Tidbits on March 14, 2013
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
This week I feature Set 4 of
my favorite Humor Cartoons and Photographs
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Humor/Set04/HumorSet04.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
Tidbits on March 14, 2013
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 IMagnifying the Universe: Move From Atoms to Galaxies in HD'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
Magnifying the Universe: Move From Atoms to Galaxies in HD ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/magnifying_the_universe_move_from_atoms_to_galaxies_in_hd.html
Criss Angel performs a really cool trick with a coffee cup at the world
renowned Cafe Du Monde located in the French Quarter in New Orleans, Louisiana
---
http://biggeekdad.com/2013/02/coffee-cup-trick/
Oscar --- The Grim Reaper Cat (according to the New England Journal of
Medicine) ---
http://msnvideo.msn.com/?src=v5:pause:email:&from=email#/video/dc4f82c8-3eda-4189-9658-2acda4fc54f4
Something You Will Never See on a New Hampshire Golf Course ---
http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=31996
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Édith Piaf’s Moving Performance of ‘La Vie en
Rose’ on French TV, 1954 ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/edith_piafs_moving_performance_of_la_vie_en_rose_on_french_tv_1954.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Tribute to Frank Sinatra
---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/e-y581HdWfY?rel=0
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
Statler Brothers Burma Shave ---
http://oldfortyfives.com/DYRT.htm
Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing the Bawdy Prison
Blues Song “Uncle Bud” (1940) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/hear_zora_neale_hurston_sing_the_bawdy_prison_blues_song_uncle_bud_1940.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
FOUND: A New Collection of Rare Photos from the
National Geographic Archives ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/found_a_new_curated_photography_collection_from_the_national_geographic_archives.html
The Pantanal of Bolivia ---
Click Here
https://www.google.com/search?q="The+Pantanal+of+Bolivia"&hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=sjA_UeiFKYy_0QHGroHYCA&ved=0CD0QsAQ&biw=1024&bih=604
Smithsonian: Snakes in a Frame: Mark
Laita’s Stunning Photographs of Slithering Beasts ---
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/artscience/2013/02/snakes-in-a-frame-mark-laitas-stunning-photographs-of-slithering-beasts/
Here's To the Beautiful Women of Our Past ---
http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/Q5XetQeFu-0&autoplay=1
Possible Airport Designs of the Future ---
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/airport-architecture/?cid=co6096254
It amazes me that designers don't design freeway ramps onto the roofs such that
robotic luggage carriers can deliver the luggage right up to where ground
transportation awaits. Instead of walking two miles from a plane to baggage
claim, escalators and moving walkways would take passengers up to their awaiting
chariots. Maybe Jihadists ruined everything in terms of airport design.
John Pugh's Murals ---
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubbershark/sets/72157627807808108/
Chicago Transit Authority: Public Art ---
http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/public_art/Public_Art_Book_Web.pdf
“The Bay Lights,” The World’s Largest LED Light
Sculpture, Debuts in San Francisco ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/the_bay_lights.html
By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage
Pictures, 1850-1920 ---
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwhome.html
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
"10½ Favorite Reads from TED Bookstore 2013," by Maria Popova,
Brain Pickings, March 2, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/26/ted-bookstore/
Can you tell a book by it's cover? ---
http://www.dezimmer.net/Covering Lolita/LoCov.htm
David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious
Literature with Lightweight Books ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/david_foster_wallaces_1994_syllabus.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
W.H. Auden’s 1941 Literature Syllabus Asks Students to Read 32
Great Works, Covering 6000 Pages ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/wh_audens_1941_literature_syllabus_asks_students_to_read_32_great_works_covering_6000_pages_.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+OpenCulture+(Open+Culture)
Arthur Conan Doyle Fills Out the Questionnaire Made Famous By
Marcel Proust (1899) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/arthur_conan_doyle_fills_out_the_questionnaire_made_famous_by_marcel_proust_1899.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
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 March 14, 2013
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2013/TidbitsQuotations0031413.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
Question
With global warming, worse coastal storms, and rising oceans is repeated
rebuilding of flood zones a good idea?
The government is spending billions to repeatedly rebuild flood zones on our
eastern seaboard ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/coastal-rebuild.png
Updates from the Smartest Person on the Planet: An Algorithm for
Everything (well almost everything)
Jensen Comment
The Wolfram Alpha computational search engine in my viewpoint is one of the top
ten computing advances of all time ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#WolframAlpha
"Stephen Wolfram Says He Has An Algorithm For Everything — Literally,"
by Mark Hachman, ReadWriteWeb, March 11, 2013 ---
http://readwrite.com/2013/03/11/stephen-wolfram-has-an-algorithm-for-everything-literally
Stephen Wolfram believes that we may have already
discovered the fundamental Unified Theory of Physics, and that he may able
to write it down via a language that his company,
Wolfram Alpha,
has developed.
That's just the beginning for the man some believe
to be the smartest person on the planet. Wolfram also plans to extend the
power of computations to messier subjects, revolutionizing everything from
law to medicine.
Best In Show At SWSW?
At his talk Monday at the
SXSW conference
in Austin, Texas (Stephen
Wolfram: The Computational Future,
#wolffuture),
Wolfram revealed that he
- Is working on an augmented reality version of
his Wolfram Alpha "computational engine."
- Has plans to place the pioneering mathematics
program Mathematica in the cloud (and make it accessible via iPhones).
Wolfram plans to more closely tie Mathematica to
other data sources to simulate the interaction of complex machinery. The
idea is to be able to answer questions like: "Would an SU-48 Flanker fighter
jet be able to fly within the atmosphere of Mars?"
He will do all this, he told attendees, by opening
up the fundamental language that his company created — one he calls, with
characteristic modesty, the Wolfram Language —
to the world at large. Eventually, he added, we'll probably use the Wolfram
Language to unify all of physics, too.
Smartest Person On The Planet?
Wolfram won the award for Speaker of the Event at
the
2012 SXSW conference, and he seems ready to
contend for the crown again. There's no disputing his smarts —
this is, after all, a guy who dropped out of Oxford at age 17 only to earn a
doctorate in particle physics from
Caltech three
years later. But at this stage in his career, Wolfram seems obsessed with
accumulating, picking apart and then weaving together disparate sources of
data, such as basic rules that can be used to achieve complex results.
Continued in article
"Richard Feynman on the Universal Responsibility of Scientists," by
Maria Popover, Brain Pickings, March 6, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/06/richard-feynman-responsibility-of-scientists/
. . .
It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the
great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,
the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the
value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but
welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to
all coming generations.
Jensen Comment
Are accountics scientists living up to their responsibilities?
In many ways they are living up to their responsibilities, but in some ways
they are failing badly relative to the real scientists, especially the "welcomed
and discussed part."
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
From AccountingWeb on March 1, 2013
How to Disable Worksheet Animation in Excel 2013
Excel 2013 has arrived, and for the most part, it's much like Excel 2007 and
2010, but with some spiffy new features, such as Recommended Charts and
Pivot Tables, Flash Fill, Quick Analysis, Power View, and more.
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/how-disable-worksheet-animation-excel-2013/221223?source=technology
"A Photo Service That Understands the Contents of Your Images:
Everpix organizes photos after analyzing them with software that can detect
things such as animals, outdoor scenes, and people," by Tom Simonite, MIT's
Technology Review, March 8, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512251/a-photo-service-that-understands-the-contents-of-your-images/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130308
Jensen Comment
The article says nothing about OCR reading of text. Hence, I don't think you can
have this service read the text in pictures of tables, charts, cartoons, and
text files that cannot be copied in any way other than pictures.
What You Will Not See or Hear on Network Television:
How to Lie With Statistics
446,000 part-time jobs were created last month, full-time jobs decreased by
276,000
"Friday’s Surprisingly Strong Jobs Numbers Aren’t Real Written," by Bob Adelmann,
The New American, March 10, 2013 ---
http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/sectors/item/14731-friday-s-surprisingly-strong-jobs-numbers-aren-t-real
Also see
The New American (3/10),
MarketWatch (3/8),
TheStreet.com (3/8),
The Christian Science Monitor (3/8)
"University System of Georgia Offers a Model for Raising Black Male
Enrollment," by Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5,
2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Georgia-Offers-a-Model-for/137711/
Jensen Comment
This article reports that different procedures were used by different
universities. This is understandable since the difference between rural town
African American males is probably great in comparison with African American
males from the heart of Atlanta where gang presence is much more significant.
The finding is that indoctrination can be as important or more important than
the education itself, but indoctrination that succeeds may vary with the needs
of each student.
Experiments in NYC have taken another approach. The most successful
experiment seems to be that of capturing students earlier on in life. Selected
K-12 students are pulled out of their traditional schools (and in some cases
even their homes). They are subjected to intense pressures (with many more
hours of schooling each week and each year) and closer relations with
instructors and each other. The key word here is "selected." Those chosen
students show more promise when selected on the basis of potential. A random
selection process may not have nearly the same performance success.
I think that behind these experiments in NYC and Georgia is an effort to
demonstrate that the research pointing to different genetic intelligence is
either entirely wrong or badly overstated. The nurture versus nature
dispute may never be resolved to anybody's satisfaction.
One thing is the rule rather than the exception --- students who do better in
college really, really want to learn and will sacrifice almost anything to
perform near the top of the competition. For those who resist cheating to get to
the top, the applause we give them at graduation is genuine.
I once had small-group lunch with
George Steinbrenner (of baseball fame) when he was invited to speak
at Trinity University. He had just been on the campus of two universities. One
was a black college where he was invited to give the commencement address. The
other was a prestigious state university where his son graduated.
He noticed a difference between the tone of the two commencements. At the
black college the tone was a dignified celebration that would've brought tears
to the eyes of Martin Luther King, Jr. The tone at the other commencement was:
"let's get this over with so we can go out and get blind drunk."
Perhaps George was overly angry with the young white man in the procession
who revealed in a flash that he was stark naked under his robe. That, of course,
was not George's son.
Tipping Point for LED Lighting
"Once-Pricey LED Bulbs to Dip Under $10," by Martin LaMonica, MIT's
Technology Review, March 6, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512236/once-pricey-led-bulbs-to-dip-under-10/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130307
"How to Choose an LED Light Bulb," by Martin LaMonica, MIT's
Technology Review, March 9, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512346/how-to-choose-an-led-light-bulb/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130311
Jensen Comment
When it's below zero outside I don't like any cold and bluish light bulbs that
remind me of fluorescent lights. Give me muted warm pastels any day.
Erika gets the darndest candle lights that we have on our dining room table
and in each window of our cottage. They have no bulb over a flickering flame
that you cannot tell from a real flame until you hold your finger in the "fire."
She buys them from QVC. I think they're called tea light candles on Amazon. They
last a very long time on batteries.
"Most-Admired Companies Aren't Always Great Investments," by Mark
Hulbert, The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324034804578346620047446456.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Amazon.com AMZN -1.09% recently emerged as the
company with the best reputation among the general public in the U.S.,
according to a survey of more than 14,000 randomly selected individuals
conducted by Harris Interactive HPOL -5.23% .
Amazon investors can only hope its fate will turn
out better than Apple's, AAPL +1.40% which topped Harris Interactive's
survey last year—and has since seen its stock fall more than 20%.
Was Apple's experience a fluke? I wouldn't bet on
it.
There are many reasons for Apple's falling stock
unrelated to consumer surveys. Yet companies that have great reputations
tend to be overvalued. Consider a study that appeared in 2010 in the Journal
of Portfolio Management titled "Stocks of Admired and Spurned Companies."
The authors analyzed the stocks of firms appearing in Fortune magazine's
annual list of "America's Most Admired Companies" between 1983 and 2007.
Though that list is compiled differently from
Harris Interactive's, the two reflect many of the same underlying factors.
For example, the top three most-admired companies in the current Fortune
ranking are in first, second and fourth place in the Harris survey.
The researchers found the spurned companies at the
bottom of Fortune's survey were a better bet, on average, than the
most-admired ones at the top. A hypothetical portfolio constructed each year
out of the least-admired companies performed nearly two percentage points
per year better than a portfolio of the most-admired companies.
These results support a contrarian interpretation
of a company's reputation, says Meir Statman, a finance professor at Santa
Clara University and one of the study's authors. His research found that
companies tended to rank higher in the Fortune survey if their stocks had
performed particularly well over the previous 12 months. This increases the
chances the company's stock will be overvalued, he says.
In fact, Mr. Statman adds, it might be that one of
the reasons a company tends to be highly admired in the first place is that
its stock price has gone up. This would be one big reason why its stock is
so vulnerable to even a slight change in investor sentiment.
It certainly is plausible that a soaring stock
price contributed to Amazon's good reputation: Its stock hit a new all-time
high in January and has gained 49% over the past 12 months, versus just 13%
for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.
Investors are more likely to find undervalued
situations among the stocks of spurned companies, Mr. Statman says. He notes
that such a company needn't perform spectacularly in order for its stock to
be a good bet: All it must do is beat investors' diminished expectations.
Because of these factors, he says, we "should tilt
our portfolios toward those at the bottom of the rankings."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The biggest problem for many investors is that the Fed's seemingly long-term
intention is too keep interest rates so low that customary safe investments like
bank Certificates of Deposits pay virtually nothing. This forces investors to
either burn savings on consumption (which is what retirees are now doing) or
take on more financial risks in the stock market (that provides as much illusion
as reality unless investors are smart enough to realize that much of what they
gain in the stock market in inflationary gain that is not for real).
I sold an Iowa farm about five years ago an am not certain that I made the
right decision. Iowa farm land has since risen to an all-time high and can ride
out droughts due to the government's generous subsidies for crop insurance
against drought and other disasters. And for farmers who had 2012 crop successes
in Iowa the corn and soy bean prices are fantastically high at the moment
because of the 2012 drought. Farm land is seemingly both an inflation hedge and
provides annual liquidity from crop successes or crop failures (due to crop
insurance).
But farm land is not necessarily a good investment at the moment because its
investment prospects have already be factored into the record high prices for
farm land in 2013. Also for distant landlords, like me before I sold the land,
it can be frustrating to deal with rent negotiations and tenants who are always
begging for things like new tile under wet ground. I don't want to be a
landlord ever again.
Farm rents are subject to high taxes, especially from the State of Iowa. I
put the farm sale proceeds into a long-term insured municipal bond fund from
Vanguard and have been happy ever since with relatively high tax-free cash
returns each year. Of course this is not an especially good inflation hedge, but
I do not expect to be alive 20 years from now --- or less. And if tax reform
ends the advantages of my tax-free investment I will simply write a check on
part of my Vanguard fund and pay off my home mortgage --- my only debt that I
keep for tax advantages.
What I really hate to see are all sucker adds in the media to buy gold coins.
First of all, if you're going to invest in gold invest in highly-reputed gold
funds rather than gold itself which is expensive to store safely and is
expensive to get rid of due to need for having it assayed and need to find
buyers who do not demand gouging cash discounts when you're forced to sell.
Investing in precious metal mutual funds in general is risky for the short term
and not good for annual cash flows. Precious metals and some other commodities
may be good inflation hedges over a very long haul if you don't need shorter
term cash flows. But most of us want some annual cash returns on our
investments.
Put simply, investors today are between a rock and hard place until the Fed
allows interest rates on safe investments return to reasonable levels that of
course still vary with time-to-maturity. But a 1.25% return on a five-year
Certificate of Deposit is not reasonable.
Bob Jensen's investment helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
Bob Jensen's tax helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
I never give out investment or tax advice to any individuals or businesses
--- which is extremely lucky for them.
Sounds even worse that an All American Notre Dame football player we've heard
a log about
Why Smart People Do Dumb Things:
The New York Times has a long piece on Paul Frampton, a theoretical
physicist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who meets a Czech
model online, then, rather gullibly, travels to South America to get to know her
in person. Instead of finding love in La Paz, Frampton winds up in a dilapidated
Buenos Aires prison. It’s a bizarre tale, a story of hubris, naivete, lust, and
deception all rolled into one. Grab a coffee, set aside some time, and have a
read.
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/the_physics_professor_the_glamour_model_and_a_whole_suitcase_full_of_trouble.html
Jensen Comment
Albert Einstein and Bobby Fisher lusted after young women. Good thing the old
letch and the young grandmaster chess player lived (mostly) in the pre-social
networking era. Dumb clutzes like me are blind to such temptations --- at least
as far as starting up conversations with ugly fraudsters who send tempting
pictures of beautiful women.
There's even been a claim that a woman did Einstein's mathematics. I wonder
what other things she did for him?
Troemel-Ploetz, D., "Mileva Einstein-Marić: The Woman Who Did Einstein's
Mathematics", Women's Studies Int. Forum, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 415–432,
1990.
"Extreme Game of Monopoly over at Simunomics," by Mark P. Holtzman,
Accountinator Blog, March 12, 2013 ---
http://accountinator.com/2013/03/12/extreme-game-of-monopoly-over-at-simunomics/
I’m having a blast with Simunomics,
a massive mulitplayer business simulation where you can start a business and
compete with other players. The goal is, of course, to maximize shareholder
value. Build up your retail, manufacturing and natural resource empire to
gain market share and build up profits.
I started with manufacturing, and built factories
making paper, dyes, beer, and ceramics. None of these fared very well. To
keep my costs down, I built them in a depressed town (Drakar), and the
markets for wholesale goods there are not very liquid. So I built a
convenience store. Unfortunately, the competition for convenience stores is
intense, and that store didn’t do too well, either.
So I sold everything – factories and all – and
switched over to retailing. Did some market research – there’s serious
demand in Drakar for phones, washing machines and fixtures. Then, I
converted my convenience store to an appliance store, stocked up on phones,
washing machines and fixtures, and started making money. At this point, I’m
manufacturing my own phones and washing machines, which I’m reselling out of
my own retail outlet.
I’ve got 272/400 points at the Startup(1) level.
I’m looking forward to expanding so that I can move on to the next level.
Right now, I’m aiming for more market presence in the appliance field, to
expand my retail operations, and to continue to vertically integrate by
manufacturing all of my own goods.
I would like to encourage my students to try out
Simunomics, too. It will better help them to understand the mechanics of
business operations. It’s also kind of addictive.
If you’d like to meet up over there, my business
name is SHU Accountinator.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on Tricks and Tools of the Trade are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#NewTools
"How the Quiet Car Explains the World," by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The
Atlantic, March 12, 2013 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/03/how-the-quiet-car-explains-the-world/273885/
I'm sitting in the quiet car of an Amtrak train
making my weekly voyage up top. There's a rule that prohibits loud talking
and digital devices. Cell phone usage is also prohibited. There are signs at
the top of the car labeled "Quiet Car" with the rules prominently displayed.
"Quiet Car" is scrawled on the outside, also. The conductor, at the
beginning of the trip, announces over the intercom, "If you can hear this
you are in the quiet car..." and then explains the rules.
As I write this someone's digital device is going
off. The woman apparently can't figure out how to shut it off. She does not
want to repair to another car to figure this out. She wants to do it here in
the quiet car. She is not alone. Somewhere around 75 percent of the time
that I've ridden in the quiet car, somewhere has decided that there is a
cell phone conversation they must have, or a song that they must play so
that all can hear its melody blaring out the headphones. Two weeks ago, one
group decided to grab some beers and make a party of it.
These people are almost always dealt with by a
conductor or other passengers. But I've never quite been able to figure out
why they come to the Quiet Car. It's not a matter of not knowing the rules,
so much as a matter of not caring. It's almost as if the offenders regard
the regular cars as a public lavatory, and the Quiet Car as a private
bathroom where they may repair to handle their shit.
I like a good bar. I like taking my wife to good
bars and drinking with her. Every once in a while we'll be at a bar and
someone (they are invariably white*) will stumble over drunkenly and decide
that we should be engaged in conversation with them. These encounters range
from the annoying (people deciding you need to hear their life story) to the
borderline violent (someone telling my wife to "shut the fuck up" -- you can
imagine how that went over) to the outright racist. (Dude pulls out a
picture of his dog and then tells us, "My dog's a nigger." That actually
went over better.) But what they all share in common is the inability to
read the rules and know the ledge; the belief that we are their private
stall.
It is not unlike what I've noticed here when
commenters arrive and complain about the prohibition against threadjacking,
the deleting, or moderation as a whole. The Internet is filled with comment
spaces, most of them only barely regulated. But that is not enough. One must
have the right to talk however one wants, here, specifically.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This takes me back to the days when airliners had smoking sections in the rear
of the plane. I never ever smoked and sat up front whenever possible, Once when
I asked the person beside me why she was smoking in the non-smoking part of the
aircraft. She said it was because "she could not stand all that smoke back
there."
The Law School Bubble Bursts
"Pop Goes the Law," by Steven J. Harper, Chronicle of Higher Education's
Chronicle Review, March 11, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Pop-Goes-the-Law/137717/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
The Law School Admission Council recently reported
that applications were heading toward a 30-year low, reflecting, as a New
York Times article put it, "increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing
student debt, and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon
graduation." Since 2004 the number of law-school applicants has dropped from
almost 100,000 to 54,000.
Good thing, too. That loud pop you're hearing is
the bursting of the law bubble—firms, schools, and disillusioned lawyers
paying for decades of greed and grandiosity. The bubble grew from a
combination of U.S. News-driven ranking mania, law schools' insatiable
hunger for growth, and huge law firms' obsession with profit above all else.
Like the dot-com, real-estate, and financial bubbles that preceded it, the
law bubble is bursting painfully. But now is the time to consider the
causes, take steps to soften the impact, and figure out how to keep it from
happening again.
The popular explanation for the recent application
plummet is that information about the profession's darker side, including
the recession's exacerbation of the attorney glut, has finally started
reaching prospective law students. Let's hope so. Marginal candidates and
those choosing law school by default might be opting out, and the law-school
market may finally be heading toward self-correction.
Still, the bubble has been huge, and the correction
will need to be, too. There were 68,000 applicants to the fall of 2012
entering class, while the total number of new, full-time jobs requiring a
law degree is 25,000 a year and falling. The onset of the recession drove
more students to consider law school as a place to wait out the economic
collapse. The number of June 2009 and 2010 admissions tests had surged to
almost 33,000. To put that in historical perspective, the June 1987 testing
session drew just under 19,000 students. The reduction in the number of LSAT
takers in the summer of 2011 to 27,000 merely brought it back to 2008
levels.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the bursting of the law school bubble ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools
Jensen Comment
What are the new graduate schools of choice among all those humanities and
science graduates?
Oh yeah, that's right!
Stanford Graduate School of Business Dean Garth Saloner discusses why and
how business schools must change if they are to serve their students and society
well, FEMD Global Focus, Issue 1 in 2013 ---
http://www.efmd.org/images/stories/efmd/globalfocus13/issue_1_2013_gsaloner_stanford.pdf
Jensen Comment
Note that the scope of this article is limited to a prestigious MBA program
comprised mostly of matured students with stellar admissions credentials,
including professional work experience and high admission scores. It focuses on
having students from backgrounds ranging from chemistry, electrical engineering,
psychology, history, mathematics, etc.
Stanford has no undergraduate business program, unlike Cornell.
Stanford has no accounting undergraduate or masters program like Cornell.
Stanford does have business Ph.D. programs, including an accounting Ph.D.
program, but Dean Saloner is not addressing Stanford's Ph.D. programs.
My point is that "critical analytical thinking roofs" praised by Dean Saloner
and broad scope a curriculum dealing with varied needs of society may not be
appropriate for business and accounting programs that are not similar to
Stanford's MBA program. For example, like it or not, we are not doing accounting
majors much of a favor if they don't have the prerequisites to take the CPA
examination in their state of choice. We aren't doing most business school
graduates much of a favor if they are more like sociology graduates and
become uninteresting to business recruiters.
Critical Thinking: Why is it so hard to teach?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CriticalThinking
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
An Instructional Teaching Case for Accounting Instructors
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on March 8, 2013
Public-University Costs Soar
by:
Ruth Simon
Mar 06, 2013
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
Click here to view the video on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Financial Ratios, Governmental Accounting
SUMMARY: The article describes the current state of affairs at
public institutions of higher education with respect to funding from the
state, tuition increases, and some university options to solve the issues
that they face. These concerns will be of interest to students generally.
The accounting focus in best presented in the related video: return on
investment in education.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article may be used in any accounting
class introducing return on investment. It also may be used in a class
covering topics in governmental or not-for-profit entities to discuss the
current economic status of public universities. By definition, the state
universities that are the focus of the article will use governmental
accounting requirements.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) Summarize the points in the article about factors
currently affecting the revenues to state universities.
2. (Introductory) How are the current issues facing state
universities affecting their students and prospective students?
3. (Advanced) Define the term ROI (return on investment) and state
how it is calculated.
4. (Advanced) Based on the discussion in the related video, how is
the concept of ROI applied to assess a student's investment in college
tuition and other costs?
5. (Advanced) What return measure is proposed in the video for
assessing a student' return on investment in his/her higher education? What
are some weaknesses of that measure? Can you propose any other measure that
would address those weaknesses?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
"Public-University Costs Soar," by Ruth Simon, The Wall Street Journal,
March 6, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324539404578342750480773548.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
Tuition at public colleges jumped last year by a
record amount as state governments slashed school funding, the latest sign
of strain in the U.S. higher-education sector.
The average amount that students at public colleges
paid in tuition, after state and institutional grants and scholarships,
climbed 8.3% last year, the biggest jump on record, according to a report
based on data from all public institutions in all 50 states to be released
Wednesday by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
Median tuition rose 4.5%.
The average state funding per student, meanwhile,
fell by more than 9%, the steepest drop since the group began collecting the
data in 1980. Median funding fell 10%. During the recession, states began
cutting support for higher education, and the trend accelerated last year.
Rising tuition costs are "another example of the
bind that public institutions are in," said Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at
the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human
Development. "Unless we make public funding a higher priority, the funds are
going to have to come from parents and students."
To be sure, last year's decline in state funding
nationwide was driven heavily by cutbacks in California, which has the
largest state system and lashed funding per student by 14.3% last year. Not
including California, per-student funding fell 8% and tuition rose 6.3%.
Paul Lingenfelter, president of the
higher-education association, noted that 31 states increased higher
education funding in 2012-13, and a number have proposed an increase for the
coming year as well.
Kaylen Hendrick, a senior at Florida State
University in Tallahassee majoring in environmental studies, is graduating
in three years rather than four in order to keep costs and borrowing down.
"Growing up, I thought if I made good enough
grades, that college would not be a problem," said Ms. Hendrick, 20 years
old, who has taken out about $15,000 in student loans and works 20 hours a
week to pay for college.
State funding for the State University System of
Florida has declined by more than $1 billion over the last six years, even
as enrollment has grown by more than 35,000 students, a spokeswoman for the
system said.
Nationally, average tuition, after institutional
grants and scholarships, increased to $5,189 in 2011-12 from $4,793 a year
earlier, according to the report, which is based on the 2011-12 academic
year and adjusted its figures for inflation. Tuition revenue accounted for a
record 47% of educational funding at public colleges last year.
The price increases at state schools come at a time
when many private colleges are reining in price increases and awarding
generous scholarships to attract families worried about rising debt loads
and a still shaky job market. In some cases, state tuition has risen so much
that costs approach what students might pay at a private college.
At Pennsylvania State University's main campus,
in-state undergraduate students receiving financial aid paid an average of
$21,342 after grants and scholarships in 2010-11, according to the U.S.
Department of Education, up 12% since 2008-09. State funding now accounts
for less than 14% of the school's educational budget, down from as much as
62% in 1970-71. "When the appropriation is cut, tuition rises," a Penn State
spokeswoman said.
In addition to raising tuition, many states have
pared spending. The California State University System declined to take the
vast majority of transfer students this spring and has turned away about
20,000 students who qualified for admission during each of the past three
years, a spokesman said.
In Kentucky, higher tuition prices make up for just
half of the loss in state funding, said Robert King, president of the
Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, which oversees the state's
system.
Continued in article
"One-Third of Colleges Are on Financially
'Unsustainable' Path, Bain Study Finds," by Goldie Blumenstyk, The
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/One-Third-of-Colleges-Are-on/133095/
"Universities Pile on Faculty Perks as Student Costs Grow," by John
Hechinger, Bloomberg, March 12, 2013 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-12/universities-pile-on-faculty-perks-as-student-costs-grow.html
The University of Chicago paid James Madara $2.5
million in severance when he stepped down in 2009 as medical dean and
hospital chief. Madara, who remained on the faculty, later joined the
American Medical Association.
Congress is taking a look at such payments
following disclosures that Jacob Lew, the new U.S. Treasury secretary,
received a $685,000 bonus when he left New York University and had $1.5
million in housing loans from the school.
Harvard and Stanford universities also offer
real-estate loans with sweet terms, records show. While the amounts are
small relative to university budgets, the perks insulate faculty and
administrators from the costs upsetting many middle-class families, said
Jonathan Robe, a research fellow at the Center for College Affordability and
Productivity in Washington.
“It certainly gives the public a clear example of
how out of touch some universities are,” Robe said. “Parents will think,
‘Here I am scraping by, raiding my retirement plan to pay for college. Why
are they making me do this just to enrich these executives?’"
Congress and President Barack Obama have been
pushing colleges to control tuition and other costs, which can exceed
$60,000 a year at a private school. In a weak job market, students are
struggling to pay off $1 trillion in education loans. ‘Super Severance’
Exit bonuses are becoming more common among senior
executives at large colleges in major cities, said Stephen Joel
Trachtenberg, a former president of George Washington University who does
executive-pay consulting.
Typically, such “super severance” amounts to one to
three times an administrator’s annual salary and bonus, according to Charles
Skorina, founder and president of an executive-search firm in San Francisco
who specializes in placing finance executives at universities.
Especially at universities on the East and West
coasts, where real estate expenses and other costs are high, trustees
including Wall Street executives are eager to pay their presidents top
dollar, Skorina said. They look for ways to pay additional compensation that
doesn’t show up in annual surveys that can anger donors and employees, he
said.
“You look for sweeteners, the car and driver, the
house and then a back-end exit bonus,” said Skorina. “An exit bonus is
palatable because until the guy leaves you don’t have to deal with it.”
Attract, Retain
Colleges say they must offer compensation packages
to win over talented executives and faculty. Harvard and Stanford said they
keep tuition affordable with generous financial-aid programs. High-level
administrators focus on efficiency and financial health, said NYU spokesman
John Beckman.
“When they have been successful -- as was the case
with Jack Lew -- the benefit to the university can range in the tens of
millions of dollars,” Beckman said in an e-mail.
At the University of Chicago, Madara’s severance
payment, including deferred compensation and retirement benefits, reflected
money earned over the course of his career, part of a package typical of
executives at peer institutions, according to Steve Kloehn, the school’s
spokesman.
Colleges must “attract and retain the best leaders
we can,” Kloehn said. Madara, 62, who became chief executive officer of the
AMA in 2011, declined to comment.
In terms of favorable loan deals for faculty and
some administrators, Harvard and Stanford are among the biggest players. As
at NYU, the colleges said they do so because of high real estate costs.
‘Shared Appreciation’
Along with low-interest home loans, Harvard offers
“shared-appreciation” mortgages to tenured faculty and some administrators.
These loans, which cover only a portion of a property’s purchase price,
don’t have monthly payments or set interest, though give Harvard a share in
any gain in value when the property is sold. Stanford and NYU have similar
programs.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
When it comes to "golden parachutes" and other severance deals in higher
education, much of which depends upon cost and volume. If these deals are only
given to selected administrators, faculty might object politically, but the
incremental cost passed along to students my be negligible.
I know of a university that makes a deal to all employees aged 62 and over.
They can get a severance of three years at full pay plus all medical coverage
and TIAA-CREF contributions for those three years. The reason ostensibly is so
that new blood and new vibrancy can be brought into a university, especially a
university where nearly all the tenure slots are filled until somebody finally
retires or dies. But the cost of this program is immense if the university is
very top heavy with most of its employees not far away from 62 years of age.
The above 62-years of age program almost certainly is politically correct
with faculty as long as early retirement is voluntary. However, it might be a
very, very costly plan with significant costs that are passed along to students.
Of course there are many other costly perks that go to some or all
administrators and/or faculty. It's not uncommon for Ivy League universities to
give $10,000 to $30,000 annual expense accounts on top of salary for research
purposes, the kind of grants that might allow for summers in Europe doing
research. Perhaps these are necessary in some disciplines like accounting in
order to be competitive in hiring the top faculty prospects. Natural scientists
might object, however, if they have to raise their own expense money from grants
outside the university when such grants are taken out of overhead for accounting
researchers unable to get outside research grants. There's less objection if
accounting research is supported by accounting firm donations to accounting
schools and departments.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
From IDG Connect on March 9, 2013
Question Posed by an Accounting Student
Wouldn't it be better if there were more exams and each
exam was incremental? Hypothetically, the first exam covers only 1 chapter, the
second covers 2 chapters, third covers 3 chapters and so on. Do you think this
approach would still be useful in developing the critical thinking ability of
students? Or is it going to defeat the purpose of “uncertainty” and just train
the students on how to get better at taking the exam?
Answer According to Hoyle
HOW WOULD YOU HAVE ANSWERED THIS QUESTION?
by Joe Hoyle
Teaching Blog
March 5, 2013
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-would-you-have-answered-this.html
"10 Worst Corporate Accounting Scandals," by Barry Ritholtz, Ritholtz
Blog, March 7, 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/worst-corp-scandals/#more-90147
Jensen Comment
Barry is a financial analyst with a political science background. As an
accounting professor I claim that he missed some of the biggest accounting
scandals even if we leave out the really big scandals before 1950 (e.g, leave
out the South Sea Scandal of monumental proportion).
There are really two tacks that one can take in the definition of "Corporate
Accounting Scandals." One is the size of the "theft" resulting from accountant
and/or auditor negligence. Barry probably had this in mind, but he missed a few
such as the Franklin Raines earnings management scandal at Fannie Mae.
The other tack is gross accountant and/or audit negligence even when the size
of the theft is somewhat smaller for a worse crime. For example, there was
enormous accountant and/or auditor negligence when pilfered $53 million from
Dixon, Illinois ---
"Rita
Crundwell, Ill. financial officer (Dixon, Illinois horse enthusiast) who
allegedly stole $53 million, sentenced to 19.5 years in prison," by Casey Glynn, CBS News, February 14, 2013 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57569411-504083/rita-crundwell-ill-financial-officer-who-allegedly-stole-$53-million-sentenced-to-19.5-years-in-prison/
There are many such thefts by accountants that are bad as it gets even if the
amounts they stole is are not in the record books.
Here are some examples of accounting examples Barry should've also
considered::
When KPMG Got Fired
Fannie Mae may have conducted the worst earnings management scheme in the
history of accounting.
. . . flexibility
also gave Fannie the ability to manipulate earnings to hit -- within
pennies -- target numbers for executive bonuses. Ofheo details an
example from 1998, the year the Russian financial crisis sent interest
rates tumbling. Lower rates caused a lot of mortgage holders to prepay
their existing home mortgages. And Fannie was suddenly facing an
estimated expense of $400 million.
Well, in its wisdom, Fannie decided to recognize only $200 million,
deferring the other half. That allowed Fannie's executives -- whose
bonus plan is linked to earnings-per-share -- to meet the target for
maximum bonus payouts. The target EPS for maximum payout was $3.23 and
Fannie reported exactly . . . $3.2309. This bull's-eye was worth $1.932
million to then-CEO James Johnson, $1.19 million to then-CEO-designate
Franklin Raines, and $779,625 to then-Vice Chairman Jamie Gorelick.
That same year Fannie installed software that allowed management to
produce multiple scenarios under different assumptions that, according
to a Fannie executive, "strengthens the earnings management that is
necessary when dealing with a volatile book of business." Over the
years, Fannie designed and added software that allowed it to assess the
impact of recognizing income or expense on securities and loans. This
practice fits with a Fannie corporate culture that the report says
considered volatility "artificial" and measures of precision "spurious."
This disturbing culture was apparent in Fannie's manipulation of its
derivative accounting. Fannie runs a giant derivative book in an attempt
to hedge its massive exposure to interest-rate risk. Derivatives must be
marked-to-market, carried on the balance sheet at fair value. The
problem is that changes in fair-value can cause some nasty volatility in
earnings.
So, Fannie decided to classify a huge amount of its derivatives as
hedging transactions, thereby avoiding any impact on earnings. (And we
mean huge: In December 2003, Fan's derivatives had a notional value of
$1.04 trillion of which only a notional $43 million was not classified
in hedging relationships.) This misapplication continued when Fannie
closed out positions. The company did not record the fair-value changes
in earnings, but only in Accumulated Other Comprehensive Income (AOCI)
where losses can be amortized over a long period.
Fannie had some $12.2 billion in deferred losses in the AOCI balance at
year-end 2003. If this amount must be reclassified into retained
earnings, it might punish Fannie's earnings for various periods over the
past three years, leaving its capital well below what is required by
regulators.
In all, the Ofheo report notes, "The misapplications of GAAP are not
limited occurrences, but appear to be pervasive . . . [and] raise
serious doubts as to the validity of previously reported financial
results, as well as adequacy of regulatory capital, management
supervision and overall safety and soundness. . . ." In an agreement
reached with Ofheo last week, Fannie promised to change the methods
involved in both the cookie-jar and derivative accounting and to change
its compensation "to avoid any inappropriate incentives."
But we don't think this goes nearly far enough for a company whose
executives have for years derided anyone who raised a doubt about either
its accounting or its growing risk profile. At a minimum these
executives are not the sort anyone would want running the U.S. Treasury
under John Kerry. With the Justice Department already starting a
criminal probe, we find it hard to comprehend that the Fannie board
still believes that investors can trust its management team.
Fannie Mae isn't an ordinary company and this isn't a run-of-the-mill
accounting scandal. The U.S. government had no financial stake in the
failure of Enron or WorldCom. But because of Fannie's implicit subsidy
from the federal government, taxpayers are on the hook if its capital
cushion is insufficient to absorb big losses. Private profit, public
risk. That's quite a confidence game -- and it's time to call it.
Wikipedia has a listing of major accounting scandals that I
don't think Barry looked at when listing his "10 Worst Corporate Accounting
Scandals" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_fraud#List_of_major_accounting_scandals
One of the largest settlements/fines paid by an accounting firm arose when
KPMG confessed to selling over $2 billion in fraudulent tax shelters. The firms
cash settlement with the IRS was over $400 million, which was a small amount
compared to the actual damages.
The February 19, 2004 Frontline worldwide
broadcast is going to greatly sadden the already sad face of KPMG. As a former
KPMG Professor of Accounting at Florida State University, it also saddens me
that the primary focus of the Frontline broadcast was on the bogus tax
shelters marketed by KPMG over the past few years. All the other large firms
were selling such shelters to some extent, but when their tactics were exposed
the others quickly apologized and promised to abandon sales of such shelters.
KPMG stonewalled and lied to a much greater extent in part because their
illegality went much deeper. The video can now be viewed online for free from
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tax/view/
My summary of the highlights is as
follows:
-
These illegal acts added an enormous
amount of revenue to KPMG, over $1 billion dollars of fraud.
American investigators have discovered that KPMG
marketed a tax shelter to investors that generated more than $1bn (£591m) in
unlawful benefits in less than a year.
David Harding, Financial Director ---
http://www.financialdirector.co.uk/News/1135558
-
While KPMG and all the other large
firms were desperately promising the public and the SEC that they were
changing their ethics and professionalism in the wake of the Andersen melt
down and their own publicized scandals, there were signs that none of the
firms, and especially KPMG, just were not getting it. See former executive
partner Art Wyatt's August 3, 2004 speech entitled "ACCOUNTING
PROFESSIONALISM: THEY JUST DON'T GET IT" ---
http://aaahq.org/AM2003/WyattSpeech.pdf
-
KPMG's illegal acts in not
registering the bogus tax shelters was deliberate with the strategy that if
the firm got caught by the IRS the penalties were only about 10% of the
profits in those shelters such that the illegality was approved all the way
to the top executives of KPMG.
Former Partner's
Memo Says Fees Reaped From Sales of Tax Shelter Far Outweigh Potential
Penalties
KPMG LLP in
1998 decided not to register a new tax-sheltering strategy for wealthy
individuals after a tax partner in a memo determined the potential
penalties were vastly lower than the potential fees.
The shelter,
which was designed to minimize taxes owed on large capital gains such as
from the sale of stock or a business, was widely marketed and has come
under the scrutiny of the Internal Revenue Service. It was during the
late 1990s that sales of tax shelters boomed as large accounting firms
like KPMG and other advisers stepped up their marketing efforts.
Gregg W. Ritchie, then a KPMG LLP tax partner who now works for a Los
Angeles-based investment firm, presented the cost-benefit analysis about
marketing one of the firm's tax-shelter strategies, dubbed OPIS, in a
three-page memorandum to a senior tax partner at the accounting firm in
May 1998. By his calculations, the firm would reap fees of $360,000 per
shelter sold and potentially pay only penalties of $31,000 if
discovered, according to the internal note.
Mr. Ritchie recommended that KPMG avoid registering the strategy with
the IRS, and avoid potential scrutiny, even though he assumed the firm
would conclude it met the agency's definition of a tax shelter and
therefore should be registered. The memo, which was reviewed by The Wall
Street Journal, stated that, "The rewards of a successful marketing of
the OPIS product [and the competitive disadvantages which may result
from registration] far exceed the financial exposure to penalties that
may arise."
The directive, addressed to Jeffrey N. Stein, a former head of tax
service and now the firm's deputy chairman, is becoming a headache
itself for KPMG, which currently is under IRS scrutiny for the sale of
OPIS and other questionable tax strategies. The memo is expected to play
a role at a hearing Tuesday by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations, which has been reviewing the role of KPMG and other
professionals in the mass marketing of abusive tax shelters. A second
day of hearings, planned for Thursday, will explore the role of lawyers,
bankers and other advisers.
Richard Smith, KPMG's current head of tax services, said Mr. Ritchie's
note "reflects an internal debate back and forth" about complex issues
regarding IRS regulations. And the firm's ultimate decision not to
register the shelter "was made based on an analysis of the law. It
wasn't made on the basis of the size of the penalties" compared with
fees. Mr. Ritchie, who left KPMG in 1998, declined to comment. Mr. Stein
couldn't be reached for comment Sunday.
KPMG, in a statement Friday, said it has made "substantial improvements
and changes in KPMG's tax practices, policies and procedures over the
past three years to respond to the evolving nature of both the tax laws
and regulations, and the needs of our clients. The tax strategies that
will be discussed at the subcommittee hearing represent an earlier time
at KPMG and a far different regulatory and marketplace environment. None
of the strategies -- nor anything like these tax strategies -- is
currently being offered by KPMG."
Continued in the article.
-
KPMG would probably still be selling
the bogus tax shelters if a KPMG whistle blower named Mike Hamersley had not
called attention to the highly secretive bogus tax shelter sales team at
KPMG. His recent and highly damaging testimony to KPMG is available at
http://finance.senate.gov/hearings/testimony/2003test/102103mhtest.pdf
This is really, really bad for the image of professionalism that KPMG tries
to portray on their happy face side of the firm. KPMG is now under criminal
investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
-
The reason that KPMG and the other large accounting firms did
and can continue to sell illegal tax shelters at the margin is that they
have poured millions into an expensive lobby team in Washington DC that has
been highly successful in blocking Senator Grassley's proposed legislation
that would make all tax shelters illegal if the sheltering strategy served
no economic purpose other than to cheat on taxes. Your large accounting
firms in conjunction with the world's largest banks continue to block this
legislation. If the
accounting firms wanted to really improve their professionalism image they
would announce that they have shifted their lobbying efforts to supporting
Senator Grassley's proposed cleanup legislation. But to do so would put
these firms at odds with their largest clients who are the primary
benefactors of abusive tax shelters.
And KPMG's negligent audits of Countrywide Financial may have
resulted in the largest economic damage ever for an auditing firm.
"Settling For Silence: KPMG
Closes The Books On New Century And Countrywide," by Francine McKenna,
re:TheAuditors, August 18, 2010 ---
http://retheauditors.com/2010/08/18/settling-for-silence-kpmg-closes-the-books-on-new-century-and-countrywide/
And if we move beyond accounting per se, the recent LIBOR
scandals are bigger than all of his "10 Worst" combined ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
The Lawsuits are "Boundless"
"Free-Textbook Company Rewrites Its Content Following Publishers’ Lawsuit,"
by Jake New, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 8, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-textbook-company-rewrites-its-content-following-publishers-lawsuit/42809?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A free-textbook company
that was sued last year by three major textbook
publishers has now rewritten the content it was accused of stealing.
Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher
Education filed a joint complaint in March 2012 against the company, known
as Boundless. The publishers asserted that the way Boundless creates its
textbooks violates their copyrights. In a process called “alignment,”
students select the traditional text they need, and Boundless pulls together
open content to create free versions of the books.
The publishers say the resulting products too
closely mirror the original texts, specifically the way the new books are
organized. Matt Oppenheim, a lawyer representing the publishers, said
Boundless was simply stealing the substance of his clients’ textbooks.
“They were stripping out the entirety of a book’s
structure and organization, topic by topic, subtopic by subtopic, and using
it to create a skeleton that they then told the world was a version of a
publisher’s book,” he said.
The lawsuit, he said, would continue.
Ariel Diaz, chief executive of Boundless, said the
rewritten versions were just part of a continuing process of improving the
company’s products, and were not a response to the lawsuit. The company
stands by the original versions of its textbooks and its defense, he said.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads on Plagiarism ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Mostly but not entirely about the economy
"100 Startling Facts About the Economy," by Morgan Housel, The Motley
Fool, February 5, 2013 ---
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/02/05/100-startling-facts-about-the-economy.aspx#ixzz2MK6aGoJB
Selected facts of possible interest:
2. If you divide their net worths by their age, Carlos Slim and Bill
Gates have each accumulated more than $100,000 in net worth for every hour
they've been alive.
3 According to Forbes, if a Google employee passes away, "their surviving
spouse or domestic partner will receive a check for 50% of their salary
every year for the next decade." (in the case of Google I suspect that
includes gay partners).
5. According to a study by Harvard professor David Wise and two
colleagues, 46.1% of Americans die with less than $10,000 in assets.
16. The U.K. economy is 3.3% smaller than it was in 2008. The U.S.
economy is 2.9% larger (both adjusted for inflation).
18. Dell "has spent more money on share repurchases than it earned
throughout its life as a public company," writes Floyd Norris of The New
York Times.
20. The International Labour Organization estimates a record 200 million
people will be unemployed around the world in 2013. If you gave them their
own country, it would be the fifth-largest in the world. (the U.S. share is
slightly over 11 million unemployed, although unemployment statistics are
misleading since they exclude unemployed people who simply stopped looking
for work because it seemed hopeless. Unemployment statistics, on the other
hand, are bloated by unemployed people earning fairly good money in the
underground economy such as housemaids, day care services, roofers,
plumbers, ranch hands, lumber jacks, drug dealers, prostitutes, security
guards, truck drivers, etc.).
21. Despite the overall population doubling, more babies were born in the
U.S. in 1956 than were born in 2009, 2010, or 2011.
24. Netflix surged more than 50% on Jan. 24 from the previous
day's low. $1,000 invested in short-term call options
would have been worth $2 million in less than 24 hours. (Please don't
try this at home.)
26. U.S. charitable giving was $298 billion in 2011, according to the
Giving USA Foundation. That's more than the GDP of all but 33 countries in
the world.
28. "Globally, the production of a given quantity of crop requires 65%
less land than it did in 1961," writes author Matt Ridley.
31. Since 2008, Americans have donated $19.1 million to the U.S. Treasury
to help pay down the national debt.
35. The 100 largest public pension funds alone have $1.2 trillion of
unfunded liabilities, according to actuarial firm Milliman.
44. According to California Common Sense, "Over the last 30 years, the
number of people California incarcerates grew more than eight times faster
than the general population."
48. According to economist Glen Weyl, "Of Harvard students graduating in
early '90s and pursuing careers in finance, 1/3 were making over $1 million
a year by 2005." (The prospects are not quite as rosy on Wall Street today.)
49. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, 44% of
those working for minimum wage in 2010 had attended at least some college,
up from 25% in 1979. (It is not clear if this includes students working for
minimum wage before graduating).
52. The number of workers aged 55 and up
is about to surpass the number of workers aged 24 to 34 for the first
time ever.
55. The IRS estimates that illegal tax-evasion reduced government tax
revenue by $450 billion in 2006 (the most recent year calculated). That's
roughly equal to what the government spends annually on Medicare.
60. The International Energy Agency predicts that the U.S. will become
the world's largest oil-producer by 2020, overtaking Saudi Arabia.
66. Since U.S. markets bottomed in March 2009, more than $8 trillion of
lost wealth has been recouped.
70. "Of the Americans who earn over $150,000, 82 percent had a bachelor's
degree. Just 6.5 percent had no more than a high school diploma," writes
Catherine Rampell of The New York Times. (This is a misleading statistic
since most of those college graduates may have done well without a college
degree due to higher IQ, motivation, work ethic, better health, low obesity
rates, opportunities to work with successful parents, etc.)
73. Credit card debt as a percentage of GDP is now at the lowest level in
two decades.
77. According to Gallup, 51.3% of Americans consider themselves
"thriving," 45.1% say they are "struggling," and 3.6% say they're
"suffering."
78. An average couple will pay $155,000 in in 401(k) fees over their
careers, according to Demos, reducing an average account balance from
$510,000 to $355,000.
84. Of the 3.1 million students who graduated high school in 2010, 78.2%
received their diplomas on time, according to the National Center for
Education Statistics. That was the highest percentage since 1974.
85. The U.S. birthrate declined 8% from 2007 to 2010, according to Pew.
At 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the 2011 U.S. birthrate was the
lowest since records began in 1920.
87. According to David Wessel of The Wall Street Journal, Americans
"spend about half of their food budgets at restaurants now, compared to a
third in the 1970s."
92. Federal nondefense discretionary spending -- all spending minus
defense and entitlements -- is
on track to hit its lowest level as a share of GDP in more than 50
years, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office.
96. In the 1960s, wages and salary income made up more than 50% of GDP.
By 2011, it was less than 44%, as dividends, interest, and capital gains
made up a growing share of the nation's income. (Manufacturing robots are
also partly to blame.)
98. "More than 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy food at some
point in 2011," writes CNNMoney, citing U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
In June 2012, 46.7 million Americans received food stamps. (It's difficult
to estimate the amount of cheating going on here, but it's very high. One
factor is that some couples with children avoid marriage so that they can
get food stamps in spite of the income of a working partner. This is why
some couples pay for groceries with food stamps before loading them into a
fancy car.)
100. The unemployment rate for those with a bachelor's degree is just
3.7% -- less than half the nationwide average. (This is a misleading
statistic. Perhaps half (a guess) of college graduates are parents at home
who are not included in the unemployment rate out of choice. And most of
those college graduates who are working may have done well without a college
degree due to higher IQ, motivation, work ethic, better health, low obesity
rates, opportunities to work with successful parents, etc More importantly,
many of the unemployed without college degrees are very hard to employ due
to retardation, poor health including mental health, gross obesity, racial
prejudice that still exists, rural living preferences, gang influences, and
other factors that skew the unemployment rate averages toward non-graduates
from college.)
From CFO.com Morning Ledger on March 8, 2013
Companies are tapping into their massive cash hoards
to reward shareholders handsomely. S&P 500 firms are expected to pay at
least $300 billion in dividends this year – topping last year’s $282 billion,
the WSJ reports in this A1 must-read. And
analysts say that could go even higher.
Apple stands to
pay out about $10 billion in a dividend policy it initiated last year, while
Exxon Mobil and
AT&T are each set
to pay dividends around $10 billion. Then there are the buybacks. In
February alone, American companies – including
Home Depot,
General Electric
and PepsiCo —
announced plans to buy back $117.8 billion of their own shares — the highest
monthly total in records dating back to 1985.
“We are starting to get out of hunker-down mode, so
what you have now is a bunch of cash-hoarders who have decided to take that
cash out of their balance sheets,” said David Ikenberry, dean of the
University of Colorado’s business school. “Is that a good thing? It
probably is. They’re liberating capital and putting it back out into the
capital markets, and letting that multiplier effect kick in.”
Cash piles are
still growing. The Fed’s latest quarterly “Flow of Funds” report, released
yesterday, said that cash and cash-equivalents held by U.S. corporations,
excluding financial companies, stood at $1.79 trillion in Q4 of 2012, up
from $1.77 trillion the previous quarter. “Corporations are flush with cash
and that cash sitting in the corporate coffers is earning next to nothing,”
said Rob Leiphart, an analyst at Birinyi Associates. “Companies have to do
something with it.”
12 Types of Answers to Avoid in Ph.D. oral examinations (wellllll, maybe
not always avoid when silence is worse)
"12 Bloopers to Avoid in Job Interviews," Robert J. Sternberg,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 25, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Bloopers-to-Avoid-in-Job/137449/
Jensen Comment
These so-called bloopers in job interviews can be extrapolated to a Ph.D. oral
examination. One of outside examiners for my oral examination was notoriously
predictable. For 10 years he purportedly asked the same questions. I was fully
prepared in advance to answer these questions.
Then for some unknown reason he chose me to ask completely new questions. He
must've been confused when I answered questions he did not ask.
After I passed that oral examination it was most certainly a 3+ martini
night.
Questions
How much of the "record" increase in the Dow is illusionary inflation that
misleads the investing public into thinking they are doing great?
Why do the major television networks hide the real facts of this "record"
high in the Dow
Here's The Crying Towel
To add pain to misery the IRS taxes those illusionary, non-real gains (possibly
at long-term capital gains rates) when the IRS should really be only taxing
inflation-adjusted gains.
"Dismal Science Takes Dim View of Dow 'Record'," by E. S. Browning,
The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324539404578342661413383002.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet
Investors and Wall Street analysts rejoiced at the
Dow Jones Industrial Average's record close on Tuesday. Economists were
unimpressed.
Seen from the perspective of the dismal science,
the Dow's close isn't a record at all. That is because economists adjust
share-price movements for inflation, a factor stock analysts prefer to
ignore. Once inflation is factored in, the Dow's stellar run over the past
few years looks more pedestrian and the investors who have ridden its wave
less wealthy.
With consumer-price increases removed, something
students learn about in Economics 101, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is
far from a record: It hasn't been in real record territory in more than 13
years.
The last nominal Dow record, in October 2007,
wasn't a record at all once inflation is removed. The last real, or
inflation-adjusted, record was on Jan. 14, 2000.
It is something that analysts and investors should
take more seriously, said Richard Sylla, a professor of financial history at
New York University's Stern School of Business. "People could be fooled if
they don't pay attention to inflation," he said.
The effects of inflation are relatively small over
the short term. But over a longer period, the distortions can be
significant. Ignoring inflation, Mr. Sylla said, the Dow appears to be
roughly 140 times its level of 100 years ago, an enormous gain. But removing
price increases and counting only real gains, the Dow is roughly seven times
its level of 100 years ago, a good gain but far from what it appears.
Even over the past 13 years, a period that is
important to many ordinary investors, the difference is significant. In
nominal terms, the Dow today appears to have risen 22% from the record it
hit in January 2000. But taking inflation into account, it still is more
than 10% below that record.
For investors planning for retirement, ignoring
inflation can mean overstating the value of future investments and
understating the amount of money that will be needed. That can be even more
the case for bonds than for stocks, Mr. Sylla said, because the interest
payments that investors receive from bonds don't change as prices rise. The
longer the bond's maturity, the more inflation eats into the bond's return.
Because most ordinary people are investing now to
cover future needs, it also is essential to take into account likely future
inflation, which will eat into the real value of future returns, he said.
"You could be fooled if you get a 10% return on
your investment. But if prices go up 10%, you won't be any better off," even
though you appear to have a big gain, he said.
Wall Street hates this reality. On Tuesday, the Dow
closed at 14253.77. That surpassed the nominal 2007 record of 14164.53 and
eclipsed the high of 11722.98 hit in 2000.
But since the end of 1994, when the 1990s stock
boom began, consumer prices have risen 55% according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. To see how much stock prices are up in real terms, analysts need
to remove that inflation.
Measuring everything in 1994 dollars reduces the
gains and makes the Dow chart less exciting, but as economists like to put
it, the numbers are real. Tuesday's close is just 9256.38 once inflation is
removed. That doesn't even match the inflation-adjusted high of 10194.80 hit
in 2007. And it is far from the real record of 10424.28 hit Jan. 14, 2000,
according to calculations by Bespoke Investment Group. In inflation-adjusted
terms, the Dow still has more than doubled since 1994, but it shows no
progress at all since the first part of 1999.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The Fed's Quantitative Easing strategy of printing trillions of dollars to pay
government bills without taxing or borrowing has contributed to this illusion.
What a sick game. Create inflation so you can tax the
illusionary gains.
Question
What five companies primarily drive ups and downs of the Dow price index?
Hint
It's like judging your teaching performance in a class of 30 students on the
basis of only five selective students chosen not at random.
Answer
"Five Stocks Do the Heavy Lifting," by Steven Rossolillo, The Wall
Street Journal, March 5, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324539404578342771985751896.html
Jensen Comment
There's fantastic interactive graphic that accompanies this online article. You
have to see it to believe it!
Bob Jensen's threads on multivariate data visualizations:
Visualization of Multivariate Data (including faces) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm
Yawn
2013 US News College Rankings ---
Click Here
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2013/02/28/which-universities-are-ranked-highest-by-college-officials?s_cid=rss:college-rankings-blog:which-universities-are-ranked-highest-by-college-officials
Bob Jensen's threads on college ranking controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Blue is Blue
From the TaxProf Blog on March 6, 2013
The Fiscal Times:
The Ten Worst States for U.S. Taxes:
-
New York
-
New Jersey
-
California
-
Vermont
-
Rhode Island
-
Minnesota
-
North Carolina
-
Wisconsin
-
Iowa
-
Maryland
The left of liberal governor of Vermont claims that his state's welfare
generosity motivates Vermonters not to seek employment (at least the kind that
does not pay cash under the table in the underground economy) ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Political/PoliticalQuotationsCommentaries.htm#VermontWelfare
Case Studies in Gaming the Income Tax Laws ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
Drew Brees was smart/lucky to reside in a lower taxation state. Poor Joe
Flacco plunks out the largest amount in taxes among NFL players. It's not clear,
however, that he pays the highest tax rates --- those are reserved for the
Bluest States.
Joe Flacco, Tom Brady, Eli Manning, Colin Kaepernick, Carson Palmer, and Phil
Rivers should get the biggest crying towels while they are singing "The Blues."
"Tax Bite Leaves Joe Flacco Only the Second Highest Paid NFL Player,"
Americans for Tax Reform, March 7, 2013 ---
http://www.atr.org/tax-bite-leaves-flacco-second-best-a7506
"New Center Hopes to Clean Up Sloppy Science and Bogus Research," by
Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 6, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/New-Center-Hopes-to-Clean-Up/137683/
Something is wrong with science, or at least with
how science is often done. Flashy research in prestigious journals later
proves to be bogus. Researchers have built careers on findings that are
dubious or even turn out to be fraudulent. Much of the conversation about
that trend has focused on flaws in social psychology, but the problem is not
confined to a single field. If you keep up with the latest retractions and
scandals, it's hard not to wonder how much research is trustworthy.
But Tuesday might just be a turning point. A new
organization, called the
Center for Open
Science, is opening its doors in an attempt to
harness and focus a growing movement to clean up science. The center's
organizers don't put it quite like that; they say the center aims to "build
tools to improve the scientific process and promote accurate, transparent
findings in scientific research." Now, anybody with an idea and some
chutzpah can start a center. But what makes this effort promising is that it
has some real money behind it: The center has been given $5.25-million by
the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to help get started.
It's also promising because a co-director of the
center is Brian Nosek, an associate professor of psychology at the
University of Virginia (the other director is a Virginia graduate student,
Jeffrey Spies). Mr. Nosek is the force behind the
Reproducibility Project, an effort to replicate
every study from three psychology journals published in 2008, in an attempt
to gauge how much published research might actually be baseless.
Mr. Nosek is one of a number of strong voices in
psychology arguing for more transparency and accountability. But up until
now there hasn't been an organization solely devoted to solving those
problems. "This gives real backing to show that this is serious and that we
can really put the resources behind it to do it right," Mr. Nosek said.
"This whole movement, if it is a movement, has gathered sufficient steam to
actually come to this."
'Rejigger Those
Incentives'
So what exactly will the center do? Some of that
grant money will go to finance the Reproducibility Project and to further
develop the
Open Science
Framework, which already allows scientists to
share and store findings and hypotheses. More openness is intended to
combat, among other things, the so-called file-drawer effect, in which
scientists publish their successful experiments while neglecting to mention
their multiple flubbed attempts, giving a false impression of a finding's
robustness.
The center hopes to encourage scientists to
"register" their hypotheses before they carry out experiments, a procedure
that should help keep them honest. And the center is working with journals,
like Perspectives on Psychological Science, to publish the results
of experiments even if they don't pan out the way the researchers hoped.
Scientists are "reinforced for publishing, not for getting it right in the
current incentives," Mr. Nosek said. "We're working to rejigger those
incentives."
Mr. Nosek and his compatriots didn't solicit funds
for the center. Foundations have been knocking on their door. The Arnold
Foundation sought out Mr. Nosek because of a concern about whether the
research that's used to make policy decisions is really reliable.
"It doesn't benefit anyone if the publications that
get out there are in any way skewed toward the sexy results that might be a
fluke, as opposed to the rigorous replication and testing of ideas," said
Stuart Buck, the foundation's director of research.
Other foundations have been calling too. With more
grants likely to be on the way, Mr. Nosek thinks the center will have
$8-million to $10-million in commitments before writing a grant proposal.
The goal is an annual budget of $3-million. "There are other possibilities
that we might be able to grow more dramatically than that," Mr. Nosek said.
"It feels like it's raining money. It's just ridiculous how much interest
there is in these issues."
Continued in article
Appeal for a "Daisy Chain of Replication"
"Nobel laureate challenges psychologists to clean up their act:
Social-priming research needs “daisy chain” of replication," by Ed Yong,
Nature, October 3, 2012 ---
http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-laureate-challenges-psychologists-to-clean-up-their-act-1.11535
Jensen Comment
Accountics scientists set a high bar because they replicate virtually all their
published research.
Yeah Right!
Accountics science journals like The Accounting Review have referees that
discourage replications by refusing to publish them. They won't even publish
commentaries that question the outcomes ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Accountics science researchers won't even discuss their work on the AAA
Commons ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
So what's new?
UK judge who issued extreme ruling for Samsung against Apple hired by...
Samsung! ---
http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/02/uk-judge-who-issued-extreme-ruling-for.html
"What is the most underused research technique among lawyers?"
Answer in an email from Brian Garner on February 26, 2013
ANSWER: Undoubtedly it's Google Books.
It's possible to perform extremely literal searches
-- word-for-word and character-for-character searches -- on Google Books,
and to have at your fingertips the entire corpus of major university
libraries' holdings. This means that you can scour all the legal treatises
at Chicago, Stanford, Oxford, Columbia, and other major institutions in
minutes -- and without ever leaving your chair.
For example, let's say you wanted to learn the
history of whether statutes can be repealed by disuse. You could first go to
the main Google Books site and type in terms such as repeal statute disuse.
A quick scan of the results would lead you to the term desuetude. You could
then scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "advanced search," where
you'd find powerful options for refining your search. By crafting different
searches using the terms desuetude, statute, repeal, disuse, American law,
etc., you would find sources discussing desuetude in Scots, Roman, English,
and American law. And as with any research project, the more you delve into
the sources, the more nuances you'll discover. (By the way, for a full
discussion of the desuetude canon and its standing in current law, see
Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal
Texts 336-39 [2012]).
As with any electronic search, the quality of the
results will depend on your research skills. But instead of paying for a
legal-research service, as lawyers so commonly do, you have a compilation of
answers in treatises with just a few strokes of your keyboard -- and best of
all: at no charge.
Granted, for a full-text reading, Google Books is
most useful when you're researching historical matters found in works in the
public domain (any book published before 1923 is not protected by copyright
laws and has passed into the public domain). But even for books still in
copyright, it can take you to sources you can purchase or consult in a
library. An especially useful feature of Google Books is the advanced-search
criterion by publication date. For example, you might ask for books
published only from 1976 to 2000.
Mind you, Google Books shouldn't be your sole
source for legal research. But you'll be surprised at how handy it can be.
So don't let this valuable research tool go untapped. Lawyers everywhere
ought to be using Google Books in addition to Westlaw, LexisNexis, and other
electronic-search services.
Don't do as I do, do as I say
Author Unknown
"Why analysts should not be investors," by Felix Salmon, Reuters,
March 7, 2013 ---
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/03/07/why-analysts-should-not-be-investors-andy-zaky-edition/
Advantages and Disadvantages of eTextbooks
March 8, 2013 message from Jerry Trites
Blog entry - E-textbooks long overdue
http://trites-e-business.blogspot.ca/2013/03/e-textbooks-in-cloud-long-overdue.html
March 8, 2013 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Jerry,
Many publisher textbooks, including accounting textbooks and supplements,
are now available, as one of the alternatives, in eBook form. The business
model for an eBook textbook is often a rental model. Students pay to get
access for a term before access is denied.
The biggest advantage that I can see in the above business model is that
books can be updated each semester. This, however, is not as easy for
authors as it sounds. For example, when the IASB and FASB adopt the
forthcoming converged Revenue Recognition Standard, the revision has to be
carried through all end-of-chapter questions, problems, and cases in the
entire book. The revision also has to be carried through on all supplements.
Richard Campbell's new multimedia solutions "manual" funded by Wiley
could be out of date two days after it hits the market.
There are drawbacks eBook textbooks.. Hard copy purchases, unlike eBook
rentals, can be shelved with all the marginal notations and referenced for
years to come --- at least until passing the CPA examination.
Many readers, like me, still prefer hard copy, which is why I still pay
to receive my AAA journals in hard copy as well as electronic form.
To my knowledge there is no used book market for an eBook even if the
book can be owned forever by a reader (usually with free future downloads if
you have computer crashes).
How do we "book" eBooks into the ledger if they become part of the
business firm's reference library? Pat Walters and Tom Selling would
probably prefer marking eBooks to market which is $0 for each eBook even
though hard copy versions of the same content on the library shelves have
higher values when marked-to-used market. In some cases, as with the Paton
and Littleton 1940 monograph, the exit value by be 100 times 1940 cost in
hard copy.
Bob Jensen's threads on eBooks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ebooks.htm
Bob Jensen
"The Object Formerly Known as the Textbook," by Jeffrey R. Young,
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 27, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Dont-Call-Them-Textbooks/136835/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Textbook publishers argue that their newest digital
products shouldn't even be called "textbooks." They're really software
programs built to deliver a mix of text, videos, and homework assignments.
But delivering them is just the beginning. No old-school textbook was able
to be customized for each student in the classroom. The books never graded
the homework. And while they contain sample exam questions, they couldn't
administer the test themselves.
One publisher calls its products "personalized
learning experiences," another "courseware," and one insists on using its
own brand name, "MindTap." For now, this new product could be called "the
object formerly known as the textbook."
Continued in article
"10½ Favorite Reads from TED Bookstore 2013," by Maria Popova,
Brain Pickings, March 2, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/26/ted-bookstore/
"The 8 Most Obnoxious Internet Commenters," by: Toby Francis,
Cracked, September 3, 2008 ---
http://www.cracked.com/article_16605_the-8-most-obnoxious-internet-commenters.html
Jensen Comment
I vote for any commenter who will not allow his/her guest to complete a single
sentence. That's not a guest. It's a speech beside a whipping post.
Comparison of Gas Prices Among the 50 States ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/GasPricesFeb2013.jpg
Source: "Feeling the Pinch at the Pump," The Wall Street Journal,
February 21, 2013 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323864304578318390193372084.html?mg=reno64-wsj
Jensen Comment
The states that have the highest gas prices tend to be those that tax the most
per gallon. In California and some other states costly air pollution control
blending adds to the costs. And in California and some other states
environmental regulations virtually prohibit the building of new refineries,
thus requiring greater costs of importing fuel into those states. I don't know
that California will ever allow a new refinery to be built in that state.
I just bought 10 gallons of diesel fuel for my tractor and paid $.50 cents
less per gallon because I use this tractor off-road for snow blowing and mowing
purposes. Most states provide some relief for off-road fuel usage. Even though
gas prices are high in the mid-west farming states, farmers do get some price
relief for growing their crops. The color is different (often red) for
off-road versus on-road usage. I don't think it is common, however, for the
state troopers to stop vehicles and examine the color of the fuel.
Note how New Hampshire is outlined by the pink of surrounding New England
states. The same thing happens with liquor and cigarette prices. We're big on
sin in New Hampshire.
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/GasPricesFeb2013.jpg
Comparisons of Sales Tax Exemptions in the 50 States ---
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/motorfuel/sales_taxes_exemptions.htm
"BMW’s Solution to Limited Electric-Vehicle Range: a Gas-Powered Loaner:
BMW’s approach to quelling range anxiety differs markedly from the tactics of
other automakers," by Kevin Bullis, MIT's Technology Review, March 6,
2013 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511906/bmws-solution-to-limited-electric-vehicle-range-a-gas-powered-loaner/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130306
Jensen Comment
If I bought a BMW i3 the batteries would not have enough oomph to get me to the
closest BMW dealer on a hot day to pick up my gas-powered loaner. Today, in
early March, it couldn't even get me half way because the batteries don't work
well in cold weather.
The limitation is the BMW purchase contract clause that says "infrequent" use
of a gas-powered loaner.
And why is it that none of the electric car promotions ever talk about the
cost of recharging the batteries?
This obviously varies by country and by regions within a country. In most of
Europe the cost of electricity is very high, which is why Europeans often heat
water in their homes on demand rather that store it up 24/7 in big hot water
tanks that are popular in USA homes.
The answer probably is that if you can afford a BMW i2 or a GM Volt or a
Tesla you never have to ask about the cost of recharging the batteries.
Japanese automakers have given up on battery-powered cars. They're betting on
fuel cells and/or greatly increased gas mileage efficiency. Meanwhile, BMW, GM,
and Tesla will keep making battery-powered cars for the top 1%, or maybe I
should say the top 0.000001%.
The odd thing is that the drivers that can afford these luxury electric cars
probably don't care two hoots if their luxury gas guzzlers get less than ten
miles to the gallon or that their private jets cost $10,000 per hour in the air.
And there are playboys who hope that when they take women out for a drive the
batteries will die miles from home near the parking lot of a motel. That might
even make a good theme for a Viagra commercial. "My batteries lost their oomph
but not me honey!"
"Accountants Will Save the World," by Peter Bakker, Harvard
Business Review Blog, March 5, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/accountants_will_save_the_worl.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Jensen Comment
You might also want to read the comments that follow this article.
Bob Jensen's threads on triple bottom accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#TripleBottom
"Ten career tips for young CPAs," by Mark Ursick, cpa2biz,
February 25, 2013 ---
http://www.cpa2biz.com/Content/media/PRODUCER_CONTENT/Newsletters/Articles_2013/CPA/Feb/BuildCareers.jsp
Jensen Comment
I especially agree with: "Don’t limit your challenges; challenge
your limits."
The most gung ho student I ever had studying the accounting for derivative
financial instruments and hedging strategies never limited his challenges even
though he was less gifted than some of my students. He just worked and worked
and worked as a student.
His first job was with a Big Four firm in Houston and within three years he
was the technical guy who virtually was in charge on an audit of a company that
had over $1 billion in derivatives. He's since moved on to become a leading
executive at Microsoft.
In contrast I had more brilliant students who got buy in my accounting theory
course but would run like somebody yelled "Fire" if they had an opportunity to
audit derivative financial instruments contracts. They never became executives
in any companies.
Wow! This is a paradigm shift in terms of when students (as sophomores)
are promised they are admitted to medical school.
"Med School Without the MCAT," by Zack Budryk, Inside Higher Ed,
February 28, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/28/mount-sinai-rethinks-medical-school-admissions
In a major policy shift, the Icahn School of
Medicine at Mount Sinai Wednesday announced that it will fill half of its
entering class going forward by admitting college sophomores -- three years
before they would enroll in medical school -- and will do so without
requiring traditional pre-med course requirements and the Medical College
Admission Test (MCAT).
In what a press release called the beginning of a
“fundamental shift,” sophomores will be admitted to
“FlexMed,” a new program in which they will spend
the rest of their undergraduate time in tracks such as computational
science/engineering, biomedical sciences and humanities/social sciences.
Students will be encouraged to take courses in biostatistics, ethics, health
policy and public health. These courses would replace the traditional
pre-med science requirements.
Students will also be encouraged, but not required,
to become proficient in Spanish or Mandarin.
David Muller, Mount Sinai’s dean of medical
education, said in an interview that although requirements issues had been
“written about for years and years... there’s been either an inertia or a
reluctance to take a first step and break down the model and try something
new. What I hope will happen is that this program will prove very successful
and prove decisively that it’s a viable alternative.”
Mount Sinai has had a
similar program on a much smaller scale in the
past, and says it has been a success.
Explaining the rationale behind the decision to
take a small program and apply it to half of the class, Muller said that
pre-med science requirements tend to be “science that is not the most
applicable to current clinical or translational research; it’s not
unimportant science, but it’s kind of outdated.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It is not clear if there are selection criteria regarding what university
sophomores will be eligible for the program. Will sophomores at Dade Community
College be in contention? Will most of the students selected have to have
stellar SAT scores as well as 4.0 grade averages in their first year of college
(not so hard to do these days). Will minority students have an edge in
affirmative action admissions?
Another consideration is that when college graduates apply for medical school
they have already worked out a financial plan for paying the hundreds of
thousands oif dollars that medical school may cost, especially those that are
now five-year programs. Can sophomores realistically work out such financing
plans years before they eventually go to medical school and are still struggling
to pay for their undergraduate degrees.
There are thousands of college graduates applying for each open slot in
nearly every medical school in the USA. I cannot think that this early-admission
experiment will catch on in a serious way in other medical schools.
This plan is tantamount to letting a selected few jump the long line for
admission.
Bob Jensen
Reply from Bob Blystone on March 1, 2013
This is a reply about the French Medical School
system from a biology professor, Bob Blystone, who leads the premed program
at Trinity University.
Note the extremely high drop out rate in the French
system. This is some ways is wasted time for drop outs who must then begin
their first year of college in another major.
Over half the students in Trinity's entering
first-year class sign up for the premed program.
After encountering chemistry and biology, over half
of those premed students change majors the second year. It's not that most
of the students change majors because of grades. Many of them change majors
when they learn that there are possibly over 1,000 applicants who graduate
and take to MCAT for each open slot in an accredited USA medical school.
Many do not want to leave the USA to study medicine, and so they become
Trinity's science majors, business majors, economics majors, psychology
majors, education majors, etc.
(PS, Trinity takes pride in having a relatively
high percentage of their premed graduates accepted into medical school,
although sometimes it takes over a year of persistently trying.)
In many cases these premeds who change majors do so
when they learn the math of what four years at Trinity will cost plus the
hundreds of thousands more it will cost to complete medical school
afterwards. Obtaining some financial literacy contributes to their decisions
to change majors, including discovery of the cost of malpractice insurance.
Note how the French system described below is a
huge paradigm shift for becoming a licensed MD. Many medical schools in the
U.S. will probably offer the French system in part (say half of the entering
class) while B.S. degrees and the MCAT scores may be required for other
students in the entering class.
There may also be other variations such as
requiring students to have the equivalent of a two-year community college
associate degree before entering medical school under a modified French
system.
Certain specialties may be denied medical school
graduates under the French system. For example, I cannot imagine that
pathologists can be educated and trained without having a lot more science
than is taught in high school and basic medical school.
Nurses, however, will still take four or five years
of science in the undergraduate and masters programs.
On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 4:30 AM, rblyston123 <rblyston@trinity.edu>
wrote:
In a french-style system a high school graduate
begins medical school. Six years later they graduate as new MDs. So where
did the college years go? There are many courses that one takes in
undergraduate school that have no immediate bearing on the medical student.
There are also some science courses that are redundant between undergraduate
and medical school.
In the french system 2000 students start as medical
students and in one year's time, more than 1000 have quit. So the first two
years of the six are very undergraduate like but by the "Junior" year, the
medical aspects of education take over the curriculum. It does require the
student to grow up quickly.
So the efficiency is reflected in cutting down
extraneous courses in the undergraduate years and cutting down redundant
coursework. Internship can be longer in the french system. Where the system
is inefficient is the first year. So many start and so few continue beyond
the first year.
On the other hand in the german style (US) just as
many start but we see them only as undergrad premeds. The medical school
does the weeding at admissions. With the french style the students weed
themselves out during the first year.
Students who come through the german style are more research prone and
the french style are more clinical oriented.
Bob Blystone
New Apps for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
Ready to make money and share your great Windows 8 app ideas with the world? Not
sure where to start? Start here! Over the course of 31 lessons, our friend Bob
Tabor from www.LearnVisualStudio.net
will teach you the fundamentals of Windows Store app development with HTML5,
CSS3, and JavaScript by walking you through building the Contoso Cookbook Hands
On Labs. ---
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Windows-Store-apps-for-Absolute-Beginners-with-JavaScript
In 1837, the Massachusetts Board of Education
devoted part of its first annual report to praising a recent classroom
innovation called the blackboard. This “invaluable and indispensible”
innovation...
On March 4, 2013 the Financial Education Daily Linked this Quotation to the
Harvard Gazette, but I could not find the source of the quote.
"From Law School to Business School — evolution of the case method,"
Harvard Gazette, April 3, 2008 ---
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/04/from-law-school-to-business-school-%E2%80%94-evolution-of-the-case-method/
On a recent Wednesday morning, 90 high achievers
from around the world prepared to get down to cases.
Their professor buzzed through the classroom like a
worker bee. Armed with large, multicolored pieces of chalk, he organized his
notes, copied pastel-coded facts and figures on the blackboard, and set up a
film screen. Soon his students would be equally hard at work, but in a
strictly cerebral way.
This day the instructor was inclined to be kind,
giving the young man who would open the class discussion an early heads-up,
allowing some time to prepare. Often in this setting, classes start with the
heart-pounding “cold call,” where a student is put to the test without
warning. The deceptively simple “start us off” translates into “as quickly
and coherently and convincingly as possible, tell us everything known about
this situation and give us your best insight.”
As well as being busy and congenial, Jan Rivkin, a
professor in the strategy unit at Harvard Business School (HBS), was clearly
engaging, his enthusiasm infectious, his sense of humor unmistakable.
He started with a brief refresher video, one he’d
secured from a colleague on holiday in the Bahamas. The class watched their
vacationing instructor drop to his knees on the beach as the tape rolled.
With a straight face, he reviewed the finer points of his recent
technology-operations-management discussion with the class, drawing a series
of overlapping diagrams in the sand. When done, he promptly jumped into the
ocean.
The crowd loved it, but it was the last light
moment. For the next hour-and-a-half the class examined whether the Spanish
clothing company Zara should update its retailers’ IT infrastructure.
During the ensuing discussion and debate, Jan
Rivkin, deftly prodded, questioned, and encouraged his deeply engaged class.
It was just another day at HBS — and one of its
standard case-classes. The case method is the primary mode of teaching and
learning at the institution, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this
year. In honor of its centennial, the School will host a series of events on
Tuesday (April 8) that will include a number of panels, a birthday
celebration, and a case discussion on the future of HBS.
While it didn’t begin with the School’s inception,
the revolutionary instructional approach followed shortly thereafter. But it
wasn’t an entirely novel concept. The model was actually borrowed from the
Harvard Law School and Christopher Columbus Langdell HLS Class of 1853 and
dean of the Law School in 1870, who pioneered the technique for the
examination of Harvard Law School cases.
Later, at HBS, it was Dean Wallace P. Donham, a Law
School grad familiar with the technique, who pushed for the full inclusion
of the case method at the Business School, where it was altered and adapted
to a business perspective. Since 1921, it has been a core part of the
curriculum.
The method of teaching differs greatly from the
traditional lecture format, in which students take notes as the professor
speaks. Instead, students are engaged in a dynamic back-and-forth with one
another and their professor, discussing a topic typically pulled from a
relevant, real-life business scenario and featuring a dilemma or challenge.
Sometimes, once the class has examined and discussed the case, the actual
CEO or president of the company in question will appear in person to explain
how the situation ultimately unfolded.
The case topics are wide-ranging and include
everything from the world of finance to semiconductors to sweeteners to
satellite television.
Some cases offer historic reflections, employing
the lessons tragedy imparts. Cases have been written, for example, about the
space shuttle Columbia’s final mission in 2003 and the management decisions
made prior to its fatal re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, Abraham
Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War, and the management of national
intelligence prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Students are given an overview of the case’s
material to read ahead of time. The packets, roughly 20 to 25 pages long,
include a list of facts, an outline of the challenge at hand, and a history
of the company or situation in text, charts, and graphs, all compiled into a
neat brief.
More than 80 percent of HBS classes are built on
the case method. Each week students prepare approximately 14 cases both
alone and with the help of study groups. But in the end they are on their
own. In class, it is up to the individual to articulate his or her argument
and persuade others of its merits. A hefty 50 percent of a student’s grade
is determined by class participation, so taking part in the conversation is
crucial. Students raise their hands energetically, trying to get quality
“air time,” as they call it. Two important unwritten rules, self-enforced by
the students themselves: Never speak unless you have something valuable to
contribute, and keep it brief.
The teaching technique most effectively prepares
the CEOs of tomorrow for what they will inevitably face in the real world,
say the professors who employ it.
“Getting a piece of material, having to sift
through it, figure out what’s important, … come to a point of view, [then]
come to class both prepared to argue that point of view … [and] prepared to
listen and be open to others’ viewpoints — those are the skills that the
business world demands, and via the case method they get to practice those
in the classroom,” said Michael J. Roberts, senior lecturer of business
administration and executive director of the Arthur Rock Center for
Entrepreneurship.
Continued in article
March 4, 2013 reply from Steve Zeff
Bob,
Thanks for this. I presume you save seen my article, "The Contribution of
the Harvard Business School to Management Control, 1908 - 1980," in the
special issue 2008 of JMAR. Bob Kaplan invited me to do the research and
write the article for the April 2008 history symposium at HBS, which kicked
off its 100th anniversary celebration. I attach the article.
Steve.
"How Virtual Teams Can Outperform Traditional Teams," by Jason Sylva,
Harvard Business Review Blog, October 9, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/events/2012/10/how-virtual-teams-can-outperfo.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
People can easily list problems they believe are
associated with virtual teams: They haven't met and don't really know other
team members; it is hard to monitor the work of others; and dispersions can
lead to big inefficiencies and degraded performance.
In this HBR webinar, Keith Ferrazzi, a foremost
expert on professional relationship development and author of Never Eat
Alone and Who's Got Your Back?, shares a strategy for managing virtual teams
that can change how your company operates - and how you manage for years to
come.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This theory should be tested in a variety of ways with respect to case analysis
by teams. I've always argued that case learning is best in live classrooms, but
I'm beginning to doubt myself on this one. Even Harvard and Darden should
experiment with onsite versus online team assignments. One advantage of online
team assignments is grading if instructors carefully track team member
contributions, possibly by monitoring online performance as silent or active
(avatar) trackers.
Bob Jensen's threads on case method teaching and research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Cases
"To Foster Financial Literacy, Students Need More Than Information, Report
Says," by Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 22,
2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/To-Foster-Financial-Literacy/137581/
Jensen Comment
The article does not make enough of a distinction between what students should
learn about their immediate financial needs (e.g., student loans) versus what
they should know when emerging as graduates onto the mean streets of life. For
example, to better prepare students for life after graduation they should now
some of the rudiments of tax strategies, buy versus rent strategies (e.g., for
cars and homes), and knowledge of how to avoid being taken in by fraudsters and
high pressured sales people.
For example, the experience of our part-time house cleaning lady could easily
be the experience of a new college graduate. Our cleaning lady is a 67-year old
widow who probably should be thinking about retirement. She has failing eyesight
and this year broke an arm and then a leg in separate incidents in her home.
Since becoming a widow she drove the same 2005 Toyota until a high pressured car
salesman got her in his clutches. Her old car only had 53,000 miles with a life
expectancy of perhaps 300,000 miles before major repairs would be needed.
Instead he talked her into a 2012 lease on a new Toyota.
Now she can less afford to retire because of the lease payments combined with
her adult children always begging her for money. She should have kept her
perfectly good 2005 Toyota and learn how to say no to the children who take
advantage of her meager Social Security and house-cleaning income..
Similarly, college graduates probably place too much priority on getting a
new car relative to better things they can do with money after graduation.
Michigan Law’s Debt Wizard! ---
http://www.law.umich.edu/financialaid/debtwizard/Pages/default.aspx
Bob Jensen's threads on student financial literacy ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#FinancialLiteracy
"Re-evaluating My Relationship With Student Evaluations," by Janni
Aragon, Inside Higher Ed, March 3, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/re-evaluating-my-relationship-student-evaluations
Jensen Comment
Professor Aragon claims never to have seen her RateMyProfessor evaluations at
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/re-evaluating-my-relationship-student-evaluations
Unlike many evaluations on RMP (feels like over half of 1+ million student
evaluations on RMP), her students do not claim she's an easy grader. unlike many
"feminists" her qualitative evaluations tend to be less bimodal on RMP.
I never pay any attention to quantitative outcomes on RMP since the samples
of students sending evaluations to RMP are self-selecting. However, 92 such
evaluations is unusually high number for professors evaluated on RMP. My feeling
is that good teachers tend to have higher numbers of RMP respondents. However,
there are many, many exceptions.
What is unique about Janni Aragon is that she writes about her teaching
evaluations in Inside Higher Education in a way that can be compared
qualitatively with her RMP self-selecting student evaluations. She seems to be
very helpful to students who seek out her help.
Her RMP outcomes appear to be consistent with her self evaluation at
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/re-evaluating-my-relationship-student-evaluations
Teaching evaluations are a dysfunctional because they are a major cause of
the disgrace in education --- monumental grade inflation across the USA ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
"The Unnecessary Agony of Student Evaluations," by Spurgeon Thompson,
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 1, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/03/01/the-unnecessary-agony-of-student-evaluations/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Student evaluations can be either the most painful
or falsely ego-boosting things we faculty members read. Sadly, they’re
becoming more and more important as American universities veer toward
private-enterprise models of educational management. Based on the concept of
the customer survey, they have been taken public by a range of Web sites,
most famously Rate My Professors.
Now that I’ve returned from a decade teaching in
Europe, where the culture around student evaluations is entirely different,
it has been eye-opening, if not alarming, to witness American higher
education’s shifts toward consumerist assumptions. The impulse behind this
shift is understandable. We’ve all done it—written a negative review of a
product we were unhappy with on Amazon, or complained about a bad experience
with an airline that lost our bag or a hotel whose bedsheets weren’t
changed.
There’s a certain liberating power that comes with
such ratings, a sense of “I’ll get them for what they did to me” or “I’ll
reward them for that extra effort they made.” The problem is when we mistake
our money for power, as if buying a service gives us control over its
manufacture or production. It doesn’t. “Consumer power” is a myth invented
to get us to buy more.
But university students aren’t strictly consumers
purchasing a product. To understand why not, try this thought experiment. If
the Apple Store made us apply to buy a new iPhone, and accepted only, say,
30 percent of us who wanted to buy one, and then told us we had to study and
master the phone’s operation manual for several years before we could
actually hold it in our hands—and even then only three-quarters of us would
actually get a phone—would we still regard ourselves as customers after all
those years? We would be something else. We would resemble more those
“pre-employees” we hear about who have to pay for their own training than we
would customers just buying things.
But there are several more basic reasons why
students are not customers. First, most of them have been forced by law to
attend school for 12 years before they arrive in a college classroom. If
they went to public schools, they did not buy that schooling. In any case,
they had no power over whether they went to school or not (even
home-schooling is regulated). And when they enter universities, students are
so conditioned by the feelings involved in being forcibly educated that they
can hardly be said to feel free. (I don’t mean about which university they
are in; I mean about being in a university at all.)
To say that an American university student has
freely chosen to be educated is a bit like saying they have freely chosen to
buy food to eat.
Further, they are graded. Customers are not. With
rampant grade inflation in this country, effectively students are told
whether they are suitable or not (given an A or a B). Over and over, they
are told whether they are good enough to continue being told whether they
are good enough. Even the most rigorous professions don’t require the kind
of extensive, multifaceted performance-review structure that five graded
courses a semester constitutes.
Now, to be asked to evaluate the performance of the
person evaluating yours—that is psychologically complex. In the business
world, my friends tell me that this is called the “360-degree performance
review,” where bosses evaluate employees, and employees, in turn, evaluate
bosses. But eventually, of course, you run out of bosses, and the “circle”
closes. In universities, it doesn’t work that way. Students come and go, and
professors generally remain.
In Europe generally, where universities are mostly
free (though increasingly less so) and very difficult to get into, students
are regarded not as consumers but as subjects needing either training or
enlightenment. The life of the mind is valued and nurtured, or,
alternatively, technical skills are passed on, depending on what kind of
institution you go to. Grades are nowhere near as inflated, and student
evaluations are regarded as formalities, like a form filled out for
bureaucrats. Value is placed not on how students regard their professors but
how professors regard their colleagues.
Teachers should evaluate the teaching skills of
other teachers, regularly, as part of life, as part of what we do in our
classrooms. Leaving it to amateurs doesn’t make sense. Leaving it to
students is almost absurd.
I liked European attitudes toward student
evaluations. But I wouldn’t want to live with them. They were dismayingly
unhelpful. Still, students are not customers, and professors are not service
providers. American universities use the myth of consumer power to sell
themselves. Few professors are fired because of student evaluations—except
those who are most vulnerable, that is, adjuncts at the very lowest rungs of
the academic industry.
But all of us internalize the responses we get;
we’re told to be tough inside when they are negative. We somehow believe
them, as if they are truths objectively obtained. Students once ourselves,
we hunger for grades and approval. Regardless of how many times our
colleagues tell us not to worry over the bad evaluations, and not to let the
good ones go to our heads, we are still very much students inside, seeking
grades.
Continued in article
A Debate by Experts About Teaching Evaluations
"Professors and the Students Who Grade Them," The New York Times,
September 17, 2012 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/09/17/professors-and-the-students-who-grade-them?hp
Jensen Comment
One of the experts is a man after my own heart:
Stuart Rojstaczer, a former professor of geology and civil engineering at
Duke University, is the creator of of the
Grade Inflation Web site. He is writing a book about undergraduate education
in the U.S.
Grade inflation is, in my opinion, the Number One disgrace in higher
education, and the major cause of grade inflation is the teaching evaluation
process where students impact the promotion, tenure, and salary outcomes of
their teachers.
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation and RateMyProfessor.com ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
"Some Russian Leaders Start to Fight Plagiarism," Inside Higher Ed,
March 1, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/03/01/some-russian-leaders-start-fight-plagiarism
Rumors abound in Russia that many top leaders have
degrees that they didn't really earn, but some officials are starting to
tackle the issue of plagiarism.
Time reported that the deputy minister of
education and science reviewed 25 dissertations at random from the history
department at Moscow Pedagogical State University. With one exception, all
were found to be extensively plagiarized, with some having as much as 90
percent of the material copied.
It's not clear that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesis
Large parts of an economics thesis written by President
Vladimir Putin in the mid-1990s were lifted straight out of a U.S. management
textbook published 20 years earlier, The Washington Times reported Saturday,
citing researchers at the Brookings Institution. It was unclear, however,
whether Putin had even read the thesis, which might have been intended to
impress the Western investors who were flooding into St. Petersburg in the
mid-1990s, the report said. Putin oversaw the city's foreign economic relations
at the time.
"Putin Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis," Moscow Times, March 27, 2006 ---
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/27/011.html
Jensen Comment
What's interesting about this news item is that it was published in Moscow. This
would not have happened in the old Soviet Union
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Yet Another Plagiarism Scandal in Germany," by Ana Dinescu, Inside
Higher Ed, March 8, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/yet-another-plagiarism-scandal-germany
"High-Profile Plagiarism Prompts Soul-Searching in German Universities,"
by Paul Hockenos, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 25, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/High-Profile-Plagiarism/137515/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
What Is the plural of "Mister"?
What is the plural of "Mrs?"
What are the plural alternatives for "Ms.?"
Answer in an email message from Mignon Fogarty (the
Grammar Girl) on February 26, 2013
Two mist sprayers are misters, but two gentlemen
are Messrs.-short for Messierus-as seen in this clip from an article in the
Wall Street Journal.
Messrs
The plural of Mrs. is Mmes. (short for Mesdames),
and the plural of Miss is Misses. The plural of Ms. is less clear. Various
sources report that the plural of Ms. can be Mses., Mss., or Mmes.
In American English, a period is required after the
abbreviations; in British English, no punctuation is required after the
abbreviations.
Visit my site to learn about more differences
between British and American English.
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Summary of Good News and Bad News for the Week Ended March 1, 2011 by From
Barry Ritholtz
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/succinct-summation-of-the-weeks-events-march-1-2013/
Jensen Comment
The estimate of 750,000 jobs lost to sequestration seems wildly exaggerated.
Estimates vary wildly. Any estimate, however, is small relative to the
12,298,303 currently unemployed workers in the USA ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Note that the stock market climbed to a 52-week high on the day sequestration
kicked in --- the sky will not fall as predicted by our President. And 750,000
jobs will not be lost --- not even close!
I also disagree that the Fed Asset Purchases
(read that printing trillions of greenbacks under Quantitative Easing instead of
taxing and borrowing) "outweigh the potential costs." This is treading on Paul
Krugman's quicksand and misleads our nation's political leaders into thinking
they can perpetually delay tax and spending reforms to reduce the deficit and
save entitlements. Welcome to Zimbabwe of the West!
Positives:
1. Bernanke: Benefits of Fed Asset Purchases are clear and
outweigh the potential costs.
2. Dow Jones Industrial Average made new 52 week highs for 6th week in a
row.
3. U.S ISM Manufacturing index climbed to 54.2 from 53.1 in January.
4. Initial jobless claims better than expected (344k vs 360k)
5. Ford posts best February sales since 2006
6. Chicago PMI jumps to 56.8 11 month high
7. Orders for durable goods rose 1.9% (Ex-transport), increasing for 5th
consecutive month.
8. New Home sales surge 15.6%
9. Home Depot’s profit jumped 32%, proxy for housing recovery.
10. Case Shiller Home Prices climbed 6.8% v one year ago and 0.88% from
a month ago. Largest year over year gain since 2006.
11. Pending home sales up 4.5% to the highest levels since April 2010
12. Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment
climbed to 77.6 from 73.8 in January. Consumer Confidence jumps to 69.6
from 58.4
Negatives:
1. The VIX spiked 37% on Monday, it’s 11th largest one day spike
2. January personal income decreased 3.6%, the biggest one-month drop in
20 years.
3. AAII Investor bullish sentiment dropped 13.4 points to 28.4%, bears
gained 4.1 points to 36.6%, highest readings for the bears since
November. (Contrarians note this as a positive)
4. Dr. Copper declined to a 2 month low
5. European markets got hammered Monday with Spain off 5.5% and Italy
off 5.7% on election outcomes.
6. China’s manufacturing is growing at the slowest pace in four months
according to the HSBC flash PMI
7. The sequestration has arrived, an estimated 750,000 jobs will be
lost.
8. Three of the four largest economies in Europe disappoint with weak
PMI data. France 43.9, Italy 45.8, Spain 46.8. (below 50 = contraction).
9. US Q4 GDP increased 0.1% missing expectations of 0.5%
10. Kansas city fed manufacturing index whiffs at -10 vs estimates of
-1.
11. Intraday spreads are widening. 6 out of the last 8 days have seen
triple digit ranges in the Dow.
My longer form reading to start off your weekend:
• Are You an Investor or a Speculator? (Part
One and
Part Two)
• Goodbye Groupon: Andrew Mason’s dance with the devil (TheVerge)
• How “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” Ruled The Internet (BuzzFeed)
• Rescuing Cesar (Men’s
Journal)
• Flawed F-35 Fighter Too Big to Kill as Lockheed Hooks 45 States (Bloomberg)
see also The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden… Is Screwed (Esquire)
• Why the West Rules—for Now: The Shape of History (The
Chronicle Review)
• Are We in Danger of a Beer Monopoly? (NYT)
• How Not To Be A Dick To Your Fat Friends (xojane)
• Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction (Vanity
Fair)
• “I’m Gonna Tell You What I’m Gonna Do”: What It Was Like To Guard
Michael Jordan, According To Craig Ehlo (Deadspin)
"World Is In a Recession (Go about your business as usual)," by Barry
Ritholtz, The Big Picture, March 7, 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/world-is-in-a-recession-go-about-your-business-as-usual/
Jensen Comment
Sorry Barry. As usual in Washington means Quantitative Easing. I'm not as
enthralled with flooding the market with greenbacks as is Barry.
"This is America, Now: The Dow Hits a Record High With Household Income at
a Decade Low," The Atlantic, March 5, 2013 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/this-is-america-now-the-dow-hits-a-record-high-with-household-income-at-a-decade-low/273719/
Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Performs Worse Than the S&P 500
"Buffett Questions Performance as S&P 500 Beats Berkshire," by Antoine
Gara, The Street, March 1, 2013 ---
http://www.thestreet.com/story/11857405/1/buffett-questions-performance-as-sp-500-beats-berkshire.html
For the first time, Warren Buffett appears
concerned he will underperform the S&P 500 when it comes to his favorite way
to peg the performance of his investing conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A_).
In Berkshire Hathaway's
annual letter to shareholders, Buffett outlined
why he is worried a rising
stock market will put the firm's
performance below that of the S&P 500 over a five-year stretch.
Such a scenario would be the first in Berkshire's
history, indicating that even the 'Oracle of Omaha' is having trouble
keeping up with rising markets.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Another consideration for the stock market under the Fed's Quantitative Easing
will be how much are the returns after inflation. The USA is just not accustomed
to inflation adjustments for reduced purchasing power of the USA dollar.
Learn to Code with Harvard’s Intro to Computer Science Course And Other
Free Tech Classes ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/learn_to_code_with_harvards_intro_to_computer_science_course_and_other_free_tech_classes_.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, EdX, HarvardX, and MITx ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
My March Calendar and Timber Harvesting
I just turned the page to my March 2013 calendar. Yes I do keep a monthly
hard copy calendar on top of my main computer.
Even in retirement there is usually something filled in ahead of time in my
monthly calendar --- usually medical-type appointments or dinner invitations for
Erika and me.
March 2013 is totally blank, and I hope it stays that way.
I mention this as one of the genuine benefits to look forward to when you retire
--- an occasional month of blanks.
Until the time comes, none of us will know what our calendar looks like after
death.
As my mind rambles I'm watching about $4 million in heavy logging machinery work
across the road. It's fascinating to watch
how about an acre of mature trees can be toppled in roughly one hour. The plan
is the clear cut about 30 acres. My views across the valley will will be
improved, but there will be less color in front of my desk during foliage
season. I do not own this land, but we are working to get the land put into a
conservatory like the golf course behind our cottage has been put into a
perpetual conservatory.
You can see the front line of trees being cut away in this picture taken from
front lawn ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DSC04899.JPG
Here's how the clear cutting operation works. I don't think the timber
removal operators even own a chain saw.
Humongous machines with giant tires (wrapped in snow chains) carry whole trees
up to an enormous chipping machine in front of my driveway. Trucks as large as
the law allows back up to the chute on the chipping machine. Roughly 2-10 at
a time whole trees are lifted by a crane into the other end of the chipping
machine. It takes about 40 minutes to fill each 18-wheel truck. The chips are
then carried away to mills that manufacture things like wood stove pellets,
electric power, and
plywood. On this job all those big trucks of chips are being taken to Pine Tree
Power as biofuel for the generation of electric power. I did not check it out,
but this type of fuel may not be allowed in California due to air pollution.
The timber harvesting companies are not making as much money these days since
most of our pulp and paper mills have been shut down for good.
The larger logs (over a foot in diameter) are cut into 15-foot lengths and
stacked onto open trailers. These are hauled off to lumber mills that
manufacture construction lumber and/or hardwood veneer.
I suspect all this heavy equipment will be trucked away in less than a week.
The hardest things to get rid of are stumps. Since this land is not being
developed for anything, the stumps will probably remain. If they were to be
removed, giant Caterpillars would be brought in to commence the slow process of
ripping the stumps out of the ground.
Trivia Question
Why do timber harvesting companies prefer the winter season?
Answer,
In winter the ground is frozen into concrete. None of their machines get bogged
down. In our thaw season (April-June) these timber harvesting companies shut
down up here. In summer they're back at it, but they can be bothered by wetlands
in the woods. Wetlands are less of a problem in the winter.
There Goes the Neighborhood
"U. of Colorado Is in Search of a Scholar of Conservative Thought U. of
Colorado Is in Search of a Scholar of Conservative Thought," by Sydni Dunn,
Chronicle of Higher Education., February 26, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Colorado-Is-in-Search-of/137567/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The University of Colorado at Boulder is adding a
conservative-in-residence to its liberal-leaning faculty in an attempt to
broaden intellectual diversity at the state's flagship campus.
The new position, the "visiting scholar in
conservative thought and policy," is being paid for entirely by private
money. A total of close to $1-million will finance the job, set to begin in
the fall and to be housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, for at least
three years.
Some professors and students are questioning the
need for the new role and have been critical of the credentials of the
finalists. Although two of the three finalists have Ph.D.'s and the third
has a master's, they all are better known for political activism and policy
work than for scholarly pursuits.
The finalists, each of whom visited Boulder and
gave public speeches on the campus this month, are Linda Chavez, chairman of
the Center for Equal Opportunity; Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution; and Steven Hayward, a fellow at the Ashbrook Center
at Ashland University.
The search committee is scheduled to recommend a
candidate for the hire the first week of March, said Keith E. Maskus,
associate dean for social sciences and head of the search committee.
The idea for the conservative appointment goes back
a decade, Mr. Maskus said, and was originally conceived of as an endowed
position. When it didn't get "far off the ground" in terms of support or
fund-raising, he said, the project was shelved. In 2008, however, the idea
was revived and reconfigured, and a group of donors decided to convert the
position to a privately financed, visiting role that is off the tenure
track.
The position was created, in part, to change the
public's perception of the institution, Mr. Maskus said. Most of the faculty
present balanced viewpoints in the classroom, he said, but the university
has a longstanding history of leaning left. And, he said, having a
conservative scholar will help balance the perspectives to which students
are exposed.
"We've appeared in the newspaper a few times; I'm
sure you can think of a few of those headlines," said Mr. Maskus, hinting at
the university's controversial firing, in 2007, of Ward Churchill, an
ethnic-studies professor. The decision, which the university said was based
on findings of research misconduct, came after Mr. Churchill became the
focus of national outrage for a provocative essay he wrote about the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in which he compared some American
victims of terrorism to Nazi bureaucrats. Breaking the Mold
Some students have reacted positively to the
creation of the conservative-scholar position.
They include Zach Silverman, who is president of
the College Democrats at the Boulder campus and a senior majoring in
political science. A university should be a marketplace of ideas, he said,
and the new visiting job promotes that mission.
"For CU, this breaks the mold of being a liberal
college, a biased college," Mr. Silverman said. "It shows we are interested
in all opinions, left or right."
Mr. Silverman, who is 21, said his professors try
to remain neutral in the classroom but that it can be obvious, particularly
in political science, which way they lean politically. In a 2008 survey that
included 825 faculty members at Boulder, only 23 were registered
Republicans, according to Ed Rozek, a political-science professor who
conducted the survey.
Embedding a conservative viewpoint in the classroom
will encourage variety, Mr. Silverman said, but only if that person is
actually a scholar. "This person needs a doctorate," he said.
Mr. Maskus, the associate dean, said one of the
qualities the search committee sought was a strong record of published books
or articles. All of the finalists fit that criterion, he said, though to
different degrees. Ms. Chavez is the only finalist without a Ph.D., for
example, but she has published three books and spent more than 40 years in
the political arena.
Faculty members, Mr. Maskus said, have expressed
concerns both about the scholarly credentials of candidates for the position
and about whether the university should be taking donations to make a
faculty appointment.
A group of private donors contributed to this
position, and some of them sit on the 10-person search committee for the
job, Mr. Maskus said. The committee has five tenured faculty members from
the College of Arts and Sciences, and five "external community" members
appointed by the chancellor. Mr. Maskus would not say how many of those
people are donors who are supporting the new position. He also did not
reveal how much money the donors who are serving on the committee
collectively contributed to the project.
Mr. Maskus said he does not believe that having
donors serve on the search committee and participate in hiring the scholar
creates a conflict of interest. The committee is following procedures that
were put in place "to avoid such conflicts," he said.
Other criticism, coming mostly from students, has
questioned whether the position is necessary.
In a guest column published in a local newspaper,
The Daily Camera, Matthew Aitken, a graduate student in physics, wrote that
the creation of the position supports the assumption that all universities
lack balance.
"Conservatism—like all other political
ideologies—should be considered on its own merits, and no special position
need be created for its proponents' voices to be heard," Mr. Aitken wrote.
"That an esteemed institution like the University of Colorado would give
credence to this specious notion of conservative victimhood is
disappointing, at best." Taking a Risk
Ms. Chavez, a finalist who visited the university
last week and gave a presentation titled "A Conservative Approach to
Immigration Reform," said it was obvious that some students did not like the
idea of the position. A number of students grilled her with questions after
her speech.
"What I find fascinating is that students who
disagree with me rarely actually read what I've written," she said. When
students hear her point of view, she said, they realize they have some
things in common. "We might differ, but our ultimate goals are the same."
Continued in article
Who's guarding the gates?
"Moving Further to the Left," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
October 24, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/24/survey-finds-professors-already-liberal-have-moved-further-left
Academics, on average, lean
to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving
even more in that direction.
Among full-time faculty members at four-year
colleges and universities, the percentage identifying as "far left" or
liberal has increased notably in the last three years, while the percentage
identifying in three other political categories has declined. The data come
from the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research
Institute, which surveys faculty members nationwide every three years on a
range of attitudes.
Here are the data for the new survey and
the prior survey:
|
2010-11 |
2007-8 |
Far left |
12.4% |
8.8% |
Liberal |
50.3% |
47.0% |
Middle of the road |
25.4% |
28.4% |
Conservative |
11.5% |
15.2% |
Far right |
0.4% |
0.7% |
"Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education," by Josh Jones,
Open Culture, November 2012 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/noam_chomsky_spells_out_the_purpose_of_education.html
Bob Jensen's threads about political bias in the Academy ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
Note that hedge funds are investment clubs (having less regulation mutual
funds and investment banks) that may have nothing to do with hedging ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_Fund
Here's an example of how two hedge fund insiders in different hedge funds
might hedge. Note, however, that there is nothing fool proof about this
strategy. One friction in the system is what we call a transaction cost.
Note that it's usually not smart to be "reckless on Wall Street,
especially if you study a concept we call "mean reversion."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_reversion_%28finance%29
"Why It’s Smart to Be Reckless on Wall Street," by Chris Arnade,
Scientific American, February 27, 2013 ---
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/02/27/why-its-smart-to-be-reckless-on-wall-street/
Thank you Barry Ritholtz for the heads up.
Here is a guaranteed way to get paid well if you
work on Wall Street. Find a best friend at a competing bank or hedge fund
and take opposite sides of the same large bet. In one year’s time one of you
will have a huge profit and get paid well. The other person will have lost
and perhaps be fired. The sum of both your profits will be zero, but the sum
of what you get paid will be positive. Split the pay.
This scheme is one of the more fanciful ways to
exploit Wall Street’s compensation structure that pays absurdly well in the
good years and just okay in the bad years. Losing money never means having
to give anything back.
That asymmetry in pay (money for profits, flat for
losses) is the engine behind many of Wall Street’s mistakes. It rewards
short-term gains without regard to long-term consequences. The results?
The
over-reliance on excessive leverage,
banks that are loaded with opaque financial products, and
trading models that are flawed.
Regulation is largely toothless if banks and
their employees have the financial incentive to be reckless.
How does Wall Street pay its employees? At the end
of each year traders are paid a base salary and a bonus. The bonus, which
fluctuates wildly, is usually a percentage of a trader’s profit. Some
companies even pay a contractual amount, often between ten and fifteen
percent. The average bonus of all employees is about three hundred thousand
dollars but payments of $1 to $15 million are common. If traders lose they
still get their base, often around two hundred thousand dollars. If their
loss is great enough, they are fired. They never have to return money.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Note that the author of the above article is a physicist. Physicists are
sometimes addicts in trading using models that they learned as physics students.
This may be one of the reasons that this article appears in Scientific
American rather than Financial Times.
It might be interesting to follow future comments on this article. Comments
to date focus on moral hazards of insider day trading.
I don't agree that regulation must always be toothless. There are ways of
regulating this behavior, one of which is to have the IRS share data with
regulators.
February 28 reads linked by Barry Ritholtz
My afternoon train reads:
• Markets Saved by the Kid From South Carolina, Again (MarketBeat)
• The 40 Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers And Traders (Forbes)
see also David Tepper Tops 2012 Hedge Fund Earnings (Forbes)
• Michael Mauboussin:
Think Twice (Outlook
Business)
• Lazy Portfolios at war with Wall Street casinos (MarketWatch)
see also The (Really) High Price Of Active Management (The
Capital Spectator)
• Why It’s Smart to Be Reckless on Wall Street (Scientific
American)
• The Consequences of Sequestration (The
Diplomat) see also Austerity Kills Government Jobs as Cuts
to Budgets Loom (NYT)
• Gold Bugs Need to Replenish the Hive (MarketBeat)
• Apple Should Stay Prudent With Cash: Analyst (MarketBeat)
see also Apple’s ‘Very Active’ Cash Talks Won’t Assuage
Investors (Bloomberg)
• Deficit hawks’ ‘generational theft’ argument is a sham (Los
Angeles Times)
• When Diet Meets Delicious (NYT)
Bob Jensen's personal finance helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
Billionaire Ex-Convicts Should Lie Low
"Martha Stewart Takes the Stand to Save Her Company," by Jeff Macke,
Yahoo, March 5, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/martha-stewart-takes-stand-save-her-company-155500326.html;_ylt=Agbbzidr5xzzYViIg1xYfDOiuYdG;_ylu=X3oDMTNyNHEyaDR0BG1pdANGUCBUb3AgU3RvcnkgTGVmdARwa2cDMDNhNjdlMjItN2M3NS0zNDg3LTk4NmUtMzI2NGI5ZGY2ODJiBHBvcwMxBHNlYwN0b3Bfc3RvcnkEdmVyAzM1MmZlYjAzLTg1YWYtMTFlMi1iZmZmLWEyNjkwMjhhMjg0YQ--;_ylg=X3oDMTFpNzk0NjhtBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANob21lBHB0A3NlY3Rpb25z;_ylv=3
Bob Jensen's fraud updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Zimbabwe printing of cash leads to Zimbabwe-like inflation that now prints $1
billion dollar bills. It takes more than one of these bills to buy one chicken
egg.
Fed Buyback in "Quantitative Easing" = Zimbabwe-Style Printing of Dollars
to Pay Government Bills Without Taxing or Borrowing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_Easing
Bernanke declared he will continue printing trainloads of cash until the
unemployment rate falls below 6.5%. That might take forever plus one day as
manufacturing and service robot technology explodes across the USA.
This
policy really discourages saving in less risky investments like bank CDs now
paying way less than one percent per year
This
policy is truly a tax on senior citizens who counted on living, at least in
part, on the interest income of their investments. Due to the Fed's Quantitative
Easing there is virtually no interest income on safe investments. Thus we have
really taxed the savings of senior citizens and forced them to burn up savings
capital in their retirement years.
Pension funds like TIAA will have to become less generous in providing
retirement annuities to college employees who are hesitant to take on more
fluctuating risk in annual retirement incomes that accompany stock market and
real estate alternatives having more financial risk.
From the CFO Morning Ledger on February 26, 2013
Ben Bernanke isn’t budging in his support for
continued bond buying. “Keeping long-term interest rates low has helped
spark a recovery in the housing market and has led to increased sales and
production of automobiles and other durable goods,” he said in his
semiannual report to Congress yesterday.
Mr. Bernanke faced some hostile questioning from the
Senate Banking Committee – particularly from Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.),
who told the Fed chief that his easy-money policies were sparking a global
currency war and creating “faux” stock-market wealth. He also accused Mr.
Bernanke of “throwing seniors under the bus” by pushing down interest rates
and reducing their returns on savings. Mr. Bernanke was pretty perturbed by
those comments,
the WSJ’s Jon Hilsenrath notes.
He shot back by pointing out that his record of keeping inflation low and
stable is better than that of any Fed chairman since World War II. Today,
Mr. Bernanke delivers the same remarks to the House Financial Services
Committee, where he’s likely to get raked over the coals by other critics.
As we noted yesterday, low rates have played a big
part in the pension woes companies are facing these days. But the low-rate
environment also offers opportunities for companies to borrow cheaply and
use the proceeds to make investments or return cash to shareholders.
Home Depot Chief
Financial Officer Carol Tomé — who also sits on the board of directors of
the Atlanta Fed –
told CFOJ’s Maxwell Murphy that her company may
borrow up to $4 billion to nearly double its expected 2013 share
repurchases. So long as the after-tax cost of any new debt is less than the
yield on Home Depot stock, a debt-fueled buyback is “just a good trade,” she
said.
Jensen Comment
Bernanke declared he will continue printing trainloads of cash until the
unemployment rate falls below 6.5%. That might take forever plus one day as
manufacturing and service robot technology explodes across the USA.
This
policy really discourages saving in less risky investments like bank CDs now
baying way less than one percent per year.
This
policy is truly a tax on senior citizens who counted on living, at least in
part, on the interest income of their investments. Due to the Fed's Quantitative
Easing there is virtually not interest income on investments. Thus we have
really taxed the savings of senior citizens and forced them to burn up their
capital in their retirement years.
Pension funds like TIAA will have to become less generous in providing
retirement annuities to college employees who are hesitant to take on more
fluctuating risk in annual retirement incomes that accompany stock market and
real estate alternatives having more financial risk. I was lucky enough to
acquire my TIAA lifetime annuities before these deals commenced to sower.
Zimbabwe printing of cash leads to Zimbabwe-like inflation that now prints $1
billion dollar bills. It takes more than one of these bills to buy one chicken
egg. I suspect I will only live long enough to see the price of one egg in the
U.S. soar to $100. I don't want to be young again.Advice from The
Washington Post's Barry Ritholz for Dealing With Quantitative Easing
(February 27, 2013) ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/02/qe-is-still-here-and-what-you-should-do/
Yesterday’s testimony by
Fed chair Ben Bernanke makes it clear that QE is here to stay for the
foreseeable future. Rather than tilt at windmills, you need to accept
this fact, and adjust accordingly.
Here are a few of the
things that you should be doing in response to zero interest rate
policy:
• Refinance
your home, locking in a 30 year fixed rate (if you can
afford a 15 year fixed, do that). This is a no brainer and the best
way to take advantage of zero rates for most families.
• Shorten
the duration of your bond holdings. Rates will go up
eventually, so those 10 year durations and longer should be 7 years
max.
•
Buy or Lease a new car. (Ben
wants you to) assuming you can afford to
•
Evaluate your risk assets: Since the March 2009 lows,
stocks are up over 100%. If you participated in most or all of this,
congrats. If you completely missed a move where equities doubled,
you need to think about why. Perhaps its time to
make suitable changes.
• Anticipate
and plan for the next correction: Monday’s 2% whackage
should have made you think about what the next 10-20% move down will
be like. What should your response be? What is it more likely to be?
Anticipating panic decision-making in advance helps you avoid the
worst of it.
•
Reduce/renegotiate any outstanding consumer debt. This is
the worst sort of debt, used to pay for depreciating baubles. IUf
you must, refinance it at lower rates.
• Are you a
trader or an investor? Make the appropriate palns for your
own timeline. Traders don’t hold losers after their prices drop;
Investors don’t flit in and out of markets.
Remember, review the
emergency procedures in the card (seatback in front of you) when you are
on the ground — not after an engine flames out at 30,000 feet.
"TBP Guide to Car Leasing & Buying," by
Barry Ritholtz, Ritholtz Blog, February 26, 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/02/guide-leasing-buying/
Jensen Caution
In the good old days when savings like CDs paid worthwhile interest rates, there
was a better argument for leasing so that you could put your savings to work
helping to make the lease payments. Thanks to the Fed's Quantitative Easing
program you now make virtually nothing on your safe investments like bank CDs..
Hence, there may be more incentive to buy a car rather than lease. However, in
the 21st Century, leasing deals have become much more attractive largely because
dealers can borrow money a next to nothing interest.
Hence, it pays to look at the above TBP Guide
before making a lease versus buy decision.
However, Bob Jensen is generally against buying
or leasing a new car. Only once in my life did I buy a new car, and that was
because of the Cash for Clunkers deal offered to me by the government. I think
many people buy new cars when gently used cars are a better personal financing
deal. I only recommend new cars for people who drive lots and lots or men who
want to show off for the women.
Dilbert ---
http://www.dilbert.com/
Dilbert's Accounting Trolls ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dilbert_characters#Accounting_trolls
New Dilbert Character: Stanky Bathturd, IRS Agent ---
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/you_be_the_editor/
Dilbert Cartoons on Market Manipulations
"Scott Adams Discovers Market Manipulation," by Barry Ritholtz, Ritholtz
Blog, March 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/scott-adams-manipulators/
Regular readers know I am a fan of Scott Adams,
creator of the comic
Dilbert
and occasional commentator on a variety of matters.
He has a somewhat odd blog post up, titled,
Here Come the Market Manipulators. In it, he
makes two interesting suggestions: The first is to decry “market
manipulators,” who do what they do for fun and profit to the detriment of
the rest of us. The second is to say that these manipulators are likely to
cause “a 20% correction in 2013.”
Let’s quickly address both of these issues: First
off, have a look at the frequency of 20% corrections in markets. According
to
Fidelity (citing
research from Capital Research and Management Company), over the period
encompassing 1900-2010, has seen the following corrections occur:
Corrections During 1900 – 2010
5%: 3 times per year
10%: Once per year
20%: Once every 3.5 years
Note that Fido does not specify which market, but
given the dates we can assume it is the Dow Industrials. (I’ll check on that
later).
Note that US market’s have not had a 20% correction
since the lows in March 2009. I’ll pull up the relevant data in the office,
but a prior corrective action of 19% is the closest we’ve come, followed by
a ~16% and ~11%.
As to the manipulators of the market, I can only
say: Dude, where have you been the past 100 years or so?
Yes, the market gets manipulated. Whether its tax
cuts or interest rate cuts or federal spending or wars or QE or legislative
rule changes to FASB or even the creation of IRAs and 401ks, manipulation
abounds.
In terms of the larger investors who attract
followers — I do not see the same evidence that Adams sees. Sure, the market
is often driven by large investors. Yes, many of these people have others
who follow them. We need only look at what Buffet, Soros, Dalio, Icahn,
Ackman, Einhorn and others have done to see widely imitated stock trades.
But that has shown itself to be a
bad idea, and I doubt anyone is making
much money attempting to do so. And, it hardly leads to the conclusion that
any more than the usual manipulation is going on.
Will be have a 20% correction? I guarantee that
eventually, we will. Indeed, we are even overdue for it, postponed as it is
by the Fed’s manipulation.
But I have strong doubts it is going to be caused
by a cabal manipulating markets for fun & profit. It will occur because
that’s what markets do . . .
Previously:
Dilbert’s Unified Theory of Everything Financial’ (October 15th, 2006)
7 Suggestions for Scott Adams (November 27th, 2007)
Don’t Follow Wealthy Investors, Part 14 (February 17th, 2008)
"What’s Wrong with the Financial Services Industry?" by Barry Ritholtz,
Ritholtz Blog, February 21, 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/02/whats-wrong-with-the-financial-services-industry/
Jensen Comment
You can also see a Dilbert cartoon about making up data ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting humor ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm#Humor
Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
"Profs Fail iEtiquette 101," by Laurie Essig, Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 27, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/02/27/profs-fail-ietiquette-101/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
"Academic Jerks," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed,
February 26, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/26/blog-post-asks-whether-nice-academics-finish-last
Jensen Comments
Sometimes the best places to collect evidence is at faculty meetings that either
become too boring or too heated. Faculty are renowned for making towering
mountains out of mole hills, countering the hypothesis that matter cannot be
created from nothing. I don't miss faculty meetings for any reason other than I
sometimes enjoyed the humor of it all.
One thing that bothered me about faculty is they sometimes portray college
administrators as the enemy. Most college administrators that I knew were
faculty who took jobs that most faculty did not want. And while administrating
those administrators counted the days until they could return to their old
faculty posts.
. . . but with the current allocation of corn to
ethanol and animal production, we end up with an estimated 3 million calories of
food per acre per year, mainly as dairy and meat products, enough to sustain
only three people per acre. That is lower than the average delivery of food
calories from farms in Bangladesh, Egypt and Vietnam
"It’s Time to Rethink America’s Corn System: Only a tiny fraction
of corn grown in the U.S. directly feeds the nation’s people, and most of that
is from unhealthy, high-fructose corn syrup," by Jonathan Foley, Scientific
American, March 5, 2013 ---
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=time-to-rethink-corn
Nothing dominates the American landscape like corn.
Sprawling across the Midwest and Great Plains, the
American Corn Belt is a massive thing. You can drive from central
Pennsylvania all the way to western Nebraska, a trip of nearly 1,500 miles,
and witness it in all its glory. No other American crop can match the sheer
size of corn.
So why do we, as a nation, grow so much corn?
The main reason is that corn is such a productive
and versatile crop, responding to investments in research, breeding and
promotion. It has incredibly high yields compared with most other U.S.
crops, and it grows nearly anywhere in the country, especially thriving in
the Midwest and Great Plains. Plus, it can be turned into a staggering array
of products. Corn can be used for food as corn flour, cornmeal, hominy,
grits or sweet corn. It can be used as animal feed to help fatten our hogs,
chickens and cattle. And it can be turned into ethanol, high-fructose corn
syrup or even bio-based plastics.
No wonder we grow so much of the stuff.
But it is important to distinguish corn the crop
from corn the system. As a crop, corn is highly productive, flexible and
successful. It has been a pillar of American agriculture for decades, and
there is no doubt that it will be a crucial part of American agriculture in
the future. However, many are beginning to question corn as a system: how it
dominates American agriculture compared with other farming systems; how in
America it is used primarily for ethanol, animal feed and high-fructose corn
syrup; how it consumes natural resources; and how it receives preferential
treatment from our government.
The current corn system is not a good thing for
America for four major reasons.
The American corn system is inefficient at feeding
people. Most people would agree that the primary goal of agriculture should
be feeding people. While other goals—especially producing income, creating
jobs and fostering rural development—are critically important too, the
ultimate success of any agricultural system should be measured in part by
how well it delivers food to a growing population. After all, feeding people
is why agriculture exists in the first place.
Although U.S. corn is a highly productive crop,
with typical yields between 140 and 160 bushels per acre, the resulting
delivery of food by the corn system is far lower. Today’s corn crop is
mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for
ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus
distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs
and chickens). Much of the rest is exported. Only a tiny fraction of the
national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for
high-fructose corn syrup.
Yes, the corn fed to animals does produce valuable
food to people, mainly in the form of dairy and meat products, but only
after suffering major losses of calories and protein along the way. For
corn-fed animals, the efficiency of converting grain to meat and dairy
calories ranges from roughly 3 percent to 40 percent, depending on the
animal production system in question. What this all means is that little of
the corn crop actually ends up feeding American people. It’s just math. The
average Iowa cornfield has the potential to deliver more than 15 million
calories per acre each year (enough to sustain 14 people per acre, with a
3,000 calorie-per-day diet, if we ate all of the corn ourselves), but with
the current allocation of corn to ethanol and animal production, we end up
with an estimated 3 million calories of food per acre per year, mainly as
dairy and meat products, enough to sustain only three people per acre. That
is lower than the average delivery of food calories from farms in
Bangladesh, Egypt and Vietnam.
Only a tiny fraction of corn grown in the U.S.
directly feeds the nation’s people, and most of that is from unhealthy,
high-fructose corn syrup
In short, the corn crop is highly productive, but
the corn system is aligned to feed cars and animals instead of feeding
people.
There are a number of ways to improve the delivery
of food from the nation’s corn system. First and foremost, shifting corn
away from biofuels would generate more food for the world, lower demand for
grain, lessen commodity price pressures, and reduce the burden on consumers
around the world. Furthermore, eating less corn-fed meat, or shifting corn
toward more efficient dairy, poultry, pork and grass-fed beef systems, would
allow us to get more food from each bushel of corn. And diversifying the
Corn Belt into a wider mix of agricultural systems, including other crops
and grass-fed animal operations, could produce substantially more food—and a
more diverse and nutritious diet— than the current system.
The corn system uses a large amount of natural
resources. Even though it does not deliver as much food as comparable
systems around the globe, the American corn system continues to use a large
proportion of our country’s natural resources.
In the U.S., corn uses more land than any other
crop, spanning some 97 million acres— an area roughly the size of
California. U.S. corn also consumes a large amount of our freshwater
resources, including an estimated 5.6 cubic miles per year of irrigation
water withdrawn from America’s rivers and aquifers. And fertilizer use for
corn is massive: over 5.6 million tons of nitrogen is applied to corn each
year through chemical fertilizers, along with nearly a million tons of
nitrogen from manure. Much of this fertilizer, along with large amounts of
soil, washes into the nation’s lakes, rivers and coastal oceans, polluting
waters and damaging ecosystems along the way. The dead zone in the Gulf of
Mexico is the largest, and most iconic, example of this.
And the resources devoted to growing corn are
increasing dramatically. Between 2006 and 2011, the amount of cropland
devoted to growing corn in America increased by more than 13 million acres,
mainly in response to rising corn prices and the increasing demand for
ethanol. Most of these new corn acres came from farms, including those that
were growing wheat (which lost 2.9 million acres), oats (1.7 million acres
lost), sorghum (1 million acres lost), barley, alfalfa, sunflower and other
crops. That leaves us with a less diverse American agricultural landscape,
with even more land devoted to corn monocultures. And according to a recent
study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
roughly 1.3 million acres of grassland and prairie were converted to corn
and other uses in the western Corn Belt between 2006 and 2011, presenting a
threat to the waterways, wetlands and species that reside there.
Looking at these land, water, fertilizer and soil
costs together, you could argue that the corn system uses more natural
resources than any other agricultural system in America, while providing
only modest benefits in food. It’s a dubious trade-off—depleting natural
resources to deliver relatively little food and nutrition to the world. But
it doesn’t need to be that way. Innovative farmers are exploring other
methods for growing corn, including better conventional, organic, biotech
and conservation farming methods that can dramatically reduce chemical
inputs, water use, soil losses and impacts on wildlife. We should encourage
American farmers to continue these improvements.
The corn system is highly vulnerable to shocks.
Although a large monoculture dominating much of the country with a single
cropping system might be an efficient and profitable way to grow corn at an
industrial scale, there is a price to being so big, with so little
diversity. Given enough time, most massive monocultures fail, often
spectacularly. And with today’s high demand and low grain stocks, corn
prices are very volatile, driving spikes in the price of commodities around
the world. Under these conditions, a single disaster, disease, pest or
economic downturn could cause a major disturbance in the corn system.
Continued in article
The Health Care Market is Not a Market
"Video: Inside ‘Bitter Pill’: Steven Brill Discusses His TIME Cover
Story," Time Magazine, February 22, 2013 ---
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-inside-times-cover-story-on-medical-bills/
Simple lab work done during a few days in the
hospital can cost more than a car. A trip to the emergency room for chest
pains that turn out to be indigestion brings a bill that can exceed the
price of a semester at college. When we debate
health care
policy in America, we seem to jump right to the issue
of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question:
Why exactly are the bills so high?
Steven Brill spent seven months analyzing hundreds
of bill from
hospitals,
doctors, and drug companies and medical equipment
manufacturers to find out who is setting such high prices and pocketing the
biggest profits. What he discovered, outlined in detail in the
cover story of the new issue of TIME, will
radically change the way you think about our medical institutions:
· Hospitals arbitrarily set prices based on a
mysterious internal list known as the “chargemaster.” These prices vary from
hospital to hospital and are often ten times the actual cost of an item.
Insurance companies and Medicare pay discounted prices, but don’t have
enough leverage to bring fees down anywhere close to actual costs. While
other countries restrain drug prices, in the United States federal law
actually restricts the single biggest buyer—Medicare—from even trying to
negotiate the price of drugs.
· Tax-exempt “nonprofit” hospitals are the most
profitable businesses and largest employers in their regions, often presided
over by the most richly compensated executives.
· Cancer
treatment—at some of the most renowned centers such as
Sloan-Kettering and M.D. Anderson—has some of the industry’s highest profit
margins. Cancer drugs in particular are hugely profitable. For example,
Sloan-Kettering charges $4615 for a immune-deficiency drug named Flebogamma.
Medicare cuts Sloan-Kettering’s charge to $2123, still way above what the
hospital paid for it, an estimated $1400.
· Patients can hire medical billing advocates who
help people read their bills and try to reduce them. “The hospitals all know
the bills are fiction, or at least only a place to start the discussion, so
you bargain with them,” says Katalin Goencz, a former appeals coordinator in
a hospital billing department who now works as an advocate in Stamford, CT.
Brill concludes:
The health care market is not
a market at all.
It’s a crapshoot. Everyone fares differently based on circumstances they
can neither control nor predict. They may have no insurance. They may
have insurance, but their employer chooses their insurance plan and it
may have a payout limit or not cover a drug or treatment they need. They
may or may not be old enough to be on Medicare or, given the different
standards of the 50 states, be poor enough to be on Medicaid. If they’re
not protected by Medicare or protected only partially by private
insurance with high co-pays, they have little visibility into pricing,
let alone control of it. They have little choice of hospitals or the
services they are billed for, even if they somehow knew the prices
before they got billed for the services. They have no idea what their
bills mean, and those who maintain the chargemasters couldn’t explain
them if they wanted to. How much of the bills they end up paying may
depend on the generosity of the hospital or on whether they happen to
get the help of a billing advocate. They have no choice of the drugs
that they have to buy or the lab tests or CT scans that they have to
get, and they would not know what to do if they did have a choice. They
are powerless buyers in a sellers’ market where the only consistent fact
is the profit of the sellers.
"Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us," Time
Magazine Cover Story, March 4, 2013, pp. 16-65 (a very long article)
---
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/
"Yes, Hospital Pricing Is Insane, But Why? Time magazine issues a
24,000-word memo on what we already knew," by Holman Jenkins Jr., The
Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323978104578334082993009730.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h
Without diminishing the epic scope of Steven
Brill's Time magazine piece about the U.S. health care system, he reiterates
in lengthy detail perversities that are already well known, without offering
a single useful insight on how it go that way, and even less on how to fix
it.
Yet Mr. Brill, founder of CourtTV and American
Lawyer magazine, author of books on terrorism and education, has written the
longest piece in Time's history—24,000 words—so attention must be paid.
That health-care costs are inflated compared to
what they would be in a reasonably transparent, competitive market (a point
Mr. Brill never clearly makes) won't be a revelation. That hospitals
allocate their costs to various items on their bills and price lists in ways
that are opaque and arbitrary is not a new discovery either.
He finds it shocking that a hospital charging
$1,791 a night won't throw in the generic Tylenol for free (instead charging
$1.50 each). But this is to commit the reification fallacy of thinking there
is some organic relationship between what a hospital charges for a
particular item and what that item costs in the first place.
He dwells on the irrationality of hospitals
charging their highest prices to their poorest customers, those without
insurance. But he's also aware that these customers often pay little or
nothing of what they are charged and hospitals reallocate the cost to the
bills of other patients. He even notes that a hospital might collect as
little as 18% of what it bills.
He vaguely gets that hospital price lists are memos
for the file, to be drawn out and waved as a reference in negotiations with
their real customers, the big health-care insurers, Medicaid, Medicare and
other large payers.
The deals hammered out with these customers tend
naturally to gravitate toward round numbers, leaving a hospital free to
allocate its costs and profits to specific items however it wants. Mr. Brill
may be offended that certain "non-profit" hospitals appear to be highly
profitable. He probably wouldn't be happier, though, if they diverted their
surplus revenues into even higher salaries and more gleamingly superfluous
facilities.
"What is so different about the medical ecosystem
that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?" Mr.
Brill asks. But his question is rhetorical since he doesn't exhibit much
urge to understand why the system behaves as it does, treating its nature as
a given.
In fact, what he describes—big institutions
dictating care and assigning prices in ways that make no sense to an
outsider—is exactly what you get in a system that insulates consumers from
the cost of their health care.
Your time might be better spent reading Duke
University's Clark Havighurst in a brilliant 2002 article that describes the
regulatory, legal and tax subsidies that deprive consumers of both the
incentive and opportunity to demand value from medical providers. Americans
end up with a "Hobson's choice: either coverage for 'Cadillac' care or no
health coverage at all."
"The market failure most responsible for economic
inefficiency in the health-care sector is not consumers' ignorance about the
quality of care," Mr. Havighurst writes, "but rather their ignorance of the
cost of care, which ensures that neither the choices they make in the
marketplace nor the opinions they express in the political process reveal
their true preferences."
You might turn next to an equally fabulous 2001
article by Berkeley economist James C. Robinson, who shows how the
"pernicious" doctrine that health care is different—that consumers must shut
up, do as they're told and be prepared to write a blank check—is used to
"justify every inefficiency, idiosyncrasy, and interest-serving institution
in the health care industry."
Hospitals, insurers and other institutions involved
in health care may battle over available dollars, but they also share an
interest in increasing the nation's resources being diverted into health
care—which is exactly what happens when costs are hidden from those who pay
them.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Over a year ago Erika's Medicare-Anthem summary of charges for the month
included an $11,376 charge for out patient surgery that was mistakenly billed to
her account. We called our doctor who did the procedure in the hospital. Our
doctor responded not to bother her or the hospital --- since Medicare-Anthem
paid the entire bill it would not matter.
This bothered us since the woman (I assume it was a woman) may not have been
eligible for Medicare-Anthem. So I phoned Medicare. Medicare said not to bother
them and advised us to contact the hospital where the procedure took place. Any
corrections should be made by the hospital and the doctor.
So I called the hospital's accounting office. They asked that I send in a
copy of the Medicare-Anthem report. I hand-delivered the report to the the
hospital accounting office --- which is miles from the hospital.
Over the ensuing year we waited for a corrected Medicare-Anthem report.
Nothing! So I did a follow up visit to the hospital's accounting office. The
feedback was that since Medicare-Anthem paid the bill there was no need to
waste time correcting this item.
I keep thinking that some woman not eligible for Medicare got a windfall gain
here. Who cares if it was Medicare-Anthem that got screwed?
Erika and I changed to a doctor that we like better. But we cannot change
hospitals.
Moral of the Story
If the third party insurer gets billed mistakenly or pays too much nobody cares,
least of all the doctors and hospitals who got reimbursed.
"Which Governments Spend the Most Per Capita on Government Healthcare:
France, Italy, the United States, Sweden, Canada, Greece, or the United Kingdom?"
by Daniel J. Mitchell, Townhall, February 22, 2013
http://www.townhallmail.com/fnbzdpfbzzgwdbzbwbdhfwcnnywnnbyfrrhpldgnrnybys_msycbpyncdb.html
See bar chart at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/HealthCostPerCapita.jpg
. . .
There are three big reasons why there’s more
government-financed healthcare spending in the United States.
1. Richer nations tend
to spend more, regardless of how they structure their healthcare systems.
2. As you can see at
the 1:18 mark of this video, the United States is
halfway down the road to a single-payer system thanks to programs such as
Medicare and Medicaid.
3. America’s pervasive
government-created third-party payer system
leads to high prices and costly inefficiency.
So what’s the moral of the story? Simple,
notwithstanding the shallow rhetoric that dominates much of the debate, the
United States does not have anything close to a free-market healthcare
system.
That was true before Obamacare and it’s even more
true now that Obamacare has been enacted.
Indeed, it’s quite likely that many nations with
“guaranteed” health care actually have more market-oriented systems than the
United States.
Avik Roy argues, for instance, that
Switzerland’s system is the best in the world. And
the chart above certainly shows less direct government spending.
And there’s also the example of Singapore, which
also is
a very rich nation that has far less government spending on healthcare
than the United States.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Articles like this are controversial and misleading. Firstly, we may be
comparing apples and kangaroos when it comes to the terms "health care" and
"cost." Much of the USA health care "cost" gets buried in other accounts like
"research" and "education." The many research universities in the USA are
contributing tuition and state taxpayer money to fund biomedical science faculty
and other science and engineering faculty who are doing medical research and
development in one way or another. But these costs are treated as "education"
and "research" costs rather than medical costs.
An enormous proportion of what the USA includes in costs of medical care is
really the cost of fraud that other nations, especially those with either free
market or nationalized coverage, avoid much more efficiently and effectively.
The frauds are especially high in Medicare billings for our aged and disabled
such as billings for nonexistent medical equipment and $6,384 cost of an aspirin
administered inside a hospital.
Much of what gets billed as "medical care" in the USA is the massive cost of
malpractice insurance, costs which nations like Canada with national health care
cover much more efficiently and effectively by leaving out the lawyers
salivating over punitive damages.
In the USA and Mexico much of the cost of geriatric and disability care is
borne by patient savings and family earnings that does not pass through
governmental or third-party insurance "medical care" accounts.. In nations with
nationalized medicine like Norway such costs are more apt to be called "medical
costs."
In the USA most patients like me bear their own eye care and dental billings
out-of-pocket and are not captured in governmental "medical care" accounts. In
many other nations the costs of these services pass through governmental
accounts.
The USA spends (usually under Medicare) hundreds of billions on patients that
are terminally ill, often extending their lives uselessly for weeks or a few
months in intensive care and cardiac care units. Most other nations save this
money by letting nature run its course for dying patients and/or facilitating
euthanasia. CBS Sixty Minutes ran a module on this under the title "The High
Cost of Dying" in the USA.
Similar discrepancies arise for extremely premature and/or underweight new
babies that are not saved in most nations outside the USA.
The above comparison of nations by Daniel Mitchell is mostly an example of
the many attempts (such as poverty and unemployment) to make international
comparisons on variables that are inconsistently defined and subject to enormous
measurement error and variation between nations
"Sandwich Generation: What are our Ethical Obligations to Care for our
Aged-Parents and Children?" by accounting professor Steven Mintz, Ethics
Sage, January 25, 2013 ---
http://www.ethicssage.com/2013/01/sandwich-generation.html
Bob Jensen's threads on health care are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
"An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network: Following the collapse of the
social network Friendster, computer scientists have carried out a digital
autopsy to find out what went wrong," MIT's Technology Review,
February 27, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/511846/an-autopsy-of-a-dead-social-network/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130228
A study reveals that many Twitter followers might in fact not be human
From the Scout Report
on November 16, 2012
Beware the tweeting crowds
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/11/social-media-followers
How fake are your Twitter followers?
http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/how-fake-are-your-twitter-followers-8211517.html
Analysis of Twitter followers of leading international companies
http://www.camisanicalzolari.com/MCC-Twitter-ENG.pdf
Status People Fake Follower Check
http://fakers.statuspeople.com/
Twitter Guide Book
http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/
The Beginner's Guide to Social Media
http://mashable.com/2012/06/12/social-media-beginners-guide/
Bob Jensen's threads on social networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
"What Is Boolean Algebra?" by Jason Marshall, The Math Dude,
March 1, 2013 ---
http://mathdude.quickanddirtytips.com/what-is-boolean-algebra.aspx
Jensen Comment
Jason points out that what sounds formidable at first blush often turns out to
be quite simple. Boolean algebra really is quite simple. Of course some things
that sound formidable really are formidable --- like topology and mathematics of
over 1,000 types of derivative financial instrument speculation trading and
hedging strategies.
My experience is that what I feared most about difficulty in mathematics was
more fear itself before I dug deeper into the topics that initially scared me.
However, I did not want to spend a lifetime of proof making among angels on the
head of a pin.
There are also different degrees of talent in mathematics. I was never very
good with math puzzles. However, I somehow mastered a sizable portion of the
mathematics of derivative financial instruments. I found that visualizing
functions made mathematics a whole lot easier. One of my visualization helpers
on hedging strategies can be found at
www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Calgary/CD/Graphing.xls
Note the tabs to separate spreadsheets at the bottom of the page
Dennis Rodman ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rodman
Jensen Comment
I lived in San Antonio when he played for the Spurs (he's also played for the d
for the Detroit Pistons, Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, and Dallas
Mavericks). He's a dirty player with a vile temper who angers his teammates as
much as his opponents with his craziness. It was humorous to see his hair
colored every shade of pastel imaginable. You can count me out as one of his
fans.
However, this morning it riled me to see news commentators, especially on Fox
News, maligning him for every bad thing he's ever done and calling him ignorant
because he knows virtually nothing about the Korean War, the DMZ, nuclear
physics, etc. Actually, I think he's been handling the press quite well in this
unexpected bridge of basketball between the world and North Korea.
If Dennis Rodman is our only hope of staving off World War III --- hey be
nice to him and give him credit where credit is due. He's accomplished more in a
week than Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton accomplished in years and years
and years.
From the Scout Report on February 22, 2013
Online OCR ---
http://www.onlineocr.net/
For those with scanned documents that would be more
useful in editable form, Online OCR offers a free, high-quality solution.
Users can simply upload an image (JPG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, GIF, and
non-editable PDF are all accepted), then choose the language and preferred
output format. At the free level, the service will convert 14 images per
hour, but those who are satisfied with the service and require more frequent
conversion may purchase a membership.
WordTalk ---
http://www.wordtalk.org.uk/Home/
The WordTalk plugin works with Microsoft Word to
create a audio version of text documents. The plugin speaks the text of the
document and highlights it along the way. It also contains a talking
dictionary so that users can decide which word spelling is most appropriate.
One of the intended audiences for this device is children who might be
having trouble with reading and writing. This version is compatible with all
computers running Microsoft Word.
After a meteor crash, a type of "gold rush" outside a Russian town
The gold rush begins for fragments of Russian meteor selling for up to
£6500 each as astronomers warn UK had a lucky escape
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2280019/The-gold-rush-begins-fragments-Russian-meteor-selling-6-500-astronomers-warn-UK-lucky-escape.html
Meteorite fragments spark Russia's newest gold rush
http://www.mining.com/meteorite-fragments-spark-russias-newest-gold-rush-63483/
Russian Meteor Blast Bigger Than Thought
http://news.discovery.com/space/asteroids-meteors-meteorites/russian-meteor-blast-bigger-nasa-130217.htm
NASA: Russia Meteor Not Linked to Asteroid Flyby
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/news/asteroid20130215.html
Top 5 Uses for Meteorites
http://dsc.discovery.com/space/slideshows/top-5-meteorite-uses/
Meteor Detection
http://www.meteorscan.com/
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
A Master List of 700 Free Courses From Great Universities ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/a_master_list_of_700_free_courses_from_great_universities.html
The Free Courses Search Site ---
http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses
There appear to be no free online accounting or business courses.
Some of the advertising disturbs me --- such as online Ph.D. programs with no
GMAT required --- to me a red flag.
However many of the free courses appear to be legitimate (although not free for
credit)
Center for Research and Reform in Education ---
http://education.jhu.edu/research/crre/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Magnifying the Universe: Move From Atoms to Galaxies in HD ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/magnifying_the_universe_move_from_atoms_to_galaxies_in_hd.html
National Science Foundation: Science of Innovation ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/innovation/
Teach Engineering: Physics ---
http://www.teachengineering.org/search_results.php?simple=physics
NOAA: Images, Visualizing Data, Marine Geology & Geophysics Division ---
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/image/
Women in Science
http://womeninscience.history.msu.edu/
50 Great Examples of Data Visualization ---
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/
Bob Jensen's threads on visualization of multivariate data ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm
The Second Look Series (Histology, Cells)
http://open.umich.edu/education/med/resources/second-look-series
Scientists Turn a Weed Into Corn (Genetics)
Weed to Wonder ---
http://www.weedtowonder.org/
Cells Alive ---
http://www.cellsalive.com/
Food: Transforming the American Table, 1950-2000 ---
http://americanhistory.si.edu/food-introduction
NOAA: Great Lakes Eco-Region ---
http://www.education.noaa.gov/Freshwater/Great_Lakes_Eco-Region.html
From the Scout Report on February 22, 2013
After a meteor crash, a type of "gold rush" outside a Russian town
The gold rush begins for fragments of Russian meteor selling for up to
£6500 each as astronomers warn UK had a lucky escape
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2280019/The-gold-rush-begins-fragments-Russian-meteor-selling-6-500-astronomers-warn-UK-lucky-escape.html
Meteorite fragments spark Russia's newest gold rush
http://www.mining.com/meteorite-fragments-spark-russias-newest-gold-rush-63483/
Russian Meteor Blast Bigger Than Thought
http://news.discovery.com/space/asteroids-meteors-meteorites/russian-meteor-blast-bigger-nasa-130217.htm
NASA: Russia Meteor Not Linked to Asteroid Flyby
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/news/asteroid20130215.html
Top 5 Uses for Meteorites
http://dsc.discovery.com/space/slideshows/top-5-meteorite-uses/
Meteor Detection
http://www.meteorscan.com/
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
Food: Transforming the American Table, 1950-2000 ---
http://americanhistory.si.edu/food-introduction
Discovering American Women's History Online ---
http://digital.mtsu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/women
Sophia Smith Collection: Women's History Archives at Smith College ---
http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/digitalcoll.html
Women in Science ---
http://womeninscience.history.msu.edu/
By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920 ---
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwhome.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
Women's Legal History ---
http://wlh.law.stanford.edu/
The Lloyd L. Gaines Collection (Law History) ---
http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=home;c=gnp
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math Tutorials
"What is Pi?" by Jason Marshall, The Math Dude, March 8, 2013 ---
http://mathdude.quickanddirtytips.com/what-is-pi.aspx
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
Judith Drake (scholar on barriers to women in physical and mental work,
including accounting) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Drake
Eight Special Women of Accounting ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2007/Aug/EightSpecialWomenInAccounting.htm
Among the AICPA-donated volumes at Ole Miss
are two binders containing photographs of individuals appearing in the
JofA or at accounting conventions from 1887 to 1979. Of the 446
individuals featured, eight are women—Christine Ross, Ellen Libby Eastman,
Miriam Donnelly, Mary E. Murphy, Helen Lord, Helen H. Fortune, Mary E. Lewis
and Beth M. Thompson. In a time when the profession was the
all-but-exclusive domain of men, they stood out not only because of their
gender but in many cases because of their accomplishments and contributions
to accounting. Consider that in 1933, slightly more than 100 CPA
certificates had been issued to women. By 1946, World War II had changed
traditional notions of gender in the workplace, and female CPAs had more
than tripled to 360—still a small contingent but, as information gleaned
from the AICPA Library indicates, one capable of exerting a strong and
beneficial influence on the profession.
Christine Ross
Born about 1873 in Nova Scotia, Ross took New York by storm in the late
1890s. New York state enacted licensure legislation in 1896 and gave its
inaugural CPA exam in December 1896. Ross sat for the exam in June 1898,
scoring second or third in her group. Six to 18 months elapsed while her
certificate was delayed by state regents because of her gender. But she had
completed the requirements and became the first woman CPA in the United
States, receiving certificate no. 143 on Dec. 21, 1899.
Ross began practicing accounting around
1889. For several years, she worked for Manning’s Yacht Agency in New York.
Her clients included women’s organizations, wealthy women and those in
fashion and business.
Helen Lord
Lord received her CPA certificate from New York in 1934 and in 1935 joined
the American Society of Certified Public Accountants, which merged with the
American Institute of Accountants (later AICPA) the following year. In 1937,
she was a partner with her father in the New York firm of Lord & Lord and a
member of the AIA. She served in the late 1940s as business manager of
The Woman CPA, published by the American Woman’s Society of Certified
Public Accountants–American Society of Women Accountants. Lord reported the
journal then had a circulation of more than 2,200.
Helen Hifner Fortune
Fortune, one of the first women CPAs in Kentucky, received certificate no.
174 in 1935 and was admitted to the AIA the following year. She became a
member of an AIA committee in 1942 and by 1947 was a partner in the
Lexington, Ky., firm of Hifner and Fortune.
Ellen Libby Eastman
Eastman began her career as a clerk in a Maine lumber company, eventually
becoming chief accountant. She studied for the CPA exam at night and became
the first woman CPA in Maine, receiving certificate no. 37 dated 1918. She
was also the first woman to establish a public accounting practice in New
England. Arriving in New York in 1920, Eastman focused on tax work and
audited the accounts of the American Women’s Hospital in Greece. In 1925,
she was a member of the ASCPA. In 1940, Eastman began working with the law
firm of Hawkins, Delafield & Longfellow in New York.
She was outspoken and eloquent regarding a
woman’s ability to succeed in accounting. In a 1929 article in The
Certified Public Accountant, Eastman recounted her adventures:
One must be willing and able to endure
long and irregular hours, unusual working arrangements and difficult travel
conditions. I have worked eighteen out of the twenty-four hours of a day
with time for but one meal; I have worked in the office of a bank president
with its mahogany furnishings and oriental rugs and I have worked in the
corner of a grain mill with a grain bin for a desk and a salt box for a
chair; I have been accorded the courtesy of the private car and chauffeur of
my client and have also walked two miles over the top of a mountain to a
lumber camp inaccessible even with a Ford car. I have ridden from ten to
fifteen miles into the country after leaving the railroad, the only
conveyance being a horse and traverse runners—and this in the severity of a
New England winter. I have done it with a thermometer registering fourteen
degrees below zero and a twenty-five mile per hour gale blowing. I have
chilled my feet and frozen my nose for the sake of success in a job which I
love. I have been snowbound in railroad stations and have been stranded five
miles from a garage with both rear tires of my car flat. I have ridden into
and out of open culvert ditches with the workmen shouting warnings to me.
And always one must keep the appointment; “how” is not the client’s concern.
Mary E. Murphy
A long-lived pioneer, Murphy (1905–1985) lectured, researched and taught in
the United States and abroad, retiring in 1973. The Iowa native earned her
bachelor of commerce degree with a major in accounting from the University
of Iowa in 1927, then obtained a master’s in accountancy in 1928 from
Columbia University Business School. In 1938, she received a doctorate in
accountancy—only the second woman in the United States to do so—from the
London School of Economics.
In 1928, Murphy began working in the New York office of Lybrand, Ross Bros.
& Montgomery. Two years later, she took the CPA exam in Iowa and received
certificate no. 67, to become the first woman CPA in Iowa. She joined the
AIA in 1937.
Following her public accounting stint, she
served for three years as the chair of the Department of Commerce at St.
Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind. Murphy also was an assistant professor of
economics at Hunter College of the City University of New York until 1951.
In 1952, she received the first Fulbright professorship of accounting, with
assignments in Australia and New Zealand. In 1957, she was appointed as the
first director of research of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in
Australia. Murphy retired in 1973 from the accounting faculty at California
State University.
She published or collaborated on more than
20 books and 100 journal articles and many book reviews and scholarly
papers. From 1946 to 1965 she was the most frequently published author in
The Accounting Review. Murphy investigated the role of accounting
in the economy, made the case for accounting education improvements and
paved the way for other aspiring women accountants to prosper. More than
half her publications explored international accounting, often advocating
standardization. She also emphasized accounting history and biographies.
Mary E. Lewis
Lewis received California CPA certificate no. 1404 in 1939. She was admitted
to the AIA that year and by 1947 had her own firm in Los Angeles.
Beth M. Thompson
Thompson worked as the office manager in the Kentucky Automobile Agency she
and her husband, Charles R. Thompson, owned. After closing the car business,
they moved to Florida, where she worked for an accounting firm. She passed
the CPA exam in 1951 with the encouragement of her husband and opened her
own accounting business in Miami. In 1955, Thompson was one of only 900
women CPAs and the only female president of a state association chapter—the
Dade County chapter of the Florida Institute of CPAs.
Miriam Donnelly
From 1949 to 1955, Donnelly was head librarian of the AIA library. (In 1957,
the AIA was renamed the AICPA.) She began her career with the library as
assistant librarian and cataloger in 1927, after working for two
governmental libraries and the New York Public Library.
History of women accountants in the 1880. US Federal Census ---
http://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=acct
Christine Ross (The First Woman CPA) ---
Click Here
http://books.google.com/books?id=W8Z2a53DJ2cC&pg=PA151&lpg=PA151&dq=%22First+Woman+CPA%22&source=bl&ots=irXssMWzFN&sig=0AneWv1qO-MB6_ixatHq-mMerRQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=N8o8UY3XBYrK0AHngoCYBw&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22First%20Woman%20CPA%22&f=false
Mary Jo McCann (First Woman CPA in Kansas) ---
http://www.kscpa.org/about/news/119-mary_jo_mccann_first_woman_cpa_in_kansas_passes
Bertha Aldrich (First Woman CPA in California) ---
http://boards.ancestry.com/surnames.aldrich/600/mb.ashx
Accounting Reform (search for women) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_reform
American Society of Women Accountants ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge#Women.27s_education
Accounting and Financial Women's Alliance ---
http://www.afwa.org/
Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
There are many items pertaining to accounting women in history, especially
in the Accounting Historians Journal
Ruth Andersen, First Woman on the Board of a Big Four Accounting Firm ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Anderson_%28accountant%29
Erma Bombeck (a termite control accountant at an advertising agency) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erma_Bombeck
Cynthia Cooper (Internal auditor who blew the whistle at WorldCom) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Cooper_%28accountant%29
Lynn Brewer was never enough of a player to even mention in my threads on the
Enron scandal
The foul mouthed Sherron Watkins was the significant whistleblowers at Enron
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnronQuiz.htm#10
Grace Andrews (early mathematician and accountant in Barnard College) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Andrews_%28mathematician%29
Patricia Courtney (IRS agent and professional baseball star) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Courtney
Patrecia Barringer (Tax accountant, auditor, and professional baseball star)
---http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Barringer
Helen Nordquist (Telephone operator, accountant, and professional baseball
star) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Nordquist
Rita Lee (Accounting Student Tennis Star) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Lee
Diane Cummins (Canadian Accountant Track Star) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Cummins
Sue Hearnshaw (British Chartered Accountant and Long Jump Star) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_Hearnshaw
Betty Wagner Spandikow (Accountant Who Became an Advocate of Breast Feeding)
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Wagner_Spandikow
Jennifer Archer (Oil and Gas Accountant Turned Fiction Writer) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Archer
Women in Business ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_business
American Business Women Association ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Business_Women%27s_Association
9 to 5 Film ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_to_5_%28musical%29
Career Women ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Career_woman
A History of Entrereneurship
"Who Are The Entrepreneurs: The Elite or the Everyday Man? A History of
Entrepreneurship," by Heather A. Haveman, Jacob Habinek, and Leo A
Googman, UC Berkeley, 2011 ---
http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/392635v2;jsessionid=00ECE18AD2472F4956AAF2D00CC2132E#page-2
Who
Are The Entrepreneurs: The Elite or the Everyday Man? A History of
Entrepreneurship
China's Tiger Woman Billionaires ---
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/03/04/amy-chua-profiles-four-female-tycoons-in-china.html
"Liz Claiborne Must Say Adieu to Liz," by: Dana Mattioli, The Wall Street
Journal, October 13, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203914304576626711202553884.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
"New Questions on Women, Academe and Careers," by Scott Jaschik,
Inside Higher Ed, September 22, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/22/women
Barbara Franklin (one of the first graduates of the Harvard Business School)
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Franklin
History of Feminism ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_feminism
Also see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mich%C3%A8le_Pujol
National Organization for Women (NOW) ---
http://www.now.org/
For example, search for "Accounting" in the search box
Women's Work ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_work
Teachers, Accountants, and Physician Women as Slaves in Ancient Rome ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
Conduct Literature for Women, 1500-1640, eds. William St Clair &
Irmgard Maassen (6 Volumes) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000).
Conduct Literature for Women, 1640-1710, eds. William St Clair &
Irmgard Maassen (6 Volumes) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002).
History of Women in the United States ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_the_United_States
The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in
America ---
http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library
Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_United_Kingdom
By Popular Demand: "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920 ---
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwhome.html
Women's Rights ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights
Title 15 of the United States Code ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_15_of_the_United_States_Code
Title 9 of the United States Code ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_9_of_the_United_States_Code
Women's Sports ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_sports
Famous Women in History ---
http://www.historynet.com/famous-women-in-history
National Women's Hall of Fame ---
http://www.greatwomen.org/
Note that some states also have hall of fame sites for women inductees
Women in Islam ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=20&offset=120&redirs=1&profile=default&search=Women+in+Accounting
Sharia (search for the sections pertaining to women) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia
Women's Rights Movement in Iran ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights_movement_in_Iran
Women in Saudi Arabia ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia
Women in Libya ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Libya
Geisha ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisha
Women of Singapore ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Singapore
Women's Roles in World Wars ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_roles_in_the_World_Wars
Women in the Military ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military
Yugoslav Partisans ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Partisans
The story of women bomber pilots from the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_Courageous
Rosie the Riveter ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter
Victorian Dress Reform ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_dress_reform
Women's Educational and Industrial Union ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Educational_and_Industrial_Union H
Women in Science ---
http://womeninscience.history.msu.edu/
Discovering American Women's History Online ---
http://digital.mtsu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/women
International Museum of Women
http://www.imow.org/home/
Women in Scotland ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Dundee
Also see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_early_modern_Scotland
Helena Marfell, First President of the Country Women's Association of
Australia ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Marfell
Women and Mormanism ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_Mormonism
WomenWatch: UN Information and Resources on Gender Equality and Empowerment
---
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/
Sophia Smith Collection: Women's History Archives at Smith College ---
http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/digitalcoll.html
Wisconsin Women's History ---
http://womenst.library.wisc.edu/bibliogs/wis-women-history.html
Women in Prison ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Hahn_Rafter
Women in Prison Film ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIP
Women in the Ku Klux Klan ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan
Women on Death Row ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_debate_in_the_United_States
Gifts of Speech: Women's Speeches from Around the World ---
http://gos.sbc.edu/
Women's Legal History ---
http://wlh.law.stanford.edu/
The Frances Perkins Center ---
http://francesperkinscenter.org/
Chicago Women's Liberation Union Herstory Project ---
http://www.cwluherstory.org/
David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious
Literature with Lightweight Books ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/david_foster_wallaces_1994_syllabus.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
National Women's History Project
http://www.nwhp.org/
African-American Women: Online Archival Collections ---
http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/collections/digitized/african-american-women/
Women Artists of the American West ---
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/WAAW/MainIndex.html
Women's Colleges ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_colleges
Women at Harvard ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University#Women
Radcliff College---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_College
Cambridge University ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge#Women.27s_education
Society of Women's Health Research ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Women%27s_Health_Research
Films Made by Women ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_cinema
Lesbian Pulp Fiction ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian_pulp_fiction
Smithsonian Education: Women's History Teaching Resources
http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/resource_library/women_resources.html
Teaching with Historic Places: Women's History Lesson Plans ---
http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/mar99.htm
Algerian Women in France ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_women_in_France
Barack Obama Supreme Court Candidates ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_Supreme_Court_candidates
Women in India ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_India
Women in Saudi Arabia ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia
Women in Libya ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Libya
Feminism in Thailand ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_Thailand
Women in Taiwan ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Taiwan
Gender Inequality in China ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_China
China's Tiger Woman Billionaires ---
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/03/04/amy-chua-profiles-four-female-tycoons-in-china.html
Gender Pay Gap in Russia ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_Russia
Economic Inequality ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality
Gender Pay Gap ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap
From the Scout Report on March 1, 2013
The movement for equal pay for women continues to gain steam across the
United States
Equal pay for women battle gains traction in New York
http://www.metro.us/newyork/news/local/2013/02/21/equal-pay-for-women-battle-gains-traction-in-new-york/
Getting equal pay could become easier for women
http://www.abqjournal.com/main/2013/02/26/politics/legislature/getting-equal-pay-could-become-easier-for-women.html
State Senator Wendy Davis Wants to Bring Federal Fair Pay Laws for Women to
Texas
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/02/state_sen_wendy_davis_wants_to.php
Wage gaps destroy employee morale, productivity
http://www.leaderpost.com/business/productiveconversations/Wage+gaps+destroy+employee+morale+productivity/8018636/story.html?__lsa=d85d-e6d9
Here We Go Again: The Long (and Frustrating) Journey of Equal Pay for Women
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marlo-thomas/equal-pay-for-women_b_2678611.html
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ2/html/PLAW-111publ2.htm
National Association of Black Accountants ---
http://www.nabainc.org/
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's Summary of Accounting History and
Accounting Theory ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
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
FOUND: A New Collection of Rare Photos from the National Geographic Archives
---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/found_a_new_curated_photography_collection_from_the_national_geographic_archives.html
Digital Scholarship Lab (history research, especially Civil War history) ---
http://dsl.richmond.edu
W.H. Auden’s 1941 Literature Syllabus Asks Students to Read 32 Great Works,
Covering 6000 Pages ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/wh_audens_1941_literature_syllabus_asks_students_to_read_32_great_works_covering_6000_pages_.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+OpenCulture+(Open+Culture)
Can you tell a book by it's cover? ---
http://www.dezimmer.net/Covering Lolita/LoCov.html
Arthur Conan Doyle Fills Out the Questionnaire Made Famous By Marcel Proust
(1899) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/arthur_conan_doyle_fills_out_the_questionnaire_made_famous_by_marcel_proust_1899.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%
The Lloyd L. Gaines Collection (Law History) ---
http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=home;c=gnp
Silver Buckle Press Collection (History of Letter Press Printing With a
Wisconsin Theme) ---
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/SilverBuckle
The Museum of Printing History ---
http://www.printingmuseum.org/
Kalamazoo College: Digital Archive (Photographs) ---
http://reason.kzoo.edu/dspace/
Food: Transforming the American Table, 1950-2000 ---
http://americanhistory.si.edu/food-introduction
Chicago Transit Authority: Public Art ---
http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/public_art/Public_Art_Book_Web.pdf
NOAA: Great Lakes Eco-Region ---
http://www.education.noaa.gov/Freshwater/Great_Lakes_Eco-Region.html
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
Fun Facts About CPAs ---
http://gordoncpablog.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/56/
Before a standard numbering system was developed,
ancient accountants used clay tokens to keep track of animals and grain.
- The State of New York gave the first CPA exam in
1896.
- The first African American CPA was John Wesley
Cromwell, Jr., licensed in 1921. John went on to lead a very successful
career after he became the controller of Howard University in 1930.
- Bubble gum was reportedly invented in 1926 by
Walter Diemer, a twenty-three year old accountant for the Fleer Corporation.
The gum was pink because it was the only food coloring in the factory when
the young accountant was experimenting with the gum recipes in his spare
time.
- Al Capone may have been the first American to
make $100 million a year, but the law finally caught up with him in 1931.
Special Agents from the IRS charged him with tax evasion. Accountants were
responsible for ending the crime czar’s career.
- Oscar winners always remember to thank their
agents, fans, and co-stars, but they should also thank their CPAs.
Accountants have controlled the ballots for the Academy Awards every year
since 1935. A team of nine CPAs spend up to 1,700 hours prior to Oscar night
counting the ballots cast in each category by hand.
- Arthur Blank, co-founder of the Home Depot and
owner of the Atlanta Falcons, is a CPA.
- Ray Wersching, who was the kicker of the San
Diego and San Francisco 49ers from 1973-1987, was a CPA during the
off-season.
- John Grisham, author of A Time to Kill, The Firm,
and many other popular novels, received his undergraduate degree in
accounting from Mississippi State University in 1981.
- Former Texas Rangers Manager Kevin Kennedy, a
CPA, did his players’ tax returns to make extra money when he managed in the
minor leagues.
- Nearly 1,400 of the FBI’s special agents are
accountants. In fact, the #2 man at the FBI, Thomas Pickard, is a CPA.
- In 1902, a competent accountant could expect to
earn $2,000 per year.
- Christine Ross, the first woman CPA in the U.S.,
received her New York state CPA certificate in 1899.
- The original due date to file individual tax
returns was March 1. It changed to March 15 in 1918, and finally to April 15
in 1955
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Édith Piaf’s Moving Performance of ‘La Vie en Rose’ on French TV, 1954 ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/edith_piafs_moving_performance_of_la_vie_en_rose_on_french_tv_1954.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
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
David Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common Word Usage Mistakes in English
---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/david_foster_wallace_breaks_down_five_common_word_usage_mistakes_in_english.html
Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/seven_tips_from_william_faulkner_on_how_to_write_fiction.html
This is the "whole ball of wax"
"Crazy English Idioms," by Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl, March 7, 2013
---
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/english-idioms.aspx
Ebonics and Why It is controversially the Required Language Skill in the
Oakland School System Rather Than Standard American English ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
February 27, 2013
February 28, 2013
March 2, 2013
March 4, 2013
March 5, 2013
March 6, 2013
March 7, 2013
March 8, 2013
March 9, 2013
March 11, 2013
March 12, 2013
March 31, 2013
FOLK NEUROSCIENCE Popular misconceptions ---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/mar/03/brain-not-simple-folk-neuroscience
Scroll down for the listing of the misconceptions.
Ask the Diva: Is Powdered Creamer a Heart-Healthy Choice?
http://nutritiondiva.quickanddirtytips.com/is-powdered-creamer-heart-healthy.aspx
The answer in short is No!
"The Business Case for Healthier Food Options In recent years, they have
generated more than 70% of the growth in sales for packaged-goods companies,"
by Michelle Obama, The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2013 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323884304578328682206937380.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h&mg=reno64-wsj
For years, America's childhood obesity crisis was
viewed as an insurmountable problem, one that was too complicated and too
entrenched to ever really solve. According to the conventional wisdom,
healthy food simply didn't sell—the demand wasn't there and higher profits
were found elsewhere—so it just wasn't worth the investment.
But thanks to businesses across the country, today
we are proving the conventional wisdom wrong. Every day, great American
companies are achieving greater and greater success by creating and selling
healthy products. In doing so, they are showing that what's good for kids
and good for family budgets can also be good for business.
Take the example of Wal-Mart WMT +0.77% . In just
the past two years, the company reports that it has cut the costs to its
consumers of fruits and vegetables by $2.3 billion and reduced the amount of
sugar in its products by 10%. Wal-Mart has also opened 86 new stores in
underserved communities and launched a labeling program that helps customers
spot healthy items on the shelf. And today, the company is not only seeing
increased sales of fresh produce, but also building better relationships
with its customers and stronger connections to the communities it serves.
Wal-Mart isn't alone in discovering that healthier
products sell. Disney DIS +1.08% is eliminating ads for junk foods from its
children's programming and improving the food served in Disney theme parks.
Walgreens is adding fresh fruits and vegetables to its stores in underserved
communities. And restaurants around the country are cutting calories, fat
and sodium from menus and offering healthier kids' meals.
These companies and so many others are responding
to clear trends in consumer demand. Today, 82% of consumers feel that it's
important for companies to offer healthy products that fit family budgets,
according to the Edelman public relations firm. Meanwhile, a study conducted
by Nielsen revealed that even when many families are operating on tight
budgets, sales of fresh produce actually increased by 6% in 2012. And in
2011, the Hudson Institute reported that in recent years, healthier foods
have generated more than 70% of the growth in sales for consumer
packaged-goods companies—and when these companies sell a high percentage of
healthier foods, they deliver significantly higher returns to their
shareholders.
These trends don't just matter for businesses that
produce and sell food. They matter for every business in America. We spend
$190 billion a year treating obesity-related health conditions like diabetes
and heart disease, and a significant portion of those costs are borne by
America's businesses. That's on top of other health-related costs like
higher absenteeism and lower worker productivity, costs that will continue
to rise and threaten the vitality of American businesses until this problem
is solved once and for all.
That's why American businesses are stepping up to
invest in building a healthier future for our kids. In doing so, they are
joining leaders from every sector across the country. Over the past few
years, through Let's Move!—our nationwide campaign to help kids grow up
healthy—we've seen teachers bringing physical education back into schools.
We've seen mayors building safe spaces where children can play, faith
leaders educating their congregations about healthy eating, and parents
preparing healthier meals and snacks for their kids. And we've seen
Republicans and Democrats working together in Congress to pass
groundbreaking legislation to improve school lunches.
And we're starting to see real results. In
Mississippi, obesity rates have dropped by 13% for elementary school-aged
kids. States like California, and cities like New York and Philadelphia,
have also seen measurable declines in childhood obesity.
So it's clear that we are moving in the right
direction. But we also know that the problem is nowhere near being solved.
We need more leaders from all across the country to step up, and I stand
ready to work with business leaders who are serious about taking meaningful
steps to forge a healthier future. We need every business in America to dig
deeper, get more creative, and find new ways to generate revenue by giving
American families better information and healthier choices. We know this can
be done in a way that's good for our kids and good for businesses.
That's why, even though we still have a long way to
go, I have never been more optimistic about our prospects for solving this
problem. And I am confident that, with leadership from America's business
community, we can give all our children the bright, healthy futures they so
richly deserve.
Humor
If you're debt limit is maxed out, here's one way to get another loan ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/Li0no7O9zmE
Forwarded by Paula
Statements seen on job applications.
- Reason for leaving last job: "maturity leave"
- Experience: "Strong ability in multi-tasting."
- Languages: "I speak English and Spinach."
- Additional skills: "I am a Notary Republic."
- Previous Employment: "Voluntary work for taking care of vegetable
people"
- Current Employment: "I am currently working in a furniture factory as a
drawer."
- Current Employment: "I have worked with restraints for the past two
years."
- Personal interests: "donating blood. Fourteen gallons so far"
- Carrer Objective: "Want to use my exiting skills."
- Experience: "Have not yet been abducted by aliens."
- Job duties: "filing, billing, printing and coping."
- Reason for leaving last job: "Bounty hunting was outlawed in my state."
- Career Objective: "career on the Information Supper Highway"
- Experience: "I have an excellent track record, although I am not a
horse."
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