Tidbits on April 9, 2013
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

This week I feature Set 1 of my Timber Harvesting (Logging) Photographs
www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Trees/TimberHarvest/Set01/TimberHarvest01.htm 

 

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

 

Tidbits on April 9, 2012
Bob Jensen

For earlier editions of Tidbits go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron" enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and other universities is at http://www.searchedu.com/.


Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations   


Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

Bob Jensen's Home Page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/

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

How Accountics Scientists Should Change: 
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy --- http://plato.stanford.edu/

"100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!)," by Jessica Gross, Ted Talk, August 3, 2007 ---
http://blog.ted.com/2007/08/03/100_websites_yo/

 




Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

The 11 Rules You Will Never Learn in School by Bill Gates --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSaCxGTuBng

PBS 2013 Online Film Festival --- http://www.pbs.org/filmfestival/home

Jay Leno’s Garage: 2014 Corvette Stingray --- http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/04/jay-lenos-garage-2014-corvette-stingray/
Even if old folks manage to get in the 2014 Corvette Stingray, be prepared to call 911 to get them out of the car.
Jay is 62 years old. His days for this this Corvette may be numbered
.

Snap Judgment (radio story telling) --- http://snapjudgment.org/

The Ocean as you have never seen it --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/mcbHKAWIk3I

Wealth and Inequality in America --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM

Kenneth S. Goldstein Audio Recordings (Folklore) --- http://clio.lib.olemiss.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/kg_audio

Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore --- http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/ACC

I Was Wondering (women in science) --- http://www.iwaswondering.org/

Makes My Dog Look Stupid --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/PztO-OvzRyg?rel=0

Education: Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City ---  http://www.kansascityfed.org/education/
Note the Financial Fables section --- http://www.kansascityfed.org/education/fables/index.cfm

Billie Holiday–The Life and Artistry of Lady Day: The Complete Film --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/ibillie_holiday--the_life_and_artistry_of_lady_dayi_the_complete_film.html

Change Your Words and Change Your World ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=Hzgzim5m7oU&vq=medium

BBC Animal Voice Overs --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aAtFrWft2k&sns=em


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

An Irish Blessing --- http://www.andiesisle.com/ThisBlessingIsForYou.html

The Four Candles --- http://www.openmyeyeslord.net/thefourcandles.htm

Yanni World Dance --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/ACWdB7QX_F8

Marine stuns crowd at Party ---
http://www.youtube.com/v/I0fQd858cRc%26hl=en_US%26feature=player_embedded%26version=3

Optical Illusion --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44mw37d8LQw

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain --- http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=pLgJ7pk0X-s

Revisit The Life & Music of Sister Rosetta Tharpe: ‘The Godmother of Rock and Roll’ ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/revisit_the_life_music_of_sister_rosetta_tharpe.html

The Good Friday 5: Musical Passion Stories You Must Hear ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/03/27/175496458/the-good-friday-5-musical-passion-stories-you-must-hear

Sugar Plum Fairy on a Glass Harp ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/QdoTdG_VNV4?rel=0&iv_load_policy=3%3Cbr%20/%3E&autoplay=0&wmode=transparent

Little Richard Plays Boogie on the Piano ---
http://www.wimp.com/oldschool/

Adrian Belew Presents the Fine Art of Making Guitar Noise — Past, Present, and Future ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/adrien_belew_presents_the_fine_art_of_making_guitar_noise.html

Billie Holiday–The Life and Artistry of Lady Day: The Complete Film --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/ibillie_holiday--the_life_and_artistry_of_lady_dayi_the_complete_film.html

Flying First Class --- http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=J1OqqQ8hBXk&vq=medium

David Bowie Releases Vintage Videos of His Greatest Hits from the 1970s and 1980s ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/david_bowie_releases_vintage_videos_of_greatest_hits.html

Web outfits like Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2

TheRadio (my favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.slacker.com/

Gerald Trites likes this international radio site --- http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:  Search for a song or band and play the selection --- http://songza.com/
Also try Jango --- http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) --- http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live --- http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note
U.S. Army Band recordings --- http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp

Bob Jensen listens to music free online (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

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama From Curiosity Rover Brings Mars to Your Computer Screen ---
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/4-billion-pixel-mars-panorama/

Johnson Space Center
JSC Digital Image Collection --- http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/

National Geographic-Adventure --- http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/

The University of Michigan Museum of Art --- http://www.umma.umich.edu/

21 Photos Of People Carrying Way Too Much Stuff ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-people-carrying-too-much-stuff-2013-4

Teachers Homepage: National Geographic Education --- http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/?ar_a=1

International Space Station Tour --- http://www.wimp.com/orbitaltour/

Columbus Indiana Architectural Archives --- http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/digitalscholarship/collections/CA

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts --- http://www.vmfa.state.va.us/Default.aspx

Digital Library of South Dakota (Black Hills) --- http://dlsd.sdln.net/index.php

Society of Architectural Historians: Archipedia Classic Buildings --- http://sah-archipedia.org/

Contini-Volterra Photographic Archive (Over 50,000 Italian Paintings) ---  http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/cv.pl

Art in Public Places: Miami-Dade County --- http://www.miamidadepublicart.org/

National Museum of Natural History: Lesson Plans & Classroom Resources ---
http://www.mnh.si.edu/education/classroom_resources.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

Will Cather in Her Own Words ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Willa-Cather-in-Her-Own-Words/138133/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

History News Network --- http://hnn.us/

Internet Archive: TV News --- http://archive.org/details/tv

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

Advice to Little Girls: Young Mark Twain's Little-Known, Lovely 1865 Children's Book ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/03/advice-to-little-girls-mark-twain/

Indiana Authors and Their Books ---
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inauthors/welcome.do;jsessionid=86E10F919216C2CC1BBE238BE6168EA8

Brown Baby Reads (African American Literacy) ---  http://www.brownbabyreads.com/

The Civil Rights Movement and the Black Experience in Miami (Florida, African America) ---  http://scholar.library.miami.edu/miamiCivilRights/

William Faulkner’s Newly-Discovered Short Story and Drawings ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/william_faulkners_newly-discovered_short_story_and_drawings.html

Free Electronic Literature --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI




Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on April 9, 2013
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2013/TidbitsQuotations040913.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




Academic Versus Political Reporting of Research:  Percentage Columns Versus Per Capita Columns ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxAirlineSeatCase.htm
by Bob Jensen, April 3, 2013


How to Crack the WSJ and Chronicle of Higher Education Pay Walls

If you are not a subscriber to the Chronicle of Higher Education, try clicking on the link below to read the following full article:
"U. of Akron to Offer Tutorials for Credit-Bearing Exams," by Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2013 ---
To read the above article enter "U. of Akron to Offer Tutorials for Credit-Bearing Exams" in the "this exact word or phrase:" search box at
http://www.google.com/advanced_search

For the Chronicle of Higher Education, getting free access you can the following:
Go to Google Advanced Search and paste "U. of Akron to Offer Tutorials for Credit-Bearing Exams" in the ""this exact word or phrase:" search box at 
http://www.google.com/advanced_search
The look for the silobreaker.com link.

Even though I am a WSJ subscriber, I like to play around with Google searches for free access to articles in general, including the WSJ.

This morning I noticed that the WSJ apparently changed the way that you can access WSJ articles for free via Google and other Web crawlers. It seems, at least today, that I can no longer access a WSJ article for free via Google if I read in the full title of an article.

However, if I read in a partial title or a phrase from the article itself I can get access for free.

Give it a try. As an illustration search for "The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World: The tale of a teed-off philanthropist and the head of Bowdoin College, where identity politics " in "The exact word or phrase:" search box at --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search
Look for the wsj.com link in that article listing.

If this does not work, only search for a portion of the title such as "The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World: "
Look for the wsj.com link in that article listing.
This one works for me this morning.

I suspect eventually, the WSJ will shut down all access to free articles via the Webcrawlers, but that's because the WSJ is making so much money that it can probably take a hit in advertising from reduced readership arising from failed Web searches.

Most other newspapers are not so fortunate.

Note that this search tactic for free articles will not generally work for fee-based scholarly journals. This is probably because such journals are not as dependent upon advertising for revenue. Also there's never going to be high readership for an article that less than 100 scholars in the world want to read.

What is more of a problem for fee-based scholarly journals is that scholars can usually access the articles for free via their campus library subscription services. Hence, if 20 accounting faculty at the University of Texas want to access a JAE, AOS, or JAR article they can do it with one library database subscription rather than each faculty member having to pay for his or her own subscription.

Also the campus library usually has access to hard copy versions of scholarly journals that can be photocopied except in the case where subscription prices are so high that universities like Cornell University refuse to subscribe to because they declare that journal to be a library rip off.

Usually these rip off journals, however, are in the natural sciences and possibly mathematics.

April 6, 2013 reply to Patricia Walters from Bob Jensen

Hi Pat,

What makes you think this is theft?
When you stumble on one of these articles via Google is there any warning from the publisher that you should not read or download the article without paying? I find no such theft warning when I find these articles via a Webcrawler.

 

If millions of searchers using Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. download these articles free because the publishers are making them available for free then it can hardly be called theft. This is not hacking into their Websites illegally. There's no warning when you find a WSJ, NYT, or Chronicle article via Google that you should not be reading or downloading this article without paying to read it. This is using a free download service that they fully encourage searchers to use.

The Chronicle of Higher education owns the silobreaker.com site that provides the free Webcrawler download to the Chronicle's pay articles that are not free at the Chronicle's main site. Why would the Chronicle do this if they didn't want to let the Webcrawlers and searchers like Bob Jensen behind the pay walls. In my case I subscribe to the Chronicle so it's not truly theft on my part.

I also subscribe to the WSJ with a full subscription that even brings me hard copy to my mail box, so quoting from the WSJ is not really theft on my part, although I'm considering dropping that subscription when it's time to renew..

I don't subscribe to the NYT, but the NYT allows 15 free downloads per month from its main site. That's enough to me since I can get 30 for free by using another browser for the second 15 freebies.

 

This begs the question of why the publishers who charge for news articles are allowing the Webcrawlers to get access and serve up these articles free from their own databases?

I think it's because they're still studying price elasticity of advertising and subscription revenues.

I'm only guessing, but my hunch is that the subscription model alone is a loser for WSJ and the NYT if the readership declines by tens of millions who will only view the articles if they are free. Advertisers will in the WSJ and NYT will curtail advertising drastically if the readership declines by 95% (just a guess).

If you want more of my opinion, I think that electronic subscriptions are such a new thing that publishers of the WSJ, NYT, and Chronicle feel that they cannot take the hit in advertising that will accompany drastic loss of readership. This electronic subscription thing is a new thing to the publishers. They're experimenting with paid electronic subscriptions in a way that does not cost them all they're readers, especially readers using the Webcrawlers.

Part of the experiment is to study the price elasticity of electronic subscribers. Both the WSJ and NYT electronic subscription prices just went up dramatically. I think the publishers are testing how elastic electronic subscriber demand is with respect to price.

One day these publishers may shut out the Webcrawlers just like the AAA Commons now shuts out the Webcrawlers. This greatly, greatly reduces Commons  readership. For example there are many articles of possible interest to Pat Walters that she probably overlooks because they don't show up in her Google searches of topics.

But the WSJ and NYT newspapers desperately need advertising revenue. They are not about to sacrifice that without first experimenting with subscription demand and price elasticity. To be honest I think they will go bankrupt if they only serve electronic and print subscribers. There are just too many competing free news services on the Web.

At moment the WSJ and NYT and Bob Jensen's Websites have one thing in common. The overwhelming majority of their readers find the articles via Webcrawlers than would visit their sites without the Webcrawlers.

 

What do the publishers fear the most if only paid subscribers can access their articles?

Suppose Joe belongs to the AAA and, thereby, has access to the AAA Commons articles. It's quite simple for Joe to download any Commons article and attach it to his private mailing list of mostly people who don't belong to the AAA. The AAA does not care if he's distributing this to only his students, but the AAA probably is not happy if he sends out 1,000 attachments to non-students.

If the WSJ and NYT change policies that only allow paid subscribers to access articles it scares them to death that paid subscribers will download selected articles and distribute them as attachments to tens of millions of their email friends.

To be honest, I think the paid subscription business model is not sustainable for news articles.
It becomes a bit more viable if those articles can be stored in a cloud where users cannot download them into their computers, But this is a new cloud technology that needs more experimentation --- especially experimentation with advertising revenues and subscription pricing elasticity.

The second thing that scares them is that there are just too many free news services on the Web, many of which are providing all those AP articles for free.

Why doesn't the WSJ allow the Webcrawlers into documents that only provide abstracts (summaries) filled with advertising and a link to the main article for a fee?

think the reason is that searchers are generally very intelligent and adapt. If they learn that Goolge links containing www.wsj.com do not link to full articles they can read and download they may just stop clicking on Google links to www.wsj.com search hits.

The WSJ could counter this by turning it into somewhat of a game. What if the WSJ started making a certain percentage (say 25%) of the Google links to WSJ  free articles that can be read and downloaded? The remaining 75% could be abstracts and advertising with links to the articles that require paying a fee to see the article.

Much depends upon the demand curve among tens of millions of searchers who will not pay fees for WSJ articles. If they get discouraged when linking to www.wsj.com links the WSJ has zero chance of having these searchers read the WSJ advertisements. If readership declines too much, the WSJ's loss in advertising revenue may be enormous relative to fees charged for access to articles.

An alternate approach (which may not be possible via Google searches) is to allow each reader a certain number of free downloads per month. The NYT now does that by allowing 15-45 free downloads a month depending upon whether readers learn the secret of changing browsers (this is a loophole that the NYT will no doubt plug before long so that each reader only gets 15 downloads per month). There are of course problems with this approach if users want to take the trouble to have multiple alias lognins.

Personally, I think the pay model of the WSJ and the NYT is a poor business model. At the moment only avid fans of these newspapers are willing to pay the hard copy and/or electronic subscription fees. If these newspapers block free access completely (e.g., via Google) then I think the loss of advertising revenue may be too much of a shock to these newspapers.

Of course the WSJ has many more circulation (2.1 million hard copies) subscribers compared to the NYT (less than one million hard copies).  However, the NYT Website claims to be to be the most popular online newspaper with over 30 million unique visitors per month, many of which arrive to the NYT Website via Webcrawlers like Google.  However, the NYT is still struggling to put up a pay wall. It has had some noted successes recently but those subscribers willing to pay hundreds of dollars per month have only been cream skimmed off the top.
 

The NYT and WSJ online newspapers thus far have not been able to get a sufficient number of online readers without giving most of their articles away for free. It remains to be seen whether they can sustain themselves by allowing article access only via fees. Given the massive competition free news services like Reuters I'm not optimistic about the pay-only business model for news services.

Another problem is that some paid subscribers will legally download articles and then illegally attach them to email messages sent to friends and colleagues. There can even be game playing where Joe has a WSJ subscription while his friend Karen has a NYT subscription. Then can then share with each other and their friends. I'm not sure it's possible to stop this type of game playing.

Respectfully,
Bob Jensen

 


Scroll down this message for instructions on how to break the Chronicle's pay wall for this article:

"U. of Akron to Offer Tutorials for Credit-Bearing Exams," by Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Akron-to-Offer-Tutorials/138243/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

For many colleges, it isn't easy to figure out how—or whether—to award academic credit for learning that occurs outside the classroom. But as institutions look to raise completion rates, be more responsive to the needs of adult learners, and deal with pressing questions about competencies and cost, solving the prior-learning puzzle has taken on new urgency.

With that challenge in mind, the University of Akron next month will roll out a new tutorial-based program aimed at helping more students earn credit for course material they've already mastered. "Save money and graduate early," promises the Web site for Express to Success, as Akron's new program is called.

The university has long offered students the option to request for-credit examinations in subjects they've studied elsewhere, but the tests weren't always available and many students weren't aware of the policy. The new tutorials are designed to give students a chance to refresh their knowledge in certain areas before deciding whether to take the tests.

"Test-prep tutorials" will be offered this summer in mathematics, statistics, sociology, psychology, and communications. They will include 10 hours of instruction, cost $100 each, and be taught by graduate assistants. The university at first will offer the tutorials in nine courses—including introductory sociology and psychology—and may expand the offerings if they're successful.

The first tutorials, in "College Algebra," "Statistics for Everyday Life," and "Introduction to Public Speaking," are scheduled to begin on May 20; the corresponding exams are in late May and early June.

William M. Sherman, Akron's senior vice president, provost, and chief operating officer, says Express to Success is a "small first step" that enables the university to offer "credentialing" for learning regardless of where it happens.

"In this day and age, learning happens anytime, anywhere, potentially all the time through any one of a number of methods—experiencing a museum, what you pick up and read or listen to in a library, what you learn on the Web, what you might learn in a massive open online course," Mr. Sherman says. The hope, he says, is that the tutorials will make the university's credit-by-exam options more appealing to more students.

University officials stress that students may pursue one of three paths after completing a tutorial. If students are confident in their mastery of the subject matter, they may take the exam for credit. If they have doubts, they may enroll in the affiliated course the next time it's offered at the university, and apply the $100 tutorial fee toward that course's tuition. Or, students may walk away and take neither the course nor the exam. The test itself, which costs $30 per credit hour, carries a risk: The grade earned on the exam is the grade that will appear on a student's transcript.

William T. Lyons, the university's acting assistant dean, is overseeing the project. He says many students feel that they've already learned the subject matter that would be taught in a university class but that their grasp of it is rusty. "They really need a refresher," says Mr. Lyons, who is also a professor of political science at Akron. The point of the tutorials, he says, is: "Do I want to try credit-by-exam or not?"

A Blended Approach

Akron's approach appears to be unusual. Like bridge programs, challenge exams, and the College Level Examination Program, known as CLEP, Express to Success aims to address the gray area where prior learning and academic credit meet. And it comes at a time of turbulent debate over higher education's pricing structures and its attitudes toward learning outside the classroom.

Chari A. Leader Kelley, of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, says Akron's efforts strike her as "student-centric" and "affordable." The program's attempts to make more students aware of the university's existing for-credit exam options, she adds, reflect a growing interest among some colleges to find ways for students to leverage their prior knowledge in certain areas. That enthusiasm is particularly prevalent, she says, among colleges looking to improve their completion rates, or those with large adult-learner populations—or both.

What appears to set the Akron program apart, says Ms. Leader Kelley, who is the council's vice president for LearningCounts.org, an online prior-learning-assessment service, is its blend of tactics. It uses exams that are unique to the University of Akron—all but one of the nine for-credit exams are identical to the final comprehensive exams offered in the affiliated university courses—along with a preparatory approach typically associated with national for-credit exams like CLEP. (But in Akron's case, she points out, the prep work has a bonus: face time with teachers.)

That institutional stamp, though, could be a limitation for some students who need to transfer the credits to another college. So says Burck Smith, the chief executive and founder of StraighterLine, a company that offers online introductory college courses at low prices. (The University of Akron was a partner with StraighterLine until 2011, when university officials said they would instead pursue an internal strategy for online learning.)

 

Jensen Comment
This is identical to obtaining AP credit on the basis of simply taking an AP examination. The difference is that the option will be available for some advanced as well as basic courses. AP credit is generally limited to basic courses.

It reminds me of the an option the University of Chicago offered in the 1900s. Students could take course final examinations for course credit without having to attend the classes in the course.

Note that I am a subscriber to the electronic version of the Chronicle of Higher Education. I can't recall the price of a password, but it ain't cheap.

Just for kicks I tried the same approach that I now use to break through the WSJ pay wall by pasting the exact title of the WSJ article into Google Advanced Search "All the words" search box ---
http://www.google.com/advanced_search
Look for the wsj.com link in that search listing.

For the Chronicle of Higher Education, getting free access is slightly different.
Go to Google Advanced Search and paste in the title of the Chronicle's article in the "All the words" search box ---
http://www.google.com/advanced_search
The look for the silobreaker.com link.

I merely passed along what is already widely known on the Web. Business Insider provided instructions on how to download WSJ articles that I merely passed along ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-read-the-wsj-for-free-online-2009-6


"Japan's Bank of Bernanke: A ceiling on the yen would stop deflation and limit damage to Asian neighbors," The Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2013 ---
To read the above article enter "Japan's Bank of Bernanke A ceiling on the yen would stop deflation and limit damage to Asian neighbors" in the "this exact word or phrase:" search box at
http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Jensen Comment
There was a time following World War II when the Japanese had a "copycat" reputation where Japanese copies were generally inferior. That of course changed when the Japanese discovered quality control to a point where Japanese products, especially in vehicles and electronics, became the standard setters for quality.

In the 21st Century the Japanese will once again be copycats. After Fed Director Ben Bernanke started printing trillions of dollars to pay government invoices without borrowing or taxation, the Japanese at long last decided that it's a good idea to crank up similar printing presses for the yen. For a time this will raise prices of imports to Japan and decrease prices of exports. But don't look for that to last if yen "quantitative easing" floods the currency market.

Quantitative Easing:  The Devil is in the Details ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing


Computer and Networking Security
"What Is a DDoS Attack?" by Eric Escobar, TechTalker, April 3, 2013 ---
http://techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com/what-is-ddos-attack.aspx 
 


The Big Problem for MOOCs Visualized ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/13dca6e0fa137324

 

MOOCs — they’re getting a lot of hype, in part because they promise so much, and in part because you hear about students signing up for these courses in massive numbers. 60,000 signed up for Duke’s Introduction to Astronomy on Coursera. 28,500 registered for Introduction to Solid State Chemistry on edX. Impressive figures, to be sure. But then the shine comes off a little when you consider that 3.5% and 1.7% of students completed these courses respectively. That’s according to a Visualization of MOOC Completion Rates assembled by educational researcher Katy Jordan, using publicly available data. According to her research, MOOCs have generated 50,000 enrollments on average, with the typical completion rate hovering below 10%. Put it somewhere around 7.5%, or 3,700 completions per 50,000 enrollments. If you click the image above, you can see interactive data points for 27 courses.

If you’re a venture capitalist, you’re probably a little less wowed by 3,700 students taking a free course. And if you’re a university, you might be underwhelmed by these figures too, seeing that the average MOOC costs $15,000-$50,000, while professors typically invest 100 hours in building a MOOC, and another 8-10 hours per week teaching the massive course. And then don’t forget the lousy contract terms offered by MOOC providers like edX – terms that make it hard to see how a university will recoup anything on their MOOCs in the coming years.

Right now, universities are producing MOOCs left and right, and it’s great deal for you, the students. (See our list of 300 MOOCs.) But I’ve been around universities long enough to know one thing — they don’t shell out this much cash lightly. Nor do professors sink 100 hours into creating courses that don’t count toward their required teaching load. We’re in a honeymoon period, and, before it’s over, the raw number of students completing a course will need to go up — way up. Remember, the MOOC is free. But it’s the finishers who will pay for certificates and get placed into jobs for a fee. In short, it’s the finishers who will create the major revenue streams that MOOC creators and providers are relying on.

Jensen Comment
The above article brought to mind all the many, many books I checked out from libraries or purchased that I must honestly say I did not finish. Unless there are incentives to read to the end, we're a society of waders who stick our feet into the waters without becoming fully submerged. A better phrase might be "curiosity dabblers."

I think that signing up for a MOOC course in most instances is motivated by curiosity much like checking out a book from the library just to "check it out."

The reasons we don't finish a book or a MOOC are many and varied.

For many of us leisure reading is motivated by little else other than curiosity and leisure entertainment. Finishing a book or MOOC is not a burning goal in life unless we are facing a competency-based examination covering the entire book or MOOC.

Most of us underestimate how busy we will become before we finish a book or a MOOC.

Most of us have to be very selective about where we devote our big sweat concentrations in learning. Great learning, like great exercise/sex, cannot be attained without deep, deep concentration and heavy sweating. Little bits are fine and fun, but the great finishes take lots of sweat.

Most of us are easily bored.

Most of us are easily disappointed.

Most of us end our flight and get back home without quite finishing the book that occupied our time while traveling.

Most of us in our senior years doze off without props/pokes to stay awake. Reading is bad enough. Operas, long sermons, and lectures are deadly. So are long drives --- which is why I prefer that Erika take the wheel when our destination is more than 30 miles. She likes driving. I've always hated driving like I hate other wastes of time. In my entire life I would never have opted for a job that had a long commute. Traffic jams and long lines in general drive me nuts.

I anticipate a day when modules from MOOC courses will become served up in Wikipedia fashion (probably without editing).

Suppose a topic like the "Beneish M-Score Index" lies buried as topic in the middle of a MOOC course on fraud detection. There may one day be a MOOC table of contents that will let you look up this topic and click directly to the course module containing the Beneish M-Score Index.

Eventually, there may be links to the MOOC modules followed by Wikipedia like editing for updates, added reference links, and case illustrations.

These are exciting times for open source education and training.

 

MOOC Interrupted: Top 10 Reasons Our Readers Didn’t Finish a Massive Open Online Course ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/10_reasons_you_didnt_complete_a_mooc.html

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, EdX, and MITx ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

 


"Five Really Dumb Money Moves You've Got to Avoid (Jensen does not agree)," by Brett Arends, The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324789504578384610026843812.html

1. Reaching for yield
2. Going into the poor house to send Junior to a country-club college
3. Owning stock in your employer
4. Taking Social Security too early
5. Buying long-term bonds

You know the smartest things to do with your money. But what are the worst moves? What should you avoid?

Weirdly enough, they are things that a surprising number of people are still doing—even though they probably know, in their heart of hearts, how foolish they really are.

Any list is going to be incomplete. But here are five to avoid.

1. Reaching for yield

What this country needs is a good 5% certificate of deposit. Instead the collapse in interest rates, and the Federal Reserve's policy of keeping them down for as long as possible, is driving people crazy—especially people who need to generate income from their investments.

In these circumstances, people start to do really foolish things in the desperate hunt for higher interest rates. That includes taking on crazy amounts of risk, or investing in complex products they don't understand, in the hope of higher yields. The Fed is producing a bull market in scams, Ponzi schemes and associated rackets.

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently warned about an epidemic of bogus high-yield "corporate promissory notes" being marketed to investors by scam artists.

The Wall Street Journal's Jason Zweig highlighted the woes of those sold complex "reverse convertibles," a legal but complicated product with embedded risks. Eric Lewis, chief investment officer of Bedrock Capital Management in Los Altos, Calif., suggests that if you can't explain an investment to a friend, including what might go wrong, you should think twice.

A high-yield bond fund such as the iShares High Yield Corporate Bond exchange-traded fund (HYG), which lends money to risky companies, sports a yield of about 5%. That's the maximum yield you can earn without taking on much more risk.

2. Going into the poor house to send Junior to a country-club college

Over the past 40 years, the cost of tuition and fees at a private university has tripled—after accounting for inflation. The cost of a public university has quadrupled.

The cost of getting a bachelor's degree has become a scandal in this country. Students spend $160,000 on a four-year degree and the results are too often questionable.

Financial planners strongly advise parents against plundering their own retirement savings, which they are likely to need, to pay for this.

Admittedly, a degree has become a protection racket—you can't get a job without one, but there are fewer jobs for those with them. But the smart move for the budget-constrained is to get a bachelor's degree at a public university. The tuition and fees average less than $9,000 a year instead of $30,000 at a private college.

3. Owning stock in your employer

This is one of the silliest and riskiest moves any investor can make. If the company hits trouble, you get whacked twice. You can lose your job and your savings—all in one fell swoop. Ask anyone who worked for Enron…or Lehman Brothers.

The law, amazingly, actually encourages this crazy move. While employers' 401(k) plans are subject to punitive regulations, lest they allow you to take on too much "risk," employers are allowed to offer their own stock among the investment options. Many do.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute says that the percentage of 401(k) assets held in employers' stock has been halved since 2000, but the numbers are still alarming. Furthermore, it's the youngest workers—those best able to take a gamble—who are shunning their employers' company stock.

At companies where the 401(k) plan offers the option, workers aged 40 or over typically hold about 20% of their entire 401(k) account in the company's stock, according to EBRI data. Crazy.

4. Taking Social Security too early

If you can afford to delay taking your Social Security retirement benefit, do.

Someone earning $50,000 a year who starts claiming Social Security as soon as he or she is able, age 62, will typically collect a monthly check of about $1,000, according to the Social Security Administration. If they wait until they are 70, that amount would double.

Taking Social Security too early, or without thinking through the consequences, is one of the biggest financial blunders people can make—roughly on a par with buying tech stocks in 2000 or a Las Vegas condo in 2006. The lure of getting money early can blind people to the big cost down the road.

(Many retirees may not have much of a choice. Hard labor at low pay over a lifetime takes its toll on a person. Also, many companies all but force older workers into early retirements.)

In any case, it doesn't take more than just a few years before the total money accrued with the higher, later benefits surpasses the total earned starting at the earlier retirement age.

But that understates the bigger issue. Social Security is insurance. For many retirees, the big risk isn't that they will run out of money before they turn 70, but after 85. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than half of women currently age 65 will live to 85 or longer, and three out of eight men.

David Blanchett, head of retirement research for financial research firm Morningstar, says it makes sense for women, married couples and those with good health to wait longer for a bigger paycheck.

5. Buying long-term bonds

A surprising number of people still subscribe to the flawed and circular argument that bonds, including long-term government bonds, are "safe." In reality, bonds—especially long-term government bonds—are the rare example of a bubble that has been explicitly declared.

 

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Owning stock in your employer ---
In some cases Arends is overly influenced by outliers like Enron. For example, owning stock in your employer after the fact was unfortunate if your employer went bankrupt. However, I don't think many employees of Apple, Microsoft, Intel, GE, Exxon, etc. made bad decisions by owning stock in their employers. You should, however, have some diversification in your portfolio.

Spending Too Much on an Expensive Private School
I agree with Arends about spending too much for your kid to go to an expensive private university like Northwestern as an undergraduate, including private universities that are not in the Ivy League. If your kid is a great student who can compete in places like Ohio State University, Texas A&M, the University of Illinois, Texas Tech, UC Berkeley, etc. --- save your own money and minimize student loans until your high-performing child is ready for a very elite graduate school. Then spend as much as you can and fill in with student loans for this child to go to an elite graduate school like Harvard, Chicago, Wharton, Dartmouth, Stanford, Northwestern, USC, etc.

I think you should invest in your promising college senior now rather than before or save it up for her or him when you die at age 88 and the "kid" is 66 years of age.

If your high school senior is less likely to perform well in an undergraduate college program at a reputable and competitive state university, then think about coming up with what it takes to get into the best undergraduate private school you can afford (with student loans) since grades are easier to obtain in nearly all of those private colleges and universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GamingForGrades

Of course if having your high school graduate interacting with certain religion-affiliated college students is most important to you, then by all means spend more on that private religious college. I can see why a devout Mormon family would shoot for Brigham Young University or a strong Catholic family might shoot for a quality Catholic college. I can understand when a Jewish family prefers Brandeis University. There are many, many college students who meet and marry shortly after graduating from college.

I agree about taking Social Security early ---
don't do it unless you're a multimillionaire.

I don't agree with avoiding long-term bonds in all cases ---
Much depends upon your age and the types of bonds. As you grow older and have a relatively large nest egg, you become less worried about inflation. For example, suppose you are getting a divorce in 2013 from a spouse who is the primary bread winner as a professor. If you are 42 years old and receive half of the TIAA-CREF accumulation in the divorce settlement, avoid the buying lifetime fixed annuity options in TIAA. Inflation will eat you alive if you live beyond your life expectancy (now over 80 for a man or a woman).

On the other hand, if you're 67 years old at the time of the divorce settlement, inflation becomes somewhat less of a concern. Much depends upon your health and other sources of income such as prospects of remarriage.

When I retired in 2006 I purchased lifetime fixed annuities for my wife and myself. And then I put nearly all of our remaining discretionary savings into an insured long-term tax-exempt bond fund from Vanguard. I've not regretted these decisions for an instant since I retired. Both of these investments weathered the 2007 economic crash like the Rock of Gibraltar. Returns from our lifetime annuities will never vary, although our fixed annuity returns negotiated in 2006 are higher than can be negotiate from TIAA in 2013. Thank the Quantitative Easing policy of the Fed for the unfortunate low interest rate alternatives on safe lifetime savings.

Returns in our long-term tax exempt bond fund remain relatively high because this is a long-term bond fund. Inflation would kill us if we were younger. But since we are both over seventy years of age, we're less worried about inflation and enjoy our comfortable-living monthly cash flows that are tax exempt. I don't much care how the values of our shares in the tax-exempt fund fluctuate since I don't intend to cash in on anything except parts of the annual cash yield on those shares.

My point is that all investors should not avoid long-term bond funds as Arends advises. Only some, primarily younger investors, should maybe ipso facto avoid such long-term bond funds. But keep in mind that bond prices in general are negatively correlated with interest rates. When interest rates are very low, like now, bond prices are relatively high. Arends has a point here! The bond prices were better in 2006 when I retired, but things become confounded by risk.

Tax exempt bonds in general are higher risk than AAA corporate bonds, which is why I prefer to invest in a very huge and diversified fund of tax exempt bonds that can weather the storm of unavoidable bankruptcies in some municipalities and school districts. There is also some risk that tax reform will reduce some of the benefits of tax exempt investments. For example, the degree of tax exemption might eventually be tied to adjusted gross income such that there's tax reform risk of having a very, very high proportion of your annual income being tax exempt.

Reaching for yield is probably a bad choice ---
unless you either are well protected against inflation in other parts or your portfolio or put those cash earnings to work into some very promising investments. For example, if you're land poor because you own real estate that significantly takes as much or more for property taxes than it pays in cash annually then I say go for some yield in your portfolio. Your real estate will most likely counter inflation over the long haul so you need not deprive yourself of the cash needed to pay your property taxes and some first-class accommodations on cruises to scenic places.

"A More Complicated — and More Dangerous — Fear," by jcoumarianos, Institutional Imperative, March 30, 2013 ---
http://www.institutionalimperative.com/2013/03/30/a-more-subtle-and-more-dangerous-fear/

When people talk about “fear and greed” in the markets, they usually mean fear of loss by “fear.” However, often a stronger fear is fear is missing upside. Listen to Jeremy Grantham talk about how many clients he lost  in the late 1990s for his conservative posture, or note that Steve Romick lost 90% of his investors during the same period for his, and you’ll understand that more subtle, but no less insidious, portfolio-damaging, fear. This is a kind of strange fear mixed with, not opposed to, greed.

It turns out, investors tolerate losses reasonably well as long as everyone else is losing. It’s kind of the investment version of misery loves company. Lose your clients’ money when everyone else is losing, and you’ll very likely keep your job. Lag a roaring market, however, and you’ll get dropped in a hurry.

This weekend the WSJ has a story about a couple, both physicians, who have re-entered the market after losing half their savings in the crash of 2008-2009, and parking their money in a bank account until now. The article notes

[t]his week, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard and Poor’s 500-stock index pushed to record highs, Ms. White and her husband hired a financial adviser and took the plunge back into the market.

The following graph shows what the physician couple missed by selling stock and moving to a bank account at the market’s nadir.

Continued in article


"The 25 Colleges With The Highest SAT Scores," by Max Rosenberg, Business Insider, April 1, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/colleges-with-the-highest-sat-scores-2013-4


City Government Fraud and Incompetence:  The Rule Rather Than the Exception

"Stockton, CA Filing Bankruptcy," by Ann-Marie Murrell, Townhall, April 2, 2013 ---
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/ann-mariemurrell/2013/04/02/way-to-go-unions--stockton-ca-filing-bankruptcy-n1555096?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

. . .

“In the 1990s,” Miller said, “Stockton granted its employees some of the most generous and unsustainable labor contracts in the State of California... Safety employees could now retire at the age of 50...Many safety retirees today earn 90 to 100 percent of what they made when they were still on the job.”

Miller also talked about the city granting things like “unlimited vacation and sick time” that could be “cashed out when an employee retired” and “Lamborghini” style health plans.

 

Other outrageous expenditures have been coming out of Stockton for years.  From StocktonFireFacts.com, here are the top 10 boondoggles:

1. City Council spent $48 Million to purchase a new City Hall building for itself. That’s just the purchase price and the cost to pay Wall Street to BORROW the money necessary for the new governmental palace.  The total cost of the building after all the interest is calculated?  We don’t know and the City Council never asked.

City Hall Report & Bond Documents

2. $33 Million settlement with Howard Jarivs Taxpayers Association due to the City illegally using Water Utility fees to fund the construction of the Stockton Events Center.

• City Repayment Schedule?• Stockton Record Article

3.  $22 million sunk into money losing Downtown Marina and has racked up $700,000 in annual operating cost losses. During the height of a City budget crisis, the Stockton City Council sunk $22 million into building a new downtown marina and then due to underestimating the costs, needed to add another $2.3 million to the bill.  City bureaucrats estimated that the marina would lose $100,000 a year.  The actual figure has balloned to $700,000 in losses a year.

Rising tide of red ink | Recordnet.com

Dry Dock Expenditure

4.  Paid $1.25 million over the independent appraisal value for a piece of property owned by a former councilmember. The site was supposed to be used for a new fire station, which even the Stockton Fire Department stated it didn’t want. The Stockton Record’s Editorial Board urged the Council to reject the deal, stating, “the city shouldn’t be dopey. It should pay no more than the appraised value.” Unfortunately, Dopey won at that Council meeting. The Council this year scrapped plans for the fire station, meaning that $2.75 million taxpayer funds have been wasted.  You can view the property here.

• Stockton ponders $2.75M land deal highlighted?• White editorial?• Council slashes program funding | Recordnet.com

5. $4 million legal settlement because the City failed to maintain our sewer system, causing too many sewage spills and violating the Federal Clean Water Act.

• Cal Tax Article?• Stockton to Pay $4 Million in Sewer Spill Settlement?• California Sportfishing Protection Alliance Settlement

6. $7 million loss at entertainment venues (Stockton Arena, Stockton Ballpark, Bob Hope Theater, etc.) subsidized by the City General Fund—which pays for firefighters and police officers

• Stockton Venue continue a troubling trading for taxpayers | Recordnet.com

7. $25,000 to clean up elephant dung at the Stockton Arena.We’d write more, but why?

• Cal Tax Article

8. $205,000 settlement for City’s failure to meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements within the city. Note that in addition to the settlement, money needed to be spent to bring facilities into compliance. We do not have that total

• ADA Settlement Agreement

9. $200,000 settlement with the Building Industry Association of the Delta due to City improperly using development fees to pay for General Fund services.

• BIA Settlements?• BIA Settlements article

10. $400,000 settlement with the San Joaquin Hotel & Motel Property Owner’s Association for devaluing property prior to the City attempting to purchase them.

None of this is anything new, and sadly none of it is surprising.  For years now, California’s state priorities have been all about satisfying unions and union workers at the expense of students and taxpayers.  Of course, anyone who regularly listens to KFI’s Jon and Ken Show in Los Angeles knew this was going to happen, and the only real surprise is that more California cities haven’t already gone belly-up.  However, Stockton probably won’t be alone for very long; many are predicting that other cities have been waiting for someone to be the first ‘fall guy’ and more bankruptcy proceedings will almost certainly follow suit.   

The thing Stockton (and Bell and others) never seem to figure out is that promising insane, out-of-control “forever pensions” to anyone who works in a public capacity is impossible to maintain.  You’d also think that parents of public school students would be a little curious as to why they have had to dip into their own pockets to buy things like books and lab equipment when the average (union) California teacher makes around $83,000 (total compensation, according to Salary.com)

 

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The sad thing is nobody will be held accountable for this fraud. Sadly such frauds became the rule rather than the exception in city governments across the USA where kickbacks are a way of doing business.

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

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


"The Debt Bomb That Taxpayers Won't See Coming ," by Steven Malanga, The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324077704578362101467799948.html

Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Illinois officials with making misleading statements to bond investors about the state's pension system. The agency detailed a long list of deceptive practices including failure to tell investors that the system was so underfunded that it risked bankruptcy.

Illinois taxpayers, as well as the holders of its debt, will ultimately bear the burden of the officials' misdeeds. But there is nothing unique about the Prairie State. For years, elected officials in states and municipalities across the country have been imprudently piling up obligations that are imposing serious strains on budgets, prompting higher taxes and cutbacks in services.

In January, city officials in Sacramento, California's capital, reported the results of a study they had commissioned on all the debt that the municipality had incurred. At a City Council meeting that the Sacramento Bee reported as "sobering," the city manager explained that Sacramento had racked up some $2 billion in obligations (mostly pensions and retiree health care). All this for a municipality of 477,000 residents with an annual general fund budget of just $366 million.

Sacramento finances are already stretched—the city has cut some 1,200 workers, or 20% of its workforce, in the past several years. Servicing its debt in years to come will only add more woe, especially given the intractability of public unions. The budget report noted that "While reducing staff is clearly not the preferred method for reducing costs, the city has a very limited ability to reduce the cost of labor absent cooperation from the city's employee groups."

According to studies by the Pew Center on the States, states and the biggest cities have made nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in promises to pay for retiree health-care insurance. Yet governments have set aside only about 5% of the money they'll need to pay for these promises.

This year a Chicago city commission reported that retiree health-care expenditures would soar from $109 million in this year's budget to $541 million in a decade. After concluding that the expenditures were unaffordable, one member of the commission proposed that retirees be required to sign on to the Illinois Health Insurance Exchange being created under President Obama's Affordable Care Act. Health insurance would be cheaper if it is subsidized by the federal government.

A December report by the States Project, a joint venture of Harvard's Institute of Politics and the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government, estimated that state and local governments now owe in sum a staggering $7.3 trillion. Incredibly, the vast majority of this debt has never been approved by taxpayers, who are often unaware of the extent of their obligations.

Most state constitutions and many municipal charters limit borrowing and mandate voter approval. No matter. Politicians evade the limits, issuing billions of dollars in municipal offerings never approved by voters, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Courts have rubber-stamped many of these schemes.

The debt incurred by New Jersey for school projects is a case in point. In 2001, legislators in Trenton hatched a scheme to borrow a shocking $8.6 billion for refurbishing school buildings. The reaction to their plan in the press and among taxpayer groups was so negative that the politicians knew that voters would never approve it. So the legislature created an independent borrowing authority. Since it, and not taxpayers, would take on the debt, politicians claimed that there was no need for voters' consent.

Taxpayer groups challenged the maneuver. The state Supreme Court brushed aside their objections, arguing that there was already precedent for such borrowing.

New Jersey's Schools Construction Corp. quickly squandered half of the money on patronage and inefficient construction practices, so in 2005 the state borrowed another $3.9 billion. All of the debt is being repaid by taxpayers. The authority, which was dissolved several years ago, had no revenues of its own.

Next door, in New York, a scant 5% of the Empire State's $63 billion in outstanding debt has ever been authorized by voters, according to the state comptroller. The rest has been engineered through independent authorities such as the Transitional Finance Authority.

These authorities are designed to circumvent voters. Of the seven bond offerings that have gone before New York voters in the past 25 years, four have been defeated. But thanks to unsanctioned debt, New Yorkers bear the second-highest per capita debt burden in the nation, $3,258, according to a January report by the state comptroller. New Jersey is No. 1, at $3,964.

To prevent the pile-up of hidden debt, taxpayers need to spearhead a revolt that will narrow the ability of officials to mortgage their future. Any such revolt will first of all seek an end to government sponsored defined-benefit pension plans, through which politicians promise benefits years hence to current employees in a manner that potentially leaves taxpayers on the hook for unlimited liabilities. Simpler, defined-contribution plans featuring individual retirement accounts would make government pension systems less expensive and their accounting more transparent.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I was wondering why my tax exempt bond fund keeps paying relatively high interest rates each month. Yipes! Now I know.

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

The sad state of governmental accounting:  It's all done with smoke and mirrors ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting


"What Happened to the Internet Productivity Miracle?"  by John Cassidy, The New Yorker, April 2, 2013 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/03/did-stevie-cohen-just-buy-off-the-us-government.html

Jensen Comment
John Cassady is one of my favorite authors. Even though he writes mostly for a liberal magazine (The New Yorker) he tends to place truth over political bias.

Some of the blatant Congressional Budget Office lies he warned about in 2010 are now being revealed as lies.

 


"Eurozone Unemployed Hits The Highest Level In History," by Joe Weisenthal, Business Insider, April 2, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/eurozone-unemployment-2013-4

Currently running at an average of 12% with a wide variance. The biggest losers are Greece and Spain with well over 26% unemployment. Germany keeps its youth unemployment low by not having a minimum wage. Germans also provide a lot of on-the-job training and advancement in the skilled trades.

If the U.S. is going to further discourage employment by raising the minimum wage, I think we should adopt a new labor classification for skilled-trade training where trainees do not necessarily earn a minimum wage.


"Thanks To Geniuses From MIT And Harvard, There Are Some Truly Innovative Boston Startups," by Megan Rose Dickey, Business Insider, April 2, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/hottest-startups-in-boston-right-now-2013-4


This begs the question of why creativity in accounting research is a rare event in terms of original inventions in the halls of our Academy ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm#Inventors

Why genius lies in the selection of what is worth observing.
"The Art of Observation and How to Master the Crucial Difference Between Observation and Intuition," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, March 29, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/29/the-art-of-observation/
This selection has a number of historic photographs of well-known scientists --- all women!

“In the field of observation,” legendary disease prevention pioneer Louis Pasteur famously proclaimed in 1854, “chance favors only the prepared mind.” “Knowledge comes form noticing resemblances and recurrences in the events that happen around us,” neuroscience godfather Wilfred Trotter asserted. That keen observation is what transmutes information into knowledge is indisputable — look no further than Sherlock Holmes and his exquisite mindfulness for a proof — but how, exactly, does one cultivate that critical faculty?

From The Art of Scientific Investigation (public library; public domain) by Cambridge University animal pathology professor W. I. B. Beveridge — the same fantastic 1957 compendium that explored the role of the intuition and imagination in science and how serendipity and “chance opportunism” fuel discovery — comes a timeless meditation on the art of observation, which he insists “is not passively watching but is an active mental process,” and the importance of distinguishing it from what we call intuition.

Though a number of celebrated minds favored intuition over rationality, and even Beveridge himself extolled the merits of the intuitive in science, he sides with modern-day admonitions about our tendency to mislabel other cognitive processes as “intuition” and advises:

It is important to realize that observation is much more than merely seeing something; it also involves a mental process. In all observations there are two elements : (a) the sense-perceptual element (usually visual) and (b) the mental, which, as we have seen, may be partly conscious and partly unconscious. Where the sense-perceptual element is relatively unimportant, it is often difficult to distinguish between an observation and an ordinary intuition. For example, this sort of thing is usually referred to as an observation: “I have noticed that I get hay fever whenever I go near horses.” The hay fever and the horses are perfectly obvious, it is the connection between the two that may require astuteness to notice at first, and this is a mental process not distinguishable from an intuition. Sometimes it is possible to draw a line between the noticing and the intuition, e.g. Aristotle commented that on observing that the bright side of the moon is always toward the sun, it may suddenly occur to the observer that the explanation is that the moon shines by the light of the sun.

For the practical applications of observation, Beveridge turns to French physiologist Claude Bernard’s model, pointing out the connection-making necessary for creativity:

Claude Bernard distinguished two types of observation: (a) spontaneous or passive observations which are unexpected; and (b) induced or active observations which are deliberately sought, usually on account of an hypothesis. … Effective spontaneous observation involves firstly noticing some object or event. The thing noticed will only become significant if the mind of the observer either consciously or unconsciously relates it to some relevant knowledge or past experience, or if in pondering on it subsequently he arrives at some hypothesis. In the last section attention was called to the fact that the mind is particularly sensitive to changes or differences. This is of use in scientific observation, but what is more important and more difficult is to observe (in this instance mainly a mental process) resemblances or correlations between things that on the surface appeared quite unrelated.

Echoing Jean Jacques Rousseau’s timeless words that “real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know” and Noam Chomsky’s similar assertion centuries later, Beveridge cautions:

One cannot observe everything closely, therefore one must discriminate and try to select the significant. When practicing a branch of science, the ‘trained’ observer deliberately looks for specific things which his training has taught him are significant, but in research he often has to rely on his own discrimination, guided only by his general scientific knowledge, judgment and perhaps an hypothesis which he entertains.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This begs the question of why creativity in accounting research is a rare event in terms of original inventions in the halls of our Academy ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm#Inventors

This is especially discouraging over the past five decades as accounting research in our Academy became dominated by accountics scientists ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm

We close with a quotation from Scott McLemee demonstrating that what happened among accountancy academics over the past four decades is not unlike what happened in other academic disciplines that developed “internal dynamics of esoteric disciplines,” communicating among themselves in loops detached from their underlying professions. McLemee’s [2006] article stems from Bender [1993].

 “Knowledge and competence increasingly developed out of the internal dynamics of esoteric disciplines rather than within the context of shared perceptions of public needs,” writes Bender. “This is not to say that professionalized disciplines or the modern service professions that imitated them became socially irresponsible. But their contributions to society began to flow from their own self-definitions rather than from a reciprocal engagement with general public discourse.”

 

Now, there is a definite note of sadness in Bender’s narrative – as there always tends to be in accounts of the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Yet it is also clear that the transformation from civic to disciplinary professionalism was necessary.

 

“The new disciplines offered relatively precise subject matter and procedures,” Bender concedes, “at a time when both were greatly confused. The new professionalism also promised guarantees of competence — certification — in an era when criteria of intellectual authority were vague and professional performance was unreliable.”

But in the epilogue to Intellect and Public Life, Bender suggests that the process eventually went too far. “The risk now is precisely the opposite,” he writes. “Academe is threatened by the twin dangers of fossilization and scholasticism (of three types: tedium, high tech, and radical chic). The agenda for the next decade, at least as I see it, ought to be the opening up of the disciplines, the ventilating of professional communities that have come to share too much and that have become too self-referential.”

 


"7 states where residents don't pay income tax," NBC News, March 31, 2013 ---
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/7-states-where-residents-dont-pay-income-tax-1C9085090?ocid=twitter

Jensen Comment
New Hampshire is not on the list even though it does not tax wages, salaries, retirement incomes, tips, etc. But it has a somewhat nuisance "Interest and Dividends Tax" beyond an exemption threshold that, if I'm not mistaken, is $5,000. It does not tax such items that are buried in retirement income. I let Turbo Tax compute the amount I owe without paying too much attention to details.

But New Hampshire more significantly has no sales tax such that residents of states like Texas, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming with sales taxes may not come out as far ahead as they think relative to New Hampshire.

The above article has some interesting details that are worth noting. For example, tax collections and spending per capita are listed for the seven states featured in the article.

What states have no individual or corporate income taxes?
Hint:  Antelope run free even if they own corporations.


"Say It With Me: Correlation ≠ Causation," by Invictus, Ritholtz Blog, March 31, 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/say-it-with-me-correlation-%E2%89%A0-causation/

Jensen Comment
In his liberal zeal Barry Ritholtz commits the same misleading cherry picking analysis while pointing a finger at  conservatives. For example, when it comes to blaming climate instead of state income taxes for flows of businesses to blue states from red states Barry selectively cherry picks "climate" data in his table. Granted that his "cold" red-state places the average temperatures are really lower in Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Providence, and Rochester.

But why did Barry selectively leave out average temperatures in most cities in California where some city migrations to blue state cities have been as much or more than from the five red-state cities above?  California is complicated, however, because it is one of the more conservative states in terms of worker unemployment compensation taxes and benefits.

Why did he not analyze why Indiana is stealing jobs from Illinois or why high-tax Illinois is heavily subsidizing large employers like Caterpillar and Sears to stay in Illinois?

Obviously correlation is not causation, but don't suggest this too loudly to referees of The Accounting Review ---
An enormous problem with accountics science, and finance in general,  is that these sciences largely confine themselves to databases where it's only possible to establish correlations and not causes, because zero causal information is contained in the big databases they purchase rather than collect themselves ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsGranulationCurrentDraft.pdf 

A factor to consider is quality of the work force apart from climate and income taxes. For example, Boston is a city that has not suffered nearly as badly as most other red-state cities losing jobs to blue-state cities. One reason is the historic highest quality universities and technical schools in the Boston metropolitan area. High tech firms seek out Boston in great measure because there are skilled workers not available in many of the blue-state cities.

The fact is that business migration is caused by a number of interactive factors including tax incentives and climate but not limited to such factors. High tax states in cold climates offset such barriers with subsidies (tax credits, free land, zero-interest lending, etc.).

Also not mentioned by Barry is the one-ton gorilla of union activism, especially in red-states. If Wisconsin, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Illinois dropped state income taxes they still might not steal a whopping number jobs from Texas apart from climate and tax considerations. This purportedly why militant unions are loosing some, certainly not all, their political clout in states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

 


The Bad News is That You Never Have to Get Off This Lifetime Welfare When You're No Longer Technically Eligible
And throw in Medicare as a fringe benefit
"Has disability become a 'de facto welfare program'?" By Barbara Raab, Senior Producer, NBC News, NBC News, March 28, 2013 ---
http://inplainsight.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/28/17459470-has-disability-become-a-de-facto-welfare-program?lite

When President Clinton signed "welfare reform" into law in 1996, he promised to end welfare as we know it. Now, some new reporting suggests we've created a new kind of welfare -- only most Americans aren't aware of it. 

The number of people who depend on checks from Social Security's disability programs has soared in recent years, according to NPR's series "Unfit for Work: the Startling Rise of Disability in America." The reports, which began over the weekend and continue this week, raise the question: How disabled are the recipients, really? As you might imagine, they have touched a nerve.

 

A quick primer: the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program provides monthly cash assistance to people who are poor and disabled, including families with disabled children. The basic monthly SSI cash benefit is a set amount -- currently $710 for an individual and $1,066 for a couple. The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program also provides monthly cash assistance, to disabled people who have worked in jobs covered by Social Security.  People who leave the workforce and go on disability also qualify for Medicare. 

After six months of investigation, NPR reporter Chana Joffee-Walt concluded that Social Security's disability programs have become "a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills." In the past three decades, she reports, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed:

Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. [...]

[And] story of these programs -- who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that -- is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.

Joffee-Walt's report takes listeners to Hale County, Ala., where one in four working-age adults is on disability, a local doctor is the go-to-guy for people in pain, and on "the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale" because people are relatively flush with cash.

She takes us inside "the disability industrial complex," including one of the private call centers that states pay to scrutinize their welfare rolls, contact as many people as possible who might qualify for federal disability payments, and move them off the state's rolls and into the federal disability system. 

The PCG [Public Consulting Group] agents help the potentially disabled fill out the Social Security disability application over the phone. And by help, I mean the agents actually do the filling out. When the potentially disabled don't have the right medical documentation to prove a disability, the agents at PCG help them get it. They call doctors' offices; they get records faxed. If the right medical records do not exist, PCG sets up doctors' appointments and calls applicants the day before to remind them of those appointments.

Joffee-Walt also reports on the 1.3 million kids on SSI, and says that some parents in Hale County told her they want kids who can "pull a check" so the family gets extra income. She suggests that some families who are surviving on that check may be holding their kids back from overcoming disabilities because they don't want to lose the money. 

Critics call the report riddled with factual errorsdevoid of context and "ill-informed". NPR's This American Life says it stands by its story.

The essence of the backlash is this: While critics admit the NPR report raises worthwhile questions, they say it does so in a sensational manner, traffics in inaccuracies and myths about Social Security's disability programs, and fails to tell the story about the millions of people these disability programs help. Here's how one critical analysis puts it:

The piece ignored that the recent rise in disability benefits is tied to the recession and higher rates of poverty, that qualifying for benefits is difficult, that SSI encourages employment, and that the current program has significantly reduced poverty among children with disabilities.

Listen to the report, read the criticisms, tell us your thoughts and personal experiences with the Social Security disability programs.

Bob Jensen's threads on the rankings of the top states where welfare draws in more residents that workers are at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Political/PoliticalQuotationsCommentaries.htm#Vermont


"Solar Downturn Casts a Shadow Over Innovation:  With no one buying new equipment, solar companies are looking to make the best of existing technology," by Kevin Bullis, MIT's Technology Review, April 7, 2013 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512801/solar-downturn-casts-a-shadow-over-innovation/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130402 


"NYC Legend, Ed Koch, Pays $3M Due to Estate Planning Blunder With No Irrevocable Trust, Laments UltraTrust.com," PRWeb, March 31, 2013 ---
http://www.prweb.com/releases/Ed-Koch-irrevocable-trust/estate-plannnig/prweb10549965.htm

Suggestion for his epitaph:
"I should've had an irrevocable trust."

Links forwarded by Paul Caron

Jensen Comment
More accurately former Mayor Koch would've saved something less that $3 million after paying his tax attorneys and CPAs.


Question
How should high school students play the college admissions and financial aid game?

"To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me If only I had a tiger mom or started a fake charity," by Suzy Lee Weiss, The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324000704578390340064578654.html

. . .

Having a tiger mom helps, too. As the youngest of four daughters, I noticed long ago that my parents gave up on parenting me. It has been great in certain ways: Instead of "Be home by 11," it's "Don't wake us up when you come through the door, we're trying to sleep." But my parents also left me with a dearth of hobbies that make admissions committees salivate. I've never sat down at a piano, never plucked a violin. Karate lasted about a week and the swim team didn't last past the first lap. Why couldn't Amy Chua have adopted me as one of her cubs?

Then there was summer camp. I should've done what I knew was best—go to Africa, scoop up some suffering child, take a few pictures, and write my essays about how spending that afternoon with Kinto changed my life. Because everyone knows that if you don't have anything difficult going on in your own life, you should just hop on a plane so you're able to talk about what other people have to deal with.

Or at least hop to an internship. Get a precocious-sounding title to put on your resume. "Assistant Director of Mail Services." "Chairwoman of Coffee Logistics." I could have been a gopher in the office of someone I was related to. Work experience!

To those kids who by age 14 got their doctorate, cured a disease, or discovered a guilt-free brownie recipe: My parents make me watch your "60 Minutes" segments, and they've clipped your newspaper articles for me to read before bed. You make us mere mortals look bad. (Also, I am desperately jealous and willing to pay a lot to learn your secrets.)

To those claiming that I am bitter—you bet I am! An underachieving selfish teenager making excuses for her own failures? That too! To those of you disgusted by this, shocked that I take for granted the wonderful gifts I have been afforded, I say shhhh—"The Real Housewives" is on.

Ms. Weiss is a senior at Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh.

Jensen Comment
Maybe an afternoon with Kinto would've humbled Suzy and even changed her life.


"The Debt Bomb That Taxpayers Won't See Coming ," by Steven Malanga, The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324077704578362101467799948.html

Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Illinois officials with making misleading statements to bond investors about the state's pension system. The agency detailed a long list of deceptive practices including failure to tell investors that the system was so underfunded that it risked bankruptcy.

Illinois taxpayers, as well as the holders of its debt, will ultimately bear the burden of the officials' misdeeds. But there is nothing unique about the Prairie State. For years, elected officials in states and municipalities across the country have been imprudently piling up obligations that are imposing serious strains on budgets, prompting higher taxes and cutbacks in services.

In January, city officials in Sacramento, California's capital, reported the results of a study they had commissioned on all the debt that the municipality had incurred. At a City Council meeting that the Sacramento Bee reported as "sobering," the city manager explained that Sacramento had racked up some $2 billion in obligations (mostly pensions and retiree health care). All this for a municipality of 477,000 residents with an annual general fund budget of just $366 million.

Sacramento finances are already stretched—the city has cut some 1,200 workers, or 20% of its workforce, in the past several years. Servicing its debt in years to come will only add more woe, especially given the intractability of public unions. The budget report noted that "While reducing staff is clearly not the preferred method for reducing costs, the city has a very limited ability to reduce the cost of labor absent cooperation from the city's employee groups."

According to studies by the Pew Center on the States, states and the biggest cities have made nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in promises to pay for retiree health-care insurance. Yet governments have set aside only about 5% of the money they'll need to pay for these promises.

This year a Chicago city commission reported that retiree health-care expenditures would soar from $109 million in this year's budget to $541 million in a decade. After concluding that the expenditures were unaffordable, one member of the commission proposed that retirees be required to sign on to the Illinois Health Insurance Exchange being created under President Obama's Affordable Care Act. Health insurance would be cheaper if it is subsidized by the federal government.

A December report by the States Project, a joint venture of Harvard's Institute of Politics and the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government, estimated that state and local governments now owe in sum a staggering $7.3 trillion. Incredibly, the vast majority of this debt has never been approved by taxpayers, who are often unaware of the extent of their obligations.

Most state constitutions and many municipal charters limit borrowing and mandate voter approval. No matter. Politicians evade the limits, issuing billions of dollars in municipal offerings never approved by voters, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Courts have rubber-stamped many of these schemes.

The debt incurred by New Jersey for school projects is a case in point. In 2001, legislators in Trenton hatched a scheme to borrow a shocking $8.6 billion for refurbishing school buildings. The reaction to their plan in the press and among taxpayer groups was so negative that the politicians knew that voters would never approve it. So the legislature created an independent borrowing authority. Since it, and not taxpayers, would take on the debt, politicians claimed that there was no need for voters' consent.

Taxpayer groups challenged the maneuver. The state Supreme Court brushed aside their objections, arguing that there was already precedent for such borrowing.

New Jersey's Schools Construction Corp. quickly squandered half of the money on patronage and inefficient construction practices, so in 2005 the state borrowed another $3.9 billion. All of the debt is being repaid by taxpayers. The authority, which was dissolved several years ago, had no revenues of its own.

Next door, in New York, a scant 5% of the Empire State's $63 billion in outstanding debt has ever been authorized by voters, according to the state comptroller. The rest has been engineered through independent authorities such as the Transitional Finance Authority.

These authorities are designed to circumvent voters. Of the seven bond offerings that have gone before New York voters in the past 25 years, four have been defeated. But thanks to unsanctioned debt, New Yorkers bear the second-highest per capita debt burden in the nation, $3,258, according to a January report by the state comptroller. New Jersey is No. 1, at $3,964.

To prevent the pile-up of hidden debt, taxpayers need to spearhead a revolt that will narrow the ability of officials to mortgage their future. Any such revolt will first of all seek an end to government sponsored defined-benefit pension plans, through which politicians promise benefits years hence to current employees in a manner that potentially leaves taxpayers on the hook for unlimited liabilities. Simpler, defined-contribution plans featuring individual retirement accounts would make government pension systems less expensive and their accounting more transparent.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I was wondering why my tax exempt bond fund keeps paying relatively high interest rates each month. Yipes! Now I know.

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

The sad state of governmental accounting:  It's all done with smoke and mirrors ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting

 


"Nate Silver Gets Real About Big Data," by Matt Asay, ReadWriteWeb, March 29, 2013 ---
http://readwrite.com/2013/03/29/nate-silver-gets-real-about-big-data

Jensen Comment
This is a message that accountics scientists don't want to hear about.

"How Non-Scientific Granulation Can Improve Scientific Accountics"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsGranulationCurrentDraft.pdf
By Bob Jensen
This essay takes off from the following quotation:

A recent accountics science study suggests that audit firm scandal with respect to someone else's audit may be a reason for changing auditors.
"Audit Quality and Auditor Reputation: Evidence from Japan," by Douglas J. Skinner and Suraj Srinivasan, The Accounting Review, September 2012, Vol. 87, No. 5, pp. 1737-1765.

Our conclusions are subject to two caveats. First, we find that clients switched away from ChuoAoyama in large numbers in Spring 2006, just after Japanese regulators announced the two-month suspension and PwC formed Aarata. While we interpret these events as being a clear and undeniable signal of audit-quality problems at ChuoAoyama, we cannot know for sure what drove these switches (emphasis added). It is possible that the suspension caused firms to switch auditors for reasons unrelated to audit quality. Second, our analysis presumes that audit quality is important to Japanese companies. While we believe this to be the case, especially over the past two decades as Japanese capital markets have evolved to be more like their Western counterparts, it is possible that audit quality is, in general, less important in Japan (emphasis added) .


A study released last week by researchers at Harvard and Stanford quantified what everyone in my hometown already knew: even the most talented rural poor kids don’t go to the nation’s best colleges. The vast majority, the study found, do not even try ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/education/scholarly-poor-often-overlook-better-colleges.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

"The Ivy League Was Another Planet," Claire Vaye Watkins, The New York Times, March 28, 2013 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/opinion/elite-colleges-are-as-foreign-as-mars.html?hpw&_r=0#h[ItgRaw,1]

. . .

A study released last week by researchers at Harvard and Stanford quantified what everyone in my hometown already knew: even the most talented rural poor kids don’t go to the nation’s best colleges. The vast majority, the study found, do not even try.

For deans of admissions brainstorming what they can do to remedy this, might I suggest: anything.

By the time they’re ready to apply to colleges, most kids from families like mine — poor, rural, no college grads in sight — know of and apply to only those few universities to which they’ve incidentally been exposed. Your J.V. basketball team goes to a clinic at University of Nevada, Las Vegas; you apply to U.N.L.V. Your Amtrak train rolls through San Luis Obispo, Calif.; you go to Cal Poly. I took a Greyhound bus to visit high school friends at the University of Nevada, Reno, and ended up at U.N.R. a year later, in 2003.

If top colleges are looking for a more comprehensive tutorial in recruiting the talented rural poor, they might take a cue from one institution doing a truly stellar job: the military.

I never saw a college rep at Pahrump Valley High, but the military made sure that a stream of alumni flooded back to our school in their uniforms and fresh flattops, urging their old chums to enlist. Those students who did even reasonably well on the Asvab (the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, for readers who went to schools where this test was not so exhaustively administered) were thoroughly hounded by recruiters.

My school did its part, too: it devoted half a day’s class time to making sure every junior took the Asvab. The test was also free, unlike the ACT and SAT, which I had to choose between because I could afford only one registration fee. I chose the ACT and crossed off those colleges that asked for the SAT.

To take the SAT II, I had to go to Las Vegas. My mother left work early one Friday to drive me to my aunt’s house there, so I could sleep over and be at the testing facility by 7:30 on Saturday morning. (Most of my friends didn’t have the luxury of an aunt in the city and instead set their alarms for 4:30.) When I cracked the test booklet, I realized that in registering for the exam with no guidance, I’d signed up for the wrong subject — Mathematics Level 2, though I’d barely made it out of algebra alive. Even if I had had the money to retake the test, I wouldn’t have had another ride to Vegas. So I struggled through it and said goodbye to those colleges that required the SAT II.

But the most important thing the military did was walk kids and their families through the enlistment process.

Most parents like mine, who had never gone to college, were either intimidated or oblivious (and sometimes outright hostile) to the intricacies of college admissions and financial aid. I had no idea what I was doing when I applied. Once, I’d heard a volleyball coach mention paying off her student loans, and this led me to assume that college was like a restaurant — you paid when you were done. When I realized I needed my mom’s and my stepfather’s income information and tax documents, they refused to give them to me. They were, I think, ashamed.

Eventually, I just stole the documents and forged their signatures. (Like nearly every one of the dozen or so kids who went on to college from my class at P.V.H.S., I paid for it with the $10,000 Nevada Millennium Scholarship, financed by Nevada’s share of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.)

Granted, there’s a good reason top colleges aren’t sending recruiters around the country to woo kids like me and Ryan (who, incidentally, got his B.S. at U.N.R. before going on to earn his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Purdue and now holds a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship with the National Research Council). The Army needs every qualified candidate it can get, while competitive colleges have far more applicants than they can handle. But if these colleges are truly committed to diversity, they have to start paying attention to the rural poor.

Until then, is it any wonder that students in Pahrump and throughout rural America are more likely to end up in Afghanistan than at N.Y.U.?

Jensen Comment
The conclusions above do not necessarily apply to elite Ph.D. programs where top college graduates XYZ state universities more frequently find their way into the Ivy League's hallowed halls on full-ride financial support packages. For example, years ago I graduated from a small Iowa farm town high school that I don't think ever placed a high school graduate in any of the nation's Ivy League universities. I commenced my higher education journey at Iowa State University. However, quite a few of this high school's graduates eventually made their way into doctoral programs in the Ivy League-class universities.

In my case I was given a full-ride fellowship (including room and board) to enroll in the Stanford University Ph.D. program after earning my MBA degree from the University of Denver. Much depends, however, on what the competition is for those graduate schools. In my case there was less competition to get into Stanford's accounting doctoral program than Stanford's MBA program. I'm absolutely certain that, even if I had been admitted into Stanford's MBA program, I would not have been given a full-ride financial fellowship.

Even today, I think applicants to accounting doctoral programs are more apt to get full-ride fellowships as doctoral students than if they instead applied for those elite MBA programs. Of course the incoming number of doctoral students is less than one percent than that of the popular Ivy League MBA programs. Many more top students apply for elite MBA degrees rather than Ph.D. degrees that take many more years of study and do not offer those Wall Street jobs upon attaining a Ph.D. diploma. Wall Street prefers the Ivy League's MBA hotshots.

Ironically, some of us unable to get Wall Street job offers ended up teaching the graduates who made millions and millions on Wall Street.

How many high-cap corporate CEOs have accounting Ph.D. degrees?

Off had, I can't think of one CEO of  among Fortune 500 companies that has a Ph.D. in accounting, although I can think of a lot of them that have MBA degrees.

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


"Eye for an Eye: The Case for Revenge," by Thane Rosenbaum, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, March 26, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Case-for-Revenge/138155/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
This is the diatribe we've come to expect from the leftist extreme in our Academy.

Adolf Hitler was not such a bad man. He was just badly understood.

Is vengeance the reason we send rapists, pedophiles, armed robbers, murderers, wife beaters, child beaters, and the lot to prison?
Isn't prevention of the bad guys from repeating their offenses a better reason?
Isn't prevention of potential like-criminals for having the same urges to commit such acts part of the reason?
Sure criminal justice is not perfect, especially in the world of the severely mentally ill, but this does not mean we should encourage more widespread crime by emptying out the prisons (until better ways of preventing crimes comes along)? This of course does not necessarily justify the death penalty or imprisonment without any possibility of parole, although I personally favor both extreme kinds of punishment for the worst of the worst.

Is vengeance the reason the EU is thrusting austerity upon Greece?
Isn't there a limit to how much the rest of Europe can continue to pay for the fiscal lack of responsibility in Greece?

If there's no pain whatsoever in debt default who will continue to loan money that is in essence a gift rather than a loan?

If there's no pain for fraud conviction, the world of contracts will become a mockery.

I have to agree with the following comment at the end of this article:

From OldFullProf

Basically nonsense. Just a wiff of this is the reason criminal justice in the United States is a pit. Sentences here lead to brutalization and cynicism, as any criminologist knows. Europe not so much. And it's good that the state monopolizes the means of justice/rehabilitation/(revenge, if you will.) Once the prisoner goes to the system, he or she should be lost to the victims. In a way, it's none of their business what happens to the perp. Anyone who's ever seen victim impact statements knows that they have no place in a courtroom. They're crazed, shrieking episodes which detract from the problem at hand. The state should be post-moral, I think. The exception of the "lost to the victims" rule is for small crimes where restorative justice is used.

This "article" is a cynical attempt to sell what is apparently a very twisted book, and the reason lawyers are not hired for crim positions any more. Responsible reviewers panned these ideas in The Myth of Moral Justice, but now he's back with the same hogwash again.

And so goes most of the rest of the comments at the end of this article, especially comments about how vigilante justice will take over if the law no longer protects potential victims.


"The Federal Debt Ceiling," AICPA, March 2013 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/InterestAreas/Tax/DownloadableDocuments/Federal-Debt-Ceiling-2-5-13.pdf

The USA's National Debt is Now Over $16 trillion and spinning out of control --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Note that this greatly understates both long-term and short term obligations due to unbooked commitments like Federal crop insurance to farmers, weather disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and hundreds of f tornadoes per year, and future Social Security, Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid entitlements.

Add to this the unfunded and unbooked state entitlements for things like public pensions and you see why good people no longer enter into politics as Democrats or Republicans --- people that can say no to special interest groups demanding more and more handouts from government and lower taxes.

Economic and Financial Indicators
The Economist
March 16-22, 2013
pp. 92-93
I could not find a URL for this table

GDP Estimated 2013 Percentage Changes for the Year --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDP
There are 17 columns of economic statistics for 47 nations plus the Eurozone
Included are estimates of the percentage changes in GDP for all of 2013
The estimated GDP gainers are China (+8.5%), India (+6.5%), and Indonesia (+6.4%)
The estimated GDP losers are led by Greece (-5.0%), Spain (-1.6%), Italy (-1.1%), The Netherlands ((-0.6%), and Hungary (-0.5%)
Germany only clocks in at an estimated 0.7% growth in GDP
The Eurozone as a whole is estimated to have a GDP decline of -.2% which explains in part the negativism about the Eruozone's economic prospects

The United States is estimated to have a 2.0% positive growth in GDP, but this falls way short of what is needed to significantly reduce unemployment

Current Unemployment Rates --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment
Unemployment is difficult to compare because of possible differences in definitions
The winners in terms of total unemployment are Thailand (0.5%) and Singapore (1.8%) current unemployment rates
Greece and Spain have much worse problems with almost non-existent opportunities for college graduates
 

The United States is currently clocked in at 7.7% but this is misleading because of having added so many temporary jobs relative to losses of full-time jobs with employment benefits like medical insurance. There is much concern about adding full-time jobs with medical benefits in advance of the costly Affordable Health Care Act.
 

The biggest losers are Greece (26.4%), Spain (26.2%)and South Africa (24.9%)
The Eurozone as a whole has unemployment currently at 11.9%

Current-Account Balances (Balance of Payment Trading) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_account
Trading accounts as a percentage of GDP are strongest for South Korea (15.2%), Norway (13.6%), Saudi Arabia (13.3%), and Switzerland (11.5%)
The loses here include South Africa (-5.4%), Indonesia (-4.1%), and Chile (-3.5%)
The United States looks relatively bad at -2.6%
The Eurozone looks better at +1.2%

The Economist: World in 2013 (Annual summary of world economics trends from The Economist magazine) ---
http://www.economist.com/theworldin/2013


The International Year of Statistics --- http://www.statistics2013.org/

Bob Jensen's links to tutorials in math and statistics  ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics


Billy Joe "Red" McCombs --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_McCombs

McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCombs_School_of_Business

David Woods ---

The Woods tax shelter was promoted by Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young, according to court documents.

"Supreme Court to weigh IRS penalties on alleged tax dodges," by Patrick Temple-West, Reuters, March 26, 2013 ---
http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2013/03_-_March/Supreme_Court_to_weigh_IRS_penalties_on_alleged_tax_dodges/

The  Internal Revenue Service's practice of slapping steep, 40 percent penalties on participants in certain alleged tax shelters will soon come to trial before the Supreme Court.

Though it rarely hears tax matters, the court has decided to weigh in on a case involving Texas billionaire Billy Joe "Red" McCombs, a former owner of professional sports teams.

The court's decision, not expected until June 2014, will likely have implications beyond McCombs' case, tax lawyers said.

Oral arguments will be scheduled when the high court's next term begins in October.

The Obama administration's solicitor general is arguing that "hundreds of millions of dollars" in tax penalties are hanging in the balance, according to court filings. However, the decision will only apply to cases brought prior to 2010.

The case being taken up by the court involves a 1999 transaction undertaken by McCombs and his business partner, Gary Woods. The government contends it had no purpose other than tax avoidance. The transaction was known as "current options bring reward alternatives," or COBRA.

According to the government, Woods and McCombs bought and sold options on foreign currencies to generate paper losses used to offset gains chiefly related to McCombs's sports ventures.

The IRS initially applied a 40-percent penalty on the unpaid taxes that the agency said were owed, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled in 2012 that the 40-percent penalty did not apply in the Woods case.

Woods is already subject to a 20 percent tax penalty on COBRA and the Supreme Court need not step in, Woods's lawyer has argued in court filings.

The lawyer representing Woods did not respond to requests for comment. Calls to San Antonio-based McCombs Partners, an investment management business which lists both Red McCombs and Gary Woods on its website, were not returned.

The IRS did not comment.

The government is arguing Woods and McCombs claimed more than $45 million in losses in 1999, from transactions that cost them only $1.37 million.

The COBRA strategy has drawn attention beyond the Woods case. COBRA was among a number of alleged tax shelter strategies subject to an IRS crackdown a decade ago.

Congress in 2010 passed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, which slapped a 40-percent penalty on transactions such as COBRA. The penalty was to apply to taxpayers found by the IRS to have made "gross valuation misstatements" on their tax filings.

With Congress ensuring that transactions like COBRA cannot escape the 40-percent penalty, a government win in the Woods case "won't have much impact on the future," said Andrew Roberson, a partner with law firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP.

For pre-2010 cases still in limbo, "it's obviously important for the IRS to get a win at the highest level," he said.

The Woods tax shelter was promoted by Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young, according to court documents. This month, Ernst agreed to a $123 million settlement to resolve a federal investigation into tax shelters it promoted.

The case is United States v Woods No. 12-562
http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.aspx?FileName=/docketfiles/12-562.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on Ernst & Young ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm


Interactive Camtasia

The amazing thing about Camtasia is that it's so simple to learn for anybody who already knows how to use common software like spread sheets and word processors. There are wonderful video tutorials on YouTube.  and at the TechSmith site.

March 24, 2013 message from Richard Campbell

This video shows how a professor of marketing from Central Michigan University makes his lectures interactive with Camtasisa.

http://youtu.be/98-2AYZA6UI 

You will see an example of chromakeying (greenscreening) that is coming in the next minor dot release to Camtasia Studio for windows v8,

Bob Jensen's threads on Camtasia are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm


In addition to reading your child a bedtime story, work with the child to solve a math problem.

Princeton-trained Astrophysicist-Mother Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is a full-time parent at the moment. She created a Bedtime Math Website that's featured on Pages 52-53 of Time Magazine on February 25, 2013 ---
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136328,00.html

One recent evening in West Caldwell, N.J., a library hosted a pajama party. Twenty little kids in princess nightgowns and football flannels counted out glittery animal stickers and pasted them onto homemade dominoes. Then they raced a stuffed pink frog on a carabiner up and down a zip line, raising and lowering their arms to speed it up and slow it down--physics in motion.

Laura Bilodeau Overdeck, a Princeton-trained astrophysicist turned stay-at-home mom, watched the scene intently. This pajama party was her idea. She's the founder of the nonprofit Bedtime Math, and she wants kids to fall in love with numbers...

Continued in article

Bedtime Math --- http://bedtimemath.org/


"Ivy League Admissions Letters Just Went Out, And Acceptance Rates Are Lower Than Ever," by Julie Zeveloff |, Business Insider, March 28, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-acceptance-rates-2013-3

Today is the day high school seniors find out whether they were accepted to some of the country's top schools.

Admissions decisions for the Ivy League schools went live at 5pm EST, and acceptance rates at the most selective schools were expected to hit record lows.

While not every college has released acceptance statistics yet, Princeton said it had offered admission to 7.3 percent of almost 26,500 applicants, and Columbia accepted 6.89 percent of the more than 33,500 students who applied, Bloomberg reported.

In comparison, Columbia's acceptance rate was 7.4 percent in 2012, and Princeton's was 7.9 percent.

The University of Pennsylvania admitted 3,785 students, for an admit rate of 12.1 percent, the admissions office told us. That's slightly lower than the school's acceptance rate of 12.3 percent last year.

The applicant pool at Penn included 31,280 students, a marginal increase over last year.

Brown admitted 9.2 percent of its applicant pool of 28,919 students, a slightly lower admit rate than last year's rate of 9.6 percent. Students from all 50 states and 83 countries were accepted, the university said.

Yale College made admission offers to 1,991 students, selected from a record-high 29,610 applicants. Its acceptance rate was 6.7 percent, compared to an acceptance rate of 6.8 percent in 2012. An additional 1,001 students were placed on the waitlist, the college said.

Cornell received more than 40,000 applications for slots in the class of 2017 — the highest number ever. It accepted 15.2 percent of applications, compared with 16.2 percent in 2012, the university said.

We've reached out to the rest of the Ivy League schools, and will update this post as more schools report their acceptance rates for 2013.

Jensen Comment
With the cost of prestigious graduate schools, particularly business, law, and medical graduate studies programs, on the rise, I think more and more students are choosing to spend less on for undergraduate studies so that they can afford prestigious and very expensive graduate studies programs.

The warnings about taking on excessive amounts of student loans for six or more years of college are perhaps getting more notice by students and parents. I have a granddaughter in a pharmacy doctoral program who will be eligible for Social Security retirement benefits about the same time her student loans are finally paid off.


Germany has a high employment rate of youth partly because Germany has no minimum wage law

"Youth Unemployment Rates: US, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Greece; Where to From Here?" Global Economic Analysis, March 28, 2013 ---
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2013/03/youth-unemployment-rates-us-germany.html


"The Hunt for Herman Melville:  The best biographers are scholars on wheels assiduously dogging their subjects' footsteps," by Carl Rollyson, The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324532004578358183100732300.html

Saying that Hershel Parker is as angry as Ahab isn't a flippant or disparaging remark. Like Herman Melville's enraged sea captain, this supremely accomplished scholar believes he is taking on a world that has tried to destroy him.

Mr. Parker is the author of the most thorough and authoritative account of Melville's life ("Herman Melville: A Biography," published in two volumes, in 1996 and 2002). The capstone of five decades of research, textual editing and literary analysis, the work is a masterpiece of the biographer's art. Nearly every page abounds with discoveries that plug the holes and correct the errata of other biographers, even as Mr. Parker adds to their best insights.

Biography is accretion, where one detail builds gradually upon another creating over time a complex portrait. Mr. Parker has spent a lifetime in archives—in New York City, London and virtually everywhere else Melville traveled, resided or worked—uncovering all sorts of fresh material. He has tried, for instance, to find every book, magazine or newspaper Melville ever read. Even Mr. Parker marvels at the single-mindedness with which he has pursued his subject—"more than half a century for a biography of only one writer!" he exclaims in his fascinating new account of his career and his craft.

Mr. Parker is one of the class of scholar-adventurers that originated in the 18th century, with James Boswell scooping up every scrap of Dr. Johnson's words and exploring every relationship that made the slightest difference in the Great Cham's life. James Anthony Froude was the only 19th-century biographer to rival Boswell's achievement. His thorough and candid life of Thomas Carlyle (1882-84) brought upon him the carping of literary critics, who believed he had revealed too much about his choleric subject's life and even accused him of fabricating intimate details. Boswell had also been so chastised by the literary establishment.

Biography didn't really recover from the opprobrium directed at Boswell and Froude until the mid-20th century, when a sequence of great works put it on new footing: Leon Edel on Henry James (1953-72), Richard Ellmann on James Joyce (1959), Richard Sewall on Emily Dickinson (1974) and Joseph Frank on Dostoevsky (1976-2002). Then came Richard Holmes, with his biographies of Shelley (1974) and Coleridge (1989, 1998), and Norman Sherry, with his multi-volume Graham Greene (1989- 2004), who made of the biographer a heroic figure, an intellectual daredevil assiduously tracking his subject's "footsteps"—to cite the title of Mr. Holmes's classic account of his arduous travels as a "romantic biographer."

The best biographers aren't your stay-at-home types; they are scholars on wheels—on foot, on skis—doing whatever it takes to get the story. In the episodic chapters of "Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative" (a play off the subtitle of "Billy Budd"), Mr. Parker sets out to explain and justify his work as researcher and biographer. He writes about theories of biography, the importance of textual fidelity and the travails of archival work. Anyone who wants to learn how to write a multi-volume life of a writer could start here.

But Mr. Parker also believes that critics representing two mighty forces (academia and the New York intellectual world) are bent on destroying the kind of scholarship that he has practiced his whole career. "Despite its immense popularity, literary biography is under attack from subversive interlopers," he writes, and ticks off a literary enemies list of academic critics, mainstream book reviewers and "interpretive" biographers who scorn careful research while favoring their own pet theories and interpretations. In "Melville Biography," he wants to turn the tables on "agenda-driven reviewers" and "recidivist critics" who have written negatively about his own books or who, he believes, have recklessly distorted Melville's life and work. Unusually, he names names—critics like Edmund Wilson, James Wood and Andrew Delbanco and many other prominent intellectuals come in for rough treatment.

Mr. Parker's first brush with this literary-critical tribunal came in 1968, when Wilson published an attack in the New York Review of Books on the scholarship that he and other young researchers had done for the Modern Language Association's editions of canonical American writers. Their textual and historical grunt work was designed to shed light on such basic and important scholarly building blocks as printer's errors in different version of Hawthorne, Melville and Howells. Wilson savaged the MLA's editions, saying that such pedantic compilations of lists of data were of minimal significance. "The old Tyrant of Talcottville," as Mr. Parker calls him, dismissed these diligent scholars for being more concerned with documents than literature. And "Wilson's prestige," Mr. Parker recalls, "was such that flatterers leapt to endorse his views," without ever reading the works. Mr. Parker found that, in his own department at the University of Southern California, his work had lost all "social legitimacy." "Even thirty and forty years later," he claims, "younger critics justified themselves to their coteries by huddling behind the corpse of Wilson as they lobbed fuzees underhanded toward scholarly editions and biographies."

In those days, literature departments were still dominated by the "New Criticism," a philosophy of literary interpretation that dismisses the artistic process. The finished work is all that matters. ("The design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art," wrote the New Critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in 1954.) The emphasis on "theory" that supplanted New Criticism, including such approaches as Deconstruction and the New Historicism—to name just two fashionable academic innovations—were even more inimical to biography. Acolytes operated from the assumption that biographical data was unstable, because the very notion of an "author" in command of language is dubious.

Such intellectual fads, Mr. Parker argues, deprive literature of the very life out of which it springs. Academic critics behave as though published texts are some unified whole, when in fact many literary classics exist in flawed versions—indeed, if one looks far back enough they exist only in corrupt editions that keep us from knowing fully what the author intended. Meticulous work with original documents can result in radical changes in our understanding of an author.

Mr. Parker describes how his sense of the relationship between Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne was altered when he looked more closely at Hawthorne's account of one of their meetings. Mr. Parker realized that Hawthorne had not looked "mildly"—as several commentators supposed—but "wildly." This one word matters because it reveals a more emotional Hawthorne than other accounts would have us believe. Melville sought not merely Hawthorne's support as a fellow author, but the older writer's affection. Hawthorne never seemed quite prepared to reciprocate Melville's desire for intimacy, but a Hawthorne who looks at Melville wildly suggests the former felt something after all. On "one wobbly letter," Mr. Parker demonstrates, a world of meaning hangs. Only the research biographer, learning how to read his subject's handwriting and studying his letters and everything that is legible in a life, can hope to understand the play of a writer's mind.

Mr. Parker (born 1935) began as a disciple of Jay Leyda, an indefatigable amateur scholar who developed a consuming obsession with the life and work of Herman Melville. Combing through archives of letters, newspaper stories and even the proverbial laundry lists, Leyda (with the aid of fellow Melvilleans like the young Hershel Parker) compiled countless facts and documents that were then logged into an all-encompassing "Melville Log" (published in two volumes in 1951, and again with a supplement in 1969). Leyda & Co. established a chronology of Melville's day-to-day life, and their tireless efforts uncovered numerous primary sources that shaped modern Melville studies. Anyone who writes about Melville today relies upon the vast stores of material that they accumulated—though it is Mr. Parker who drew most extensively upon them for his monumental biography.

Yet throughout his career, Mr. Parker complains, popular reviewers and academic critics have derided him as a collector of trivialities. He cites James Wood complaining, in the New Republic in 1997, that too many pages in the first volume of his biography were spent recapitulating the reviews of "Omoo," Melville's second novel and his second semi-autobiographical account of life in the Pacific. Mr. Parker contends, though, that what can seem like minutiae is crucial to explaining what was happening in the life of the 28-year-old writer. Unfavorable notices of "Omoo"—a best seller in the end—would have meant that he and his fiancée, Elizabeth Shaw, could not have announced their engagement. Nor could Melville have "confidently embarked on 'Mardi' "—yet another South Pacific narrative but one linked less to Melville's own adventures than to his emerging worldview and philosophical musings. This was where his art began to turn toward the type of writing that produced "Moby-Dick," and thus a decisive moment in Melville's life hinged on whether he could become a family man and support his family as an author. The reviews, in short, mattered deeply to Melville, as they must to the scholar, if not the critic. The Melville of theorists and literary critics, Mr. Parker suggests, is an "amputated manikin," "a condensed version"—primarily a high-minded writer of literary prose, and not the workaday writer whom Mr. Parker presents.

Continued in article

 


March 28, 2013 (LawProse Lesson 111) from Brian A., Garner

Why do plural possessives cause so much trouble?

      Much confusion surrounds plural possessives. Is it as simple as adding an apostrophe to the final -s? What if the plural noun doesn't end in -s? How do you form a possessive for units of time? What about joint possessives? The list goes on.

      This confusion became apparent when our last LawProse Lesson, on the misuses of apostrophes, generated a few e-mails from readers objecting to our illustration of a plural possessive: The fugitive fled to the Joneses' house, not the Smiths'. That example is correct. Why is it not "Jones's house" and "Smith's house"? Because the fugitive fled to the house of Mr. and Mrs. Jones (the Joneses, plural), not to the house of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (the Smiths, plural). This is a spot-on illustration of the general rule for plural possessives:

      When forming a plural possessive, use the word's
      standard plural form and add an apostrophe after
      the final -s.


Pluralize first, then form the possessive. If the fugitive had fled to the house of Mark Jones {Mark Jones's house} or to the house of Connor Smith {Connor Smith's house}, then the readers' objections would have been sustained.

      Of course, as with most rules, there are nuances. So here are some go-to guidelines for the most common issues that arise with plural possessives:

Irregular plurals -- that is, those not ending in -s. Add -'s just as you would to the singular form {children's or men's clothing} {the three mice's cages}.

Units of time or value. For times or values, follow the general rule and add the apostrophe after the final -s {seven days' notice} {ten years' experience} {40 dollars' worth}. In these examples, the units of time and value are adjectives preceding the nouns notice, experience, and worth. They could also be rendered as fully expressed genitives {notice of seven days} {experience of ten years} {a worth of 40 dollars}. But five months pregnant takes no apostrophe because the main word pregnant (as in pregnant for five months) is an adjective, not a noun.

Nouns ending in -s that are plural in form but singular in meaning. For singular terms that derive from plurals, treat the term as a plural. Just add an apostrophe after the final -s {politics' impact} {the United States' influence on commerce} {General Motors' market share}. Some people try to make it *General Motors's cars, but this form is both highly pedantic and alien-looking since the singular proper name General Motors is actually formed from a plural.

Joint possessives. To indicate joint possession, add -'s to just the last element in the series {Strunk and White's book (Strunk and White are coauthors)}. To signal individual possession, add -'s to each element in the series {King's and Taylor's books (King and Taylor wrote separate books)}.

Acronyms and initialisms. It doesn't come up often (and it's easily avoided), but the plural possessive of acronyms and initialisms follows the general rule. Take the singular {an MRI}, make it plural {two MRIs}, and add an apostrophe {the three MRIs' role in the diagnosis}. If there's a plural word in an initialism -- as when Lloyd's Register Drilling Integrity Services becomes the singular name LRDIS -- treat the full initialism as a singular and make the possessive form singular {LRDIS's contentions}.

 The toughest thing to remember is to pluralize first. Mr. and Mrs. Flowers are the Flowerses (it's the only plural accepted by recognized grammarians). Their house is the Flowerses' house. George Flowers's garden is beloved by all the other Flowerses. And now we see plural possessives in full bloom. If you're surprised, don't worry. You're not alone, and there's no punishment (such as 30 days' hard labor).


Sources:
Garner's Modern American Usage 644-47 (3d
   ed. 2009).
The Chicago Manual of Style 353-58 (16th ed. 2010).

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


"The New 6 Strikes Rule of Internet Piracy," by Eric Excobar, Tech Talker, March 27, 2013 ---
http://techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com/new-6-strikes-rule-internet-piracy.aspx


"How the internet (and other technology) is making us poor," by Christopher Mims, Quartz, March 27, 2013 ---
 http://qz.com/67323/how-the-internet-made-us-poor/

Robotics Displacing Labor Even in Higher Education
"The New Industrial Revolution," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, March  25, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Industrial-Revolution/138015/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Baxter is a new type of worker, who is having no trouble getting a job these days, even in a tight economy. He's a little slow, but he's easy to train. And companies don't hire him, they buy him—he even comes with a warranty.

Baxter is a robot, not a human, though human workers in all kinds of industries may soon call him a colleague. His plastic-and-metal body consists of two arms loaded with sensors to keep his lifeless limbs from accidentally knocking over anyone nearby. And he has a simulated face, displayed on a flat-panel computer monitor, so he can give a frown if he's vexed or show a bored look if he's waiting to be given more to do.

Baxter is part of a new generation of machines that are changing the labor market worldwide—and raising a new round of debate about the meaning of work itself. This robot comes at a price so low—starting at just $22,000—that even businesses that never thought of replacing people with machines may find that prospect irresistible. It's the brainchild of Rodney Brooks, who also designed the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which succeeded in bringing at least a little bit of robotics into millions of homes. One computer scientist predicts that robots like Baxter will soon toil in fast-food restaurants topping pizzas, at bakeries sliding dough into hot ovens, and at a variety of other service-sector jobs, in addition to factories.

I wanted to meet this worker of the future and his robot siblings, so I spent a day at this year's Automate trade show here, where Baxter was one of hundreds of new commercial robots on display. Simply by guiding his hands and pressing a few buttons, I programmed him to put objects in boxes; I played blackjack against another robot that had been temporarily programmed to deal cards to show off its dexterity; and I watched demonstration robots play flawless games of billiards on toy-sized tables. (It turns out that robots are not only better at many professional jobs than humans are, but they can best us in our hobbies, too.)

During a keynote speech to kick off the trade show, Henrik Christensen, director of robotics at Georgia Tech, outlined a vision of a near future when we'll see robots and autonomous devices everywhere, working side by side with humans and taking on a surprisingly diverse set of roles. Robots will load and unload packages from delivery trucks without human assistance—as one company's system demonstrated during the event. Robots will even drive the trucks and fly the cargo planes with our packages, Christensen predicted, noting that Google has already demonstrated its driverless car, and that the same technology that powers military drones can just as well fly a FedEx jet. "We'll see coast-to-coast package delivery with drones without having a pilot in the vehicle," he asserted.

Away from the futuristic trade floor, though, a public discussion is growing about whether robots like Baxter and other new automation technologies are taking too many jobs. Similar concerns have cropped up repeatedly for centuries: when combines first arrived on farms, when the first machines hit factory assembly lines, when computers first entered businesses. A folk tune from the 1950s called "The Automation Song" could well be sung today: "Now you've got new machines for to take my place, and you tell me it's not mine to share." Yet new jobs have always seemed to emerge to fill the gaps left by positions lost to mechanization. There may be few secretaries today, but there are legions of social-media managers and other new professional categories created by digital technology.

Still, what if this time is different? What if we're nearing an inflection point where automation is so cheap and efficient that human workers are simply outmatched? What if machines are now leading to a net loss of jobs rather than a net gain? Two professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, raised that concern in Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Digital Frontier Press, 2011). A recent report on 60 Minutes featured the book's thesis and quoted critics concerned about the potential economic crisis caused by robots, despite the cute faces on their monitors.

But robots raise an even bigger question than how many jobs are left over for humans. A number of scholars are now arguing that all this automation could make many goods and services so cheap that a full-time jobs could become optional for most people. Baxter, then, would become a liberator of the human spirit rather than an enemy of the working man.

That utopian dream would require resetting the role work plays in our lives. If our destiny is to be freed from toil by robot helpers, what are we supposed to do with our days?

To begin to tackle that existential question, I decided to invite along a scholar of work to the Automate trade show. And that's how my guest, Burton J. Bledstein, an expert on the history of professionalism and the growth of the modern middle class, got into an argument with the head of a robotics company.

It happened at the booth for Adept Technology Inc., which makes a robot designed to roam the halls of hospitals and other facilities making deliveries. The latest model­—a foot-tall rolling platform that can be customized for a variety of tasks­—wandered around the booth, resembling something out of a Star Wars film except that it occasionally blasted techno music from its speakers. Bledstein was immediately wary of the contraption. The professor, who holds an emeritus position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explained that he has an artificial hip and didn't want the robot to accidentally knock him down. He needn't have worried, though; the robot is designed to sense nearby objects and keep a safe distance.

The company's then-CEO, John Dulchinos, assured us that on the whole, robots aren't taking jobs—they're simply making life better for human employees by eliminating the most-tedious tasks. "I can show you some very clear examples where this product is offloading tasks from a nurse that was walking five miles a day to allow her to be able to spend time with patients," he said, as the robot tirelessly circled our feet. "I think you see that in a lot of the applications we're doing, where the mundane task is done by a robot which has very simple capability, and it frees up people to do more-elaborate and more-sophisticated tasks."

The CEO defended the broader trend of companies' embracing automation, especially in factory settings where human workers have long held what he called unfulfilling jobs, like wrapping chicken all day. "They look like zombies when they walk out of that factory," he said of such workers. "It is a mind-numbing, mundane task. There is absolutely no satisfaction from what they do."

"That's your perception," countered Bledstein. "A lot of these are unskilled people. A lot of immigrants are in these jobs. They see it as work. They appreciate the paycheck. The numbness of the work is not something that surprises them or disturbs them."

"I guess we could just turn the clock back to 1900, and we can all be farmers," retorted Dulchinos.

But what about those displaced workers who can't find alternatives, asked Bledstein, arguing that automation is happening not just in factories but also in clerical and other middle-class professions changed by computer technology. "That's kind of creating a crisis today. Especially if those people are over 50, those people are having a lot of trouble finding new work." The professor added that he worried about his undergraduate students, too, and the tough job market they face. "It might be a lost generation, it's so bad."

Dulchinos acknowledged that some workers are struggling during what he sees as a transitional period, but he argued that the solution is more technology and innovation, not less, to get to a new equilibrium even faster.

This went on for a while, and it boiled down to competing conceptions of what it means to have a job. In Bledstein's seminal book, The Culture of Professionalism, first published in 1976, he argues that Americans, in particular, have come to define their work as more than just a series of tasks that could be commodified. Bledstein tracks a history of how, in sector after sector, middle-class workers sought to elevate the meaning of their jobs, whether they worked as athletes, surgeons, or funeral directors: "The professional importance of an occupation was exaggerated when the ordinary coffin became a 'casket,' the sealed repository of a precious object; when a decaying corpse became a 'patient' prepared in an 'operating room' by an 'embalming surgeon' and visited in a 'funeral home' before being laid to rest in a 'memorial park.'"

The American dream involves more than just accumulating wealth, the historian argues. It's about developing a sense of personal value by connecting work to a broader social mission, rather than as "a mechanical job, befitting of lowly manual laborer."

Today, though, "there's disillusionment with professions," Bledstein told me, noting that the logic of efficiency is often valued more than the quality of service. "Commercialism has just taken over everywhere." He complained that in their rush to reduce production costs, some business leaders are forgetting that even manual laborers have skills and knowledge that can be tough to simulate by machine. "They want to talk about them as if these people are just drones," he said as we took a break in the back of the exhibit hall, the whir of robot motors almost drowning out our voices. "Don't minimize the extent of what quote-unquote manual workers do—even ditch diggers."

In Genesis, God sentences Adam and Eve to hard labor as part of the punishment for the apple incident. "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life" was the sentence handed down in the Garden of Eden. Yet Martin Luther argued, as have other prominent Christian leaders since, that work is also a way to connect with the divine.

Continued in article

"Rethink Robotics invented a $22,000 humanoid (i.e. trainable) robot that competes with low-wage workers," by Antonio Regalado, MIT's Technology Review, January 16, 2013 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509296/small-factories-give-baxter-the-robot-a-cautious-once-over/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130116

"Rise of the Robots," by Paul Krugman, The New York Times, December 8, 2012 ---
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/

Catherine Rampell and Nick Wingfield write about the growing evidence for “reshoring” of manufacturing to the United States. They cite several reasons: rising wages in Asia; lower energy costs here; higher transportation costs. In a followup piece, however, Rampell cites another factor: robots.

The most valuable part of each computer, a motherboard loaded with microprocessors and memory, is already largely made with robots, according to my colleague Quentin Hardy. People do things like fitting in batteries and snapping on screens.

As more robots are built, largely by other robots, “assembly can be done here as well as anywhere else,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst based in San Jose, Calif., who has been following the computer electronics industry for a quarter-century. “That will replace most of the workers, though you will need a few people to manage the robots.”

Robots mean that labor costs don’t matter much, so you might as well locate in advanced countries with large markets and good infrastructure (which may soon not include us, but that’s another issue). On the other hand, it’s not good news for workers!

This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing about globalization and inequality, capital bias didn’t look like a big issue; the major changes in income distribution had been among workers (when you include hedge fund managers and CEOs among the workers), rather than between labor and capital. So the academic literature focused almost exclusively on “skill bias”, supposedly explaining the rising college premium.

But the college premium hasn’t risen for a while. What has happened, on the other hand, is a notable shift in income away from labor:.

"Harley Goes Lean to Build Hogs," by James R. Hagerty, The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443720204578004164199848452.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid&mg=reno64-wsj

If the global economy slips into a deep slump, American manufacturers including motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson Inc. that have embraced flexible production face less risk of veering into a ditch.

Until recently, the company's sprawling factory here had a lack of automation that made it an industrial museum. Now, production that once was scattered among 41 buildings is consolidated into one brightly lighted facility where robots do more heavy lifting. The number of hourly workers, about 1,000, is half the level of three years ago and more than 100 of those workers are "casual" employees who come and go as needed.

All the jobs are not going to Asia, They're going to Hal --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Space_Oddessey
"When Machines Do Your Job: Researcher Andrew McAfee says advances in computing and artificial intelligence could create a more unequal society," by Antonio Regalado, MIT's Technology Review, July 11, 2012 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428429/when-machines-do-your-job/

Are American workers losing their jobs to machines?

That was the question posed by Race Against the Machine, an influential e-book published last October by MIT business school researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The pair looked at troubling U.S. employment numbers—which have declined since the recession of 2008-2009 even as economic output has risen—and concluded that computer technology was partly to blame.

Advances in hardware and software mean it's possible to automate more white-collar jobs, and to do so more quickly than in the past. Think of the airline staffers whose job checking in passengers has been taken by self-service kiosks. While more productivity is a positive, wealth is becoming more concentrated, and more middle-class workers are getting left behind.

What does it mean to have "technological unemployment" even amidst apparent digital plenty? Technology Review spoke to McAfee at the Center for Digital Business, part of the MIT Sloan School of Management, where as principal research scientist he studies new employment trends and definitions of the workplace.

Every symphony in the world incurs an operating deficit
"Financial Leadership Required to Fight Symphony Orchestra ‘Cost Disease’," by Stanford University's Robert J Flanagan, Stanford Graduate School of Business, February 8, 2012 ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/symphony-financial-leadership.html

 What if you sat down in the concert hall one evening to hear Haydn’s Symphony No. 44 in E Minor and found 5 robots scattered among the human musicians? To get multiple audiences in and out of the concert hall faster, the human musicians and robots are playing the composition in double time.

Today’s orchestras have yet to go down this road. However, their traditional ways of doing business, as economist Robert J. Flanagan explains in his new book on symphony orchestra finances, locks them into limited opportunities for productivity growth and ensures that costs keep rising.

"Patented Book Writing System Creates, Sells Hundreds Of Thousands Of Books On Amazon," by David J. Hull, Security Hub, December 13, 2012 ---
http://singularityhub.com/2012/12/13/patented-book-writing-system-lets-one-professor-create-hundreds-of-thousands-of-amazon-books-and-counting/

Philip M. Parker, Professor of Marketing at INSEAD Business School, has had a side project for over 10 years. He’s created a computer system that can write books about specific subjects in about 20 minutes. The patented algorithm has so far generated hundreds of thousands of books. In fact, Amazon lists over 100,000 books attributed to Parker, and over 700,000 works listed for his company, ICON Group International, Inc. This doesn’t include the private works, such as internal reports, created for companies or licensing of the system itself through a separate entity called EdgeMaven Media.

Parker is not so much an author as a compiler, but the end result is the same: boatloads of written works.

"Raytheon's Missiles Are Now Made by Robots," by Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg Business Week, December 11, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-11/raytheons-missiles-now-made-by-robots

A World Without Work," by Dana Rousmaniere, Harvard Business Review Blog, January 27, 2013 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/morning-advantage/2013/01/morning-advantage-a-world-with.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
Historically, graduates who could not find jobs enlisted in the military. Wars of the future, however, will be fought largely by drones, robots, orbiting orbiting satellites. This begs the question of where graduates who cannot find work are going to turn to when the military enlistment offices shut down and Amazon's warehouse robotics replace Wal-Mart in-store workers.

If given a choice, I'm not certain I would want to be born again in the 21st Century.

The Sad State of Economic Theory and Research ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm


Macroeconomics in a World We've Never Known Before

On March 28, 2013 Barry Ritholz linked to the following excellent slide show on macroeconomics that touches on quantitative easing controversies. I might add that I generally disagree with Barry on quantitative easing and his general fears of austerity. But this link is an excellent summary of the problems in the global economy that have never been encountered in history.

The slides used at the Global Interdependence Center conference in Dubai on March 26, 2013.

A Must Read
"Kotok: Complete Report from Dubai," by David Kotok, March 28, 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/report-from-dubai-2/

Jensen Comment
Last night in a television news show it was claimed that one million government employees are being laid off in Cuba and are being thrust upon a private sector that really is not yet able to provide them with new jobs. The idea is that most of them will form their own small businesses.

Featured in the newscast was a cobbler and his two sons who for more than ten years have hauled a hand-peddled sewing machine and old bicycle tires to a street corner shoe repair "business." Let's call him Jose. Jose is now very fearful that his popular cobbler business will be overrun by new competition from former government workers. At best over the past ten years he was able to marginally feed his family. Of course housing has been free in Cuba. That too may change soon.


"POGUE: Google's Evernote Killer Is 'Fast And Simple And Limited'," by Megan Rose Dickey, Business Insider, March 28, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/pogue-on-google-keep-2013-3

Evernote ---  http://www.evernote.com/
Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored images.
(there are free and fee options)

Features for Windows

  • Create notes containing text, webclips, snapshots, to-dos, PDFs, and more
  • Take photos of everything from whiteboards to wine labels and Evernote will make them searchable
  • Premium users can attach any type of file to their notes
  • Windows User Guide | PDF

 

From the Scout Report on February 12, 2010

Evernote 3.5.1.1410 --- http://www.evernote.com/ 

Looking to remember an image you found? Or perhaps a helpful email link? Evernote makes this all possible, and it can be used with a range of mobile devices as well. The program works as a note-taking application as well, and everything a user does with the program is automatically synchronized to their Evernote account. Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored images. This version of Evernote is compatible with computers running Windows XP and Vista or Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6.


"10 Huge Brands That Committed Suicide," Business Insider, March 27, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-brands-that-committed-suicide-2013-3

To these we might add the tens of thousands of failed companies and banks who got glowing audit reports from their auditors only slightly ahead of their death notices --- sort of like those corpses on a slap that had no warnings in their most recent complete physical examinations.


How Could Our Academy Let Such a Horrible Thing Happen?
It's bad enough that the University of Colorado hired a non-tenured conservative, but now this.
"Florida Gulf Coast Has An Unapologetically Pro-Capitalist Economics Department, And Every Student Gets A Copy of Ayn Rand," by Tony Manfield, Business Insider, March 25, 2013 ---

 

Harvard has a conservative professor named Harvey Mansfield, but when he was President of Harvard, Larry Summers worked behind the scenes to get Harvey fired. Harvey advised all non-tenured faculty stricken with the conservatism disease to not "hoist up the Jolly Roger" until attaining tenure ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias

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

Bob Jensen's threads on liberal bias in the media and higher education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias

He will be be moving into the neighborhood, but he will not be given TENURE up front (Whew!!!!)
U.C. Boulder is going to hell in a hand basket if they give Professor Hayward tenure!
"U. of Colorado at Boulder Names Steven Hayward Its First 'Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought'," by Sydni Dunn, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 13, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Colorado-at-Boulder/137895/

The University of Colorado at long last has one conservative professor. For threads on the many universities that are more politically correct than the University of Colorado go to:
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias

Jensen Comment
Professor Hayward in coming out of Ashland University in Ohio. Ashland University is not exactly a center of extreme conservatism. In fact, tenured professors who show signs of advanced conservatism disease are fired outright for being a scholar on such things (gasp) Ayn Rand ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Tenure-Shrugged/17731/

"Group Aims to Help Conservative Parents Counter ‘PC Indoctrination’ at Colleges," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2013 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/group-aims-to-help-conservative-parents-counter-pc-indoctrination-at-colleges/43005?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Education Versus Indoctrination ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/noam_chomsky_spells_out_the_purpose_of_education.html

Jensen Comment
It seems to me that by the time students leave home, they are free to make up their own minds about education versus indoctrination. I think most students have been indoctrinated before entering college from a variety of sources, notably parents, clergy, peers, and high school teachers.
I'm not at all sure parents must organize to counter their adult children's exposure to the liberal ideals of this professor.

Bob Jensen's threads on the liberal bias of the Academy ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias


"My Amazon bestseller made me nothing:  My novel shot to the top of the site's bestseller list last summer. You won't believe how little I got paid," by Patrick Wensink, Salon, March 15, 2013 ---
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/hey_amazon_wheres_my_money/

In one more week I was going to be a millionaire.

At least, that was the rumor circulating around my wife’s family. One more week on Amazon’s best-seller list and I would have seven figures in the bank, easily. Her cousin had looked this fact up on the Internet, so it had to be true.

“Please tell them that is nowhere near true,” I said. “But don’t tell them how much money I’m actually going to make.”

“OK,” my wife said. “Can I tell them how many books you sold?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

I didn’t have a good answer. Secrecy seemed like the practical, professional response in times of success.

It made me wonder where this writerly knee-jerk reaction comes from. It wasn’t that people would think I made too much money. The opposite, actually.

* * *

This past summer, my novel, “Broken Piano for President,” shot to the top of the best-seller lists for a week. After Jack Daniel’s sent me a ridiculously polite cease and desist letter, the story went viral and was featured in places like Forbes, Time magazine and NPR’s Weekend Edition. The New Yorker wrote one whole, entire, punctuated-and-everything sentence about me! My book was the No. 6 bestselling title in America for a while, right behind all the different “50 Shades of Grey” and “Gone Girl.” It was selling more copies than “Hunger Games” and “Bossypants.” So, I can sort of see why people thought I was going to start wearing monogrammed silk pajamas and smoking a pipe.

But the truth is, there’s a reason most well-known writers still teach English. There’s a reason most authors drive dented cars. There’s a reason most writers have bad teeth. It’s not because we’ve chosen a life of poverty. It’s that poverty has chosen our profession.

Even when there’s money in writing, there’s not much money.

* * *

I was reminded of a single page in “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”; specifically, the section where Dave Eggers breaks down his $100,000 advance on sales from his publisher. He then lists all his expenses. In the end the author banked a little less than half. It wasn’t bad money — just not the “I bet Dave Eggers totally owns a Jaguar”-type of income I expected. I mean, his name was on the cover of a book! He must be rich.

That honesty was refreshing and voyeuristic. I always said if I ever had a chance, I’d make a similar gesture. As a person learning about writing and publishing, there was something helpful about Eggers’ transparency. So here is my stab at similar honesty: the sugar bowls full of cocaine, bathtubs full of whiskey, semi-nude bookstore employees scattered throughout my bedroom tale of bestseller riches.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
To add pain to misery, I'm told that authors in general should not expect to roll in dough from sales of book rights to Hollywood.

In fairness, I think authors of best-selling novels are in a better negotiating position to make more money from publishers after their first best selling success. Something similar happens to highly successful NFL players chosen neat the bottom of the draft.


"Four Facing Charges in Multi-Faceted Mortgage Fraud Conspiracy," FBI, March 27, 2013 ---
http://www.fbi.gov/pittsburgh/press-releases/2013/four-facing-charges-in-multi-faceted-mortgage-fraud-conspiracy

Bob Jensen's threads on Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


Whenever Government Hangs Up a Piñata, Organized Crime Usually Brings its Long Poles

"11 in Detroit Charged in Student-Loan Fraud, Inside Higher Ed, March 29, 2013

Federal authorities have charged 11 people in the Detroit area in four separate crime rings in which people applied for student loans for which they were not eligible, costing the government more than $1 million, The Detroit Free Press  reported. The schemes generally involved distance education providers where students need not be physically present in class. Those applying for the loans lacked either a high school diploma or a GED and thus were not eligible.

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

Bob Jensen's threads on Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


"SoCal Woman Sentenced to 13 Years in Federal Prison in Medicare Fraud Scheme Involving Durable Medical Equipment," FBI, March 28, 2013 ---
http://www.fbi.gov/losangeles/press-releases/2013/socal-woman-sentenced-to-13-years-in-federal-prison-in-medicare-fraud-scheme-involving-durable-medical-equipment

"Registered Nurse Pleads Guilty in Connection with Detroit ($24 Million) Medicare Fraud Scheme," FBI, March 22, 2013 ---
http://www.fbi.gov/detroit/press-releases/2013/registered-nurse-pleads-guilty-in-connection-with-detroit-medicare-fraud-scheme

Bob Jensen's threads on Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor (Business History in Massachusetts and Rhode Island) --- http://www.nps.gov/blac/index.htm

From Duke University (business history images)
R.C. Maxwell Company Records, 1904-1990s and undated ---
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/rcmaxwellco/


Probe in depth into creativity and child development
"A Design History of Childhood," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, March 18, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/18/century-of-the-child-moma-book/


"How the Banking System Is Destroying America," by Barry Ritholtz, The Washington Blog, March 29, 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/how-the-banking-system-is-destroying-america/

. . .

The long-time Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee (Charles McFadden) said on June 10, 1932:

Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies ….

And congressman Dennis Kucinich said:

The Federal Reserve is no more federal than Federal Express!

The Fed Is Owned By – And Is Enabling – The Worst Behavior of the Big Banks

Most people now realize that the big banks have become little more than criminal enterprises.

No wonder a stunning list of economists, financial experts and bankers are calling for them to be broken up.

But the Federal Reserve is enabling the banks. Indeed, the giant banks and the Fed are part of a malignant, symbiotic relationship.

Specifically:

The corrupt, giant banks would never have gotten so big and powerful on their own. In a free market, the leaner banks with sounder business models would be growing, while the giants who made reckless speculative gambles would have gone bust. See this, this and this.

It is the Federal Reserve, Treasury and Congress who have repeatedly bailed out the big banks, ensured they make money at taxpayer expense, exempted them from standard accounting practices and the criminal and fraud laws which govern the little guy, encouraged insane amounts of leverage, and enabled the too big to fail banks – through “moral hazard” – to become even more reckless.

Indeed, the government made them big in the first place. As I noted in 2009:

As MIT economics professor and former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson points out today, the official White House position is that:

(1) The government created the mega-giants, and they are not the product of free market competition

***

(3) Giant banks are good for the economy

***

The [corrupt, captured government "regulators"] and the giant banks are part of a single malignant, symbiotic relationship.

Indeed, the Fed and their big bank owners form a crony capitalist cartel that is destroying the economy for most Americans. The Fed has been bailing out the giant banks while shafting the little guy.

Fed boss Bernanke falsely stated that the big banks receiving bailout money were healthy, when they were not. They were insolvent. By choosing the big banks over the little guy, the Fed is dooming both.

No wonder many top economists say that we should end – or strip most of the powers from – the Federal Reserve.

Even long-time Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan says that we should end the Fed.

A Better Alternative

Conservative and liberal economists both point out that the big banks are already state-sponsored institutions … so the government should create a little competition through public banking.

State-owned public banks – like North Dakota has – would take the power away from the big banks, and give it back to the people … as the Founding Fathers intended.

Even a 12-year old sees the wisdom of public banking.

Jensen Comment
I disagree to Barry on the point that a better alternative would be to create state-owned banks like North Dakota State Banks. I agree that we need many more banks to create competition is banking since the big banks since the 1970s bought up the competition when creating their own nationwide networks of branch banks.

State-run businesses do not have a market discipline and are too prone to political cronyism, kickbacks, and other types of fraud. There's just too much moral hazard in state-owned banking.

I would instead prefer to "trust bust" by breaking up the giant banks into smaller banks, possibly by reverting to laws that do not allow interstate banking. Let's go back to the good old days where a local boy, George Bailey, manages each local bank.

Bob Jensen's threads on how the mega banks have become "rotten to the core" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#InvestmentBanking


"Which Type of Returns Are You Referring To?" by Barry Ritholtz,, March 28, 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/real-nominal-total-aftertax/

Jensen Comment
Barry only a few of the many types of returns that should be understood by our students. For a more complete summary, go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/roi.htm

One of the most popular downloads at my Website compares several types of returns is the wtdcase2a.xls at the bottom of the list of files at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Excel/
Note the tab to the Answers spreadsheet.
Students can put in their own input numbers and then observe the sensitivity of the outcomes to things like inflation rates.


From the Scout Report on March 8, 2013

Graphing Calculator by Desmos.com ---
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graphing-calculator-by-de/bhdheahnajobgndecdbggfmcojekgdko 

This fluid, intuitive graphing calculator, compatible with Chrome browsers, makes graphing complex equations a snap. It includes all the functions of the large, rectangular model many high-school students are familiar with and produces easy-to read graphs with marked intercepts. Users can use the program to plot multiple graphs on top of one another, making this a great teaching tool.


ScanMaster 1.2 ---
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.scan.master 

Would you like to have an easily accessible scanner at your disposal? ScanMaster makes this a reality, and it's quite simple to use. The application gives users the ability to scan their documents, photos, or other items and then edit them as they see fit. This is made possible through a continuous capture mode and visitors can also transform these images into PDFs. This version is compatible with all devices running Android 2.2 and newer.


Detroit moves closer to an unusual takeover of its municipal operations

Detroit: Motoring Towards Disaster
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/03/detroit

Fiscal emergency declared in Detroit
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a0fac316-8274-11e2-843e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2MaeBRCGT

Detroit bankruptcy: state takeover begins as Gov. Rick Snyder taps city
manager
http://newyork.newsday.com/news/nation/detroit-bankruptcy-state-takeover-begins-as-gov-rick-snyder-taps-city-manager-1.4739056

Oakland County's L. Brooks Patterson on Detroit's Finances
http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2013/03/03/news/politics/doc5133aeca665a7073215078.txt

Mayor Bing's Statement Regarding Gov. Snyder's Declaration of a Financial
Emergency in Detroit
http://www.detroitmi.gov/News/tabid/3196/ctl/ReadDefault/mid/4561/ArticleId/220/Default.aspx

Detroit: City on the Move
http://archive.org/details/DetroitC1965

 

From the Scout Report on March 29, 2013

Free Alternative to Camtasia for Mac Users
Ripcorder Screen ---
https://itunes.apple.com/app/ripcorder-screen/id532632386?mt=12 

The Ripcorder Screen application allows users to create movies from their Macs' on-screen activities. The application will capture whatever is played on the display and transform it into a QuickTime movie. This can be most useful for users who would like to share information with colleagues or friends seeking to learn more about a particular computer operation or process. This version is compatible with all operating systems running Mac OS X 10.7 and newer.

There is also a Ricorder Audio App


Ribbet --- http://www.ribbet.com/ 

Ribbet offers visitors the opportunity to edit their photos on the fly online. The site gives users the ability to crop, resize, and rotate their images, along with adding captions in a host of different fonts. Also, there are a number of compelling special filters with names like Cairo, Morocco, Los Angeles, and Fiji. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


New research suggests that the speed of light may not be constant

Scientists examine nothing, find something
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0325/Scientists-examine-nothing-find-something

Speed of light may not be fixed, scientists suggest
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130325111154.htm

Speed of Light May Not be Constant
http://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/2013/03/26/speed-of-light-may-not-be-constant/

Testing Einstein's E=mc2 in Outer Space
http://uanews.org/story/testing-einsteins-emc2-outer-space

Ole Roemer and the Speed of Light
http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/essaybooks/cosmic/p_roemer.html

American Association of Physics Teachers
http://aapt.org/resources/


Teaching Case from The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on April 5, 2013

Tesla Sees First-Ever Quarterly Profit
by: Mike Ramsey and Tess Stynes
Apr 02, 2013
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
 

TOPICS: Corporate Taxes, Earnings Forecasts, Revenue Forecast, Revenue Recognition

SUMMARY: "Tesla Motors Inc. said it would report a first-quarter profit, sending the luxury electric-car maker's shares surging 16% on Monday." The article notes that the company recognizes revenue when cars are delivered--no surprise there but the company takes a $5,000 for each car ordered that becomes nonrefundable as soon as the customer selects specifications. The company also earns a significant portion of its revenues from sales of pollution control tax credits issued by the state of California and by the U.S. Federal government.

CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Questions lead students to the Form 8-K filing specifically discussing management guidance about soon-to-be released earnings and to the 2012 Form 10-K for revenue recognition policies.

QUESTIONS: 
1. (Introductory) What product does Tesla Motors manufacture? Identify your source for information about the company.

2. (Introductory) What milestone did Tesla Motors reach during the first quarter of 2013? How did the market react to this news? Do you think this is likely to be an overreaction? Explain your answer.

3. (Advanced) When does Tesla record revenue from its sales of automobiles? Why do you think this accounting policy is mentioned--is there anything unusual about the timing of recognition? To help answer this question, you may access the Tesla Motors annual report for 2012 filed on Form 10-K and available on the SEC web site at http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=1318605&accession_number=0001193125-13-096241&xbrl_type=v# Click on Notes to Financial Statements and then Reservation Payments on the left hand side of the page.

4. (Advanced) Access the company's Filing on Form 8-K--dated March 30, 2013, and filed on April 1, 2013--on which this article is based, available on the SEC's web site at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000119312513135229/d514482dex991.htm What is the basis for the improved financial performance to be reported for the upcoming quarter?

5. (Advanced) The 8-K filing contains the words, "as a result, Tesla is amending its Q1 guidance to full profitability, both GAAP and non-GAAP." What is management guidance? What are GAAP earnings versus non-GAAP earnings?

6. (Introductory) Why do you think that management reported this guidance as soon as the number of vehicles sold indicated that the company would do better than break-even? Why not just wait until the quarterly report for the 3 months ended March 31, 2013, is reported very soon?

7. (Advanced) What are pollution tax credits? What is the significance of this portion of the company's operations? Hint: to understand the company's earning and sale of California state and U.S. Federal pollution control credits, return to the Form 10-K and review the Summary of Significant Accounting Policies related to revenue recognition.
 

Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island

"Tesla Sees First-Ever Quarterly Profit," by: Mike Ramsey and Tess Stynes, The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323611604578396313231119032.html

Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA -0.90% said it would report a first-quarter profit, sending the luxury electric-car maker's shares surging 16% on Monday.

The Palo Alto, Calif., maker of $70,000 vehicles lifted its forecast for the quarter after delivering more Model S electric vehicles than it previously forecast. Tesla has a backlog of 15,000 orders and books revenue for the vehicles as soon as they are shipped to customers.

The company, which has reported a loss every quarter since it went public in 2010, said its Model S deliveries reached more than 4,750 vehicles in the first quarter, compared with Tesla's February outlook for 4,500 cars.

In 4 p.m. Nasdaq Stock Market NDAQ +0.47% trading, Tesla shares finished up $6.04 at $43.93. Corporate Intelligence

Tesla Says It Will Turn a Profit, No Fooling

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had projected a first-quarter loss of seven cents a share for Tesla.

The disclosure, made late Sunday, came a few days after Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk had used Twitter to foreshadow news coming from the Silicon Valley car maker.

"I am incredibly proud of the Tesla team for their outstanding work. There have been many car startups over the past several decades, but profitability is what makes a company real. Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution," Mr. Musk said in a statement.

A Tesla representative said the profit forecast wasn't the big announcement that Mr. Musk alluded to, and later added the company would make an announcement on Tuesday.

In a message posted last week on Twitter, Mr. Musk said a "really exciting" bit of news was to come and that he was going to "put my money where my mouth is in v[ery] major way." He later said he had to delay the announcement so as not to create any end-of-quarter distractions.

The profit forecast for Tesla comes at a critical time as investors had been waiting to see if the company could ever move beyond the startup stage in an industry where even long-established giants have struggled to compete.

Tesla also said it would no longer offer the 40-kilowatt-hour battery pack with the Model S. That option, which allowed buyers to buy a car that cost around $60,000, is being discontinued because of lack of demand. The smaller battery pack offered an estimated range of 160 miles, compared with 230 miles for the 60 kWh version.

The 60 kWh Model S, the next largest battery size, starts at just under $70,000. Buyers may be eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit for a vehicle's purchase.

Tesla said it would give customers who ordered the smaller pack a 60 kWh model, but limit its range electronically, unless they choose to pay for the upgrade.

Tesla last month said in regulatory filings that it shortened its $465 million loan term by nearly five years.

Last year, the company booked $40.5 million for selling pollution tax credits to other auto makers, an amount that equaled almost 10% of its total annual revenue. Higher sales this year would generate more credits and could be a significant source of earnings.

Continued in article

Also see the take on this topic in MIT's Technology Review
"Why Tesla Survived and Fisker Won’t," by Kevin Bullis, MIT's Technology Review, April 4, 2013 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513151/why-tesla-survived-and-fisker-wont/

 Jensen Comment
Two things that really bug me about virtually all articles about electric cars.

  1. The articles never discuss the cost to the car owner and the costs to society for recharging the batteries. A considerable amount of electricity is required to recharge the Tesla and Fisker cars. But the articles never investigate those costs.

     
  2. The Teslas and Fisker electric cars are probably the worst decisions in terms of cost per mile after the luxury-car purchase prices and recharging power bills are spread over the miles driven.

It's important the companies like Tesla are continuing to conduct R&D, but don't expect the buyers of such cars in the near future to be buying them because of what they save relative to conventional cars.

The Japanese are getting out of all-electric cars until they make more sense to the general public. Much of their hopes ride on fuel cell discoveries of the future --- especially hydrogen fuel cells.


Ward Churchill Versus Colorado University --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill

"Supreme Court refuses to hear Ward Churchill's appeal, CU declares 'matter is now over'," by Brittany Anas, Colorado Daily, April 1, 2013 ---
http://www.coloradodaily.com/news/ci_22914721/ward-churchill-appeal-denied-supreme-court#axzz2PEoPC42f

Bob Jensen's threads on the Ward Churchill (Cherokee Wannabe) Saga ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
Probably his most important antagonists were Native Americans who viewed him as a phony Native American.


From the FBI on April 7, 2013

04.05.13 Philadelphia: Woman sentenced to more than 28 years for kidnapping 14-year-old victim.
04.05.13 Miami: Three sentenced to prison for roles in $50 million Medicare fraud scheme.
04.05.13 Headquarters: Hate crime case, $100 million SBA loan fraud among week’s Top Ten stories.

Today’s FBI: Facts and Figures 2013-2014—which provides an in-depth look at the FBI and its operations—is now available ---
http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/todays-fbi-facts-figures/facts-and-figures-031413.pdf/view

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm


In the U.S. a major problem is ID Theft
In North Korea it's IPoop Theft

"N.Koreans 'Forced to Produce Fertilizer," Chosun.com, April 1, 2013 ---
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2013/04/01/2013040101044.html

North Koreans are being forced to make fertilizer for the regime. A source in Beijing on Sunday said, "Fertilizer is essential for the spring sowing season, but North Korea has almost no chemical fertilizer, so the government ordered every person to produce hundreds of kilograms."

In North Korea, fertilizer is usually made by mixing human feces with straw, but the excrement is harder to come by than one might expect. The source said, "There are cases of theft of squat toilets because of this, and people are putting locks on their lavatories to prevent this."

Until 2007, South Korea gave North Korea some 300,000 tons of chemical fertilizer a year. Until last year, farmers survived on the remainder and with help from China, but the reserves have run out and assistance from Beijing dwindled as the regime ignored Chinese pleas to desist from its nuclear and missile tests.

A North Korea expert in China said, "North Koreans are not only forced to produce more fertilizer but also to collect more scrap metal. The dire domestic situation could explain why the regime has been spouting so much belligerent rhetoric recently."

Jensen Comment
As a young child on an Iowa farm we spread manure on the fields, including the manure under the outhouse behind the farm house.

This makes me wonder how we must waste valuable nutrients in our leeching field runoffs of septic tanks beneath the surface of the topsoil and the amount of nutrients we waste in town sewage plants. Maybe the North Koreans have a better idea here. Think of how much more efficient it would be if poop was so valuable that present day copper wire thieves turned their attention on our poopies.


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


Education Tutorials

The 11 Rules You Will Never Learn in School by Bill Gates --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSaCxGTuBng

"100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!)," by Jessica Gross, Ted Talk, August 3, 2007 ---
http://blog.ted.com/2007/08/03/100_websites_yo/

"100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!)," by Jessica Gross, Ted Talk, August 3, 2007 ---
http://blog.ted.com/2007/08/03/100_websites_yo/

PBS 2013 Online Film Festival --- http://www.pbs.org/filmfestival/home/

Annenberg Lesson Plans --- http://www.learner.org/resources/lessonplanbrowse.html

National Art Education Association --- http://www.arteducators.org/

Art Education 2.0 --- http://arted20.ning.com/

National Museum of Natural History: Lesson Plans & Classroom Resources ---
http://www.mnh.si.edu/education/classroom_resources.html

Cross-Cultural Investigations: Technology and Development (Multicultural Online Education and Open Sharing) ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/anthropology/21a-801j-cross-cultural-investigations-technology-and-development-fall-2012/

Old Time Radio Researchers Group --- http://www.otrr.org/index.htm 

From Carleton College (Interactive Simulation Role Play by Residents (students) of a Town Alongside an Active Volcano
The Sleeping Mountain --- http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/roleplaying/examples/sleepmtn.html

Snap Judgment (radio story telling) --- http://snapjudgment.org/

National Geographic-Adventure --- http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/

Teachers Homepage: National Geographic Education --- http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/?ar_a=1

The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/the_history_of_the_world_in_46_lectures.html

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

The Popular Science Digital Archive Lets You Explore Every Science and Technology-Filled Edition Since 1872 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/digital_archive_of_popular_science_magazine.html

Read the Original Letters Where Charles Darwin Worked Out His Theory of Evolution --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/read_the_original_letters_where_charles_darwin_worked_out_his_theory_of_evolution.html

The Ocean as you have never seen it --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/mcbHKAWIk3I

Exploratorium: Optical Illusions --- https://www.exploratorium.edu/explore/staff_picks/optical_illusions

Lick Observatory Records Digital Archive --- http://digitalcollections.ucsc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p265101coll10

UC-San Diego Laboratory Safety Videos --- http://blink.ucsd.edu/safety/research-lab/laboratory/videos.html

AP Central: AP Biology Course Home Page --- http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teachers_corner/2117.html

BioEd Online: Lessons - Safety and Lab Techniques (from the Baylor University School of Medicine) ---
http://www.bioedonline.org/lessons/safetylab.cfm

Spongelab: Build-A-Body (anatomy and physiology) --- http://www.spongelab.com/game_pages/bab.cfm

The A&P Professor (Anatomy & Physiology) --- http://www.theapprofessor.org/

Anatomy Corner --- http://anatomycorner.com/

BioDigitalHuman (anatomy) ---  https://www.biodigitalhuman.com/

GetBodySmart (anatomy and physiology) --- http://www.getbodysmart.com/

American Physiological Society: Learning Resources ---
http://www.the-aps.org/mm/Education/Undergraduate/Learning-Resources

BBC: Human Body & Mind --- http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/

Human Body Maps --- http://www.healthline.com/human-body-maps/ 

American Physiological Society: Women Life Scientists Units
http://www.the-aps.org/mm/Education/K-12/Learning-Resources/Special-Teaching-Collections/Women-Life-Scientists-Units

PennMedicine: Medical Animation Library --- http://www.pennmedicine.org/health_info/animationplayer/

Insects --- http://www.insects.org/

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization ---
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/

Visualization of Multivariate Data (including faces) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm 

Evolutionary Biology Digital Dissection Collections --- http://digital.lib.buffalo.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/BIO001

Researchers Unlock The Mystery Behind Circular Patches In The African Desert ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/mystery-of-fairy-circles-solved-2013-3

Purdue Agriculture: Botany and Plant Pathology Teaching Resources ---
https://ag.purdue.edu/btny/pages/teachingresources.aspx

Science & Health Education Partnership Lessons --- http://www.seplessons.org/

Access Excellence @ the National Health Museum --- http://www.accessexcellence.org/ 

MedPix Radiology Teaching Files & Medical Image Database --- http://rad.usuhs.edu/medpix/parent.php3?mode=home_page

Radiology Education --- http://www.radiologyeducation.com/

MedPix Radiology Teaching Files & Medical Image Database --- http://rad.usuhs.edu/medpix/parent.php3?mode=home_page

USDA Agricultural Projections to 2022
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/oce-usda-agricultural-projections/oce131.aspx#.UVHuhI7WczY

Future Agricultures --- http://www.future-agricultures.org/

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama From Curiosity Rover Brings Mars to Your Computer Screen ---
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/4-billion-pixel-mars-panorama/

California Geological Survey-Educational Resources Center ---
http://www.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/information/Pages/EdResCenter.aspx

Teaching Geology --- http://www.colorado.edu/geolsci/Resources/

U.S. Department of Energy: Office of Science: Discovery & Innovation --- http://science.energy.gov/discovery-and-innovation/

U.S. Department of Energy: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy --- http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/

Society of Architectural Historians: Archipedia Classic Buildings --- http://sah-archipedia.org/

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

Cornell University Political Americana Collection --- http://www.lunacommons.org/luna/servlet/CORNELL~9~1

Wealth and Inequality in America --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM

From Carleton College (Interactive Simulation Role Play by Residents (students) of a Town Alongside an Active Volcano
The Sleeping Mountain --- http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/roleplaying/examples/sleepmtn.html

Advances in Visualization
Mapping for Results: The World Bank --- http://maps.worldbank.org/

Citizenship Works (Helpers for persons seeking U.S. citizenship) ---  http://www.citizenshipworks.org/

Mershon Center for International Security Studies (national security) ---  http://mershoncenter.osu.edu/

Northwestern University Transportation Center --- http://www.transportation.northwestern.edu/

Virginia Tech Transportation Institute --- http://www.vtti.vt.edu/

Integrating U.S. Climate, Energy, and Transportation Policies --- http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/2009/RAND_CF256.pdf

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

Florida Law --- http://ufdc.ufl.edu/flaw1

New Jersey Digital Legal Library --- http://njlegallib.rutgers.edu/

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


Math Tutorials

What is Algebra (including history)? --- http://mathdude.quickanddirtytips.com/what-is-algebra.aspx

The International Year of Statistics --- http://www.statistics2013.org/

Advances in Visualization
Mapping for Results: The World Bank --- http://maps.worldbank.org/

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization ---
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/

IBM's Website for Data Visualization --- --- http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/app 
IBM's site lets people collaborate to creatively visualize and discuss data on fast food, Jesus' apostles, greenhouse-gas trends, and more.

"Sharing Data Visualization," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, April 11, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18516/ 

Bob Jensen's threads on visualization of multivariate data ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm

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


History Tutorials

"100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!)," by Jessica Gross, Ted Talk, August 3, 2007 ---
http://blog.ted.com/2007/08/03/100_websites_yo/

Media History Digital Library --- http://mediahistoryproject.org/

UCLA Film & Television Archive --- http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/

Charlie Parker (films in history) --- http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/

Snap Judgment (radio story telling) --- http://snapjudgment.org/

Old Time Radio Researchers Group --- http://www.otrr.org/index.htm 

American Radio Works: Don't Lecture Me ---
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/

The Popular Science Digital Archive Lets You Explore Every Science and Technology-Filled Edition Since 1872 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/digital_archive_of_popular_science_magazine.html

"100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!)," by Jessica Gross, Ted Talk, August 3, 2007 ---
http://blog.ted.com/2007/08/03/100_websites_yo/

Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor (Business History in Massachusetts and Rhode Island) --- http://www.nps.gov/blac/index.htm

National Museum of Natural History: Lesson Plans & Classroom Resources ---
http://www.mnh.si.edu/education/classroom_resources.html

Will Cather in Her Own Words ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Willa-Cather-in-Her-Own-Words/138133/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

History of the Car Radio --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_radio

Society of Architectural Historians: Archipedia Classic Buildings --- http://sah-archipedia.org/

Contini-Volterra Photographic Archive (Over 50,000 Italian Paintings) ---  http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/cv.pl

Billie Holiday–The Life and Artistry of Lady Day: The Complete Film --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/ibillie_holiday--the_life_and_artistry_of_lady_dayi_the_complete_film.html

Art in Public Places: Miami-Dade County --- http://www.miamidadepublicart.org/

Cornell University Political Americana Collection --- http://www.lunacommons.org/luna/servlet/CORNELL~9~1

Rural Information Center: Historic Preservation Resources --- http://www.nal.usda.gov/ric/ricpubs/preserve.html

University of Georgia Libraries: Historical Maps Database --- http://hmap.libs.uga.edu/hmap/search

The University of Michigan Museum of Art --- http://www.umma.umich.edu/

Public Art Archive --- http://www.publicartarchive.org/

Robert E. Lee Papers --- https://repository.wlu.edu/handle/11021/18509

Lee Family Digital Archive (includes Robert E. Lee) --- http://leearchive.wlu.edu/

The Diary of a Civil War Nurse --- http://americanhistory.si.edu/documentsgallery/exhibitions/nursing_1.html

University of Idaho Historical Photograph Collection --- http://contentdm.lib.uidaho.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/spec_uihp

Idaho Yesterdays --- http://134.50.3.223/idahoyesterdays/index.php/IY

Vandal Video Collection of Historic University of Idaho Football and Basketball Games --- http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/digital/vandalvideo/

West Virginia Archives and History --- http://www.wvculture.org/history/archivesindex.aspx

Digital Archives of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn ---.
 http://www.beethoven-haus-bonn.de/sixcms/detail.php?template=startseite_digitales_archiv_en

Advice to Little Girls: Young Mark Twain's Little-Known, Lovely 1865 Children's Book ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/03/advice-to-little-girls-mark-twain/

Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm  


Language Tutorials

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


Music Tutorials

Digital Archives of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn ---.
 http://www.beethoven-haus-bonn.de/sixcms/detail.php?template=startseite_digitales_archiv_en

Billie Holiday–The Life and Artistry of Lady Day: The Complete Film --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/ibillie_holiday--the_life_and_artistry_of_lady_dayi_the_complete_film.html

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

Advice to Little Girls: Young Mark Twain's Little-Known, Lovely 1865 Children's Book ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/03/advice-to-little-girls-mark-twain/

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


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

March 28, 2013

March 29, 2013

March 30, 2013

April 1, 2013

April 2, 2013

April 3, 2013

April 4, 2013

April 5, 2013

April 6, 2013

April 8, 2013

 


Can You Compensate for a High Sodium Diet?
What are the benefits of drinking water to flush out the salt?
http://nutritiondiva.quickanddirtytips.com/how-to-compensate-for-high-sodium-diet.aspx
Interestingly intake of potassium to balance sodium is not necessarily a good idea and can be a disaster for diseased kidneys. I have a neighbor up the road who sadly will be going on kidney dialysis any day now. His diet up to now severely limits intake of anything with potassium --- which therefore eliminates almost any root vegetables grown below ground, including potatoes.


How much dairy is too much?
http://nutritiondiva.quickanddirtytips.com/how-much-dairy-is-too-much.aspx


Science & Health Education Partnership Lessons --- http://www.seplessons.org/

Access Excellence @ the National Health Museum --- http://www.accessexcellence.org/ 


AUTOMATIC external defibrillators (AEDs) are remarkable devices. Left hanging on the walls of airports or shopping centres for years, they can be deployed in minutes by untrained passers-by to deliver precisely gauged electric shocks to victims of sudden cardiac arrest. The life-saving effectiveness of AEDs is well proven: a big American study in 2010 found that 38% of people who suffered a cardiac arrest outside the hospital and were shocked by an AED survived, compared to just 9% of those given cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) alone.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/03/regulating-defibrillators




Bits of Humor

Makes My Dog Look Stupid --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/PztO-OvzRyg?rel=0

BBC Animal Voice Overs --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aAtFrWft2k&sns=em

The 12 Funniest Google Searches Ever ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-google-search-results-ever-2013-4


Bob Jensen probably blogs from his cottage bout as much as anybody in the world blogs from a personal residence. At last another blogger, Robert Moran, has shown Jensen how he can probably get a refund from the IRS rather than pay all those taxes he's been sending off to Uncle Sam.

"'That Seems About Right,' Says Soon-To-Be-Audited Man," TheOnion, April 2, 2013 ---
http://www.theonion.com/articles/that-seems-about-right-says-soontobeaudited-man,31898/?ref=auto


Awful Puns Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Punography

When chemists die, they barium.

Jokes about German sausage are the wurst.

A soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time.

How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it.

I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me.

This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never met herbivore.

I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I can't put it down.

I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words.

They told me I had type A blood, but it was a Type-O.

A dyslexic man walks into a bra.

PMS jokes aren't funny, period.

Why were the Indians here first ? They had reservations.

Class trip to the Coca-Cola factory. I hope there's no pop quiz.

Energizer bunny arrested. Charged with battery.

I didn't like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.

How do you make holy water? Boil the hell out of it!

Did you hear about the cross eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?

When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble.

What does a clock do when it's hungry ? It goes back four seconds.

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me!

Broken pencils are pointless.

I tried to catch some fog. I mist.

What do you call a dinosaur with a extensive vocabulary? A thesaurus.

England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.

I dropped out of communism class because of lousy Marx.

All the toilets in New York's police stations have been stolen. Police have nothing to go on.

I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.

Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.

Velcro - what a rip off!

Cartoonist found dead in home. Details are sketchy.

Venison for dinner? Oh deer!

I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure

 

Forwarded by Gene and Joan

All I need to know
I learned from the Easter Bunny!
  • Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
  • Everyone needs a friend who is all ears.
  • There's no such thing as too much candy.
  • All work and no play can make you a basket case.
  • A cute tail attracts a lot of attention.
  • Everyone is entitled to a bad hare day.
  • Let happy thoughts multiply like rabbits.
  • Some body parts should be floppy.
  • Keep your paws off of other people's jelly beans.
  • Good things come in small, sugar coated packages.
  • The grass is always greener in someone else's basket.
To show your true colors, you have to come out of the shell.
The best things in life are still sweet and gooey.
May the joy of the season fill your heart.
AND MAY GOD BLESS YOU!
Happy Easter!

 




Tidbits Archives --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron" enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and other universities is at http://www.searchedu.com/

Online Distance Education Training and Education --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray Zone of Fraud  (College, Inc.) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

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

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

How Accountics Scientists Should Change: 
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm 

What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?  ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong

The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm

Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So

Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews

 

World Clock --- http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/

Interesting Online Clock and Calendar --- http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones --- http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) --- http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
         Also see http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
        
Facts about population growth (video) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth --- http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq --- http://www.costofwar.com/ 
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons --- http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.

Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

CPA Examination --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle --- http://cpareviewforfree.com/

Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at http://iaed.wordpress.com/

Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting educators.
Any college may post a news item.

Accounting  and Taxation News Sites ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

 

For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators) http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.

Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing, doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics) research, publication, replication, and validity testing.

 

CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/  (Closed Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.
Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.
AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1 
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.
Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com 
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog

Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board on this financial reporting blog from Financial Executives International. The site, updated daily, compiles regulatory news, rulings and statements, comment letters on standards, and hot topics from the Web’s largest business and accounting publications and organizations. Look for continuing coverage of SOX requirements, fair value reporting and the Alternative Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such as the subprime mortgage crisis, international convergence, and rules for tax return preparers.
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv

September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as well as a practicing CPA)

I found another listserve that is exceptional -

CalCPA maintains http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/  and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.

There are several highly capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and the answers are often in depth.

Scott

Scott forwarded the following message from Jim Counts

Yes you may mention info on your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not have access to the files and other items posted.

Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I will get the request to join.

Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.

We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in California.... ]

Please encourage your members to join our listserve.

If any questions let me know.

Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk

 

 

 

 

Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) --- http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm

 

Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Some Accounting History Sites

Bob Jensen's Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
 

Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

Sage Accounting History --- http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269

A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm 

A nice timeline of accounting history --- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING

From Texas A&M University
Accounting History Outline --- http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html

Bob Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds

History of Fraud in America --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

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

All my online pictures --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone:  603-823-8482 
Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu