites while they are at work.
#13 In the United States today,
47 percent of all high school students have had sex.
#14 The United States has the highest
teen pregnancy rate on the entire planet. If our young men behaved
differently this would not be happening.
#15 In the United States today,
one out of every four teen girls has at least one sexually transmitted
disease. If our young men were not sex-obsessed idiots running around
constantly looking to "score" these diseases would not be spreading like
this.
#16 Right now, approximately
53 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 24 year old age bracket are
living at home with their parents.
#17 According to one survey,
29 percent of all Americans in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket are
still living with their parents.
#18 Young men
are nearly twice as likely to live with their parents as young women the
same age are.
#19 Overall, approximately
25 million American adults are living with their parents in the United
States right now according to Time Magazine.
#20 Today, an all-time low
44.2% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 are married.
#21 Back in 1950,
78 percent of all households in the United States contained a married
couple. Today, that number has declined to
48 percent.
#22 Young men are about
four times more likely to commit suicide as young women are.
"Sen. Lieberman: Adam Lanza had ‘hypnotic’ involvement with violent video
games," Beltway Confidential, December 18, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://washingtonexaminer.com/sen.-lieberman-adam-lanzas-hypnotic-involvement-with-violent-video-games-may-have-led-him-to-kill/article/2516269#.UNDCdfJXfDO
Jensen Comment
I did not verify these statistics.
One of the things that bothers me is the proportion of D and F grades going
to males in public schools since grade inflation is so severe that almost nobody
gets a D or F grade in a public school --- those low grades are reserved mostly
for students who did not try in the least to pass.
"Dumbest Generation Getting Dumber," by Walter E. Williams,
Townhall, June 3, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/06/03/dumbest_generation_getting_dumber
The Program for International Student Assessment
(PISA) is an international comparison of 15-year-olds conducted by The
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that measures
applied learning and problem-solving ability. In 2006, U.S. students ranked
25th of 30 advanced nations in math and 24th in science. McKinsey & Company,
in releasing its report "The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in
America's Schools" (April 2009) said, "Several other facts paint a worrisome
picture.
First, the longer American children are in school,
the worse they perform compared to their international peers. In recent
cross-country comparisons of fourth grade reading, math, and science, US
students scored in the top quarter or top half of advanced nations. By age
15 these rankings drop to the bottom half. In other words, American students
are farthest behind just as they are about to enter higher education or the
workforce." That's a sobering thought. The longer kids are in school and the
more money we spend on them, the further behind they get.
While the academic performance of white students is
grossly inferior, that of black and Latino students is a national disgrace.
The McKinsey report says, "On average, black and Latino students are roughly
two to three years of learning behind white students of the same age. This
racial gap exists regardless of how it is measured, including both
achievement (e.g., test score) and attainment (e.g., graduation rate)
measures. Taking the average National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
scores for math and reading across the fourth and eighth grades, for
example, 48 percent of blacks and 43 percent of Latinos are 'below basic,'
while only 17 percent of whites are, and this gap exists in every state. A
more pronounced racial achievement gap exists in most large urban school
districts." Below basic is the category the NAEP uses for students unable to
display even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for
proficient work at their grade level.
The teaching establishment and politicians have
hoodwinked taxpayers into believing that more money is needed to improve
education. The Washington, D.C., school budget is about the nation's
costliest, spending about $15,000 per pupil. Its student/teacher ratio, at
15.2 to 1, is lower than the nation's average. Yet student achievement is
just about the lowest in the nation. What's so callous about the Washington
situation is about 1,700 children in kindergarten through 12th grade receive
the $7,500 annual scholarships in order to escape rotten D.C. public
schools, and four times as many apply for the scholarships, yet Congress,
beholden to the education establishment, will end funding the school voucher
program.
Any long-term solution to our education problems
requires the decentralization that can come from competition. Centralization
has been massive. In 1930, there were 119,000 school districts across the
U.S; today, there are less than 15,000. Control has moved from local
communities to the school district, to the state, and to the federal
government. Public education has become a highly centralized
government-backed monopoly and we shouldn't be surprised by the results.
It's a no-brainer that the areas of our lives with the greatest innovation,
tailoring of services to individual wants and falling prices are the areas
where there is ruthless competition such as computers, food, telephone and
clothing industries, and delivery companies such as UPS, Federal Express and
electronic bill payments that have begun to undermine the postal monopoly in
first-class mail.
At a Washington press conference launching the
McKinsey report, Al Sharpton called school reform the civil rights challenge
of our time. He said that the enemy of opportunity for blacks in the U.S.
was once Jim Crow; today, in a slap at the educational establishment, he
said it was "Professor James Crow." Sharpton is only partly correct. School
reform is not solely a racial issue; it's a vital issue for the entire
nation.
PBS Short Video “Bad Behavior Online” Takes on the Phenomenon of
Cyberbullying ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/pbs_short_video_bad_behavior_online.html
Science is Filled With Urban Legends
"The Scientific Blind Spot: Knowledge is less a canon than a consensus."
by David A. Shaywitz, The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324894104578113590368047244.html?mg=reno64-wsj
In 1870, German chemist Erich von Wolf analyzed the
iron content of green vegetables and accidentally misplaced a decimal point
when transcribing data from his notebook. As a result, spinach was reported
to contain a tremendous amount of iron—35 milligrams per serving, not 3.5
milligrams (the true measured value). While the error was eventually
corrected in 1937, the legend of spinach's nutritional power had already
taken hold, one reason that studio executives chose it as the source of
Popeye's vaunted strength.
The point, according to Samuel Arbesman, an applied
mathematician and the author of the delightfully nerdy "The Half-Life of
Facts," is that knowledge—the collection of "accepted facts"—is far less
fixed than we assume. In every discipline, facts change in predictable,
quantifiable ways, Mr. Arbesman contends, and understanding these changes
isn't just interesting but also useful. For Mr. Arbesman, Wolf's copying
mistake says less about spinach than about the way scientific knowledge
propagates.
Copying errors, it turns out, aren't uncommon and
fall into characteristic patterns, such as deletions and
duplications—exactly the sorts of mistakes that geneticists have identified
in DNA. Using approaches adapted from genetics, paleographers—scientists who
study ancient writing—use these accumulated errors to trace the age and
origins of a document, much in the same way biologists use the accumulation
of genetic mutations to assess how similar two species are to each other.
For example, by analyzing the oddities and duplicated errors in the 58
surviving versions of "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" from Chaucer's
"Canterbury Tales," researchers deduced the content of the original version.
Mr. Arbesman's interest in the spread of knowledge
also leads him to the story of Brontosaurus, the lovable, distinct herbivore
we all grew up with—only it never existed. Originally described in 1879 by
Othniel Marsh, the Brontosaurus was soon determined to be a type of dinosaur
that Marsh had already discovered in 1877, the Apatosaurus. But since the
original Apatosaurus was just "a tiny collection of bones," while the
Brontosaurus that Marsh named "went on to be supplemented with a complete
skeleton, beautiful to behold," the second discovery captured the public's
imagination and the name "Brontosaurus" stuck for nearly a century. Only
recently has the name "Apatosaurus" started to gain traction.
Knowledge, then, is less a canon than a consensus
in a state of constant disruption. Part of the disruption has to do with
error and its correction, but another part with simple newness—outright
discoveries or new modes of classification and analysis, often enabled by
technology. A single chapter in "The Half-Life of Facts" looking at the
velocity of knowledge growth starts with the author's first long computer
download—a document containing Plato's "Republic"—journeys through the rapid
rise of the "@" symbol, introduces Moore's Law describing the growth rate of
computing power, and discusses the relevance of Clayton Christensen's theory
of disruptive innovation. Mr. Arbesman illustrates the speed of
technological advancement with examples ranging from the magnetic properties
of iron—it has become twice as magnetic every five years as purification
techniques have improved—to the average distance of daily travel in France,
which has exponentially increased over the past two centuries.
To cover so much ground in a scant 200 pages, Mr.
Arbesman inevitably sacrifices detail and resolution. And to persuade us
that facts change in mathematically predictable ways, he seems to overstate
the predictive power of mathematical extrapolation. Still, he does show us
convincingly that knowledge changes and that scientific facts are rarely as
solid as they appear.
In some cases, the facts themselves are variable.
For example, the height of Mount Everest changes from year to year, as
colliding continental plates push up and erosion wears the mountain down.
The mountain even moves laterally at a rate of about six centimeters a year,
thus making both its height and location a "mesofact"—a slowly changing
piece of knowledge.
More commonly, however, changes in scientific facts
reflect the way that science is done. Mr. Arbesman describes the "Decline
Effect"—the tendency of an original scientific publication to present
results that seem far more compelling than those of later studies. Such a
tendency has been documented in the medical literature over the past decade
by John Ioannidis, a researcher at Stanford, in areas as diverse as HIV
therapy, angioplasty and stroke treatment. The cause of the decline may well
be a potent combination of random chance (generating an excessively
impressive result) and publication bias (leading positive results to get
preferentially published).
If shaky claims enter the realm of science too
quickly, firmer ones often meet resistance. As Mr. Arbesman notes,
scientists struggle to let go of long-held beliefs, something that Daniel
Kahneman has described as "theory-induced blindness." Had the Austrian
medical community in the 1840s accepted the controversial conclusions of Dr.
Ignaz Semmelweis that physicians were responsible for the spread of childbed
fever—and heeded his hand-washing recommendations—a devastating outbreak of
the disease might have been averted.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
What science has never been able to explain is why Popeye's vaunted strength was
real after he ate spinach even if the spinach should not have made him so
powerful. This is that part of human behavior that makes fact more strange than
fiction.
A rare voice for conservatism in our liberal Academy
Luigi Zingales at the University of Chicago ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Zingales
Video on A Captitalism for the People (ISBN-13:
9780465029471 ) for the ," by Luigi Zingales ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exFdzKLkg_4
William F. Buckley, Jr. ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley,_Jr.
William A. Rusher ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rusher
Bill Buckley, a great and entertaining debater, for decades was the leading
spokesman of contemporary conservatism as founder and editor of The New
Republic.
William Rusher was “the other Bill.” But in many ways it’s Rusher, not Buckley,
who shaped contemporary conservatism.
"The Syndicate," by Geoffrey Kabaservice, The New Republic,
August 27, 2012 ---
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/william-rusher-national-review-david-frisk#
If Not
Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
by David B.
Frisk
ISI Books, 517 pp., $34.95
ON APRIL 15, 1974, A DEBATE
failed to take place at Yale University, even though the speakers were
present and the auditorium was full. William Shockley, the Nobel
laureate physicist turned eugenicist crank, faced William A. Rusher, the
publisher of the leading conservative magazine, National Review.
Shockley came to argue that, since black people were intellectually
deficient for genetic reasons, the government should support their
sterilization. Rusher did not have a problem with Shockley’s racism: “I
have no objection to Shockley’s premise,” he wrote. He intended to
criticize Shockley only for his misplaced (“liberal”) faith in
government’s ability to cure the problem of racial IQ inferiority.
Predictably, the students
in the audience shouted down both speakers. The university was
overwhelmed by negative publicity, and criticized for blocking free
speech. The media made much of the students’ rudeness toward
Rusher—didn’t they realize that he was there to oppose the racist
viewpoint? (The media reaction was evidence of the success of Rusher’s
effort—and the laziness of the press.) The whole episode, in short, was
a work of conservative-movement performance art that bore Rusher’s
characteristic hallmarks: it was media-savvy, cynical, manipulative,
embarrassing to the establishment, possessed of a nasty racial edge, and
too clever by half.
The Shockley brouhaha
isn’t mentioned in David B. Frisk’s new biography of Rusher. Like most
books about the movement that are blurbed, reviewed, published, and read
almost exclusively by conservatives, the biography is generally
uncritical of its subject and skirts episodes that might discredit the
cause. The book is instead concerned with presenting an engaging
portrait of the man who spent most of his life known as “the other
Bill,” overshadowed by National Review’s flamboyant
editor-in-chief, William F. Buckley, Jr. It also makes the case that
Rusher strengthened the conservative movement by providing political
intelligence and perspective that Buckley lacked. Yet Frisk’s
unwillingness to grapple with the grittier details of Rusher’s career
curiously undervalues his subject, for in many ways it was Rusher, not
Buckley, who was the founding father of the conservative movement as it
currently exists. We have Rusher, not Buckley, to thank for the
populist, operationally sophisticated, and occasionally extremist
elements that characterize the contemporary movement.
Rusher was born in
Chicago in 1923, and although he grew up in the New York City area he
remained skeptical of the East Coast and its liberal ways for all of his
life. Rusher’s parents argued viciously before they divorced, perhaps
ruining him for marriage, while also—according to Frisk—teaching him how
to win debates by taking advantage of opponents’ weak spots. Rusher
mastered his debating skills as an undergraduate at Princeton in the
early 1940s, where he acquired another lifelong trait: his resentment of
the establishment. Aristocratic swells at pre-war Princeton deemed him
an un-clubbable middle-class striver (“black shoe,” in the terminology
of the day), instilling a lifelong hatred of liberal elites.
Rusher’s introduction to
practical politics began in the early 1950s, not long after his
graduation from Harvard Law School, when his involvement in the national
Young Republican (YR) federation connected him with the strategic genius
F. Clifton White. Rusher and White went on to create a political machine
that held the YRs in thrall for decades to come. The Syndicate, as the
White-Rusher nation-wide network of low-level Republican operatives
became known, allowed the two men to extend their influence beyond the
YRs to the broader Republican Party—imitating the structure of New York
governor Thomas Dewey’s tightly run national Republican network, which
helped to deliver the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections to Dewey’s
favored candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
As Rusher’s
anti-Communist feelings intensified and he became increasingly aligned
with National Review (which he joined as publisher in 1957), the
Syndicate began to siphon off power from the Dewey organization and to
turn the party away from Dewey-Eisenhower moderation. White and Rusher
masterminded the delegate-hunting operation that led to Barry
Goldwater’s seizure of the GOP presidential nomination in 1964, and
Syndicate alumni went on to high positions in Republican
administrations. Many are still active in party politics today.
Scholars, including
Frisk, have yet to analyze the Syndicate adequately, mostly because its
activities were necessarily sub rosa and directed against
moderates inside the GOP rather than Democrats. (Conservatives, by and
large, do not write about the movement as impartial scholars, and the
internal developments of the Republican Party were out of academic vogue
until quite recently.) But the Syndicate provided much of the
conservative movement’s ideological content and personnel, as well as
its tactics and tone. Many of those tactics were borrowed directly from
the Communist Party: manipulation of elections, the creation of front
groups, intimidation, slander, agit-prop techniques, and an
ends-justify-the-means approach. Rusher was rather proud of his mastery
of what he called “the black art of winning conventions” and other
political contests, but the darker side of the Syndicate’s influence is
still felt today: it provided a template for a movement that knows very
much about how to incite resentments and oppose establishments, but very
little about how to govern.
Frisk averts his gaze
from the Syndicate’s unsavory activities and focuses on more pleasant
and often quite fascinating matters, such as Rusher’s relations with
Buckley, his debates with other National Review colleagues, his
extensive travels to anti-Communist bastions, and his connoisseurship in
food and wine. Frisk describes Rusher’s generous mentorship of
generations of right-wing activists and his indefatigable correspondence
with movement participants. Though Rusher achieved some public
prominence through his nationally syndicated column “The Conservative
Advocate” (published from 1973 to 2009), his speeches, and his
appearances on the PBS television show The Advocates during the
’70s, Frisk’s account suggests that his more significant role may have
been as a movement nexus and motivator, a sort of Allard Lowenstein of
the right.
In fact, Rusher was
something of a sage, outlining the conservative future in 1963 in his
essay “Crossroads for the GOP,” which called for the joining of white
Southern populists with traditional-minded economic conservatives—a
prophetic glimpse of the Southern Strategy that began under Richard
Nixon and has continued to the present day. But he had little confidence
in his vision. He was quite skeptical that the Republican Party could
ever be converted, and devoted much of his energies to a quixotic quest
for a conservative third party. As late as 1979, he called the
Republican Party “that putrefying corpse,” and asked a friend, “Do you
see the slightest evidence that the GOP is really going
anywhere?” Ironically, it is Rusher’s polarizing caricature of an
America divided into “producers” and “non-producers” that has lived on
in the Tea Partiers today.
But Frisk makes a strong
case that Rusher was not a mere populist propagandist. Though he was
passionately opposed to abortion, for example, he warned pro-lifers that
American democracy “requires constant compromise among people who differ
passionately.” Still, Rusher was, as he put it (paraphrasing Napoleon),
“not very fond of women or games. ... 100 percent a political
animal.” Partisan politics colored his whole life, and he apparently had
only a single Democratic friend. And he was, ultimately, a hard-shelled
conservative warrior.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Sadly conservatism is mostly a topic of history as the Academy surrounds itself
with a liberal choir these days. Rusher may be one of the reasons vocal
conservatives re despised on campus. Sadly when a scholar wears the Scarlet
C around his/her neck that scholar is deemed to accept even the most
objectionable extremes of conservatism. Similarly, when a radical liberal wears
a Scarlet L around his/her neck that scholar is deemed to accept even the most
objectionable extremes of conservatism. Scholars that think for themselves
should be afforded more respect.
Sadly on college campuses the liberals built politically correct walls to
shut out debate that is not politically correct. The days of civil debate on
some topics are over..
96% of the faculty and staff at Ivy League colleges
that contributed to the 2012 presidential race donated to President Obama's
campaign, reveals a Campus Reform investigation compiled using numbers released
by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). From the eight elite schools,
$1,211,267 was contributed to the Obama campaign, compared to the $114,166 given
to Romney. The highest percentage of Obama donors came from Brown University and
Princeton, with 99 percent of donations from faculty and staff going towards his
campaign.
Oliver Darcey, November 24, 2012 ---
http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4511
"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
"The Academic Mob Rules Instead of encouraging wide discussion, the
Chronicle of Higher Education fires a blogger," by Naomi Schaefer Riley,
The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304363104577391842133259230.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
"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
The Nobel Prize for Political Literature: Tolstoy and Twain never won,
but many obscure writers have. Criteria other than high art seem to be involved,"
by Joseph Epstein, The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444799904578054821709524326.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
"The Liberal Skew in Higher Education," by Richard Posner, The
Becker-Posner Blog, December 30, 2007 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
"The Difference Between Political Journalists and B-School Profs," by
Justin Fox, Harvard Business Review Blog, March 9, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2010/03/the-difference-between-politic.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE
"New View of Faculty Liberalism: Why are professors liberal?" by
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, January 18, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/18/liberal
Bob Jensen's threads about the liberal bias of the media and the Academy
are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
"Top 10 Epic Tech-Gadget Failures," by Robyn Tippins, ReadWriteWeb,
December 14, 2012 ---
http://readwrite.com/2012/12/14/top-10-epic-tech-gadget-failures
1. Minidisc
2. Highway Hi-Fi
3. DivX
4. Web TV
5. The Audrey Internet
Appliance
6. Palm Foleo
7. Panasonic Jungle
8. Solar Bath Apparatus
9. Flobee
10. Walking Toaster (The
Aristocrat of Toasters, The Toast-O-Lator)
Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Technology
Editing is "the lifeblood of the profession," Hutner
remarked. He emphasized that tasks like putting out new editions, compiling
anthologies, and editing journals, among other things, "matter to members of the
professoriate as much as, if not more than, writing thesis-length books," which
are otherwise the gold standard in the humanities.
"The Editor as Power Broker," by Jeffrey J. Williams, Chronicle of Higher
Education's Chronicle Review, December 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Editor-as-Power-Broker/136259/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
As I read this piece I kept thinking that this is not about Gordon Hutner. It's
about Tony Hopwood who founded Accounting, Organizations and Society in
1976 and was the AOS Editor until just before he died ---
http://fisher.osu.edu/departments/accounting-and-mis/the-accounting-hall-of-fame/membership-in-hall/anthony-george-hopwood/
Tony published quite a few accountics science articles, but the main
contribution of AOS was to go beyond the limits of big data and limiting
assumptions of mathematics to encompass a much more scholarly view of
accounting, organizations, and society. He was willing to publish accounting
research papers that contained no equations and statistical inference tables
But having a
good idea is only the start. What you have to do is make it
into a story. Some people think that all they need in order to be a writer is
inspiration. Not a bit of it! Plenty of people have good ideas, but very few of
them
actually go on and write story. That's where the hard work starts.
Phillip Pullman, "How do Writers Think of
Their Ideas?"
Big Questions From Little People, Edited by Gemma Elwin Harris, Faber & Faber,
Ltd., ISBN 978-0-16-222322-7, 2012, Page 168
Also see the video at
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/adam_savage_host_of_mythbusters_explains_how_simple_ideas_become_great_scientific_discoveries.html
Every today that is, and that will be, Is sculptured by all that was
Bob
Schlag - January 24, 1982
"Fresh Design Brightens Evernote 5," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall
Street Journal, December 18, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323723104578187450194767998.html?mg=reno64-wsj
Ever miss the simplicity of file cabinets and
manila folders? Although today's digital lifestyle is supposed to be easier,
it can quickly turn into a muddled mess of out-of-sync devices, forgotten
account passwords and misplaced files.
Since its debut in 2008, Evernote has tried to
change that. This free service gives people a place to store all kinds of
documents and uses a system of virtual notebooks to sort things like PDFs,
text notes, audio snippets and drawings. One of Evernote's strongest
features has been its usability on almost all devices and operating systems,
including Macs, Windows PCs, BlackBerrys, devices running iOS (Apple's AAPL
-0.96% mobile operating system) or Android, and browsers and printers.
But like a ho-hum, reliable car that merely got you
where you wanted to go, Evernote hasn't always been a particularly
delightful thing to use.
Meet Evernote 5, a revamped version of the service
that purrs with fluid features and playful design elements. In place of a
dull list view of notes and notebooks, a handsome Cards view shows better
images and details for saved items; on iOS, each card spins around and
floats toward you when it's selected.
A new Atlas section sorts all Evernote entries by
where they were captured, displaying attractive maps that bring life to
boring notes. Searching has improved. And a handy left-side panel includes
new sections for Shortcuts to notebooks or notes, which you set up, and
Recent Notes, which displays the five most recent things saved to your
Evernote account.
Evernote 5 recently launched on Apple's Mac
computers and iOS mobile devices, and the company will bring out versions
for Windows, Android and the Web early next year. A free Evernote account
gives you 60 megabytes of usage a month, while a Premium account includes 1
gigabyte of usage each month, no ads, offline usage and other extras.
Premium costs $45 a year or $5 monthly.
Last summer, when I finished my final project for
graduate school, I relied on Evernote to organize all of my notes, files,
emails, photos and interviews. It did the job, but Evernote 5 is simply
better looking, more functional and more enjoyable to use.
If you like collaborating with other people on
notes, you can share anything from your Evernote account with others via
Facebook, FB -0.69% Twitter, LinkedIn LNKD -0.81% or email. Evernote 5 has a
smarter way of displaying notebooks, with a small people icon in the top
right of each shared notebook. The covers of these notebooks also tell who
owns them, and notebooks can now be sorted by Name, Note Count or Owner in
one simple step.
Evernote makes seven different apps and works with
various products from other companies. To keep track of all these offerings,
a Trunk section in Evernote 5 sorts them and directs people to links where
they can buy or download products.
My favorite app is the Evernote Web Clipper, which
works with browsers including Google GOOG -0.36% Chrome, Firefox, Internet
Explorer and Apple's Safari to help you save anything you find on the Web.
This can include entire Web pages or just a particular image or selection of
text. I used Evernote to gather gift ideas for family and friends, keeping
them all in a notebook labeled Christmas 2012.
I also like using Evernote's Clearly, which is a
browser add-on for Chrome and Firefox that works like the Reader tool in
Apple's Safari browser. I use it with Chrome, and anytime I click on the
Clearly icon, the text of the blog page or website that I'm reading appears
without cluttered ads and other distractions. I can adjust the background
color and text size on the page, or clip pages directly to Evernote.
A few keyboard shortcuts are extra helpful when
using Evernote on your computer. Pressing Control + N on Windows, or Command
+ N on Macs, will instantly create a new note. On Macs, tapping Command + Z
will undo your last action in Evernote and pressing Command + ; will check
spelling.
One of the little-known Evernote features is its
integration with email. Each account, free or Premium, is assigned an email
address. This address is your account name added to a forgettable string of
letters and numbers, but it can be added to your email contacts. Anything
you email to your Evernote account gets saved just like a note would.
Continued in article
"Zotero vs. EndNote," by Brian Croxall, Chronicle of Higher
Education, May 3, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/zotero-vs-endnote/33157
"Taking Better Notes in Zotero," by Lincoln Mullen, Chronicle of
Higher Education, October 10, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/taking-better-notes-in-zotero/36561?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen threads on Zotero and EverNote ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#WebData
"Every Apple-Made App On Your iPhone Can Be Replaced By A Better App,"
by Steve Kovach, Business Insider, December 14, 2012 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/bad-apples-2012-12?op=1
With yesterday's launch of
Google Maps for iOS, I reached the point where I
no longer use any of Apple's built-in apps on my
iPhone.
Well, there are three very basic exceptions: Clock,
Messages* (the texting
app), and Phone. Other than that,
every app I use on my iPhone was made by a third-party developer who pulled
off something better than Apple's default app for the same task.
And now, all of the Apple-made apps are now in a
folder labeled with an Emoji of a smiling pile of poop.
Here's my current setup:
Continued in article
Daughter Maria sent a cartoon with the caption:
"Reading is how people install software in their brains."
Question
Why does gold lose it's luster when the Fed prints money to pay government's
bills?
Precious Metals Prices Hit Hard by Fed's Evans' Rule ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/fed-announces-evans-rule-2012-12
"Google Maps is now available for iPhone." Google, December 12. 2012
---
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-maps-is-now-available-for-iphone.html
Note the Student Comment About Availability of Test Banks Via Google
Posting by Rick Lillie on the AAA Commons December 12, 2012
Using Google Search to find
publisher test banks on the Internet -- Do your students do this?
details:
I teach several online
courses. I use timed exams for some of the courses, while others
are open-book, research-type exams without time limits. Sometimes,
I use publisher provided test banks as a source of
multiple-choice type questions. I tend to select questions that are
rather difficult and not readily found in text material. In other
words, students have to really think in order to answer the
questions.
I'm fully
aware that many test banks are readily available via the Internet.
Until recently, this did not bother me too much. However, this past
term, a couple of grad students showed me
how to search for specific questions
using Google Search. The students
simply copy/pasted a test question into the Google Search line or
typed in the question. The search process quickly opened the test
databank for a specific chapter and damn near took students right to
the question and suggested answer.
I'm reasonably
savvy when it comes to technology. However, I did not realize the
extent to which test banks and other supposedly restricted
publisher-provided support materials were readily available online
via Google Search. To see how pervasive this situation might be, I
applied the Google Search technique to several questions from
several exams. Each search
result produced the test bank by chapter, question, and answer.
I've used a
variety of techniques to protect exams (both traditional and online
formats) and overall course assessment strategies and I've felt
pretty comfortable with test results. However, this latest approach
to using Google Search has caused me to rethink how I approach
testing in traditional, blended, and online course formats.
I am interested in
your experiences with this issue. I look forward to reading your
comments and suggestions.
Rick Lillie (CSU San
Bernardino)
Anonymous
Student Comment -- Interesting
I took an online course (from a
state university) that was set up similarly in that I had 30-50
questions from a test bank and a limited amount of time to take
the test. I would go through and answer as many questions as I
could from my memory, but the ones I wasn't sure on or didn't
know at all, I'd go to Google and, almost always, find someone
who had used the question (and answer) as part of the study
sheet somewhere.
Turned a lot of
would-be Bs and Cs into As
Jensen Comment
My question is why the student is allowed to do a Google search during an
examination? It's one thing to study a purloined test bank before an examination
and quite another to be able to look up specific answers during an examination.
There are various ways to maintain testing integrity among online students ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm
University of California Research ---
http://research.universityofcalifornia.edu/
News and stories (including videos) about research in the University of
California system
Categories: Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside,
San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Lawrence Berkeley,
Lawrence, Livermore, Los Alamos, Agriculture, and Natural Resources
This site includes profiles of researchers, including active and emeritus
accounting researchers, at the various campus locations.
The University of Georgia takes this a step further by putting faculty
profiles on Wikipedia.
Profiles of Scientists and Engineers ---
http://science360.gov/series/Profiles+of+Scientists+and+Engineers/711d5cab-8416-40f7-9297-099c1f37a9bd
Social Offender = A + S2
"Social Offender for Our
Times," by Evan R. Goldstein, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle
Review, December 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Is-for-/136263/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Julie Smith David, who is now a full-time
administrator in the American Accounting Association, posted the following on
the AAA Commons: She needs to update her profile following her move to Sarasota
---
http://commons.aaahq.org/people/687f7dcd30
I always
enjoy reflecting on the year, and finding out what others think
has made a difference...so from many of the "best of" lists that
come out at this time of year, the one that first caught my eye:
7 Most Important Tech Trends Of 2012 posted
on CIO's web site...
What struck me
as interesting was how many of these technologies (5 out of 7)
have implications for accountants:
1. Big data -
if we're not analyzing it, are we doing our job?
3. Near-field
communications - what are the audit implications? Privacy
issues?
4. Biometrics -
sure it helps with security, but, again, what about privacy?
6. Bring Your
Own Device (BYOD—oh, don't I wish it was a "---B"?) - the
technology challenges with consumer devices are huge, as are
implications for processes (and SOX compliance), security, and
potentially privacy
7. 3-D Printing
- We have entered the Enterprise and can have replicators in our
homes! Think how this could turn manufacturing on its head: no
more "work in progress" and a lot less inventory! Would ABC
costing still be needed?
My questions to
all of you - are you including these in your classes and your
research? Do you think the accounting profession sees these
initiatives as ones they should be involved in? Do you think
the article missed anything important?
And if these
aren't too interesting, here are a few more "best of's" for
2012:
Happy New Year
to you, and yours!
Bob Jensen's threads on technology trends are
at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology
trends are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
"The Woman Charged With Making Windows 8 Succeed: In a Q&A,
Julie Larson-Green explains why Microsoft felt it was necessary to rethink an
operating system used by 1.2 billion people," by Tom Simonite, MIT's
Technology Review, December 13, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508311/the-woman-charged-with-making-windows-8-succeed/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121214
As the head of Windows product development at
Microsoft, Julie Larson-Green is responsible for a piece of software used by
some 1.3 billion people worldwide. She’s also the person leading the
campaign to introduce as many of those people as possible to Windows 8, the
dramatic redesign of the iconic operating system that must succeed if
Microsoft is to keep pace with a computing industry now shaped more by
phones and tablets than desktop PCs.
Windows 8 throws out design features familiar to
Windows users since 1995, swapping in simpler, bolder interfaces designed to
be operated using a touch screen. The release of the Surface, a device
somewhere between a tablet and laptop, also sees Microsoft break its
tradition of leaving the building of hardware to other companies.
Larson-Green took over the role a few weeks ago,
after Microsoft veteran Steven Sinofsky left amid rumors of personal
disputes with other Microsoft executives. However, Larson-Green has long
been a senior figure inside the Windows division and even took the lead on
drawing up the first design brief for Windows 8. An expert in technical
design, she also led the introduction of the novel, much copied “ribbon”
interface for Microsoft Office, widely acknowledged as a major improvement
in usability.
Larson-Green met last week with Tom Simonite at
Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington.
Why was it necessary to make such broad
changes in Windows 8?
When Windows was first created 25 years ago, the
assumptions about the world and what computing could do and how people were
going to use it were completely different. It was at a desk, with a monitor.
Before Windows 8 the goal was to launch into a window, and then you put that
window away and you got another one. But with Windows 8, all the different
things that you might want to do are there at a glance with the Live Tiles.
Instead of having to find many little rocks to look underneath, you see a
kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on and everything you care
about all at once. It puts you closer to what you’re trying to get done.
Windows 8 is clearly designed with touch in
mind, and many new Windows 8 PCs have touch screens. Why is touch so
important?
It’s a very natural way to interact. If you get a laptop with a touch
screen, your brain clicks in and you just start touching what makes it
faster for you. You’ll use the mouse and keyboard, but even on the regular
desktop you’ll find yourself reaching up doing the things that are faster
than moving the mouse and moving the mouse around. It’s not like using the
mouse, which is more like puppeteering than direct manipulation.
In the future, are all PCs going to have
touch screens?
For cost considerations there might always be some
computers without touch, but I believe that the vast majority will. We’re
seeing that the computers with touch are the fastest-selling right now. I
can’t imagine a computer without touch anymore. Once you’ve experienced it,
it’s really hard to go back.
Did you take that approach in Windows 8 as
a response to the popularity of mobile devices running iOS and Android?
We started planning Windows 8 in June of 2009,
before we shipped Windows 7, and the iPad was only a rumor at that point. I
only saw the iPad after we had this design ready to go. We were excited. A
lot of things they were doing about mobile and touch were similar to what
we’d been thinking. We [also] had differences. We wanted not just static
icons on the desktop but Live Tiles to be a dashboard for your life; we
wanted you to be able to do things in context and share across apps; we
believed that multitasking is important and that people can do two things at
one time.
Can touch coexist with a keyboard and mouse
interface? Some people have said it doesn’t feel right to have both the
newer, touch-centric elements and the old-style desktop in Windows 8.
It was a very definite choice to have both environments. A finger’s never
going to replace the precision of a mouse. It’s always going to be easier to
type on a keyboard than it is on glass. We didn’t want you to have to make a
choice. Some people have said that it’s jarring, but over time we don’t hear
that. It’s just getting used to something that’s different. Nothing was
homogenous to start with, when you were in the browser it looked different
than when you were in Excel.
I wonder if you’re experiencing a little
déjà vu, after previously leading a radical change to the interface for
Office that initially met with complaints.
Yes! A lot of it is familiar. Some people who review it for a shorter period
of time may not feel how rich it really is. We’re going for the over time
impression rather than the first 20 minutes out of the box. We’ve found that
the more invested you were in the old way, the more difficult the transition
is, which is unfortunate because we first hear about everything in the tech
press. Those are the ones that we knew up front are going to have the most
challenge.
How long does it take people to adjust?
Two days to two weeks is what we used to say in Office, and it’s similar in
Windows 8. We do a “living with Windows” program where we watched people
over a series of months in their household. A lot of people don’t have
trouble upfront.
What data do you have on how people buying Windows 8 are reacting?
When you sign into your Windows PC, one of the
things you get asked is whether you’ll be part of our customer experience
improvement program, and if you will, then you’re sending some data to us.
Everyone gets asked that. We get terabytes and terabytes of data every day,
and we can’t possibly use it all. So far we’re seeing very encouraging
things. Over 90 percent of customers, from our data, use the charms and find
the start screen all in the first session. Even if you’re a desktop user,
over time there’s a cutover point around six weeks where you start using the
new things more than the things you’re familiar with.
Microsoft has chosen to make its own
hardware for Windows 8 with the Surface tablets. Why not leave that to the
equipment manufacturers, as you’ve done in the past?
It was a way to test our hypothesis of a new way of
working. It takes time for individuals to adjust, but it also takes time for
the industry to adjust to new things—all the complicated things about the
supply chain and issues like what sizes of glass gets cut. Surface is our
vision of what a stage for Windows 8 should look like, to help show
consumers and the industry our point of view on what near perfect hardware
would look like. We believe in Surface as a long-term product, but we know
that partners will have other innovations and ideas. One of the things
that’s always been nice about Windows is choice—you’re not locked into one
size, one shape, one color, one version.
Your predecessor, Steven Sinofsky, was
widely credited with driving Microsoft to create Windows 8 through sheer
force of will. Is that true?
Steven is an amazing leader and an amazing brain
and an amazing person, but one person can’t do everything. It’s really about
the team that we created and the culture that we created for innovation.
Continued in article
Question
As robots take increasingly displace labor in almost any market, are writers and
music composers safe?
"Patented Book Writing System Creates, Sells Hundreds Of Thousands Of
Books On Amazon," by David J. Hull, Security Hub, December 13, 2012
---
http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/
Philip M. Parker, Professor of Marketing at INSEAD Business School,
has had a side project for over 10 years. He’s created
a computer system that can write books about specific subjects in about 20
minutes. The patented algorithm has so far generated hundreds of thousands
of books. In fact, Amazon lists over 100,000 books attributed to Parker, and
over 700,000 works listed for his company,
ICON Group
International, Inc. This doesn’t
include the private works, such as internal reports,
created for companies or licensing of the system itself through a separate
entity called
EdgeMaven Media.
Parker is not so much an author as a compiler, but
the end result is the same: boatloads of written works.
Now these books aren’t your typical reading
material. Common categories include specialized technical and business
reports, language dictionaries bearing the “Webster’s” moniker (which is in
the public domain), rare disease overviews, and even crossword puzzle books
for learning foreign languages, but they all have the same thing in common:
they are automatically generated by software.
The system automates this process by building
databases of information to source from, providing an interface to customize
a query about a topic, and creating templates for information to be
packaged. Because digital ebooks and print-on-demand services have become
commonplace, topics can be listed in Amazon without even being “written”
yet.
The abstract for the U.S. patent issued in 2007
describes the system:
The present invention provides for the
automatic authoring, marketing, and or distributing of title material. A
computer automatically authors material. The material is automatically
formatted into a desired format, resulting in a title material. The
title material may also be automatically distributed to a recipient.
Meta material, marketing material, and control material are
automatically authored and if desired, distributed to a recipient.
Further, the title may be authored on demand, such that it may be in any
desired language and with the latest version and content.
To be clear, this isn’t just software alone but a
computer system designated to write for a specific genre. The system’s
database is filled with genre-relevant content and specific templates coded
to reflect domain knowledge, that is, to be written according to an expert
in that particular field/genre. To avoid copyright infringement, the system
is designed to avoid plagiarism, but the patent aims to create original but
not necessarily creative works. In other words, if any kind of content can
be broken down into a formula, then the system could package related, but
different content in that same formula repeatedly ad infinitum.
Parker explains the process in this nearly
10-minute video:
Scroll down to the video ---
http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/
Continued in article
Jensen Questions
If you publish an average of 1,267 books per year in your discipline can you
possibly be denied promotion and tenure?
Will you continued to require a single essay that counts 50% of the grade in
your theory course?
How do you sue an anonymous computer for plagiarism?
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Taxes: Navigating the Fiscal Cliff? AICPA Can Help ---
http://www.aicpa.org/InterestAreas/Tax/Resources/Pages/tax-fiscal-cliff.aspx
According to Hoyle
"EVERYONE CHANGES OVER TIME," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, December 14,
2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/12/everyone-changes-over-time.html
. . .
I am always shocked by how many well intentioned
faculty members turn testing over to a textbook test bank. I want to run
screaming into the night when I hear that. In my opinion, an overworked
graduate student who does not know you or your students is not in any
position to write a legitimate test for your students. When writing this
blog, I sometimes discuss what I would do if I were king of education.
Burning all test banks would be one of my first royal acts.
Yes, I know you are extremely busy. But abdicating
this valuable task to a person who might never have taught a single class
(or a class like yours) makes no sense. Any test in your class should be
designed for your students based on what you have covered and based on what
you want them to know. It should not be composed of randomly selected
questions written by some mysterious stranger. To me, using a test bank is
like asking Mickey Mouse to pinch hit for Babe Ruth. You are giving away an
essential element of the course to someone who might not be up to the task.
Over the decades, I have worked very hard to learn
how to write good questions. During those years, I have written some
questions that were horrible. But, I have learned much from that experience.
--The first thing I learned about test writing was
that a question that everyone could answer was useless. --The second thing
that I learned was that a question that no one could answer was also
useless.
As with any task, you practice and you look at the
results and you get better. You don’t hand off an essential part of your
course to a test bank.
As everyone who has read this blog for long
probably knows, one of the things I started doing about 8 years ago was
allowing students to bring handwritten notes to every test. That immediately
stopped me from writing questions that required memorization because the
students had all that material written down and in front of them.
That was a good start but that was not enough.
Allowing notes pushed me in the right direction but it did not get me to the
tests I wanted. It takes practice and study.
About 3 weeks ago, I wrote a 75 minute test for my
introduction to Financial Accounting class here at the University of
Richmond. This test was the last one of the semester (prior to the final
exam). By that time, I surely believed that everyone in the class had come
to understand what I wanted them to accomplish. So, I wanted to test the
material in such a way as to see how deeply they really did understand it.
I wrote 12 multiple-choice questions designed to
take about 4-8 minutes each. For accounting tests that are often numerically
based, I like multiple-choice questions because I can give 6-8 potential
answers and, therefore, limit the possibility of a lucky guess.
In writing the first four of these questions, I
tried to envision what an A student could figure out but that a B student
could not. In other words, I wanted these four questions to show me the
point between Good and Excellent. These were tough. For those questions, I
really didn’t worry about the C, D, or F students. These questions were
designed specifically to see if I could divide the A students from the B
students.
The next four questions were created to divide the
B students from the C students. They were easier questions but a student
would have to have a Good level of understanding to figure them out. I knew
the A students could work these questions and I knew the D students could
not work them. These four were written to split the B students from the C
students.
The final four questions were created to divide the
C students from those with a lesser level of understanding. They were easier
but still not easy. I wanted to see who deserved a C and who did not. If a
student could get those four questions correct, that (to me) was average
work. Those students deserved at least a C. But, if a student could not get
those four, they really had failed to achieve a basic level of understanding
worthy of a C.
Then, I shuffled the 12 questions and gave them to
my students.
How did this test work out in practice? Pretty
well. When it was over, I put the papers in order from best to worse to see
if I was comfortable with the results. I genuinely felt like I could tell
the A students from the B students from the C students from everyone else.
And, isn’t that a primary reason for giving a test?
Okay, I had to create a pretty interesting curve to
get the grades to line up with what I thought I was seeing. But I am the
teacher for this class. That evaluation should be mine. I tell my students
early in the semester that I do not grade on raw percentages. Getting 66
percent of the questions correct should not automatically be a D. In fact,
in many cases, getting 66 percent of the questions correct might well be a
very impressive performance. It depends on the difficulty of the questions.
After the first test, students will often ask
something like, “I only got four questions out of 12 correct and I still got
a C, how can that be?” My answer is simple “by answering those four
questions, you have shown me how much you have understood and I thought that
level of understanding deserved a C.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think professors who use publisher test banks are totally naive on how easy it
is to get publisher test banks. Some who aren't so naive contend that learning
from memorizing test banks is so tremendous that they want to give student A
grades for memorizing a test bank. I think that's a cop out!
The following appears in RateMyProfessor for a professor that will remain
unnamed ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/
She is a really easy teacher-especially if you have
old tests!! There are always repeat questions from the year before! It is
always easy to see what will be on the test if you go to class...she always
picks one question from each topic she talked about in class! You won't even
need to buy the book bc everything is from her lecture!
She tries to indoctrinate all of her pupils with
her liberal views on the the environment, business, and religion. She's
patronizing, rude, her voice is annoying, and she NEVER speaks on econ. she
pushes her views on us daily. cares more about the environment than econ and
won't listen to other opinions. treats students like they're idiots.
"How You Test Is How They Will Learn," by Joe Hoyle,
Teaching Financial Accounting Blog, January 31, 2010 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-you-test-is-how-they-will-learn.html
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Fantasy Academe: a Role for Sabermetrics Fantasy Academe: a Role for
Sabermetrics 1," by Robert Zaretsky, Chronicle of Higher Education,
December 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Fantasy-Academe-a-Role-for/136325/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
The above article was triggered by an unfavorable accreditation review at the
University of Houston. Interestingly, before the 1990s the AACSB accreditation
standards were filled with bright lines that were essentially "sabermetrics,"
such as student/faculty ratio thresholds and the minimum proportion of
terminally qualified faculty in each department, with "terminally qualified"
defined as not being doctoral faculty with degrees outside the field of
business such as non-qualifying doctoral degrees in education, economics,
mathematics, statistics, history, etc.
Then, for complicated reasons and excuses, the AACSB moved toward eliminating
bright line sabermetrics with squishy standards rooted in mission-driven
criteria. AACSB mission-driven accreditation standards are analogous to
principles-based accounting standards. Now business administration departments
may define "terminally qualified" in terms of the unique missions of the college
of business.
I might add that top university officials hate bright line, rules-based
accreditation standards. In the old days some astute college presidents (I know
one personally) absolutely refused to allow a college of business to seek
AACSB accreditation. This is because when the number of business major credit
hours soar relative to humanities and science, business deans would blackmail
the college president for increased budgets on the basis that the falling behind
the bright lines of the AACSB would result in losing accreditation. Losing
accreditation is much more serious than not having had such accreditation in the
first place. It's a bit like getting a divorce versus not ever having been
married in the first place. Divorces can be expensive. As Jerry Reed sang, "she
got the gold mine and I got the shaft."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-p0zn3PijY
Mission-based AACSB standards are a bit more like bypassing rules-based
marriage laws with squishy standards where the business school in College A has
a much different faculty-student profile than business school B. My college
president friend mentioned above readily funded our quest for AACSB
accreditation when the AACSB restated its standard setting to be mission-based.
This meant that this president couldn't be blackmailed out of using his own
discretion in setting budgets for all departments on campus.
I might add that the AACSB has not been at all flexible with regard to the
distance education mission. Distance education cannot be the primary mission,
and no for-profit university is accredited by the AACSB whether or not it has
onsite campuses to supplement its distance education degree alternatives.
What should be the role of sabermetrics in accreditation?
"New Business-School (AACSB) Accreditation Is Likely to Be More
Flexible, Less Prescriptive," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/New-Business-School/130718/
New accreditation standards for business schools
should be flexible enough to encourage their widely divergent missions
without diluting the value of the brand that hundreds of business schools
worldwide count among their biggest selling points.
That message was delivered to about 500 business
deans from 38 countries at a meeting here this week.
The deans represented the largest and most
geographically diverse gathering of business-school leaders to attend the
annual deans' meeting of AACSB International: the Association to Advance
Collegiate Schools of Business.
The association is reviewing its accreditation
standards, in part to deal with the exponential growth in the number of
business schools overseas, many of which are seeking AACSB accreditation.
The committee that is drawing up proposed new
standards gave the deans a glimpse at the changes under consideration, which
are likely to acknowledge the importance of issues like sustainable
development, ethics, and globalization in today's business schools. A
council made up of representatives of the accredited schools will have to
approve the changes for them to take effect, and that vote is tentatively
scheduled for April 2013.
Joseph A. DiAngelo, the association's chair-elect
and a member of the committee reviewing the standards, said that when the
rules are too prescriptive, schools' mission statements, which drive their
curricula and hiring patterns, all start to look the same.
"It's all vanilla. I want to see the nuts and the
cherries and all the things that make your school unique," said Mr. DiAngelo,
who is also dean of the Erivan K. Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph's
University, in Philadelphia.
The last time the standards were revised, in 2003,
schools were put on notice that they would have to measure how much students
were learning—a task some tackled with gusto. One business school Mr.
DiAngelo met with on a recent accreditation visit "had 179 goals and
objectives, and they only have 450 students," he said. "I said, You can't be
serious."
The committee's challenges include providing a more
flexible accreditation framework to allow schools to customize their
approaches without angering members that have already sweated out the more
rigorous and prescriptive process.
And even though many schools outside the United
States have trouble meeting the criteria for accreditation, especially when
it comes to having enough professors with Ph.D.'s, "We don't think it's
appropriate to have dual standards for schools in the U.S. and those outside
the U.S.," said Richard E. Sorensen, co-chair of the accreditation-review
committee and dean of the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on accreditation issues ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#AccreditationIssues
Makes you think twice about what you report to the Better Business Bureau,
Angie's List, Facebook, and other media outlets
"Could You Be Sued For That Negative Yelp Review?" by Dana Rousmaniere,
Harvard Business Review Blog, December 11, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/morning-advantage/2012/12/morning-advantage-could-you-be.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
When Fairfax, Virginia, resident Jane Perez took to
the internet to post a scathing review of a contractor’s work on her home,
she had no idea that it would result in a $750,000 defamation lawsuit. The
contractor, Christopher Dietz, claimed that Perez’s review was false and
cost him $300,000 in lost business.
Justin Jouvenal at the Wall Street Journal says
that it’s just one of a growing number of defamation lawsuits over online
reviews on sites such as Yelp, Angie’s List and TripAdvisor, where the
freewheeling world of acerbic Web speech is colliding with the ever-growing
importance of online reputations for businesses. “It’s snark vs. status,”
writes Jouvenal.
Free-speech advocates say the lawsuits are heavy-handed attempts to stifle
critical — but valuable — consumer information. Business owners argue that a
defamatory review can devastate a business. Lawyers say such cases are a
cautionary tale for a new era: Those who feel targeted by defamation on the
Web are more likely to file suit, and judges and juries are more likely to
take such claims seriously than in years past, raising the legal stakes over
vitriolic reviews, nasty blog comments and Facebook feuds.
Jensen Comment
But I think it's unlikely that you will be sued by ranting and raving over
Nigerian frauds. I saw a CBS news report on the latest Nigerian scam --- selling
dogs for cash upfront for dogs andpuppies that are never delivered ---
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2007-05-30/business/0705300246_1_real-puppies-english-bulldog-puppies-nigeria
These Nigerians scammers don't want any confrontations in court.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Controller finds more accounting problems in parks payroll," Los Angeles
Times, Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2012 ---
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/12/california-parks-accounting-scandal-payroll.html
A review of the scandal-plagued California parks
department found that managers were circumventing payroll policies and
boosting employee salaries, according to the state controller's office on
Tuesday.
"The deliberate disregard for internal controls
along with little oversight and poorly trained staff resulted in improper
payouts to parks' employees," said Controller John Chiang in a statement.
"When security protocols and authorization requirements so easily can be
overridden, it invites the abuse of public funds."
One of the apparent abuses involved "out of class"
payments, which is extra money paid to employees for handling duties outside
their regular responsibilities. The controller's office said managers were
circumventing proper procedures to award payments totaling $520,000 to 203
employees from July 1, 2009, through June 30, 2012.
Although a lack of paperwork made it impossible for
officials to determine exactly how much of that money was wrongfully paid,
some policies were violated, resulting in excessive payments, according to
the controller's office.
A spokesman for the parks department did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.
[Updated, 11:58 a.m. Dec. 18: "We acknowledge and
it is widely known that some very unfortunate events occurred at the
Department of Parks and Recreation, in particular with the mismanagement of
payroll systems and data," said Roy Stearns, a parks spokesman, in a
statement. He said the department is using the controller's findings to
"continue to improve and safeguard our payroll systems."]
The controller's review was launched after
officials revealed the parks department had hidden away $54 million in two
accounts over a period of several years. The department's director, Ruth
Coleman, was ousted, and Gov. Jerry Brown appointed a retired Marine
general, Anthony Jackson, to replace her last month. Jackson is awaiting
Senate approval.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"U. of Michigan’s Social-Media Director Quits Over Résumé Controversy,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-michigans-social-media-director-quits-over-resume-controversy/52973?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
I posted this mostly to note that the whistle blower in this instance remained
anonymous. We had a recent discussion on the AECM about the ethics of anonymous
whistle blowing. I find nothing controversial about anonymous whistle blowing
regarding facts that can be easily verified. There's a gray zone in such
instances as conduct that is not as easily proven such as what exactly went on
behind locked doors of the oval office when President Clinton was locked inside
with an intern.
The Best Illustrated Children’s Books and Picturebooks of 2012 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/12/07/best-childrens-books-2012
"The Top Five Career Regrets," by Daniel Gulati, Harvard Business
Review Blog, December 14, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/12/the_top_five_career_regrets.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
I had just finished a guest lecture on business and
innovation at
Parson's School
for Design, and a particularly attentive front-row
audience member kicked off question time with the curliest one of the day. I
answered quickly with the hope of getting back on target. But judging from
the scores of follow-up questions and the volume of post-lecture emails I
received, a talk on career regret would have been the real bull's-eye.
Ever since that afternoon, I've been on a mission
to categorically answer the awkward but significant question of exactly what
we'd do if we could magically rewind our careers. The hope? That by exposing
what others are most disappointed about in their professional lives, we're
maximizing our chances of minimizing regret in our own.
To this end, I sat down with 30 professionals
between the ages of 28 and 58, and asked each what they regretted most about
their careers to date. The group was diverse: I spoke with a 39-year-old
managing director of a large investment bank, a failing self-employed
photographer, a millionaire entrepreneur, and a Fortune 500 CEO.
Disappointment doesn't discriminate; no matter what industry the individual
operated in, what role they had been given, or whether they were soaring
successes or mired in failure, five dominant themes shone through.
Importantly, the effects of bad career decisions and disconfirmed
expectancies were felt
equally across age groups.
Here were the group's top five career regrets:
1. I wish I hadn't taken the job for the
money. By far the biggest regret of all came from those who opted
into high-paying but ultimately dissatisfying careers. Classic
research proves that compensation is a "hygiene"
factor, not a true motivator. What was surprising, though, were the feelings
of helplessness these individuals were facing. Lamented one investment
banker, "I dream of quitting every day, but I have too many commitments."
Another consultant said, "I'd love to leave the stress behind, but I don't
think I'd be good at anything else." Whoever called them
golden handcuffs wasn't joking.
2. I wish I had quit earlier.
Almost uniformly, those who had actually quit their jobs to pursue their
passions wished they had done so earlier. Variable reinforcement schedules
prevalent in large corporations, the visibility of social media, and the
desire to log incremental gains are
three reasons that the
80% of people dissatisfied with their jobs don't
quit when they know they should. Said one sales executive, "Those years
could have been spent working on problems that mattered to me. You can't
ever get those years back."
3. I wish I had the confidence to start my
own business. As their personal finances shored up, professionals I
surveyed yearned for more control over their lives. The logical answer? To
become an owner, not an employee in someone else's company. But in the words
of Artful Dodger,
wanting it ain't enough. A
recent study found that 70% of workers wished
their current job would help them with starting a business in the future,
yet only 15% said they had what it takes to actually venture out on their
own. Even Fortune 500 CEOs dream of entrepreneurial freedom. Admitted one:
"My biggest regret is that I'm a 'wantrepreneur.' I never got to prove
myself by starting something from scratch."
4. I wish I had used my time at school more
productively. Despite all the
controversy currently surrounding student loans,
roughly
86% of students still view college as a worthwhile
investment. This is reflected in the growing popularity of college: In
writing
Passion & Purpose, my coauthors and I found
that 54% of Millennials have college degrees, compared to 36% of Boomers.
Although more students are attending college, many of the group's
participants wished they had thoughtfully parlayed their school years into a
truly rewarding first job. A biology researcher recounted her college
experience as being "in a ridiculous hurry to complete what in hindsight
were the best and most delightfully unstructured years of my life." After
starting a family and signing up for a mortgage, many were unable to carve
out the space to return to school for advanced study to reset their careers.
5. I wish I had acted on my career hunches.
Several individuals recounted windows of opportunity in their careers, or as
one professional described, "now-or-never moments." In 2005, an investment
banker was asked to lead a small team in (now) rapidly growing Latin
America. Sensing that the move might be an upward step, he still declined.
Crushingly, the individual brave enough to accept the offer was promoted
shortly to division head, then to CEO. Recent theories of psychology
articulate the importance of identifying these sometimes unpredictable but
potentially rewarding
moments of change, and jumping on these
opportunities to non-linearly advance your professional life.
Continued in article
Jensen Comments
Outside the realm of mathematics and the natural sciences, writers should
probably avoid use of the words "proof" and "proves." In the social sciences and
business about the only things that can be "proven" are tautologies. Classic
research does not prove compensation is not a true motivator in many (most?)
instances. Ask any prostitute on the streets? Ask most (not all) any con men or
women? Ask most any bank robber? Ask most any Wall Street executive selling out
the best interest for shareholders so he can get a bigger bonus?
Some of the above "career regrets" can be turned inside out. For example, I
know a number of professors who gave up tenured faculty positions to follow
business interests that turned into disasters. Now the best they can do is
struggle in life with low-paid and part-time adjunct teaching contracts.
The term "using school more productively" has various meanings. For example,
it might be confused with not choosing a major having more career opportunities.
This can also vary. Some students have such high GRE/GMAT/LSAT scores that they
can turn around most any undergraduate major into a successful graduate school
major in an Ivy League university. Most other students are not so successful on
admissions tests. Using "school more productively" can even mean something apart
from academics and grades. Some Harvard Business School graduates with average
grades maximized career success by making use of student and alumni networking
opportunities afforded by the HBS.
And many other workers quit or retired too soon. Ask most any old person in a
second career as a Wal-Mart greeter.
The University of Wisconsin Professor Althouse has the most popular law
professor blog in the USA ---
http://althouse.blogspot.com/
Her blog postings vary across the board and are not just devoted to law or
academe.
From TaxProf (Paul Caron) on December 13, 2012 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/
Law Prof Blog Traffic Rankings
Below are the updated quarterly traffic
rankings (page views and visitors) of the Top 35 blogs edited by law
professors with publicly available SiteMeters for the most recent 12-month
period (October 1, 2011 - September 30, 2012), as well as the percentage
change in traffic from the
prior 12-month period:
|
Blog |
Page Views |
Change |
1 |
Althouse |
17,765,378 |
-1.5% |
2 |
Legal Insurrection |
12,767,013 |
+83.0% |
3 |
Hugh Hewitt |
6,411,500 |
+14.6% |
4 |
Leiter Reports:
Philosophy |
5,689,919 |
+0.4% |
5 |
Patently-O |
3,479,729 |
-1.9% |
6 |
Jack Bog's Blog |
3,223,336 |
+14.9% |
7 |
TaxProf Blog |
3,203,552 |
-14.8% |
8 |
PrawfsBlawg |
1,843,279 |
+16.2% |
9 |
Sentencing Law & Policy |
1,357,636 |
-9.6% |
10 |
The Faculty Lounge |
1,246,610 |
-6.6% |
11 |
Concurring Opinions |
1,129,607 |
-16.1% |
12 |
Lawfare |
1,107,726 |
n/a |
13 |
The Incidental
Economist |
1,066,656 |
n/a |
14 |
Harvard Law Corp Gov |
1,041,407 |
+40.4% |
15 |
Balkinization |
1,025,291 |
-1.9% |
16 |
Leiter's Law School
Reports |
1,020,418 |
-3.0% |
17 |
Opinio Juris |
1,005,429 |
+22.4% |
18 |
Election Law Blog |
896,154 |
+158.6% |
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting professor blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
"Leading British Universities Join New MOOC Venture," by Marc Parry,
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 13. 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/leading-british-universities-join-new-mooc-venture/41211?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
Break out the Champaign for MOOCs, but hold back the really expensive stuff for
when Oxford and Cambridge announce their new MOOCs.
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, EdX, and MITx from prestigious universities
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
College, Reinvented ---
http://chronicle.com/section/College-Reinvented/656
"For Whom Is College Being Reinvented? 'Disruptions' have the buzz but
may put higher education out of reach for those students likely to benefit the
most," by Scott Carlson and Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education,
December 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-False-Promise-of-the/136305/
Last year, leading lights in for-profit and
nonprofit higher education convened in Washington for a conference on
private-sector innovation in the industry. The national conversation about
dysfunction and disruption in higher education was just heating up, and
panelists from start-ups, banking, government, and education waxed
enthusiastic about the ways that a traditional college education could be
torn down and rebuilt—and about how lots of money could be made along the
way.
During a break, one panelist—a banker who lines up
financing for education companies, and who had talked about meeting consumer
demands in the market—made chitchat. The banker had a daughter who wanted a
master's in education and was deciding between a traditional college and a
start-up that offered a program she would attend mostly online—exactly the
kind of thing everyone at the conference was touting.
For most parents, that choice might raise
questions—and the banker was no exception. Unlike most parents, however, the
well-connected banker could resolve those uncertainties, with a call to the
CEO of the education venture: "Is this thing crap or for real?"
In higher education, that is the question of the
moment—and the answer is not clear, even to those lining up to push for
college reinvention. But the question few people want to grapple with is,
For whom are we reinventing college?
The punditry around reinvention (including some in
these pages) has trumpeted the arrival of MOOC's, badges, "UnCollege," and
so on as the beginning of a historic transformation. "College Is Dead. Long
Live College!," declared a headline in Time's "Reinventing College"
issue, in October, which pondered whether massive open online courses would
"finally pop the tuition bubble." With the advent of MOOC's, "we're
witnessing the end of higher education as we know it," pronounced Joseph E.
Aoun, president of Northeastern University, in The Boston Globe
last month.
Read beneath the headlines a bit. The pundits and
disrupters, many of whom enjoyed liberal-arts educations at elite colleges,
herald a revolution in higher education that is not for people like them or
their children, but for others: less-wealthy, less-prepared students who are
increasingly cut off from the dream of a traditional college education.
"Those who can afford a degree from an elite
institution are still in an enviable position," wrote the libertarian
blogger Megan McArdle in a recent Newsweek article, "Is College a
Lousy Investment?" For the rest, she suggested, perhaps apprenticeships and
on-the-job training might be more realistic, more affordable options. Mr.
Aoun, in his Globe essay, admitted that the coming reinvention
could promote a two-tiered system: "one tier consisting of a campus-based
education for those who can afford it, and the other consisting of low- and
no-cost MOOC's." And in an article about MOOC's, Time quotes
David Stavens, a founder of the MOOC provider Udacity, as conceding
that "there's a magic that goes on inside a university campus that, if you
can afford to live inside that bubble, is wonderful."
But if you can't, entrepreneurs like him are
creating an industrialized version of higher education that the most fervent
disruptionists predict could replace mid-sized state institutions or
less-selective private colleges. "I think the top 50 schools are probably
safe," Mr. Stavens said.
A 'Mass
Psychosis'
Higher education does have real problems, and
MOOC's, badges—certificates of accomplishment—and other innovations have
real potential to tackle some of them. They could enrich teaching, add
rigor, encourage interdisciplinarity, reinforce education's real-world
applicability, and make learning more efficient—advances all sorely needed.
But the reinvention conversation has not produced
the panacea that people seem to yearn for. "The whole MOOC thing is mass
psychosis," a case of people "just throwing spaghetti against the wall" to
see what sticks, says Peter J. Stokes, executive director for postsecondary
innovation at Northeastern's College of Professional Studies. His job is to
study the effectiveness of ideas that are emerging or already in practice.
He believes that many of the new ideas, including
MOOC's, could bring improvements to higher education. But "innovation is not
about gadgets," says Mr. Stokes. "It's not about eureka moments. ... It's
about continuous evaluation."
The furor over the cost and effectiveness of a
college education has roots in deep socioeconomic challenges that won't be
solved with an online app. Over decades, state support per student at public
institutions has dwindled even as enrollments have ballooned, leading to
higher prices for parents and students. State funds per student dropped by
20 percent from 1987 to 2011, according to an analysis by the
higher-education finance expert Jane Wellman, who directs the National
Association of System Heads. States' rising costs for Medicaid, which
provides health care for the growing ranks of poor people, are a large part
of the reason.
Meanwhile, the gap between the country's rich and
poor widened during the recession, choking off employment opportunities for
many recent graduates. Education leading up to college is a mess: Public
elementary and secondary systems have failed a major segment of society, and
the recent focus on testing has had questionable results.
Part of the problem is that the two-tiered system
that Mr. Aoun fretted about is already here—a system based in part on the
education and income of parents, says Robert Archibald, an economics
professor at the College of William and Mary and an author of Why Does
College Cost So Much?
"At most institutions, students are in mostly large
classes, listening to second-rate lecturers, with very little meaningful
faculty student interaction," he says. "Students are getting a fairly
distant education even in a face-to-face setting."
If the future of MOOC's as peddled by some were to
take hold, it would probably exacerbate the distinction between "luxury" and
"economy" college degrees, he says. Graduates leaving high school well
prepared for college would get an even bigger payoff, finding a place in the
top tier.
"The tougher road is going to be for the people who
wake up after high school and say, I should get serious about learning," Mr.
Archibald says. "It's going to be tougher for them to maneuver through the
system, and it is already tough."
That's one reason economists like Robert B. Reich
argue for more investment in apprentice-based educational programs, which
would offer an alternative to the bachelor's degree. "Our entire economy is
organized to lavish very generous rewards on students who go through that
gantlet" for a four-year degree, says the former secretary of labor, now a
professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. As a
country, he says, we need to "expand our repertoire." But it's important
that such a program not be conceived and offered as a second-class degree,
he argues. It should be a program "that has a lot of prestige associated
with it."
With few exceptions, however, the reinvention crowd
is interested in solutions that will require less public and private
investment, not more. Often that means cutting out the campus experience,
deemed by some a "luxury" these days.
Less Help Where
It's Needed
Here's the cruel part: The students from the bottom
tier are often the ones who need face-to-face instruction most of all.
"The idea that they can have better education and
more access at lower cost through massive online courses is just
preposterous," says Patricia A. McGuire, president of Trinity Washington
University. Seventy percent of her students are eligible for Pell Grants,
and 50 percent come from the broken District of Columbia school system. Her
task has been trying to figure out how to serve those students at a college
with the university's meager $11-million endowment.
Getting them to and through college takes advisers,
counselors, and learning-disability experts—a fact Ms. McGuire has tried to
convey to foundations, policy makers, and the public. But the reinvention
conversation has had a "tech guy" fixation on mere content delivery, she
says. "It reveals a lack of understanding of what it takes to make the
student actually learn the content and do something with it."
Amid the talk of disruptive innovation, "the real
disruption is the changing demographics of this country," Trinity's
president says. Waves of minority students, especially Hispanics, are
arriving on campus, many at those lower-tier colleges, having come from
schools that didn't prepare them for college work. "The real problem here is
that higher education has to repeat a whole lot of lower education," Ms.
McGuire says. "That has been drag on everyone."
Much of the hype around reinvention bypasses her
day-to-day challenges as a president. "All of the talk about how higher
education is broken is a superficial scrim over the question, What are the
problems we are trying to solve?" she says. The reinvention crowd has
motivations aside from solving higher education's problems, she suspects:
"Beware Chicken Little, because Chicken Little has a vested interest in
this. There is an awful lot of hype about disruption and the need for
reinvention that is being fomented by people who are going to make out like
bandits on it."
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies
and law at the University of Virginia and a frequent commentator on
technology and education, believes that some of the new tools and
innovations could indeed enhance teaching and learning—but that doing so
will take serious research and money.
In any case, he says, the new kinds of distance
learning cannot replace the vital role that bricks-and-mortar colleges have
in many communities.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, EdX, and MITx ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Nassim Nicholas Taleb ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
I had lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It didn't go
well.
Bom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review,
December 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/This-Is-Not-a-Profile-of/136257/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Jensen Common
This interview may have been an outlier. One problem was that roasted black swan
was not on the menu.
The "I-Series," have spread campuswide after a
two-year pilot --- imagination, inspiration, and innovation.
"At U. of Maryland, an Effort to Make Introductory Courses Extraordinary,"
by Dan Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/At-U-of-Maryland-an-Effort/136317/
Required introductory courses are as important as
they are unloved.
They are a key part of the general-education
curriculum, which makes up as much as one-third of the typical baccalaureate
student's education, and they are the subject of seemingly never-ending
revitalization efforts.
Many senior faculty members avoid teaching such
courses because they see them as being filled with callow students with
little interest in the subject. Students often see them as the curricular
equivalent of eating their vegetables, the unappetizing fare they must
endure before they get to the interesting parts of their educations.
Critics argue that such distaste is well founded.
These courses typically take the form of a slog through a discipline's
"greatest hits," can prove to be deadly to students' curiosity, and often
serve as gatekeepers that keep them from advancing.
The University of Maryland at College Park thinks
it may have found a way to make these courses more engaging and rigorous.
New and retooled introductory courses, called the "I-Series," have spread
campuswide after a two-year pilot. This fall, all incoming freshmen must
take at least two I-Series courses as part of a new set of core
requirements.
The "I" refers to a litany of higher-education
buzzwords beginning with that letter, including imagination, inspiration,
and innovation.
Jargon aside, the courses are organized around
provocative questions or propositions. They have titles like, "Is America
Destined to Fall by 2076?," "Rise of the Machines: Artificial Intelligence
Comes of Age," and "Economics and the College Affordability Crisis."
"They are not run-of-the-mill, staid introductory
courses with a set body of knowledge the students memorize and regurgitate,"
says Donna B. Hamilton, the university's associate provost for academic
affairs and dean for undergraduate studies, and the driving force behind the
I-Series.
The courses bring the meaty stuff of a
discipline—its debates, approaches to problems, and ways of viewing the
world—to freshmen and sophomores, rather than reserving such intellectual
pleasures for upperclassmen and graduate students. And many of them are
taught by senior faculty who have not led an introductory course in years.
But reality has a way of intruding on ambitions, as
Ms. Hamilton is aware. While many colleges have created small freshman
seminars as a way of revitalizing their general-education curricula, such an
effort would be prohibitively expensive at College Park, with its 26,000
undergraduates.
Ms. Hamilton hopes the I-Series will offer the best
of both worlds: large class sizes that are affordable at a big institution
but taught in a way that offers more engagement than a typical lecture. She
hopes her institution's strategy will ultimately prove realistic and
long-lasting. Administrators and faculty committees set the expectations.
Faculty members decide how best to retool their courses or to invent new
ones, for which they earn $5,000. The budgets of departments, colleges, or
programs also receive $110 for each student enrolled in a course.
"It took a force of will to say, 'We're going to
make an impact on our undergraduates,'" Ms. Hamilton says, "and make clear
that this really, really counts and this really matters." Kindling Interest
Many administrators have made similar
pronouncements only to see their efforts stymied by institutional inertia
and complexity, says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of
American Colleges and Universities, a membership organization that advocates
for high-quality liberal education.
Such frustrations do not seem to have discouraged
the perpetual effort to improve general education. More than half of the 433
chief academic officers surveyed by the association in 2009 said general
education had increased in priority at their institutions, and 89 percent
were making some change in this part of the curriculum.
The general-education curriculum generates such
intense interest, Ms. Schneider says, because it usually represents the
largest academic endeavor on a campus, and it tends to serve as the vehicle
for many academic expectations. General-education courses are supposed to be
distinctive and reflect the college's values while also providing students
with core skills like quantitative reasoning, oral and written ability, and
critical thinking. Maintaining focus on such disparate goals can be
difficult, though, especially after the faculty committee and provost's
office start rethinking other parts of the curriculum.
The factor that will ultimately determine whether
College Park's efforts pay off, Ms. Schneider says, is how well faculty
members are supported in changing how they teach. Ms. Hamilton's office
approves I-Series syllabi and offers faculty members help in revising them.
Workshops and teaching consultations are also available.
"There's no reason why in a class of 60 you can't
have collaborative learning going on," Ms. Schneider says. But "it's harder,
and it takes skill."
To help develop these skills, faculty members
teaching the I-Series courses have been meeting throughout the semester to
share strategies and exchange ideas. At a recent session, several faculty
members described their plans to "flip," in whole or in part, their courses
the next time they taught them. Students might watch lectures online outside
class and spend time in class working together to apply what they learn.
Other faculty members have tried more incremental
methods.
David B. Sicilia, an associate professor of
history, said he wondered at first how he could make his course, "Moneyland:
Business in American Culture," which bore all the hallmarks of a lecture,
feel less like one.
He also wanted the 100 students in his course to
feel history on a visceral level. He tried role-playing, casting some of his
students as employees of Chemical and Chase Manhattan banks during their
merger in the mid-1990s.
During his lecture, he called on several students.
Using company documents as primary sources, he explained that "business
units" had been reorganized and the students had either not been "selected"
for a position or their job had been "eliminated."
Some were speechless, he recalls. Others asked how
they could keep their jobs. Mr. Sicilia stuck to the antiseptic text laid
out in the documents. To flesh out the context, he quoted the statements
made by the bank's top executive at the time and cited reactions of fired
employees.
"That became very experiential for the students,"
he told his colleagues during the faculty meeting. "That starts to feel to
me to be really different from what we do in regular lecture courses."
While he has tried similar exercises in other
courses, Mr. Sicilia says he might not have attempted it in a large
introductory course had he not been teaching in the I-Series. "There's just
an overall cultural message that we get from administration to try to be
more innovative and creative," he says. "It's made our general-education
curriculum a lot more interesting and a lot more relevant." Unexpected
Results
Large class sizes can make innovation more
difficult, say many faculty members in the history department at College
Park. As course sections grow to more than 100 students, discussion sections
become unwieldy, which places a burden on teaching assistants.
In such cases, the pedagogical shifts can be
relatively modest, though still effective. Richard Bell, an associate
professor of history, started incorporating field trips to sites of
historical interest for his course, "Pursuits of Happiness: Ordinary Lives
in the American Revolution," which teaches the social and cultural history
of the time.
He also earns high praise from his students for a
simple tactic: He stops his lectures every five or 10 minutes to ask them
questions, and he listens to their answers.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One enormous problem with the I-series is cost. Each of two basic courses in
accounting may have as many as 3,000+ students each semester and these are not
usually part of the general education core courses.
My daughter's first chemistry course at the University of Texas completely
filled a lecture room holding 600+ students. It would be very expensive to hire
added faculty to teach this course in sections of 100 students or less. And if
the instructors in all those sections had wide I-Series discretion, courses
using these sections at prerequisites could not entirely sure that students
having the first chemistry course all had the same course.
"An Introduction to College Giving: Four simple rules to make sure
donations to your alma mater have the biggest impact," by Nicole Hong,
The Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578148752735952548.html?mod=ITP_thejournalreport_1&mg=reno64-wsj
Feeling nostalgic toward your alma mater? Want to
show your old college how much you appreciate it?
Well, better do some studying first.
Colleges and universities are much larger and more
complex than your average nonprofit, and miscommunication about a donation's
intended use can occur. In recent years a number of high-profile lawsuits
have been filed that claimed schools didn't respect a donor's intent when
using a gift. More in Wealth Management
Should We End the Tax Deduction for Charitable
Donations? Investment Advice for 2013 An Introduction to College Giving How
to Avoid Problems That Can Derail Home Sales Investing in Sports Art Read
the complete report .
Wealth advisers and university officials say the
easiest way to avoid such problems is with a written agreement up front that
clearly establishes a gift's intended use. Many schools also issue annual
reports for donors to outline exactly how their gifts are being used.
Beyond that, here are four other ways to maximize
the impact of a donation of any size to a college or university: 1. Add
modest restrictions to the gift.
Universities generally prefer donations without
restrictions. That way, they can put the money in their general endowment
fund and use it any way they choose. But directing gifts to an area of
personal significance can be more gratifying for the donor.
Enlarge Image image image Lloyd Miller
In 2000, Richard Rogel, president of investment
firm Tomay Inc., set up a scholarship with his wife, Susan, specifically for
out-of-state University of Michigan students. He attended Michigan as a New
Jersey native and had to work several jobs to pay for the out-of-state
tuition. The scholarship fund has already helped more than 430 students,
says Jerry May, vice president for development at the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based
university.
Donors, however, should be careful not to restrict
gifts so narrowly that they go unused. If you're from Greenville, S.C., and
want to create a scholarship fund just for students from Greenville, you
might want to add a clause that says the scholarship can be given to any
student from the South if a Greenville native can't be found. Similarly, if
you're passionate about Spanish history and want to endow a professor of
prehistoric Iberian art, you could allow the endowment to go to any
art-history professor if no Iberian specialist exists.
"Modest restrictions are helpful," Mr. May says.
But "the worst thing in the world is when the money has so many restrictions
that it goes unused," he adds. 2. Give a nonmonetary donation.
While donors can give anything from fine art to
real estate, universities say some of the most practical nonmonetary
donations they receive are scientific equipment and musical instruments.
Enlarge Image image image
Gary Calton, president of scientific research firm
Calton Research Associates, donated more than $500,000 in scientific
equipment, including incubators and DNA-analyzing thermocyclers, to his alma
mater, Eastern New Mexico University, in 2005. Without the donation, "it
would have been a long time until the university could have afforded
equipment like this," says Manuel Varela, a biology professor at the
Portales, N.M.-based school. "It was like Christmas Day opening up the boxes
and distributing the equipment to very grateful people."
In January, West Virginia University in Morgantown,
W.Va., received a new Steinway piano from WVU physics professor Arthur
Weldon and his wife, Barbara, to put in a student practice room. The
donation was aimed at allowing students to practice on the same piano they
use for concerts.
Keep in mind that if you donate art or real estate
that can't be directly used, the school typically will sell it and use the
proceeds to fund scholarships. 3. Consider donating to a school you didn't
attend.
While your first impulse may be to donate to your
alma mater, giving to another university might actually cater better to your
interests. An Olympics fan, for example, might find it gratifying to donate
to athletic programs at the University of Southern California, which has
sent more athletes to the Games than any other university. New York City
residents might donate to New York University if they frequent performances
from the Tisch School of Arts.
Donating to a smaller university, meanwhile, can
maximize the impact of a big gift. A gift like a new science library or
fitness center can be "transformative" for a small school, says Rebecca
Chopp, president of 1,500-student Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pa. "At
a larger university, it's just one gift among many," she says. "There's very
much a specialness at small schools. Donors feel like they're key
stakeholders shaping the destiny of the school." 4. Compare the tax
treatment of different gifts.
Tax advantages are important to consider because
they allow donors to make more generous gifts, says Anne McClintock,
executive director of the planned giving team at Harvard University in
Cambridge, Mass.
Some donors give schools appreciated stock instead
of cash to avoid paying income tax on the capital gains. Say you have
$50,000 in stock that had appreciated from $5,000. If you sell the shares
and donate the remaining cash, the university would only get $43,250 due to
a 15% long-term capital-gains tax on the $45,000 gain. But if you donate the
shares directly, the university gets the entire $50,000, and you get a tax
deduction for the full $50,000.
For donations of more than $1 million, consider
creating a charitable remainder trust, says Tom Abendroth, a partner at
Chicago-based law firm Schiff Hardin LLP, who focuses on estate planning and
charitable issues. This method allows donors to convert appreciated
securities or real estate into lifelong income without incurring
capital-gains tax.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Mortgages in Reverse: Taxpayers get hit by another federal housing
money loser," The Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324640104578165683785829580.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Spare a thought for
Shaun Donovan, who must be tired of crafting
nuanced explanations of how his agency costs taxpayers billions of dollars.
The latest example came this month when the Housing and Urban Development
Secretary told the Senate that the Federal Housing Administration's
once-modest reverse-mortgage program is the latest drain on taxpayers thanks
to gross mismanagement.
Or as Mr. Donovan delicately put it to Tennessee
Senator
Bob Corker, the FHA's reverse-mortgage business is
an "important" issue that the agency needs "to make changes on." You don't
say.
HUD's independent actuary estimated last month that
the FHA will lose $2.8 billion this fiscal year on reverse mortgages, and in
the worst case $28.3 billion, with the losses stretching through 2019. The
feds have no idea how big the pool of red ink might be.
For those who haven't seen former Senator Fred
Thompson's TV ads, reverse mortgages are a type of home-equity loan for
Americans age 62 and older who have mostly or fully paid off their mortgage.
If the borrower can pay real-estate taxes, insurance and other fees, he can
borrow against the home and stay in it until death. Then the lender demands
repayment with interest.
The problem is that taxpayers, via the FHA, insure
lenders against the funds they advance plus accrued interest, and borrowers
can also borrow to pay the fees. FHA did fewer than 50,000 reverse-mortgage
deals a year until 2006, when the housing mania went galactic. By 2007, the
agency was insuring more than 100,000 reverse mortgages, and by 2009 the
average FHA-backed reverse mortgage reached $262,763, often paid in a lump
sum.
At least FHA guarantees for home purchases foster
Congress's professed goal of homeownership—though we've seen in the housing
bust how that misallocates capital. But guarantees for reverse mortgages go
to people who are already homeowners who want to cash out of a real-estate
asset. That's fine if they want to do it at their own risk. FHA's guarantees
are essentially a subsidy for older Americans to spend down their savings.
FHA crowded out competitors and now accounts for 90% of outstanding reverse
mortgages.
The FHA's analysts didn't foresee an extended
period of house price declines and didn't price mortality risk properly.
Many loans are now worth more than the house itself, and heirs decided to
walk away. FHA has to foot the bill for selling the house and make good on
the shortfall between the net proceeds and what lenders are owed on the
insurance. Taxpayers are ultimately on the hook.
So now comes the usual Beltway talk about reform to
try to save a program that shouldn't exist. The National Reverse Mortgage
Lenders Association wants to limit the amount that borrowers can draw
upfront and have lenders do more stringent underwriting and set aside money
to cover taxes and insurance. Mr. Donovan told the Senate he wants to make
the program "much more effective and safe."
Continued in article
The sad state of governmental accounting (it's all done with smoke and
mirrors) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
"New Platform Lets Professors Set Prices for Their Online Courses," by
Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/New-Platform-Lets-Professors/136251/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Professors typically don't worry about what price
point an online course will sell at, or what amenities might attract a
student to pick one course over another. But a new online platform,
Professor Direct, lets instructors determine not only how much to charge for
such courses, but also how much time they want to devote to services like
office hours, online tutorials, and responding to students' e-mails.
The new service is run by StraighterLine, a company
that offers online, self-paced introductory courses. Unlike massive open
online courses, or MOOC's, StraighterLine's courses aren't free. But tuition
is lower than what traditional colleges typically charge—the company calls
its pricing "ultra-affordable." A handful of colleges accept StraighterLine
courses for transfer credit.
Instructors who offer courses on Professor Direct
will be able to essentially set their own sticker prices, as long as they
are higher than the company's base price. One professor teaching an online
mathematics course with a base price of $49, for example, plans to charge
$99. For each student who signs up, the company will pocket the $49 base
price, and the professor gets the remaining $50.
The instructor in that math course is Dan Gryboski,
who has previously taught as an adjunct at the University of Colorado but is
taking the year off from traditional teaching so he can stay home and take
care of his three young children. He views Professor Direct as a way to keep
up his teaching within the time windows he now has for professional work.
It's also up to each professor using Professor
Direct to decide what services to offer students in addition to a core set
of materials prepared by the company. Mr. Gryboski says he is promising
students who sign up for his two math courses that he will quickly respond
to any e-mail questions they have about the material, that he will be
available for online office hours for two hours a week, and that he will
create additional tutorial videos to supplement the existing materials for
the courses. Valuing Their Own Work
The instructor thinks he can do that e-mailing in
short bursts throughout the day, and handle the other tasks when his
children are napping or after they've gone to bed at night. He decided to
cap enrollment in his courses at 50 students each—which he makes clear on
the course pages so students know that he won't be spread too thin. It is up
to each professor to set the caps for their courses.
"Students pay a premium to have professor contact,"
Mr. Gryboski explains. He sees two major selling points: that students can
talk with someone who knows the specifics of the course they are taking,
rather than an outside tutor, and that students can consult someone who is
familiar with exactly what will be on the tests in the course. "I know from
teaching that's what students want the most," Mr. Gryboski adds.
The service puts instructors in the novel position
of setting the value of their work, even as they seek to reach students who
can't afford traditional options. Mr. Gryboski says he decided to start by
seeking to make about what he has been paid as an adjunct, but he hopes to
raise how much he earns in the future if things go well. "I see it kind of
like an introductory offer," he says of his current pricing strategy.
StraighterLine also offers professors commissions
for students they attract to the courses, says Burck Smith, the company's
chief executive.
Mr. Smith adds that he hopes professors will devise
a number of teaching models at a variety of prices. "You'll have very
expensive high-touch, high-cost courses. You'll have low-touch, low-cost
courses. You'll have everything in between," he says. "You'll have branded
people who can charge premiums."
Think tanks and associations have also expressed an
interest in using the platform, he says.
For instance, the Ashoka Foundation, which hopes to
create a new generation of social entrepreneurs, is considering running four
courses with StraighterLine and offering an entrepreneurship certificate to
those who complete the bundle of courses. "It allows them to be a college in
a way but not have to do all the stuff that colleges do," Mr. Smith says.
A post on the company's blog describing the new
service argues that the idea "draws remarkably on the earliest history of
the university, when outstanding scholars attracted a following of students
and were paid directly by students." All Kinds of Instructors
StraighterLine is not the first to try such an
approach. A company called Udemy also runs a platform that lets professors
teach courses for personal profit—though none of the company's courses are
approved for college credit.
Most people teaching on Udemy have no connection to
colleges or universities. Many are book authors, consultants, or just people
passionate about a topic or discipline. They can charge any price they want;
30 percent of any fees go to Udemy, and the rest to the instructors.
More than 35 professors at traditional colleges are
using the platform so far, though most of them are offering their courses at
no charge, Eren Bali, a co-founder of Udemy, said in an interview this fall.
One professor who has put a price on his Udemy
course is David Janzen, an associate professor of computer science at the
California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. He priced his
course at $89 per student. His goal was not to rake in money, he says, but
to bring in about the same amount per hour as he does with his consulting
work. And his price is lower than that of the typical Udemy course, many of
which cost $99.
"It seemed to be a good, reasonable price," Mr.
Janzen says.
His course builds on a series of online labs he has
created as part of his research, using what he calls "step based" exercises.
"You can't go to the next step until you pass this step," he explains.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It would seem that demand will depend upon the reputation of the instructor
combined with accreditation of the program that offers the courses for a fee.
Students might pay for courses for learning sake, but they probably won't pay
much unless the course credits are accepted for transfer credit in most colleges
and universities. For respect, the courses must have rigorous academic standards
where grades are assigned on the basis of competency and not just effort.
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, EdX, and MITx from prestigious universities
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
"Open-Book, Closed-Book, or 'Cheat Sheet'? Researchers Test the Merits of
Different Exam Types," by Dan Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education,
December 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Open-Book-Closed-Book-or/136249/
Like many faculty members, Afshin M. Gharib and
William L. Phillips have strong preferences for giving certain types of
examinations.
Both men, associate professors of psychology at
Dominican University of California, have kept up a running debate on the
topic. Mr. Gharib likes open-book tests because the scores result in a
normal, bell-shaped distribution curve and do not stress out his students.
Mr. Phillips favors tests in which students can
prepare a crib sheet with material from the course. He has held fast to the
belief that the act of preparing a crib sheet produces an added educational
benefit.
Most professors, they acknowledge, go with a third
option, the traditional closed-book style, which many see as the
most-rigorous of test types.
To help settle their debate, Mr. Gharib and Mr.
Phillips conducted a study of their students. The results appear in their
paper, "Cheat Sheet or Open-Book? A Comparison of the Effects of Exam Types
on Performance, Retention, and Anxiety," on which they collaborated with
Noelle Mathew, an undergraduate student at Dominican. The
article was published
recently in Psychology Research.
They studied 297 students who took eight sections
of an introductory psychology course and 99 students in four sections of a
statistics course. Mr. Gharib taught the psychology sections and Mr.
Phillips instructed in statistics. They used the same texts, assignments,
and exams in each of their sections.
Students in the psychology course took all three
forms of tests—open-book, closed-book, and one in which they could prepare a
letter-size piece of paper with as much information as they wanted, an
approach the researchers called a "cheat sheet" exam.
Students in the statistics course took the
open-book and cheat-sheet exams. They did not take a closed-book test
because it seemed unrealistic to expect students to remember long formulas,
said Mr. Phillips.
Students in the psychology course scored best on
the open-book exam, with cheat-sheet test scores coming in slightly lower,
and closed-book exams last. Statistics students fared better on the
open-book exams than they did on the cheat-sheet test.
"I think I won," said Mr. Gharib.
Pop Quiz
Two weeks after taking the second of the three
tests, the students were given a surprise closed-book quiz to measure how
well they had retained the material. To the researchers' surprise, students
retained the material equally well, regardless of the type of exam they had
originally taken.
The researchers also found that students who do
well on one type of exam also fare well on the other two, a finding that Mr.
Gharib said was particularly important.
"Type of exam, it turns out, really is not
important," he said. "You can measure students' learning and their ability
on any type of test you want."
Mr. Phillips agrees. "It kind of depends on what
you want the student to get out of the class and what your expectations
are," he said.
Students also completed a three-question survey
about which type of test they thought they would fare best on, which type
they would study for, and which they preferred. Students took a pretest
measure of anxiety on open-book and cheat-sheet tests.
Not surprisingly, students preferred open-book and
cheat-sheet exams over closed-book ones and reported the lowest levels of
anxiety when taking open-book exams.
But, again, the results yielded a surprise.
Students thought they would study most for the closed-book exams, but that
view was not reflected in reports of their actual habits. Students in the
psychology class spent the most time studying for the cheat-sheet exam, or
more than four hours. Open-book exams yielded slightly fewer hours of study,
while closed-book exams resulted in the least amount of time studying, 3.32
hours.
Statistics students, who took only two types of
tests, also spent more time studying for cheat-sheet exams.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I usually found take-home examinations did not separate my best students from
free riders.
So I generally alternated between cheat sheets and open-book examinations.
Probably most often I let students use their hand-written note books (typically
the note book of choice was a ring binder). If students had photocopied material
or computer printouts in their notebooks they could not use such notebooks on
cheat-sheet examinations. My students usually sat a class room with computer
stations. Computers remained turned off during cheat-sheet examinations. They
could be turned on during open-book examinations, but I usually did not allow
Web searching during examinations. I could monitor what was on a student's
screen at any time during any class period, including examination periods.
Sometimes examination answers were only placed in computer files.
My students consistently reported that the examinations they liked the
least were open-book examinations. That's because the questions were harder.
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm
"Doctoral Degrees Rose in 2011, but Career Options Weren't So Rosy,"
by Stacey Patten, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 5, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Doctoral-Degrees-Rose-in-2011/136133/
American universities awarded a total of 49,010
research doctorates in 2011, a 2-percent increase from 2010, according to an
annual survey by the National Science Foundation.
A report describing the survey's findings, released
on Wednesday, says that almost three-quarters of all doctorates awarded last
year were in science and engineering fields, a proportion that increased by
4 percent from the previous year. During the same period, the number of
doctorates awarded in the humanities declined by 3 percent.
That decline was attributed in part to the
reclassification of most doctor-of-education degrees as professional rather
than research doctorates. Without that decrease in education degrees, the
overall number of research doctorates awarded would have exceeded 50,000,
said Mark K. Fiegener, a project officer at the NSF.
Mr. Fiegener noted that certain trends were
continuing. "There's increased representation of women in all fields, with
greater numbers in the hard sciences and engineering," he said. "The same is
true with race and ethnicity, but to a lesser degree."
Women continue to become more prevalent with each
cohort of doctorate recipients, according to the report. They earned 42
percent of doctorates in science and engineering in 2011, up from 30 percent
20 years ago. The share of doctorates awarded to black students rose to over
6 percent in 2011, up from a little over 4 percent in 1991. And the
proportion of Hispanic doctorate recipients increased from a little over 3
percent in 1991 to just over 6 percent last year.
Despite the gains in degree attainment, trends on
postgraduate career opportunities appear to reflect the broader economic
malaise. The proportion of new doctoral recipients who reported having
definite job commitments or a postdoctoral position fell in both the
humanities and sciences, and was at the lowest level in the past 10 years.
Meanwhile, the proportion of students who planned
to pursue postdoctoral positions continued rising, especially in engineering
and social-science fields. Last year more than two-thirds of doctoral
graduates in the life sciences, and over half of those in engineering, took
postdoctoral positions immediately after graduation.
Five years ago 33 percent of graduates in the
humanities had no employment or postdoctoral commitments upon completion;
that number rose to 43 percent in 2011.
The report, "Doctorate Recipients From U.S.
Universities: 2011," is available on the National Science Foundation's
Web site.
"Chemistry Ph.D. Programs Need New Formula, Experts Say," by Stacey
Patton, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 10, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Chemistry-PhD-Programs-Need/136235/
The humanities disciplines are not alone in
grappling with how to stay relevant and prepare graduate students for jobs
that meet the demands of a rapidly changing labor market. Doctoral programs
in chemistry need to be overhauled, too, including by reducing students'
time to degree, the American Chemical Society says in a new report.
The chemical society released the report on Monday
at news conference here at which speakers discussed ways that doctoral
training needed to change to meet pressing societal needs and play a greater
role in producing new jobs. The
report, "Advancing Graduate Education in the
Chemical Sciences," focuses on five key areas of graduate education the
society says need to be overhauled: curricula, financial support, laboratory
safety, career opportunities, and mentoring of postdoctoral students.
Among the recommendations are that programs need to
be changed so that students can complete their Ph.D.'s in less than five
years and that the chemical society collect and publish data on student
outcomes in Ph.D. and postdoctoral programs.
The report is the result of a yearlong review that
was conducted by 22 scientists and other experts, mostly from universities
but also from industry, that the chemical society appointed to a commission.
Bassam Z. Shakhashiri, the chemical society's president, said at the news
conference that the report was "long overdue."
According to data from the society, nearly 25,000
jobs have been lost in chemical-manufacturing companies in the United States
since 2008, and layoffs continue. Employment patterns are also changing, as
chemical companies are hiring fewer new graduates of chemistry Ph.D.
programs than in the past. Small businesses are continuing to hire more new
chemistry Ph.D.'s but at slow rates.
Experts in the field say they face a conundrum:
Innovation in chemistry is declining at the very time that society needs
scientists to come up with solutions to problems like climate change and
obesity, to further drug discoveries, and to help find ways of improving
food generation, infrastructure, and water supplies.
Graduate education in the American sciences,
speakers at the news conference said, has not kept pace with global
economic, social, and political changes since World War II, when the current
graduate-education system evolved.
Among the members of the commission that drafted
the recommendations were Larry R. Faulkner, president emeritus of the
Houston Endowment and former president of the University of Texas at Austin,
who was the panel's chair; Paul L. Houston, dean of the College of Sciences
at Georgia Institute of Technology, who was the panel's executive director;
Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the Association of American
Universities; and Peter J. Stang, a professor at the University of Utah, the
2013 Priestley Medal winner, and editor of the Journal of the American
Chemical Society.
The commission recommended that:
- Curricula be refreshed to sufficiently prepare
students for careers once they graduate. That includes cutting
time-to-degree to less than five years, closing gaps in students'
ability to communicate complex topics to both technical and nontechnical
audiences, teaching students to work more collaboratively across
disciplines, and requiring students to learn new science and technology
outside of their academic training. Departments also need to be more
transparent about the kinds of career opportunities available to their
Ph.D. students.
- The current system of financial support for
graduate students be overhauled. While student debt was not discussed at
length because most students in the field receive research grants and
fellowships, the speakers said that the support system now in place
rests too heavily on individual research grants and involves serious
conflicts between the education of graduate students and the needs of
grant-supported research. The committee recommended that federal and
state agencies, private foundations, and universities take steps to
"decouple" more student-support funds from specific research projects so
that students will have better balance between their teaching
responsibilities and their research as they seek to finish their degrees
in less than five years.
- Departments review the size and mix of
students in their programs. While the speakers said it was important to
welcome international students, programs need to place a high priority
on building "the domestic fraction of their graduate enrollments,"
especially students from underrepresented minority groups.
- Academic chemical laboratories adopt best
safety practices to protect students and other workers. Noting the heavy
publicity that
laboratory accidents and findings of safety
violations have drawn, speakers said that faculty need to lead by
example and create a "culture of safety" in campus labs. They also
called for uniform lab-safety standards across campuses.
- The American Chemical Society collect and
publish data on Ph.D. and postdoctoral student outcomes, organized by
department, on time-to-degree, types of job placements, salaries, and
overall student satisfaction with the graduate experience and employment
outcome.
- Institutions, departments, and faculty mentors
take greater responsibility for ensuring that postdoctoral students are
integrated into the fabric of the faculty and receive better mentoring
to support their professional development.
"This won't be a report that sits on the shelf,"
said Mr. Shakhashiri. "The ultimate goal is to have action taken."
The chemical society's board has already committed
$50,000 for "dissemination activities" to get the word out to faculty,
deans, college presidents, policy makers, agencies that provide financial
support, industries that employ chemical scientists and engineers, and
professional societies. The next phase will begin in 2013
An English professor worries as his daughter decides
to seek a Ph.D. in his discipline.
"Following the Family Trade," by David Chapman, Chronicle of Higher
Education, December 12. 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Following-the-Family-Trade/136223/
The Old English "ceapman" wandered from village to
village, peddling his wares from a bag or pushcart. Like all medieval
trades, it was expected that the children would take over the family
business from the parents, and Ceapman the Elder begat Ceapman the Younger.
From that trade name came the common surname "Chapman," which I myself bear
from some ancient unknown ancestor. And since, at some point, "chapmen" were
identified particularly with the selling of cheap pamphlets or small
books—"chapbooks"—it seems a particularly fitting name for an English
professor.
I had, of course, no idea that my daughter would
choose to follow in the same profession as my own. It is true that there are
pictures of me reading to her in utero, and that we bought her countless
books in her early childhood. But this was true for her brother as well, and
he always felt that classic literary works were the curse of a malicious god
on unsuspecting children.
In college, when my daughter decided to major in
English, I experienced both joy and apprehension. Of course, I was pleased
to be a part of her discovery of so many works that had enriched my own
life. And we shared that secret knowledge that was at the heart of the
medieval guild. We instantly understood why someone would wear a T-shirt
that said, "My mother is a fish." Spending a long afternoon in a good used
bookstore seemed like nirvana to both of us. We watched film adaptations
with the studious eye of experienced critics: "Can you believe they chose
her to play Jane Eyre? Did the screenwriters actually read
A Christmas Carol?" We were literary soulmates.
But I also had misgivings about what following her
father's trade might mean to her economic future. Sure, it was fine for me
to break away from my father's path—engineering—to pursue what I loved, but
I didn't want my daughter to worry constantly about making ends meet as I
had through graduate school and into my early years of teaching. Back then,
our idea of splurging was buying a boxed pizza at the grocery store and
renting a move on videotape. We clipped coupons, cut corners, and prayed
that the car wouldn't break down. When the liner came loose on the roof of
my old station wagon, I used thumb tacks to hold it in place and kept on
driving. The shiny tacks on the billowing red liner made it look like a
rolling Victorian bordello.
In spite of my dire warnings about poverty and
unemployment, my daughter decided to pursue a doctoral degree in English
with the hope of eventually landing a college teaching job. When she kept
getting a steady stream of doomsday articles about employment prospects for
college English teachers from everyone she knew (including her father), she
naturally grew a little defensive. She recently wrote to me explaining her
reason for persisting despite all the negative publicity:
"I am reminded of a scene in Tootsie where
Dustin Hoffman is auditioning for a role and frantically saying, 'You want
taller? I can be taller!' I think as students we all hit a
hyper-obsessive mode where we scan each document we write [in job
applications] for minute changes and fret over every revision. We try to
possess some sort of psychic knowledge that will let us read between the
lines of every job ad. At the end of the day, however, I just try to remind
myself that first, I love what I do. Whether I get a job or not, I'm glad I
decided to study the Victorian novel. And secondly, if I don't get a job the
world does not end. As I often tell my students, there are so many
opportunities for English majors, and even more for Ph.D.'s. And if that
doesn't work, I could try to make a living as a castaway on a Pacific
island. Reading Robinson Crusoe 10 times should have prepared me
for something."
In an odd quirk of fate, my daughter is actually
earning her Ph.D. from the same university where I received my first
graduate degree. Since we moved away from that area before she was born, and
she grew up in an entirely different region of the country, I was quite
surprised when she made that choice. It certainly had nothing to do with any
influence I possessed since all of my former professors have either gone on
to their reward or entirely forgotten me. The young guns of the department
that I knew in the 1980s are now the Old Guard.
When I was a graduate student there, our classes
met on the edge of the campus in a renovated old house that lent a bohemian
air to the program. I remember my old technical-writing professor would
bring his dog to class and talk about everything from ancient Roman
engineering manuals to analytic philosophy. When the dog began to whimper
and scratch at the door, he was expressing openly what many of us were
feeling on the inside. The department brought in a steady stream of
outstanding poets like Seamus Heaney and William Stafford. It was the first
time I had met someone in person whose work had been anthologized, and I
didn't know whether to shake hands or bow down to them like some medieval
saint.
My daughter's classes meet in one of those
corporate-looking classroom buildings, the kind that could readily be
converted into a field hospital in a time of natural disaster. Her own
experiences, although uncolored by the haze of nostalgia, focus on people as
well:
"I think it's the personalities, both of the
faculty and my fellow students, that make graduate school so enjoyable for
me. I know that in a Victorian film class you can mock the movies
unceasingly, but you mustn't bring popcorn. I know that in an 18th-century
class if you're willing to take a position, you will be asked to defend it
both with the text and with a full range of historical knowledge. I know
that in the Milton class you may be asked to act or sculpt scenes from clay.
It will be those moments—the unique ones that defined a class or a person in
a way I wouldn't have expected—that will stay with me. The show-offs, the
long-winded lecturers, the theory-obsessed philosophers, and the impractical
dreamers will always be part of any university, but it was my friends and
teachers who immersed me in meaningful conversation around great books that
are my fondest memories."
I've been curious in my discussions with my
daughter about what has changed in the narrative of English studies over the
past 30 years. Having graduated during the Golden Age of continental theory,
when Derrida reigned on the Olympian heights of deconstructionism and Terry
Eagleton was his Hermes, I've been surprised to learn that there is no new
theorist that has dominated the profession in the way Derrida and Foucault
did in the 1980s, as Northrop Frye did in the 1950s, or Brooks and Warren in
the pre-WWII years. Perhaps a victim of its own deconstruction, English
studies has found, as Yeats prophesied, "the center will not hold." Of
course, there are certainly the remnants of New Historicism and
deconstruction, with a smattering of gender criticism, postcolonial studies,
digital humanities, ecocriticism, film studies, food studies, animal
studies, and so on. At times, it seems more like a cable television guide
than an academic discipline.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on proposals for radical changes in doctoral programs
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DoctoralProgramChange
"Oklahoma State Didn't Report Sexual Assaults, Citing FERPA,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 13, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/12/13/oklahoma-state-didnt-report-sexual-assaults-citing-ferpa
An Oklahoma State University spokesman said
administrators declined to notify police about allegations that a fraternity
member had sexually assaulted nearly a dozen new members because it believed
the alleged perpetrator was protected under the Family Educational Rights
and Protection Act, Oklahoma’s
News On 6 reported. The university waited nearly
three weeks to go to police, handling the allegations through its own
disciplinary procedures at first. FERPA, which explicitly states that the
rule should not prevent institutions from approaching police with personally
identifiable information about a possible crime, prohibits colleges from
releasing identifying information in students’ private educational records.
Further, as Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law
Center, pointed out on the
FERPA Fact blog, universities are required under
the Clery Act to issue timely warnings to campus whenever criminal behavior
“represents a threat” to people there. Oklahoma State said it found a male
student responsible for four sexual misconduct violations; the student has
been suspended for three years. Local police are investigating the case.
Jensen Question
Why isn't this felon in jail?
He must've been a football star.
December 11, 2012 message from Dan Stone
Forthcoming in the Fall, 2012 AAA IS section
newsletter
---------------------------------
The following is a work of fiction. It represents
the (probably mistaken) views of the author and not necessarily those of any
saner, more reasonable person or persons, including members of the IS
section of the AAA, or, any other member or officer of the IS section, or,
of the AAA.
---------------------------------
The mad clockmakers’ guild labors in the
mountain kingdom of Strayhorn, near the clear waters of Lake Mystine.
Clockmakers do two tasks: (1) making hand-crafted artisan clocks and (2)
evaluating and approving the clocks made by other guild members.
Membership in the guild is restricted to those who labor as apprentices
to master clockmakers for four to six years, and who survive the
(sometimes) harsh treatment by clockmakers of their apprentices.
Constructing a single clock requires two to seven years and is usually
done in teams of clockmakers. Clockmakers are handsomely rewarded for
clocks that their fellow clockmakers approve. They receive nothing for
clocks that are rejected by fellow clockmakers, and, they receive no
compensation for evaluating and approving the clocks of others.
Competing teams of clockmakers use different
tools and methods. Therefore, it is unsurprising that clockmakers, when
evaluating clocks, favor those constructed using similar tools and
methods as they use in making their own clocks. As in any guild, petty
rivalries abound that lead the clocks of some teams to be favored by
other teams, and eschewed by rivals - usually independent of their
quality, craftsmanship, or accuracy. Although there are no substantive
differences in their clocks, the clocks of clockmakers who live closer
to the lake, i.e., in more beautiful and desirable locations, are
approved more often than those who live in the more remote, less
hospitable regions.
The citizens of Strayhorn consider the
clockmakers mad because the clockmakers waste most of the resources
provided to them, including time, metals, wood, and tools. Guild members
approve less than 10% of the clocks made by their fellow craftsmen. The
other 90% are burned, in large bonfires, in winter, to heat the
clockmaker’s homes and studios. Clockmakers’ opinions in evaluating and
approving clocks are sacred. They cannot be questioned or challenged
without punishment by the Guild’s leaders, who are appointed by
committees of clockmakers. This is another point on which the
clockmakers are considered mad: clockmakers receive little training in
evaluating the clocks of others; many know little or nothing about the
tools and methods used by clockmakers who work in other areas. But these
same clockmakers, when making clocks, at which they are highly skilled,
have over 90% of their clocks rejected by their fellow Guild members.
Periodically, the citizens of Strayhorn call
upon the Guild to reform, and to stop its remarkable waste of resources.
In addition, in their darker moments, often in winter, the citizens ask
why guild members are paid handsome salaries from the public treasury
despite wasting 90% of their time on failed clocks. Guild leaders
inevitably argue that this is the best possible system of clock making,
that any reforms or changes would threaten the Guild’s vitality and
viability, and that, after all, the citizens should be happy that they,
now and then, actually get a working, accurate clock that is sometimes
also beautiful. The Guild’s leaders have also created a new rule that
requires Guild members to burn their discarded clocks only during
daylight hours so that the citizens of Strayhorn are less likely to see
the flames produced by the resources wasted by the Guild’s members.
However, many guild members, particularly the older ones, are well paid,
comfortable, and delight in walking, on cold winter days, by the houses
warmed by the fires produced by their competing guild members’ burning
clocks. They share the view of another learned Professor, Dr. Pangloss,
that “all is for the best in the best of all possible <clockmaker>
worlds” (Voltaire 1829)
-------------------------------------
Commentary:
My (obvious, I hope) contention is that the above
parable opines on the manuscript submission and review process that we
employ in academe. Some of the assertions of this parable, which are
supported by published evidence, or my experiences, include:
1. PhD education requires 4-6 years to complete,
2. PhD students are sometimes mistreated by their
supervisors (Fine and Kurdek 1993),
3. The criteria for acceptance in journals are
capricious (Gans and Shepard, 1994); reviewers generally disagree in their
evaluations of manuscripts (Fiske and Fogg 1990; Fogg and Fiske 1993).
4. An approximate 10% acceptance rate at journals
(see AAA editor’s reports – which indicate acceptance rates of ~ 7 to 20%),
5. Scholars receive little (i.e., inadequate)
training in a very difficult task: reviewing manuscripts.
6. The rejection of manuscripts is sometimes
motivated by petty competitions among teams of rival authors (from my
experience as an editor; see also Moizer 2009; Frey 2003).
7. Schadenfreude, i.e., pleasure derived from the
misfortune of others, i.e., the rejection of competing researchers’ papers,
is an important but largely unacknowledged motivator in manuscript
evaluations (Frey 2003)
Reforms to ameliorate some of the above problems
include:
1. Widely available online reviewer, submitting
author, and reader evaluations of academic journals, using Yelp and eBay
like evaluations that are universally accessible.
2. Removal of abusive reviewers from the peer
evaluation system through activist editors and public disclosure of their
abusive behavior by editors and other scholars.
3. Training in writing constructive reviews for
scholarly communities.
4. Ethical education of young scholars regarding
the morale obligations of the review process, including fairness,
objectivity, and constructive comments.
References
Blank, R. M., 1991, "The effects of double-blind
versus single-blind reviewing: Experimental Evidence from The American
Economic Review," The American Economic Review, 81: 5 (December), 1041-
1067.
Fine, M. A. and L. A. Kurdek (1993). "Reflections
on Determining Authorship Credit and Authorship Order on Faculty-Student
Collaborations." American Psychologist 48(11 (November )): 1141- 1147
Fiske, D. W. and L. Fogg (1990). "But the Reviewers
Are Making Different Criticisms of My Paper - Diversity and Uniqueness in
Reviewer Comments." American Psychologist 45(5): 591-598.
Fogg, L. and D. W. Fiske (1993). "Foretelling the
Judgments of Reviewers and Editors." American Psychologist 48(3): 293-294.
Frey, B. S. "Publishing as Prostitution? - Choosing
between One's Own Ideas and Academic Success.", Public Choice 116, no. 1-2
(Jul 2003): 205-23.
Gans, J. S., and G. B. Shepard, 1994, "How are the
mighty fallen: rejected classic articles by leading economists," Journal of
Economic Perspectives, 8: 1 (Winter), 165-179.
Moizer, P. "Publishing in Accounting Journals: A
Fair Game?" Accounting Organizations and Society 34, no. 2 (Feb 2009):
285-304.
Voltaire. 1829. Candide. 2 vols Paris,: Caillot.
+++ AECM Home Page (View archives, unsubscribe,
etc.): http://www.aecm.org +++ Dan Stone
3:13 PM (15 hours ago)
to AECM Forthcoming in the AAA IS section fall 2012
newsletter
----------------------------------
A Reply: Baking Better Bread by Roger Debreceny
Guilds are an important part of the functioning
of a modern economy. When managed well, guilds bring theoretical and
applied learning to a knowledge domain. There is no comparison between
the products of a German master guild baker (for example) with those of
their counterparts in the USA. The same can be said for many other
disciplines including medicine. The problem is not necessarily with the
notion of a guild but with the training in the guild. Our problems often
arise as a result of tenure and promotion performance metrics
influencing our learning and knowledge production systems. The need to
rush out two or three papers in a handful of accepted journals leads to
PhD dissertations made up of three papers ready to go to journals. This
leads in turn to concentrated and narrow PhD preparation that
discourages the wide reading that was typical of earlier iterations of
PhD study.
Within our section there is probably little
that we can do to change now strongly entrenched PhD factories. We can,
however, change the way that we do business within the section and the
Journal of Information Systems. We can do more to improve the flow of
papers through the JIS. We must not forget that reviews often
significantly improve the quality of papers. I have observed this as
author, reviewer and editor. Further, I think that we generally have
more flexible reviewers in the accounting information systems domain
than elsewhere in the discipline. There is more that we can do, however.
Here are some suggestions that might improve the process:
• Pre-submission screening .. offer authors the
opportunity to get informal feedback on a near to final draft. This
might ensure that papers going to reviewers would be of higher quality.
Talking about metrics – would a paper that came in for screening and was
not subsequently completed count as a rejection? It is curious, that we
revel in poor quality: “Look at me! I’m a high quality journal. I reject
90% of submissions!” That would never be acceptable in other areas of
knowledge creation or use.
• Naming reviewers on the paper (some MIS
journals are doing this already)
• Rating reviewers on consistent metrics
• Rewarding reviewers (financially or in some
other tangible way) -- why just have one best reviewer award? Why not as
many awards as reviewers meet five star ratings in the year? Why not
give a complimentary mid-year meeting registration for each five star
reviewer?
• Clearly stating expectations of reviewers.
• Working with authors to get the paper to
publishable form (our current editor, Miklos Vasarhelyi excels in this)
• Clearly stating expectations of authors
• Taking risks on papers and theme issues
• Experimenting with production processes
Jensen Comment on Defense Mechanisms
The publication hurdles combined with publish-or-perish obstacles to
promotion and tenure have led to some questionable defenses, especially
in accountics science.
Accounting is not alone as a discipline
questioning its doctoral programs and its promotion and tenure criteria. The
most vocal discipline seeking change is the Modern Languages Association
(MLA) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
Rethinking Tenure,
Dissertations, and Scholarship
A Dramatic Proposal for
Change in Humanities Education
A panel of some of the top professors of foreign
languages has concluded that the programs that train undergraduate majors
and new Ph.D.’s are seriously off course, with so much emphasis on
literature that broader understanding of cultures and nations has been lost
. . . The implications of this call for change are, several panel members
said, “revolutionary” and potentially quite controversial. For example, the
measures being called for directly challenge the tradition in which first
and second-year language instruction is left in many departments to
lecturers, who frequently play little role in setting curricular policy. The
panel wants to see tenure-track professors more involved in all parts of
undergraduate education and — in a challenge to the hierarchy of many
departments — wants departments to include lecturers who are off the tenure
track in planning the changes and carrying them out.
Scott Jaschik, "Dramatic Plan for Language Programs," Inside Higher Ed,
January 2, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/02/languages
A ‘Radical’ Rethinking of Scholarly Publishing
"Upgrading to Philosophy 2.0," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed,
December 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/apa
There was no theorizing
about ghosts in the machine at an annual meeting of philosophers last
Friday. Instead, they embraced technology’s implications for their
field, both within the classroom and beyond.
. . .
Harriet E. Baber of the
University of San Diego thinks scholars should try to make their work as
accessible as possible, forget about the financial rewards of publishing
and find alternative ways to referee each other’s work. In short, they
should ditch the current system of paper-based academic journals that
persists, she said, by “creating scarcity,” “screening” valuable work
and providing scholars with entries in their CVs.
“Now why would it be a
bad thing if people didn’t pay for the information that we produce?” she
asked, going over the traditional justifications for the current order —
an incentive-based rationale she dubbed a “right wing, free marketeer,
Republican argument.”
Instead, she argued,
scholars (and in particular, philosophers) should accept that much of
their work has little market value ("we’re lucky if we could give away
this stuff for free") and embrace the intrinsic rewards of the work
itself. After all, she said, they’re salaried, and “we don’t need
incentives external [to] what we do.”
That doesn’t include
only journal articles, she said; class notes fit into the paradigm just
as easily. “I want any prospective student to see this and I want all
the world to see” classroom materials, she added.
Responding to questions
from the audience, she noted that journals’ current function of
refereeing content wouldn’t get lost, since the “middlemen” merely
provide a venue for peer review, which would still happen within her
model.
“What’s going to happen
pragmatically is the paper journals will morph into online journals,”
she said.
Part of the purpose of
holding the session, she implied, was to nudge the APA into playing a
greater role in any such transition: “I’m hoping that the APA will
organize things a little better.”
This could just have easily have been a
Joe Hoyle blog
"How am I doing? Reflections on What Teaching Entails," by Rosalie
Arcala Hall, Inside Higher Ed, December 13, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/how-am-i-doing-reflections-what-teaching-entails
Jensen Comment
I agree with Professor Hall states, but I think she has not perhaps studied
or experienced the power of intense electronic communications that are both
more spontaneous and often more revealing than face-to-face office hour
encounters. The power of such electronic communications was discovered early
on in the SCALE experiments at the University of Illinois ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois
Tax Professor Amy Dunbar also demonstrated the power of such online
communications between an instructor and her students ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm
Obviously such intense online communications are not generally feasible
when there are hundreds or thousands of student online or onsite. There may,
however, be smaller recitation sections with teaching assistants who
communicate intensely with students.
Academic Publishing in the Digital Age: Scott McLemee claims this is
a "must read"
"Sailing from Ithaka," By Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, August
1, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/08/01/mclemee
It’s not always clear
where the Zeitgeist ends and synchronicity kicks in, but Intellectual
Affairs just got hit going and coming.
In
last week’s column, we checked
in on a professor who was struggling to clear his office
of books. They had been piling up and possibly breeding
at night. In particular, he said, he found that he
seldom needed to read a monograph more than once. In a
pinch, it would often be possible to relocate a given
reference through a digital search – so why not pass the
books along to graduate students? And so he did.
While getting ready to shoot that
article into the Internet’s
“series of tubes,” my editor
also passed along a copy of “University Publishing in a
Digital Age” – a report sponsored by Ithaka and JSTOR.
It was released late last week. On
Thursday, IHE ran a
detailed and informative article
about the Ithaka Report, as I
suppose it is bound to be known in due time. The groups
that prepared the document propose the creation of “a
powerful technology, service, and marketing platform
that would serve as a catalyst for collaboration and
shared capital investment in university-based
publishing.”
Clearly
this would be a vaster undertaking than JSTOR, even. The
Ithaka Report may very well turn out to be a turning
point in the recent history, not only of scholarly
publishing, but of scholarship itself. And yet only a
few people have commented on the proposal so far – a
situation that appears, all things considered, very
strange.
So, at
the risk of being kind of pushy about it, let me put it
this way: More or less everyone reading this column who
has not already done so ought (as soon as humanly
possible) to get up to speed on the Ithaka Report. I say
that in spite of the fact that the authors of the report
themselves don’t necessarily expect you to read it.
It’s
natural to think of scholarship and publishing as
separate enterprises. Each follows its own course –
overlapping at some points but fundamentally distinct
with respect to personnel and protocols. The preparation
and intended audience for the Ithaka Report reflects
that familiar division of things. It is based on surveys
and interviews with (as it says) “press directors,
librarians, provosts, and other university
administrators.” But not – nota bene! — with scholars.
Which is no accident, because “this report,” says the
report, “is not directed at them.”
The point bears stressing. But
it’s not a failing, as such. Press directors and
university librarians tend to have a macroscopic view of
the scholarly public that academic specialists, for the
most part do not. And it’s clear those preparing the
report are informed about current discussions and
developments within professional associations – e.g.,
those leading to the recent
MLA statement on tenure and
promotion.
But
scholars can’t afford to ignore the Ithaka Report just
because they were not consulted directly and are not
directly addressed as part of its primary audience. On
the contrary. It merits the widest possible attention
among people doing academic research and writing.
The report calls for
development of “shared electronic publishing
infrastructure across universities to save costs, create
scale, leverage expertise, innovate, extend the brand of
US higher education, create an interlinked environment
of information, and provide a robust alternative to
commercial competitors.” (It sounds, in fact, something
like
AggAcad, except on steroids
and with a billion dollars.)
The
existence of such an infrastructure would condition not
only the ability of scholars to publish their work, but
how they do research. And in a way, it has already
started to do so.
The
professor interviewed for last week’s column decided
to clear his shelves in part because he expected to be
able to do digital searches to track down things he
remembered reading. Without giving away too much of this
professor’s identity away, I can state that he is not
someone prone to fits of enthusiasm for every new gizmo
that comes along. Nor does he work in a field of study
where most of the secondary (let alone primary)
literature is fully digitalized.
But he’s
taking it as a given that for some aspects of his work,
the existing digital infrastructure allows him to
offload one of the costs of research. Office space being
a limited resource, after all.
It’s not
that online access creates a substitute for reading
print-based publications. On my desk at the moment, for
example, is a stack of pages printed out after a session
of using Amazon’s Inside the Book feature. I’ll take
them to the library and look some things up. The
bookseller would of course prefer that we just hit the
one-click, impulse-purchase button they have so
thoughtfully provided; but so it goes. This kind of
thing is normal now. It factors into how you do
research, and so do a hundred other aspects of digital
communication, large and small.
The implicit question now is
whether such tools and trends will continue to develop
in an environment overwhelmingly shaped by the needs and
the initiatives of private companies. The report raises
the possibility of an alternative: the creation of a
publishing infrastructure designed specifically to meet
the needs of the
community of scholars.
Continued in article
Also see "New Model for University Presses," The University of
Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication Blog, July 31, 2007 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
As posted in Open Access News...
It’s the nightmare-come-true scenario for many an academic:
You spend years writing a book in your field, send it off to
a university press with an interest in your topic, the
outside reviewers praise the work, the editors like it too,
but the press can’t afford to publish it. The book is
declared too long or too narrow or too dependent on
expensive illustrations or too something else. But the
bottom line is that the relevant press, with a limited
budget, can’t afford to release it, and turns you down,
while saying that the book deserves to be published.
That’s
the situation scholars find themselves in increasingly these
days, and press editors freely admit that they routinely
review submissions that deserve to be books, but that can’t
be, for financial reasons. The underlying economic bind
university presses find themselves in is attracting
increasing attention, including last week’s much awaited
report from Ithaka, “University Publishing in a Digital
Age,” which called for
universities to consider entirely new models.
One
such new model is about to start operations: The
Rice University Press, which was eliminated in 1996, was
revived last year with the idea
that it would publish online only, using low-cost
print-on-demand....
Rice is
going to start printing books that have been through the
peer review process elsewhere, been found to be in every way
worthy, but impossible financially to publish....
Some of the
books Rice will publish, after they went through peer review
elsewhere, will be grouped together as “The Long Tail
Press.” In addition, Rice University Press and Stanford
University Press are planning an unusual collaboration in
which Rice will be publishing a series of books reviewed by
Stanford and both presses will be associated with the work….
Alan Harvey,
editor in chief at Stanford, said he saw great potential not
only to try a new model, but to test the economics of
publishing in different formats. Stanford might pick some
books with similar scholarly and economic potential, and
publish some through Rice and some in the traditional way,
and be able to compare total costs as well as scholarly
impact. “We’d like to make this a public experiment and post
the results,” he said.
Another part
of the experiment, he said, might be to explore “hybrid
models” of publishing. Stanford might publish most of a book
in traditional form, but a particularly long bibliography
might appear online…
University Publishing in a Digital Age
In case you've not seen
the notices, the non-profit organization Ithaka
has just released a report on the state of
university press publishing today,
University Publishing in a Digital Age.
Based on a detailed study
of university presses, which morphed into a
larger examination of the relationship among
presses, libraries and their universities, the
report's authors suggest that university presses
focus less on the book form and consider a major
collaborative effort to assume many of the
technological and marketing functions that most
presses cannot afford; they also suggest that
universities be more strategic about the
relationship of presses to broader institutional
goals.
|
.
|
The Digital Revolution and
Higher Education ---
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/College-presidents.aspx
Question
What is "scholarship" as a substitute for "research" as a tenure criterion?
Scholarship = the mastery of existing knowledge, including writing and
sharing via review articles, tutorials, online videos, Website content, etc.
Research = the production of new knowledge from conception to rigorous
analysis, including insignificant fleecing to new knowledge that overturns
conventional wisdom.
"‘Scholarship Reconsidered’ as Tenure Policy," by Scott Jaschik, Inside
Higher Ed, October 2, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/02/wcu
In 1990,
Ernest Boyer published Scholarship Reconsidered,
in which he argued for abandoning the traditional
“teaching vs. research” model on prioritizing faculty
time, and urged colleges to adopt a much broader
definition of scholarship to replace the traditional
research model. Ever since, many experts on tenure, not
to mention many junior faculty members, have praised
Boyer’s ideas while at the same time saying that
departments still tend to base tenure and promotion
decisions on traditional measures of research success:
books or articles published about new knowledge, or
grants won.
Scholarship
Reconsidered may make sense, but the fear has been that
too many colleges pay only lip service to its ideas,
rather than formally embracing them — at least that’s
the conventional wisdom. Indeed, a trend in recent years
has been for colleges — even those not identified as
research universities — to take advantage of the tight
academic job market in some fields to ratchet up tenure
expectations, asking for two books instead of one, more
sponsored research and so forth.
Western
Carolina University — after several years of discussions
— has just announced a move in the other direction. The
university has adopted Boyer’s definitions for
scholarship to replace traditional measures of research.
The shift was adopted unanimously by the Faculty Senate,
endorsed by the administration and just cleared its
final hurdle with approval from the University of North
Carolina system. Broader definitions of scholarship will
be used in hiring decisions, merit reviews, and tenure
consideration.
Boyer,
who died in 1995, saw the traditional definition of
scholarship — new knowledge through laboratory
breakthroughs, journal articles or new books — as too
narrow. Scholarship, Boyer argued, also encompassed the
application of knowledge, the engagement of scholars
with the broader world, and the way scholars teach.
All of
those models will now be available to Western Carolina
faculty members to have their contributions evaluated.
However, to do so, the professors and their departments
will need to create an outside peer review panel to
evaluate the work, so that scholarship does not become
simply an extension of service, and to ensure that rigor
is applied to evaluations.
Lee S.
Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching (through which Boyer did much of
his work), said Western Carolina’s shift was
significant. While colleges have rushed to put Boyer’s
ideas into their mission statements, and many individual
departments have used the ideas in tenure reviews,
putting this philosophy in specific institutional tenure
and promotion procedures is rare, he said. “It’s very
encouraging to see this beginning to really break
through,” he said. What’s been missing is “systematic
implementation” of the sort Western Carolina is now
enacting, he said.
What
could really have an impact, Shulman said, is if a few
years from now, Western Carolina can point to a cohort
of newly tenured professors who won their promotions
using the Boyer model.
John
Bardo, chancellor at Western Carolina, said that a good
example of the value of this approach comes from a
recent tenure candidate who needed a special exemption
from the old, more traditional tenure guidelines. The
faculty member was in the College of Education and
focused much of his work on developing online tools that
teachers could use in classrooms. He focused on
developing the tools, and fine-tuning them, not on
writing reports about them that could be published in
journals.
“So when
he came up for tenure, he didn’t have normal
publications to submit,” Bardo said. Under a trial of
the system that has now been codified, the department
assembled a peer review team of experts in the field,
which came back with a report that the professors’
online tools “were among the best around,” Bardo said.
The
professor won tenure, and Bardo said it was important to
him and others to codify the kind of system used so that
other professors would be encouraged to make similar
career choices. Bardo said that codification was also
important so that departments could make initial hiring
decisions based on the broader definition of
scholarship.
Asked
why he preferred to see his university use this
approach, as opposed to the path being taken by many
similar institutions of upping research expectations,
Bardo quoted a union slogan used when organizing workers
at elite universities: “You can’t eat prestige.”
The
traditional model for evaluating research at American
universities dates to the 19th century, he said, and
today does not serve society well in an era with a broad
range of colleges and universities. While there are top
research universities devoted to that traditional role,
Bardo said that “many emerging needs of society call for
universities to be more actively involved in the
community.” Those local communities, he said, need to
rely on their public universities for direct help, not
just basic research.
Along
those lines, he would like to see engineering professors
submit projects that relate to helping local businesses
deal with difficult issues. Or historians who do oral
history locally and focus on collecting the histories
rather than writing them up in books. Or on professors
in any number of fields who could be involved in helping
the public schools.
In all
of those cases, Bardo said, the work evaluated would be
based on disciplinary knowledge and would be subject to
peer review. But there might not be any publication
trail.
Faculty
members have been strongly supportive of the shift. Jill
Ellern, a librarian at the university (where librarians
have faculty status), said that a key to the shift is
the inclusion of outside reviews. “We don’t want to lose
the idea of evaluations,” she said. “But publish or
perish just isn’t the way to go.”
Richard
Beam, chair of the Faculty Senate and an associate
professor of stage and screen in the university’s
College of Fine and Performing Arts, said that the
general view of professors there is that “putting great
reliance on juried publication of traditional research
didn’t seem to be working well for a lot of institutions
like Western. We’re not a Research I institution —
that’s not our thrust.”
Bob Jensen's threads on tenure can be found in the following links:
(Teaching vs. Research) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#TeachingVsResearch
(Micro-level Research) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MicroLevelResearch
(Co-authoring) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#JointAuthorship
(Scholarship in the Humanities) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
(Obsolete and Dysfunctional Tenure) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Tenure
Bob Jensen's threads on the
flawed peer review process are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReviewFlaws
College campuses display a
striking uniformity of thought
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield once famously
advised a conservative colleague to wait until he had tenure and only then
to "hoist the Jolly Roger." But few professors are getting around to
hoisting the Jolly Roger at all. Either they don't have a viewpoint that is
different from their colleagues, or they've decided that if they are going
to remain at one place for several decades, they'd rather just get along. Is
tenure to blame for the unanimity of thinking in American universities? It's
hard to tell. But shouldn't the burden of proof be on the people who want
jobs for life?
Naomi Schafer Riley, "Tenure and Academic Freedom: College campuses display
a striking uniformity of thought," The Wall Street Journal, June 23,
2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571593663539265.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
The Digital Revolution and Higher Education ---
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/College-presidents.aspx
Controversies in the anonymous blind review process of research journals
"Kill Peer Review or Reform It?" by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher
Ed, January 6, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/06/humanities-scholars-consider-role-peer-review
Thank you Ron Huefner for the heads up.
"Blind peer review is
dead. It just doesn’t know it yet." That's the way Aaron J. Barlow, an
associate professor of English at the College of Technology of the City
University of New York, summed up his views here on the future of the
traditional way of deciding whose work gets published in the humanities.
Barlow didn't dispute
that most of the top journals in the humanities continue to select
papers this way. But speaking at a session of the annual meeting of the
Modern Language Association, he argued that technology has so changed
the ability of scholars to share their findings that it's only a matter
of time before people rise up against the conventions of traditional
journal publishing.
While others on the
panel and in the audience argued for a reformed peer review as
preferable to Barlow's vision of smashing the enterprise, and some
questioned the practicality of simply walking away from peer review
immediately, the idea that the system needs radical change was not
challenged. Barlow said that the system might have been justified once
when old-style publishing put a significant limit on the quantity of
scholarship that could be shared. But in a new era, he said, the
justifications were gone. (Reflecting the new technology era, Barlow and
one other panelist spoke via Skype, to an audience that included two
tables and wireless for bloggers and Twitter users -- and this
journalist -- to write about the proceedings as they were taking place.)
To many knowing nods in
the room, Barlow argued that the traditional system of blind peer review
-- in which submissions are sent off to reviewers, whose judgments then
determine whether papers are accepted, with no direct communication with
authors -- had serious problems with fairness. He said that the system
rewards "conformity" and allows for considerable bias.
He described a recent
experience in which he was recruited by "a prestigious venue" to review
a paper that related in some ways to research he had done. Barlow's work
wasn't mentioned anywhere in the piece. Barlow said he realized that the
journal editor figured Barlow would be annoyed by the omission. And
although he was, Barlow said he didn't feel assigning the piece to him
was fair to the author. "It was a set-up. The editor didn't want a
positive review, so the burden of rejection was passed on to someone the
author would not know."
He refused to go along,
and said he declined to review the paper when he realized what was going
on. This sort of "corruption" is common, he said.
Barlow has a long
publishing record, so his frustrations with the system can't be chalked
up to being unable to get his ideas out there. But he said that when one
of his papers was recently rejected, he simply published it on his blog
directly, where comments have come in from fans and foes of his work.
"I love the editorial
process" when comments result in a piece becoming better, he said, and
digital publishing allows this to happen easily. But traditional peer
review simply delays publication and leaves decision-making "in the
dark." Peer review -- in the sense that people will comment on work and
a consensus may emerge that a given paper is important or not -- doesn't
need to take place prior to publication, he said.
"We don't need the
bottleneck or the corruption," he said. The only reason blind peer
review survives is that "we have made appearance in peer reviewed
journals the standard" for tenure and promotion decisions. That will
change over time, he predicted, and then the traditional system will
collapse.
Peer Review Plus
While Barlow noted the
ability of digital publishing to bypass peer review, the idea of an
intense, collaborative process for selecting pieces and improving them
came at the session from the editor of Kairos, an online
journal on rhetoric and technology that publishes work prepared for the
web. Kairos has become an influential journal, but Cheryl Ball,
the editor and an associate professor of English at Illinois State
University, discussed how frustrating it is that people assume that an
online journal must not have peer review. "Ignorance about digital
scholarship" means that she must constantly explain the journal, she
said.
Kairos uses
a
three-stage review process. First, editors
decide if a submission makes sense for a review. Then, the entire
editorial board discusses the submission (online) for two weeks, and
reaches a consensus that is communicated to the author with detailed
letters from the board. (Board members' identities are public, so there
is no secrecy about who reviews pieces.) Then, if appropriate, someone
is assigned to work with the author to coach him or her on how to
improve the piece prior to publication.
As Ball described the
process, thousands of words are written about submissions, and lengthy
discussions take place -- all to figure out the best content for the
journal. But there are no secret reviewers, and the coaching process
allows for a collaborative effort to prepare a final version, not
someone guessing about how to handle a "revise and resubmit" letter.
The process is quite
detailed, but also allows for individual consideration of editorial
board members' concerns and of authors' approaches, Ball said. "Peer
reviewers don't need rubrics. They need good ways to communicate," she
said. Along those lines, Kairos is currently updating its tools
for editorial board consideration of pieces, to allow for synchronous
chat, the use of electronic "sticky notes" and other ways to help
authors not only with words, but with digital graphics and
illustrations.
Learning From
Law Reviews
Allen Mendenhall, a
Ph.D. student at Auburn University who is also a blogger and a lawyer,
suggested that humanities journals could take some lessons from law
reviews. Mendenhall is well aware of (and agrees with) many criticisms
of law reviews, and in particular of the reliance for decisions on law
students who may not know much about the areas of scholarship they are
evaluating.
Continued in article
A ‘Radical’ Rethinking of Scholarly Publishing
"Upgrading to Philosophy 2.0," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed,
December 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/apa
There was no theorizing
about ghosts in the machine at an annual meeting of philosophers last
Friday. Instead, they embraced technology’s implications for their
field, both within the classroom and beyond.
. . .
Harriet E. Baber of the
University of San Diego thinks scholars should try to make their work as
accessible as possible, forget about the financial rewards of publishing
and find alternative ways to referee each other’s work. In short, they
should ditch the current system of paper-based academic journals that
persists, she said, by “creating scarcity,” “screening” valuable work
and providing scholars with entries in their CVs.
“Now why would it be a
bad thing if people didn’t pay for the information that we produce?” she
asked, going over the traditional justifications for the current order —
an incentive-based rationale she dubbed a “right wing, free marketeer,
Republican argument.”
Instead, she argued,
scholars (and in particular, philosophers) should accept that much of
their work has little market value ("we’re lucky if we could give away
this stuff for free") and embrace the intrinsic rewards of the work
itself. After all, she said, they’re salaried, and “we don’t need
incentives external [to] what we do.”
That doesn’t include
only journal articles, she said; class notes fit into the paradigm just
as easily. “I want any prospective student to see this and I want all
the world to see” classroom materials, she added.
Responding to questions
from the audience, she noted that journals’ current function of
refereeing content wouldn’t get lost, since the “middlemen” merely
provide a venue for peer review, which would still happen within her
model.
“What’s going to happen
pragmatically is the paper journals will morph into online journals,”
she said.
Part of the purpose of
holding the session, she implied, was to nudge the APA into playing a
greater role in any such transition: “I’m hoping that the APA will
organize things a little better.”
"Hear the One About the Rejected Mathematician? Call it a scholarly
'Island of Misfit Toys,' Chronicle of Higher Education, August
12, 2009 ---
Click Here
Rejecta Mathematica is an open-access online journal that publishes
mathematical papers that have been rejected by others. Rejecta's motto
is caveat emptor, which is to say that the journal has no technical
peer-review process.
As The Economist notes in its article on
the journal, there are plenty of examples of scholars who have suffered
rejection, only to go on to become giants in their field. (OK, two.)
Nonetheless, if you have lots of free time on your hands, by all means,
check out the inaugural issue.
And if deciphering mathematical formulae
isn't your thing, stand by: Rejecta says it may open the floodgates to
other disciplines. Prospective franchisees are invited to contact the
journal.
Next up: Rejecta Rejecta, a journal for
articles too flawed for Rejects Mathematica, printed on single-ply
toilet paper.
‘Scholarship Reconsidered’ as Tenure Policy," by Scott Jaschik,
Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/02/wcu
"Time's Up for Tenure," Laurie Fendrich, Chronicle of Higher
Education's The Chronicle Review, April 18, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/fendrich/times-up-for-tenure?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
"Survey Identifies Trends at U.S. Colleges That Appear to Undermine
Productivity of Scholars," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher
Education, June 14, 2009 ---
Click Here
"What I Wish I'd Known About Tenure," by Leslie M. Phinney,
Inside Higher Ed, March 27, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2009/03/27/phinney
1. Striving for tenure at a university is like gambling in a
casino;
2. Becoming tenured is like joining a fraternity;
3. A tenure case is like a hunk of Swiss cheese;
4. The majority of those embarking on an academic career will end up
with tenure cases in the gray zone;
5. Just as there are risk factors for contracting a disease, risk
factors exist for not obtaining tenure;
6. True tenure is always being able to obtain another position;
7. The best type of tenure is that which matches your ideals and values;
8. Fight or flight decisions are part of the tenure process;
9. While important, tenure is only one facet in life.
Leslie M. Phinney was an assistant professor of mechanical
engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1997
until 2003. She received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award from
2000-2004 and a 2000 NASA/ASEE Faculty Fellowship at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratories. She is now a principal member of the technical staff at
Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, N.M.
Jensen Comment
I agree with Dr. Phinney on many points, but I disagree that tenure seeking
is like casino gambling. In a fair-game casino the odds are known and always
in favor of the house. In tenure seeking there are so many unpredictable
factors (departmental colleagues, college colleagues, university-level P&T
members, etc.) that the odds are most certainly not knowable. There are many
factors that are unpredictable such as what weight decision makers will put
upon student evaluations and journal quality where published work appears.
Tenure seeking is more like running for public office than casino gambling.
One of the big problems with tenure seeking is that
decision makers are usually not held accountable, although committee chairs
are often forced to write down reasons for rejection decisions.
One of the big advantages of tenure seeking is that
most colleges now require documentation of progress toward tenure every two
years or thereabouts. Tenure decisions should not come as a huge surprise in
the sixth year of appointment.
Another controversial problem is arises when the tenure
clock is suspended, sometimes unpaid, for a variety of reasons for which
there is some justification --- health of a family member, pregnancy, leaves
of absence from teaching, etc. The reason that these tenure clock
suspensions are controversial is that in many instances the tenure candidate
can do research and writing during the tenure clock suspension and thereby
gain some advantage over other candidates given no more than six years
before a final tenure decision is reached.
Jensen Comment
I've been a long-time advocated of greatly increased estate taxation. But I also
see problems if the threshold is set too high to protect family farms. Family
farm estates, along with many other estates like farm estates, have frequent
problems with liquidity. Estate taxes will exacerbate that problem to a point
where the assets of the estate (e.g., the farm land and equipment) must be
auctioned off to pay increased estate taxes. The end result will be
ever-increasing loss of family farms to big agribusiness conglomerates. Maybe
this is inevitable even without increasing estate taxes, but I would hope that
along with increases in estate taxation some innovative solutions are found to
allow farms to be passed on to family heirs rather than forcing these farms to
be victims of ever-increasing ownership of the land by giant and faceless
multinational corporations.
From the Scout Report on December 14, 2012
Online Dictation ---
http://ctrlq.org/dictation/
If you are looking for an online dictation program,
look no further than Online Dictation for use with Google Chrome. This
dictation program allows users to convert their spoken voice into digital
text with little fuss. Visitors just need to attach a microphone to their
computers to allow the program to pick up their voices. This version is
compatible with all computers running Google Chrome.
Shapeshifter ---
http://flamefusion.net/Software/Shapeshifter
If you have ever wanted a clipboard manager, this
program is for you. Shapeshifter allows visitors to manage their clipboard
history and customize how they use the materials on their clipboard. After
installing the program, visitors just need to press CTRL+V to view a
complete clipboard history for their convenience. This version is compatible
with all operating systems.
Can the introduction of new technologies transform the educational
experience in Africa?
Digital education in Kenya: Tablet Teachers
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21567972-schools-africa-are-going-digitalwith-encouraging-results-tablet-teachers
Microsoft pumps billions into education
http://www.gadget.co.za/pebble.asp?relid=5529
Kenya's mobile telephones: Vital for the poor
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21566022-report-describes-sacrifices-poor-make-keep-mobile-phone-vital
Digital technology in Africa-21st century challenges
http://www.21stcenturychallenges.org/challenges/digital-technology-in-africa/
The Transformational Use of Information and Communication Technologies in
Africa
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTINFORMATIONANDCOMMUNICATIONANDTECHNOLOGIES/Resources/282822-1346223280837/MainReport.pdf
Africa-Education: UNESCo
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/worldwide/education-regions/africa/
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
A Crash Course in English Literature: A New Video Series by Best-Selling
Author John Green ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/a_crash_course_in_english_literature.html
Subtle Distinctions in Technical Terminology
Machine Learning, Big Data, Deep Learning, Data Mining, Statistics, Decision &
Risk Analysis, Probability, Fuzzy Logic FAQ ---
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=6465
17 Animations of Classic Literary Works: From Plato and Shakespeare, to
Kafka, Hemingway and Gaiman ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/17_animations_of_classic_literary_works.html
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Richard Felder's Home Page
RESOURCES IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION
http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/RMF.html
Profiles of Scientists and Engineers
http://science360.gov/series/Profiles+of+Scientists+and+Engineers/711d5cab-8416-40f7-9297-099c1f37a9bd
University of California Research ---
http://research.universityofcalifornia.edu/
Creative Chemistry ---
http://www.creative-chemistry.org.uk/
Practical Physics ---
http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/practical-physics
Teaching Advanced Physics ---
http://tap.iop.org/
The Physics of Guinness Beer Demystified ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/the_physics_of_guinness_beer.html
Google Presents an Interactive Visualization of 100,000 Stars ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/google_presents_an_interactive_visualization_of_100000_stars.html
Strange Science: The Rocky Road to Modern Paleontology and Biology ---
http://www.strangescience.net/index.htm
Note the Goof Gallery (including forgeries and frauds)
Gulf Coast Addiction Technology Transfer Center ---
http://www.utexas.edu/research/cswr/gcattc/
Bureau of Reclamation Historic Dams and Water Projects: Managing Water in the
West
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/ReclamationDamsAndWaterProjects/Index.html
What Makes Us Tick? Free Stanford Biology Course by Robert Sapolsky Offers
Answers ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/what_makes_us_tick_free_stanford_biology_course_by_robert_sapolsky_offers_answers.html
Relativity Theory ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_theory
Marilyn Monroe Explains Relativity to Albert Einstein (in a Nicolas Roeg Movie)
---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/marilyn_monroe_explains_relativity_to_albert_einstein.html
Is it mere chance that the home of origins of the atomic bomb were in Chicago
that now has an enormous and very erotic statue of Marilyn Monroe? ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Humor/2012/Set03/HumorSet03.htm
Scroll to the bottom of the page for three pictures of Chicago's statue of
Marilyn Monroe.
Should schools and offices have blue walls and ceilings? And maybe our
bedrooms should be red.
What’s the deal with the different colors of light? The
blue light is intended to stimulate the brain during “day” time, since the human
brain has evolved to respond to the blue sky. Being exposed to blue light
suppresses melatonin, that sleepy hormone, and promotes the formation of
melanopsin, which helps keep people awake. Meanwhile, red light does just the
opposite: stimulating melatonin, suppressing melanopsin. By dialing in blue
light at certain times and red light at others, astronauts can help promote a
healthy sleep-wake cycle.
David Zax, "Curing Outer Space Insomnia: With the help of novel
color-changing light technology," MIT's Technology Review, December 17,
2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508916/curing-outer-space-insomnia/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121218
Is it mere chance that for decades examination booklets were called "Blue
Books?"
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
60-Second (Video) Adventures in Economics ---
http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2012/09/60-second-adventures-in-economics/
Smart About Money - National Endowment for Financial Education ---
http://www.smartaboutmoney.org/
InfoGraphic on How the Tax Burden Has Changed ---
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/30/us/tax-burden.html
Case Studies in Gaming the Income Tax Laws ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
Institute of Race Relations ---
http://www.irr.org.uk/
University of California Research ---
http://research.universityofcalifornia.edu/
Gulf Coast Addiction Technology Transfer Center ---
http://www.utexas.edu/research/cswr/gcattc/
Bureau of Reclamation Historic Dams and Water Projects: Managing Water in the
West
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/ReclamationDamsAndWaterProjects/Index.html
The Guardian Books Podcast ---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/books
In 1942, Disney released “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” an anti-Nazi propaganda movie
that bolstered support for the war, and eventually won the Academy Award for
Best Animated Short Film. Then, a year later, came The Spirit of ’43, which
features Donald Duck helping Americans to understand why they need to pay their
taxes. Other wartime Disney shorts include Donald Gets Drafted (1942), The Old
Army Game (1943), and Commando Duck (1944) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/donald_ducks_bad_nazi_dream_and_others_disney_propaganda_cartoons.html
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math and Statistics Tutorials
Learning Math: Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability ---
http://www.learner.org/resources/series158.html
Khan Academy ---
http://www.khanacademy.org/
Nassim Nicholas Taleb ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
I had lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It didn't go
well.
Bom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review,
December 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/This-Is-Not-a-Profile-of/136257/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
What is GIS technology?
"Looking at the Battle of Gettysburg Through Robert E. Lee’s Eyes:
Anne Kelly Knowles, the winner of Smithsonian American Ingenuity Awards, uses
GIS technology to change our view of history," by Tony Horwitz, Smithsonian
Magazine, December 2012 ---
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Looking-at-the-Battle-of-Gettysburg-Through-Robert-E-Lees-Eyes-180014191.html
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Looking-at-the-Battle-of-Gettysburg-Through-Robert-E-Lees-Eyes-180014191.html#ixzz2ElhHXzM6
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
Emily Dickenson ---
http://www.emilydickinson.org/
Watch an Animated Film of Emily Dickinson’s Poem ‘I Started Early–Took My
Dog’ ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/animated_film_of_emily_dickinsons_poem_i_started_early--took_my_dog.html
Bill Murray Reads Poetry at Construction Site ---
http://www.openculture.com/2010/05/bill_murray_reads_poetry_at_construction_site.html
Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/jean-paul_sartre_writes_a_script_for_john_hustons_film_on_freud_1958.html
From the University of Kentucky
Buffalo Trace Oral History Project ---
http://www.nunncenter.org/buffalotrace/
Preserve the story of the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky which
has a truly remarkable history intertwined with Kentucky history in general.
Kentuckiana Digital Library (focus is on Kentucky history and
photographs) ---
http://kdl.kyvl.org
17 Animations of Classic Literary Works: From Plato and Shakespeare, to
Kafka, Hemingway and Gaiman ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/17_animations_of_classic_literary_works.html
Mount Horeb (a town in Wisconsin) Digital Collections
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/WI/MountHorebLocHist2
Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport ---
http://www.mtc.gov.on.ca/en/home.shtml
Plat Books of Missouri ---
http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?page=index;c=platic
World War I Photographic History in a French Village
Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt ---
http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/remember-me/
World War One ( World War I ) Color Photos ---
http://www.worldwaronecolorphotos.com/
The Guardian Books Podcast ---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/books
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Now Free on the
Kindle ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/12/the_complete_sherlock_holmes_now_free_on_the_kindle.html
THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES (includes drawings) ---
http://www.bakerstreet221b.de/canon/
The Chronicles of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ---
http://www.siracd.com/work_bell.shtml
Mystery Net ---
http://www.mysterynet.com/
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: His Life, All
His Works and More ---
http://sirconandoyle.com/index.php
A Study In Scarlet by Arthur
Conan Doyle (1859-1930) ---
Click Here
The Adventure Of The
Sussex Vampire by Arthur Conan Doyle ---
Click Here
The Adventures of
Gerard by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) ---
Click Here
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
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
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
"SAT Tip: Ignore Prepositional Phrases," Bloomberg Businessweek,
December 5, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-05/sat-tip-ignore-prepositional-phrases
Spellchecker.org
Spelling, grammar, and writing checker ---
http://www.spellchecker.org/
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
December 11, 2012
December 12, 2012
December 13, 2012
December 14, 2012
December 15, 2012
December 16, 2012
December 17, 2012
December 18, 2012
December 19, 2012
December 20, 2012
"Link between autism and planned violence discounted by experts," by
Deborah Kotz, Boston Globe, December 17, 2012 ---
http://www.boston.com/dailydose/2012/12/17/link-between-autism-and-planned-violence-discounted-experts/4zR3RIA6210AYEvhjJisJK/story.html
"Scorpion Protein Illuminates Brain Tumors for Surgeons: A compound
derived from a toxin from scorpion venom could help neurosurgeons differentiate
between healthy and cancerous brain tissue," by Susan Young, MIT's
Technology Review, December 17, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508351/scorpion-protein-illuminates-brain-tumors-for-surgeons/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121217
MethResources (drug addiction) ---
http://www.methresources.gov/Index.html
Alcohol, Temperance & Prohibition
http://library.brown.edu/cds/temperance/
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration ---
http://www.samhsa.gov
The Willard Suitcase Exhibit Online (psychiatric, psychiatry, mental
illness) ---
http://www.suitcaseexhibit.org/indexhasflash.html
Global Drug Reference Online ---
http://www.globaldro.com/
Gulf Coast Addiction Technology Transfer Center ---
http://www.utexas.edu/research/cswr/gcattc/
Merry Christmas Humor Video ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAckfn8yiAQ
Forwarded by Maureen
Us
older people need to learn something new every day...
Just to keep the grey matter tuned up.
Where did "Piss Poor" come from? Interesting history.
They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a
pot.
And then once it was full it was taken and sold to the tannery...
if you had to do this to survive you were "Piss Poor".
But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy
a pot...
They "didn't have a pot to piss in" and were the lowest of the low.
The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water
temperature
Isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be.
Here are some facts about the 1500's
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May,
And they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were starting
to smell,
brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.
Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water.
The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water,
Then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children.
Last of all the babies.
By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.
Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!"
Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath.
It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small
animals
(mice, bugs) lived in the roof.
When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall
off the roof.
Hence the saying, "It's raining cats and dogs."
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house.
This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings
Could mess up your nice clean bed.
Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some
protection.
That's how canopy beds came into existence.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt.
Hence the saying, "Dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get
slippery
In the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep
their footing..
As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door,
It would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the
entrance-way.
Hence: a thresh hold.
(Getting quite an education, aren't you?)
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always
hung over the fire.
Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly
vegetables
And did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving
leftovers
In the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day.
Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while.
Hence the rhyme:
“Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days
old."
Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special.
When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off.
It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon."
They would cut off a little to share with guests
And would all sit around and chew the fat.
Those with money had plates made of pewter.
Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food,
causing lead poisoning death.
This happened most often with tomatoes,
so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Bread was divided according to status..
Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle,
and guests got the top, or the upper crust.
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky.
The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days...
Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for
burial.
They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family
would gather around
and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up.
Hence the custom; “holding a wake."
England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to
bury people.
So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and
reuse the grave.
When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch
marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive.
So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the
coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.
Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift)
to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be,
“saved by the bell" or was "considered a dead ringer."
And that's the truth.
Now, whoever said history was boring!!!
So get out there and educate someone!
Share these facts with a friend.
Inside every older person is a younger person wondering,
"What the heck happened?"
We'll be friends until we are old and senile.
Then we'll be new friends.
Smile, it gives your face something to do!
Do you think these Dear Santa letters were actually written by kids?
If so then you probably believe that Santa wrote the replies.
Dear Santa,
How are you? How is Mrs. Claus? I hope everyone, from the reindeer to the
elves, is fine. I have been a very good boy this year. I would like an X-Box 360
with Call of Duty IV and an iPhone 4 for Christmas. I hope you remember that
come Christmas Day..
Merry Christmas,
Timmy Jones
* *
Dear Timmy,
Thank you for you letter. Mrs. Claus, the reindeer and the elves are all fine
and thank you for asking about them. Santa is a little worried all the time you
spend playing video games and texting. Santa wouldn’t want you to get fat. Since
you have indeed been a good boy, I think I’ll bring you something you can go
outside and play with.*
Merry Christmas,
Santa Claus
* * ***********************************************
Mr. Claus,
Seeing that I have fulfilled the “naughty vs. nice” contract, set by you I
might add, I feel confident that you can see your way clear to granting me
what I have asked for. I certainly wouldn’t want to turn this joyous season into
one of litigation. Also, don’t you think that a jibe at my weight coming from an
overweight man who goes out once a year is a bit trite?
Respectfully,
Tim Jones
* *
Mr. Jones,
While I have acknowledged you have met the “nice” criteria, need I remind you
that your Christmas list is a request and in no way is it a guarantee of
services provided. Should you wish to pursue legal action, well that is your
right. Please know, however, that my attorney’s have been on retainer ever since
the Burgermeister Meisterburger incident and will be more than happy to take you
on in open court. Additionally, the exercise I alluded to will not only improve
your health, but also improve your social skills and potentially help clear up a
complexion that looks like the bottom of the Burger King fry bin most days.
Very Truly Yours,
S Claus
* **************************************************************
Now look here Fat Man, I told you what I want and I expect you to bring it. I
was attempting to be polite about this but you brought my looks and my friends
into this. Now you just be disrespecting me. I’m about to tweet my boys and
we’re gonna be waiting for your fat ass and I’m taking my game console, my game,
my phone, and whatever else I want. WHAT EVER I WANT, MAN!
T-Bone
* *
Listen Pizza Face,
Seriously??? You think a dude that breaks into every house in the world on
one night and never gets caught sweats a skinny G-banger wannabe? “He sees you
when you’re sleeping; He knows when you’re awake”. Sound familiar, genius? You
know what kind of resources I have at my disposal. I got your shit wired, Jack.
I go all around the world and see ways to hurt people that if I described them
right now, you’d throw up your Totino's pizza roll all over the carpet of your
mom’s basement. You’re not getting what you asked for, but I’m still stopping by
your crib to stomp a mud hole in you’re ass and then walk it dry. Chew on that,
Petunia.
S Clizzy
* ****************************************************************
Dear Santa,
Bring me whatever you see fit. I’ll appreciate anything.
Timmy
* *
Timmy,
That’s what I thought you little bastard.
Santa
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