Set 5 (2013) Fall Foliage Pictures
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Foliage/Set15/FoliageSet05.htm  

 

Tidbits on June 11, 2013
Bob Jensen

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

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


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


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

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

Facebook is perhaps the ultimate example of the old, wise saying: If you aren’t paying for a product, then you ARE the product
Comparisons of Antivirus Software ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_antivirus_software#Microsoft_Windows

Based upon this analysis I chose F-Secure

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/

From the University of Pittsburgh
Birds of America (435 birds mounted online) --- http://digital.library.pitt.edu/a/audubon/
The Darlington Digital Library (bird photographs) --- http://digital.library.pitt.edu/d/darlington
Audubon Magazine - Multimedia --- http://archive.audubonmagazine.org/multimedia/index.html

America in Color from 1939-1943 --- http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Tree Tunnels --- http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/magnificent-tree-tunnels

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

 

 




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

Trace Darwin’s Footsteps with Google’s New Virtual Tour of the Galapagos Islands ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/googles-new-virtual-tour-of-the-galapagos-islands.html

Richard Feynman Gets Jazzed Explaining How Rubber Bands Work ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/richard-feynman-gets-jazzed-explaining-how-rubber-bands-work.html

The Famous Feynman Lectures on Physics: The New Online Edition (in HTML5) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-famous-feynman-lectures-on-physics-now-online-in-html5.html

The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/the_richard_feynman_film_trilogy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Virtual Open Heart Surgery --- http://www.abc.net.au/science/lcs/heart.htm

Dog Goldberg TV Commercial --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/AA56LgpFbSw?rel=0

Visualizing Slavery: The Map Abraham Lincoln Spent Hours Studying During the Civil War ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/visualizing-slavery-the-map-abraham-lincoln-spent-hours-studying-during-the-civil-war.html

Rules for Teachers in 1872 & 1915: No Drinking, Smoking, or Trips to Barber Shops and Ice Cream Parlors ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/rules-for-teachers-in-1872-1915-no-drinking-smoking-or-trips-to-barber-shops-and-ice-cream-parlors.html

How To Remember People's Names ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-remember-peoples-names-2013-9

9/11 Boatlift --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/MDOrzF7B2Kg?rel=0

E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life: Free Access to All The World’s Knowledge About Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/e-o-wilsons-the-encyclopedia-of-life.html

The Stunt That Got Elvis Costello Banned From Saturday Night Live ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-stunt-that-got-elvis-costello-banned-from-saturday-night-live.html

The 10 Best Pubs In London ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-pubs-in-london-2013-9
For food I always had better luck in Holland than London

The Power of Giving --- http://awakenedworldtv.com/the-power-of-giving-remarkably-moving-video/

Moments in Time --- http://moments.org/


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

A Bluegrass Version of Metallica’s Heavy Metal Hit, “Enter Sandman” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/a-bluegrass-version-of-metallicas-heavy-metal-anthem-enter-sandman.html

Old Piano Adventure The Saloon Sound ---
http://www.angelfire.com/ak2/intelligencerreport/piano1.html

Download Free Music from 150+ Classical Composers, Courtesy of Musopen.org ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/download-free-classical-music-from-150-composers-courtesy-of-musopen-org.html

Miles Davis Plays Music from Kind of Blue Live in 1959, Introducing a Completely New Style of Jazz --- Click Here
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/dVStz9qTla8/miles-davis-plays-music-from-kind-of-blue-live-in-1959-introducing-a-completely-new-style-of-jazz.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Watch Janis Joplin’s Final Interview Reborn as an Animated Cartoon ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/watch-janis-joplins-final-interview-reborn-as-an-animated-cartoon.html

Set Chopin Free: A Kickstarter to Campaign to Put 245 Chopin Pieces Into the Public Domain --- Click Here
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/MflGse9CIVU/set-chopin-free.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

The Nine Most Famous Johnny Cash Performances Ever Recorded ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-famous-johnny-cash-performances-2013-9

The Evolution of the Rock Guitar Solo: 28 Solos, Spanning 50 Years, Played in 6 Fun Minutes ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/evolution-of-the-rock-guitar-solo.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

Pandora (my favorite online music station) --- www.pandora.com
TheRadio
(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's threads on nearly all types of free music selections online ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm


Photographs and Art

What It Looks Like When A Russian Spyplane Sees American Fighter Jets
http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-plane-brushes-with-american-jet-2013-9

They've Turned Over The Costa Concordia And The Pictures Are Nuts ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/theyve-turned-over-the-costa-concordia-and-the-pictures-are-nuts-2013-9

What Did the Continents Look Like Millions of Years Ago?
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/what-did-the-continents-look-like-millions-of-years-ago/279892/

Inside the Bone Factory ---
http://images.businessweek.com/photos/2013-09-19/inside-the-bone-factory?campaign_id=DN092313

Rare Photos Capture A Golden Eagle Attacking A Deer ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/golden-eagle-attacks-a-sika-deer-2013-9

An Architecture Lover's Guide To Tel Aviv ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/an-architecture-lovers-guide-to-tel-aviv-2013-9

The Best 3-D Map Of The Milky Way's Center Ever Created ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/3-d-map-of-the-milky-way-galactic-bulge-2013-9

A Planetary Perspective: Trillions of Pictures of the Earth Available Through Google Earth Engine --- Click Here
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/ZMb25Qiandc/google-earth-engine.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

James Wallace Black, 1825-1896  (photographs) ---
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/collections/72157625067549743/

Curious City (Chicago) --- http://curiouscity.wbez.org

A Picture Of The Soyuz Spacecraft Engulfed In Flames Shows The Exact Moment When It Touched Down ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/flaming-soyuz-spacecraft-touchdown-2013-9

3 Awesome Photos Of Sports Stadiums That No Longer Exist ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/vintage-sports-stadiums-that-no-longer-exist-photos-2013-9

Tehran Propaganda Murals ---
http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/digital_collections/tehran_murals.cfm

Winterthur Digital Collection (Museum of over 90,000 early American art and household objects) ---
http://museumcollection.winterthur.org/

National African American Photographic Archive
http://catalogquicksearch.memphis.edu/iii/cpro/CollectionViewPage.external?lang=eng&sp=1000011&suite=def

Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History


Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

The 10 Greatest Books Ever, According to 125 Top Authors (Download Them for Free) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-10-greatest-books-ever.html

Portraits of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin & Other Literary Legends by Gisčle Freund ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/classic-portraits-of-virginia-woolf-james-joyce-walter-benjamin.html

Discover Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Version of the Bible, and Read the Curious Edition Online ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/thomas-jeffersons-cut-and-paste-bible.html

Poetry Resources (writing and reading) --- http://www.freebooknotes.com/ultimate-poetry-resource-guide/

Jack Kerouac Reads American Haikus, Backed by Jazz Saxophonists Al Cohn & Zoot Sims (1958) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/listen-to-jack-kerouac-read-american-haikus.html

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/ernest-hemingways-favorite-hamburger-recipe.html
Trinity University's former economics professor and gourmet food critic Bill Breit undertook a project in the 1980s to find the best hamburger served up in Texas. After traveling far and wide he concluded that the best hamburger was served up by a German restaurant called Krause's Cafe in New Braunfels. I think that Krause's Cafe is no longer in business.

See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Handwritten Manuscripts for The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/princeton-digitizes-f-scott-fitzgeralds-handwritten-manuscripts.html

E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life: Free Access to All The World’s Knowledge About Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/e-o-wilsons-the-encyclopedia-of-life.html

Religion Without God," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, September 18. 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/09/18/review-ronald-dworkin-religion-without-god 

George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/george-orwells-1984-free-ebook-audio-book-study-resources.html

"Is Franz Kafka Overrated? Critics have long tended to see him as a modernist master on par with Joyce, Proust, and Picasso. Let's reconsider that," by Joseph Epstein, The Atlantic, June 19, 2013 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/is-franz-kafka-overrated/309373/

James Joyce’s “Dirty Letters” to His Wife Nora Are Pornographic, Erotic, Romantic, and Funny (1909) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/james-joyces-dirty-letters-to-his-wife.html

Darwin’s Personal Library Goes Digital: 330 Books Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/darwins_personal_library_goes_digital_330_books_online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Trace Darwin’s Footsteps with Google’s New Virtual Tour of the Galapagos Islands ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/googles-new-virtual-tour-of-the-galapagos-islands.html

Biodiversity Heritage Library: Charles Darwin's Library --- http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/darwinlibrary

Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) --- Click Here

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) --- Click Here

10 Surprising Books That Parents Have Tried To Ban From Schools ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/banned-books-in-school-libraries-2013-9

The Odd Habits and Curious Customs of Famous Writers ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/23/odd-type-writers/

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 September 30, 2013
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2013/TidbitsQuotations093013.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




16 Ingenious Uses For Everyday Household Items --- http://www.businessinsider.com/best-uses-for-everyday-household-objects-2013-9


11 Big Complaints About iOS 7 --- http://www.businessinsider.com/complaints-about-ios-7-2013-9


"Germany Is Exporting Its Grandmas (to Poland)," by Naomi, Kresge, Bloomberg Business Week, September 26, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-26/germany-exports-its-seniors-to-nursing-homes-abroad

Jensen Comment
Canada's approach to elderly grandmas who are only slightly impaired is to haul. at taxpayer expense, in portable Granny Cabins behind the homes of their children. When the time comes when Granny is no longer able to care for herself adequately in her Granny Cabin the cabin is hauled off for another grandma. I don't know if the same applies to a Grandpa Cabin, but I suspect the program is gender neutral. Usually grandpa kicks the bucket before grandma.

In the USA Medicare does not pay for nursing home care or Grandma Cabins. The only patients who get taxpayer-funded nursing home care are the very poor on Medicaid. Most nursing care in the USA is funded by family savings until the patients become so ill that hospitalization is required. A major Medicare expense is keeping terminally ill people alive in hospitals, often in intensive care units costing over $10,000 per day. No other nation spends as much keeping terminally ill patients artificially live on machines.

On November 22, 2009 CBS Sixty Minutes aired a video featuring experts (including physicians) explaining how the single largest drain on the Medicare insurance fund is keeping dying people hopelessly alive who could otherwise be allowed to die quicker and painlessly without artificially prolonging life on ICU machines.
"The Cost of Dying," CBS Sixty Minutes Video, November 22, 2009 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/19/60minutes/main5711689.shtml?tag=mncol;lst;1  

Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm


The Real Scandal Concerns the Academics in the USA Who Buy This Phony Research for Tenure and Promotions and Pay Raises
"Looks good on paper A flawed system for judging research is leading to academic fraud," The Economist, September 28, 2013 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21586845-flawed-system-judging-research-leading-academic-fraud-looks-good-paper?frsc=dg|a
Thank you Richard Sansing for the heads up.

DISGUISED as employees of a gas company, a team of policemen burst into a flat in Beijing on September 1st. Two suspects inside panicked and tossed a plastic bag full of money out of a 15th-floor window. Red hundred-yuan notes worth as much as $50,000 fluttered to the pavement below.

Money raining down on pedestrians was not as bizarre, however, as the racket behind it. China is known for its pirated DVDs and fake designer gear, but these criminals were producing something more intellectual: fake scholarly articles which they sold to academics, and counterfeit versions of existing medical journals in which they sold publication slots.

As China tries to take its seat at the top table of global academia, the criminal underworld has seized on a feature in its research system: the fact that research grants and promotions are awarded on the basis of the number of articles published, not on the quality of the original research. This has fostered an industry of plagiarism, invented research and fake journals that Wuhan University estimated in 2009 was worth $150m, a fivefold increase on just two years earlier.

Chinese scientists are still rewarded for doing good research, and the number of high-quality researchers is increasing. Scientists all round the world also commit fraud. But the Chinese evaluation system is particularly susceptible to it.

By volume the output of Chinese science is impressive. Mainland Chinese researchers have published a steadily increasing share of scientific papers in journals included in the prestigious Science Citation Index (SCI—maintained by Thomson Reuters, a publisher). The number grew from a negligible share in 2001 to 9.5% in 2011, second in the world to America, according to a report published by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China. From 2002 to 2012, more than 1m Chinese papers were published in SCI journals; they ranked sixth for the number of times cited by others. Nature, a science journal, reported that in 2012 the number of papers from China in the journal’s 18 affiliated research publications rose by 35% from 2011. The journal said this “adds to the growing body of evidence that China is fast becoming a global leader in scientific publishing and scientific research”.

In 2010, however, Nature had also noted rising concerns about fraud in Chinese research, reporting that in one Chinese government survey, a third of more than 6,000 scientific researchers at six leading institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification or fabrication. The details of the survey have not been publicly released, making it difficult to compare the results fairly with Western surveys, which have also found that one-third of scientists admit to dishonesty under the broadest definition, but that a far smaller percentage (2% on average) admit to having fabricated or falsified research results.

In 2012 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an American journal, published a study of retractions accounting for nation of origin. In it a team of authors wrote that in medical journal articles in PubMed, an American database maintained by the National Institutes of Health, there were more retractions due to plagiarism from China and India together than from America (which produced the most papers by far, and so the most cheating overall). The study also found that papers from China led the world in retractions due to duplication—the same papers being published in multiple journals. On retractions due to fraud, China ranked fourth, behind America, Germany and Japan.

“Stupid Chinese Idea”

Chinese scientists have urged their comrades to live up to the nation’s great history. “Academic corruption is gradually eroding the marvellous and well-established culture that our ancestors left for us 5,000 years ago,” wrote Lin Songqing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an article this year in Learned Publishing, a British-based journal.

In the 1980s, when China was only beginning to reinvest in science, amassing publishing credits seemed a good way to use non-political criteria for evaluating researchers. But today the statistics-driven standards for promotion (even when they are not handed out merely on the basis of personal connections) are as problematic as in the rest of the bureaucracy. Xiong Bingqi of the 21st Century Education Research Institute calls it the “GDPism of education”. Local government officials stand out with good statistics, says Mr Xiong. “It is the same with universities.”

The most valuable statistic a scientist can tally up is SCI journal credits, especially in journals with higher "impact factors"—ones that are cited more frequently in other scholars’ papers. SCI credits and impact factors are used to judge candidates for doctorates, promotions, research grants and pay bonuses. Some ambitious professors amass SCI credits at an astounding pace. Mr Lin writes that a professor at Ningbo university, in south-east China, published 82 such papers in a three-year span. A hint of the relative weakness of these papers is found in the fact that China ranks just 14th in average citations per SCI paper, suggesting that many Chinese papers are rarely quoted by other scholars.

The quality of research is not always an issue for those evaluating promotions and grants. Some administrators are unqualified to evaluate research, Chinese scientists say, either because they are bureaucrats or because they were promoted using the same criteria themselves. In addition, the administrators’ institutions are evaluated on their publication rankings, so university presidents and department heads place a priority on publishing, especially for SCI credits. This dynamic has led some in science circles to joke that SCI stands for “Stupid Chinese Idea”.

Crystal unclear

The warped incentive system has created some big embarrassments. In 2009 Acta Crystallographica Section E, a British journal on crystallography, was forced to retract 70 papers co-authored by two researchers at Jinggangshan university in southern China, because they had fabricated evidence described in the papers. After the retractions the Lancet, a British journal, published a broadside urging China to take more action to prevent fraud. But many cases are covered up when detected to protect the institutions involved.

The pirated medical-journal racket broken up in Beijing shows that there is a well-developed market for publication beyond the authentic SCI journals. The cost of placing an article in one of the counterfeit journals was up to $650, police said. Purchasing a fake article cost up to $250. Police said the racket had earned several million yuan ($500,000 or more) since 2009. Customers were typically medical researchers angling for promotion.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize


MBA Applications On the Rise in 2013 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/09/25/mba-applications-rise


SAT College Admissions Test --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT

ACT College Admissions Test --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT_%28test%29

Only 43% of SAT test takers are prepared to start college ---
http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/cb-seniors-2013

Jensen Comment
And those who are the least prepared resist taking the SAT test. They intead opt for the ACT test having easier questions.

"Why Do Would-Be Business Majors Bomb on the SAT?" by Louis Lavell, Bloomvberg Businessweek, September 27, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-27/why-do-would-be-business-majors-bomb-on-the-sat

According to the latest College Board report (PDF) on SAT scores, college-bound seniors who intend to major in business had some of the lowest scores around.

Among a dozen prospective majors accounting for the most test-takers, only three scored lower on writing and critical reasoning: health professions, education, and security and protective services. Would-be business majors fared well on math, but even there they got creamed by biology, engineering, and computer science. Ten years ago, the picture wasn’t all that different.

There are any number of reasons why college applicants with less-than-great SAT scores would gravitate toward business—including assumptions that business programs are less selective than other majors, easier than other programs, or more likely to result in gainful employment.

But it may be far simpler than that.
Steve Schneider, a school counselor for 17 years who works at Sheboygan South High School in Sheboygan, Wis., says he believes the problem may be that many would-be business majors don’t know why they’re going to college and probably don’t belong there. They choose business mainly to satisfy parents and others who are pressuring them about their college plans.

“I think ‘business’ is a default answer,” Schneider says. “It’s the answer of least resistance.”

Many students who end up in business programs in four-year colleges, where about 40 percent of all students ultimately drop out, are probably better-suited to community colleges, career programs at technical schools, and certification programs, Schneider says. The low SAT scores, he says, are the result of too many kids starting down the wrong path. “Is it an indicator that kids aren’t as smart as they should be?” he asks. “I think it’s an indicator that there are more kids taking that test than need to be.”

Ruth Lohmeyer, a counselor at Lincoln Northeast High School in Lincoln, Neb., for the past 11 years, agrees. While most of the students at Northeast take the ACT, not the SAT, she says many of them graduate intending to major in business, which they view as “a good major to have if you don’t know what you want to do.”

“Students that I’ve worked with perceive it as a degree they can complete,” says Lohmeyer, who counsels many students in poverty who will be the first in their families to attend college. “It’s a degree that is [seen as] generic—they can have a business degree and use it in many different career fields.”

If that’s the case, it might help explain some of the shortcomings of business programs themselves.

According to the National Survey of Student Engagement, 42 percent of senior business majors spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying, a greater percentage than in any other major.

 

Jensen Comment
Except for accounting and finance concentrations, undergraduate business graduates from college do ;poorly in terms of unemployment and expected salary levels ---
"From College Major to Career" --- http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/NILF1111/#term= 
Poor career placement immediately after graduation mostly likely due in part to having worse average SAT scores about business students. Of course there is much variation between universities and geography and tracking into graduate schools. I suspect that students with low SAT scores also tend to eventually have low LSAT, GMAT, and GRE scores later on when applying for graduate studies.  Business management has the highest "Popularity" in terms of numbers of undergraduate majors. The table below ignores the length of time it takes a graduate to finally get career job other than part-time non-career McJobs. Timing varies a great deal by major and graduate studies.

Averages are hurt by lower gpa graduates relative top graduates' unemployment and earnings.
Major Field (2010 Census Data)
Unemployment Percent
25th % Earnings
Median % Earnings
75th % Earnings
Popularity
ACCOUNTING
5.4%
$41,000
$61,000
$94,000
3
ACTUARIAL SCIENCE
0.0%
$52,000
$81,000
$116,000
150
ADVERTISING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS
6.1%
$36,000
$50,000
$74,000
41
AEROSPACE ENGINEERING
3.6%
$60,000
$84,000
$111,000
105
AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS
1.3%
$30,000
$57,000
$99,000
122
AGRICULTURE PRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT
3.0%
$32,000
$48,000
$71,000
75
ANIMAL SCIENCES
5.7%
$26,000
$40,000
$60,000
67
ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHEOLOGY
6.9%
$30,000
$40,000
$60,000
55
APPLIED MATHEMATICS
4.1%
$52,000
$71,000
$100,000
131
ARCHITECTURAL ENGINEERING
5.8%
$50,000
$71,000
$96,000
140
ARCHITECTURE
10.6%
$37,000
$60,000
$85,000
33
AREA ETHNIC AND CIVILIZATION STUDIES
5.7%
$34,000
$48,000
$76,000
66
ART AND MUSIC EDUCATION
4.2%
$32,000
$41,000
$51,000
48
ART HISTORY AND CRITICISM
6.9%
$33,000
$45,000
$71,000
81
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
0.0%
$56,000
$62,000
$101,000
170
ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES AND METEOROLOGY
1.6%
$40,000
$68,000
$101,000
146
BIOCHEMICAL SCIENCES
7.1%
$30,000
$48,000
$80,000
87
BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING
6.8%
$39,000
$60,000
$94,000
126
BIOLOGY
5.6%
$35,000
$51,000
$76,000
14
BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
5.9%
$45,000
$68,000
$101,000
137
BOTANY
6.9%
$26,000
$40,000
$55,000
147
BUSINESS ECONOMICS
5.0%
$44,000
$71,000
$101,000
80
BUSINESS MANAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION
6.0%
$38,000
$56,000
$85,000
1
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
3.8%
$60,000
$86,000
$117,000
49
CHEMISTRY
5.1%
$39,000
$59,000
$85,000
36
CIVIL ENGINEERING
4.9%
$55,000
$76,000
$101,000
32
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
19.5%
$25,000
$40,000
$61,000
168
COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND BIOPSYCHOLOGY
4.5%
$36,000
$43,000
$91,000
167
COMMERCIAL ART AND GRAPHIC DESIGN
8.1%
$31,000
$45,000
$69,000
21
COMMUNICATION DISORDERS SCIENCES AND SERVICES
3.3%
$32,000
$41,000
$50,000
98
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES
6.7%
$33,000
$50,000
$73,000
89
COMMUNICATIONS
6.3%
$35,000
$50,000
$81,000
7
COMMUNITY AND PUBLIC HEALTH
4.1%
$31,000
$46,000
$70,000
110
COMPOSITION AND SPEECH
7.7%
$30,000
$40,000
$61,000
99
COMPUTER ADMINISTRATION MANAGEMENT AND SECURITY
9.5%
$39,000
$52,000
$75,000
114
COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
5.6%
$44,000
$62,000
$86,000
31
COMPUTER ENGINEERING
7.0%
$58,000
$81,000
$102,000
47
COMPUTER NETWORKING AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS
5.2%
$35,000
$53,000
$76,000
97
COMPUTER PROGRAMMING AND DATA PROCESSING
6.2%
$39,000
$55,000
$84,000
121
COMPUTER SCIENCE
5.6%
$50,000
$77,000
$102,000
10
CONSTRUCTION SERVICES
5.4%
$49,000
$65,000
$101,000
76
COSMETOLOGY SERVICES AND CULINARY ARTS
7.3%
$26,000
$41,000
$60,000
115
COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY
5.2%
$23,000
$34,000
$42,000
133
COURT REPORTING
4.9%
$36,000
$55,000
$81,000
151
CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND FIRE PROTECTION
4.7%
$36,000
$50,000
$73,000
13
CRIMINOLOGY
5.2%
$35,000
$50,000
$71,000
92
DRAMA AND THEATER ARTS
7.1%
$28,000
$40,000
$60,000
45
EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
4.1%
$28,000
$37,000
$45,000
50
ECOLOGY
5.2%
$31,000
$43,000
$60,000
109
ECONOMICS
6.3%
$42,000
$69,000
$108,000
16

Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce

Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

 

 


Let the baby teach itself to swim
"Florida Colleges Make Plans for Students to Opt Out of Remedial Work," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Some-Florida-Colleges-Plan-for/141783/

New students who show up here at Florida State College at Jacksonville have to take placement tests in mathematics, English, and reading. About 70 percent end up in one or more remedial courses. For now, at least.

State lawmakers voted in May to make such courses, which some see as obstacles to progress, optional for most students. Starting next year, recent high-school graduates and active-duty military members in Florida will have the choice of whether to take the courses or even the tests meant to gauge students' readiness for college-level work.

That prospect has sent a wave of anxiety across the state's 28 community and state colleges, which all have open admissions. Their fear: that an influx of unprepared students could destabilize introductory courses and set those who will struggle up for failure.

The colleges have become ground zero in a national battle over remedial education, a field whose current models aren't working, say even its most ardent supporters. Several organizations—including Complete College America and Jobs for the Future, both backed by groups including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation—have been pushing to reduce the number of students who end up in noncredit remedial courses. Based on the argument that remedial education, as currently delivered, is ineffective, the groups have persuaded lawmakers in Connecticut, Tennessee, and other states to pass laws channeling more students directly into credit-bearing courses.

Complete College America, whose leaders testified before the Florida Legislature, estimates that fewer than one in 10 students who start in remedial courses, which educators and state lawmakers also call developmental courses, graduate within three years. Its vice president, Bruce Vandal, says that only about 15 percent of the students whose test scores place them into the courses truly need to be there. The others, he says, could succeed in credit-bearing courses if colleges were to consider a broader set of criteria in placing them.

But even Mr. Vandal questions the wisdom of leaving the choice up to students. If the law gave colleges the flexibility to identify and support unprepared students, steering some toward technical certificates, that would help, he says.

Thomas R. Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College, testified alongside Mr. Vandal in favor of reforming remediation, but he agrees that making it optional goes too far.

"If you have a complete open door to college-level classes, you'll get more students in there who can't manage it," says Mr. Bailey, who is also a professor of economics and education at Teachers College. "Colleges are going to have to figure out what to do with students who make it partway through and drop out."

That is one of many questions Florida's community colleges are anticipating and scrambling to answer. Educators are preparing to revamp courses so that instructors can teach to a broader range of abilities.

Meanwhile, they are beefing up advising for students who are determined to skip remediation, even when they have little chance of passing a college-level course.

While campus officials acknowledge that the existing remedial system is deeply flawed, they point to experimental new models and efforts already in place to bolster students' progress.

The goal of moving students along makes sense, educators say, but only if those students are ready for it, not if they simply opt out.

"We're worried about the students who are going to come in and say, 'Yeah, I'm fine. Let me try,'" says Jacksonville's interim president, Willis N. Holcombe, a former chancellor of the Florida College System and a former English professor. "You may be trying to teach someone the five-paragraph essay," he says, "and they can't write a complete sentence."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
With the disgrace of grade inflation and chicken professors trembling over student evaluations, those students who cannot read or write or add two plus two will probably graduate as honor students.


21 Scams Used By Devious Car Dealers — And How To Avoid Them ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-avoid-21-car-dealer-scams-tricks-2013-9

Jensen Comment
When I was teaching the mathematics of finance one of my favorite illustrations was not mentioned in the above "scams." Scam 22 should be understating the annual percentage rate (APR) of a car financing contract. My bottom line advice to my students is to never, never indicate that the purchase will be anything other than a cash purchase until the very last moment before signing the purchase contract.

Presumably a buyer is shrewd enough to have negotiated a rock-bottom cash price. For new cars this is easy since there are various Web sites for comparing new car purchases. It's bit more difficult for used cars since every used car is unique.

"For Those Who Need Help Picking a Car, There Is CarZen," by Erick Schonfeld, The Washington Post, October 19, 2008 --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/20/AR2008102000013.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

Are you compatible with your car? A new site set to launch in a few days called Carzen (http://new.carzen.com/) aims to help you find the car that is perfect for you. The main feature of the site is a car consulting tool that asks you basic questions about the qualities you are looking for in a car (price, size, fuel economy, reliability) and then spits back a list with the best matches

CarZen is extremely detailed. You can narrow your search by brand, options (sunroof, power seats), cargo capacity, safety, or performance characteristics. Looking for a car with a high baby-seat score or on ethat is particularly easy to park in tight city spots? No problem. Once you finish answering the questions, which at times seem more like a personality test, the site generates a list of cars that can be sorted by best match, price, miles per gallon, or brand.

If you are looking for a new car and don't already know what you want, it is a good way to generate an initial list. You can drill down to get more details for each car. There is even a button to get a price quote, although that doesn't seem to be working at the moment. (Nevertheless, the business model is to create a trusted research tool for car buyers and generate lead-generation fees). The site is still in private beta, but you can check it out by clicking on the "learn more" button in the widget below and then clicking through to the site.

Jensen Comment
There is also a page entitled "Advice" for advice on such things as lease vs. buy --- http://www.carzen.com/advice

After negotiating the rock-bottom cash price is the time to then ask about financing alternatives. Devious dealers who report low APR financing rates often do so on the basis of a car price higher than the rock-bottom cash price. Shrewd car buyers will whip out a financial calculator, tablet computer, or laptop and then verify the true annual percentage rate of the car dealer's financial deal.

Example calculations using Excel are provided in my EarlBob Car Salesman file at
www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Excel/FraudEarlBob.xls 


The Ten Car Models That Americans Least Like to Buy (apart from electric cars) ---
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2013/09/26/the-cars-americans-dont-want-to-buy/?utm_source=247WallStDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=SEP272013A&utm_campaign=DailyNewsletter


Dixon, Illinois will recover slightly less than 80% ($40 million) of the $53 million embezzled by Comptroller Rita Crundwell

"Dixon to recoup $40 million after Crundwell thefts," by Derek Barichello, Daily Chronicle, September 25, 2013 ---
http://goingconcern.com/post/cliftonlarsonallen-settles-dixon-36-million-over-crundwell-fraud

The city reached a $40 million out-of-court settlement this morning with its former auditors and Fifth Third Bank, who the city said were to blame for former Comptroller Rita Crundwell's theft of nearly $54 million over two decades.

Mayor Jim Burke made the announcement this morning during a special meeting of the Dixon City Council, during which the council approved the settlement...

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


I wonder if robot bartenders can also converse about football, politics, jokes, tax law, and existentialism
"Make It a Double, One-Armed Robot Bartender," by Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 24, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-24/make-it-a-double-one-armed-robot-bartender?campaign_id=DN092413

Jensen Questions
Does Hal the Bartender converse about Obamacare, psychotherapy, football, politics, jokes, tax law, women, fair value accounting, and existentialism?

Does Hal spill a bit more than a shot into your glass all evening if you put $20 in the tip jar when you sit down at the bar?


"JSTOR Tries Individual Subscription Service for Researchers," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2013 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/jstor-tries-individual-subscription-service-for-researchers/46803?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
JSTOR provides Web access to a deep history of scholarly journals. Many of us have permissions to download those articles "free" because our universities pay a subscription price for students, staff, and retired staff. Now JSTOR will provide an inexpensive subscription price to anybody in the world.

For example, JSTOR is the only service that I know of that provides Web access to the earliest years of The Accounting Review articles. TAR commenced publishing in 1926. The AAA only provides access (for a fee) to a small subset TAR issues published since 1999.

One frustrating aspect of JSTOR is that access to the most recent articles of a journal is delayed for quite some time. For current issues of all AAA journals it's best to go directly to the AAA archives


Predicting Felonies is Not Politically Correct

September 26, 2013 message from Dennis Huber

The story says, "A more Phillip K. Dick-inspired dystopian technology, recently described by Bloomberg, claims to accurately predict the probability that someone will commit a felony based on only a few details, ranging from eye and skin color, to whether a person has tattoos..." Why is this not bordering racial/religious/ethnic profiling?

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/09/26/big-data-fraud/#!

Dennis

September 27, 2013 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Dennis,

This raises the sticky issue of whether some research should be banned. The reason is that some extremely dangerous discoveries can lead to societal abuse of basic discoveries of the research.

Examples of research that maybe should have been banned:

Personally, I'm not in favor of banning basic research except in some obvious cases like how to make backpack weapons of mass destruction.

I am in favor of doing research on on the issue of correlations of skin color and felonies in virtually all nations. Doing so may lead some results that we don't like to hear. But they may also lead to some unexpected outcomes that suggest that the felonies are not so much caused by racial crime propensities as they are the underlying causes like a welfare system that destroys the two-parent homes of poor people.

Respectfully,
Bob Jensen

 


"Worried About Message, Colleges Scrutinize Social Media," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Worried-About-Message/141773/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Lynne M. Thomas, curator of rare books and special collections at Northern Illinois University Libraries, used to maintain two work-related Facebook pages and a blog. This past summer, she put them on hiatus—and took to social media to explain why.

"Our institution has launched new reporting requirements for all NIU social-media accounts that are, to put it mildly, onerous to the point of ludicrous," Ms. Thomas wrote on her personal blog. "They want us to count all interactions. And document whether they are positive, negative, or neutral. They want screen shots to document all of our counting and downloaded analytics. Every. Month."

As colleges take a greater interest in what employees do online as part of their work, Ms. Thomas is likely to find she's not alone in feeling burdened by increased scrutiny. How to handle social media has become a popular topic at conferences for administrators, and other institutions are likely to follow Northern Illinois's example, if they haven't already. "We're not the only university that's going through these social-media audits," said Kathryn A. Buettner, the university's vice president for university relations. If others aren't going through the same thing, "they will be soon."

So far, there have been no reports that other social-media administrators at Northern Illinois have taken a turn-out-the-lights approach, but the reporting requirement kicked in only this month.

Still, the prospect of all that red tape was too much for Ms. Thomas, at least temporarily. In a subsequent blog post, she said she is considering her options as the library reworks its social-media strategy. For now, though, "my departmental social-media stuff is no longer active, although I retain my personal accounts, noting that my opinions are my own, per university policy." she said via e-mail.

Just a Few Clicks

When any member of a department or program can with a few clicks create an online presence, how many semi-institutional Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter streams, and YouTube channels are springing up? How watchful an eye should a college keep on them? As their institutions test the possibilities of social-media sites, university administrators—among them public-relations and communications staff members and risk managers—are trying to figure out how to balance the rewards and risks of social engagement.

Many colleges and universities, including Northern Illinois, already have guidelines for online behavior. Within legal limits, what professors, staff members, and students say on their personal Web sites or Twitter feeds is their own business, as long as they make it clear that they're not speaking for the institution.

Continued in article

Career Ladder to Nowhere
"All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go," by Ann Friedman, The Baffler, No. 23, 2013 ---
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/all_linkedin_with_nowhere_to_go

. . .

This frenetic networking-by-vague-association has bred a mordant skepticism among some users of the site. Scott Monty, head of social media for the Ford Motor Company, includes a disclaimer in the first line of his LinkedIn bio that, in any other context, would be a hilarious redundancy: “Note: I make connections only with people whom I have met.” It’s an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder.

On one level, of course, this world of aspirational business affiliation is nothing new. LinkedIn merely digitizes the core, and frequently cruel, paradox of networking events and conferences. You show up at such gatherings because you want to know more important people in your line of work—but the only people mingling are those who, like you, don’t seem to know anyone important. You just end up talking to the sad sacks you already know. From this crushing realization, the paradoxes multiply on up through the social food chain: those who are at the top of the field are at this event only to entice paying attendees, soak up the speaking fees, and slip out the back door after politely declining the modest swag bag. They’re not standing around on garish hotel ballroom carpet with a plastic cup of cheap chardonnay in one hand and a stack of business cards in the other.

LinkedIn does have some advantages over the sad old world of the perennially striving, sweating minor characters in Glengarry Glen Ross. After all, it doesn’t require a registration fee or travel to a conference center. Sometimes there are recruiters trolling the profiles on the site. It’s a kinder, gentler experience for the underemployed. It distills the emotionally fraught process of collapsing years of professional experience onto a single 8˝ x 11 sheet of paper into the seemingly more manageable format of the online questionnaire. In the past year, the site has made the protocols of networking even more rote, allowing users to select from a list of “skills” and, with a few clicks, declare their proficiency. “You can add up to 50 relevant skills and areas of expertise (like ballet, iPhone and global business development),” chirps an infobox on the site.

A century or so ago, critics worried that the rise of scientific management in the industrial workplace would deskill the American worker; now, in the postindustrial order of social-media-enabled employment, skills (or, you know, quasi-skills) multiply while jobs stagnate. Sure, you probably won’t get hired at most places on the basis of your proficiency in ballet—but if you’re so inclined, you can spend some of your ample downtime on LinkedIn endorsing the iPhone skills of select colleagues and acquaintances.

These Thoughts for Hire

LinkedIn’s architects are self-aware enough to know that, even in the age of social-media following, some of us must be leaders. In October, the site enabled users to “follow” a handpicked set of “thought leaders.” LinkedIn has given this “select group” permission “to write long-form content on LinkedIn and have their words and sharing activity be followed by our 187 million members.” So far, 190 leaders have made the cut. The “most-followed influencers” are familiar names to anyone who’s ever killed time in an airport bookstore: Richard Branson, Deepak Chopra, Arianna Huffington, Tony Robbins.

The animating vision behind the thought leader initiative is that great digital-economy will-o’-the-wisp known as the flattened hierarchy. “It used to be that the only way to hear what someone had to say on LinkedIn was to ask to connect with them. And you’re supposed to only do that with people you know and have done business with,” Isabelle Roughol, one of LinkedIn’s editors, wrote me in an email. “The average professional won’t chat at the coffee machine with someone like [Virgin Group founder] Richard Branson, but we still want to know how he got his start in business, how he manages his team or why he thinks private space travel is the future. That’s the space our ‘Influencers’ program fills.”

Continued in article

 

The social media backlash may be starting.
People in their 30s are quitting Facebook and Twitter, and LinkedIn is reaching down to students. This could just be the start --- Click Here
http://247wallst.com/media/2013/09/23/is-the-social-media-backlash-taking-hold-facebook-linkedin-twitter-have-to-care/?utm_source=247WallStDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=SEP242013A&utm_campaign=DailyNewsletter

"Facebook and Twitter Are Converging:  The two largest social networks are becoming more similar, as they borrow each other’s features, and search for profit," by Tim Simonite, MIT's Technology Review, September 13, 2013 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519296/facebook-and-twitter-are-converging/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130916

"Social Media: Ten Things Accountants Should Never Do," by Mark Lee, AccountingWeb, May 23, 2013 --- Click Here
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/social-media-ten-things-accountants-should-never-do/221837?source=technology

Bob Jensen's threads on social media ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm


How to Mislead With Statistics

A new, much discussed comparison of student learning from non-tenure-track and tenure-track instructors downplayed its limitations and has been widely misunderstood, writes philosopher Edward Kazarian
"What the Study Didn't Show." by Edward Kazarian, Inside Higher Ed, September 23, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/09/23/essay-report-comparing-student-learning-instructors-and-tenure-track

How to Mislead With Statistics

How Wealth Possibly Impacts Negative Behavior (e.g., aggression, cheating, crime, etc)

September 22, 2013 reply from Jagdish Gangolly

I am sure this will be a controversial post, but could not resist posting it.

http://www.whydontyoutrythis.com/2013/07/take-two-normal-people-add-money-to-just-one-of-them-and-watch-what-happens-next.html

 
Take Two 'Normal' People, Add Money To Just One Of Them, And Watch What Happens Next 

 
FRIDAY, JULY 19, 2013 Science can explain a lot of things that I've always wondered about (go, science!). In this case, it explains what I've known for a long time but been unable to quite understand: Why do some folks who have a lot more money than others seem to be less nice and more evil to everyone around them? At 0:50, someone actually takes candy from babies. No, really. At 3:00, we start to see the science unfold before our eyes. Entire management courses could — and should — be taught with the bit starting at 4:40. by Brandon Weber, Upworthy Read More: 
http://www.whydontyoutrythis.com/2013/07/take-two-normal-people-add-money-to-just-one-of-them-and-watch-what-happens-next.html 

Regards,

Jagdish

Jagdish S. Gangolly Department of Informatics College of Computing & Information State University of New York at Albany 1400 Washington Ave Albany, NY 12222 Phone: 518-956-8251, Fax: 518-956-8247

 

September 22, 2013 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Jagdish,

This research suggests mankind may have evolved on a different track than monkeys. Experiments with monkeys repeatedly show that when pairs of monkeys observe each other getting differential rewards, the monkey in each pair getting the least reward unfairly becomes aggressive and even dangerous.

Keltner's research findings are counter to automobile insurance pricing. The overwhelming majority of teenage drivers are not yet rich and do not come from rich families. Yet they are the ones paying significantly higher insurance rates until age 26. This suggests that Keltner may be overstating his univariate results in a complicated world having other causes like hormone imbalances and diet (including alcohol use) that trump wealth causes of aggression. In San Antonio the police are called out for domestic disturbances much more on week ends when people consume much more alcohol.

I suspect that in egalitarian nations like Finland and Sweden, domestic crime is more closely related to alcohol abuse than wealth distribution, and the worst aggressors are probably at the lower ends of the wealth scale.

I've not studied the works of Keltner. But his conclusions about behavior run counter to behavior of drug addicts. It's when they are out of money needed for a fix that they feel the desperate urge to hold up convenience stores, rob banks, and mug people on the street. This is just another example where perhaps Dacher Keltner has assumed away the real world in running his experiments like playing monopoly games with students.

I've not studied the works of Dacher Keltner, but I would think scientists would more carefully examine how he controls for such things as missing variables, differences between game playing and real life, problems of using students as surrogates, etc.

For example, there's a suspected world of difference between aggression in urban versus smaller town and rural settings. My psychologist friend Phil Zimbardo (Stanford) ran an experiment years ago where he left older cars with windows open in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Brooklyn while secretly observing the cars parked on the streets. In Palo Alto people that passed by rolled up the windows (this was back in the days that windows had cranks). In San Francisco the car radios were stolen. In Brooklyn young men beat the crap out the cars the parked cars.

Perhaps Keltner's really on to something here, but he may be prone to making extrapolations to the real world that are tenuous and oversimplified in terms of the complicated multivariate real world of infinite varieties of circumstances that affect behavior. I don't think Phil Zimbardo ever published his parked car experiments because of these complications in real life.

Multivariate and nonlinear systemic complications in behavior experiments in general create enormous research problems unless they are conducted with massive sample sizes across multiple cultures. The same thing applies to double blind medicine studies which is why drug manufacturing companies are often required to conduct drug tests on tens or hundreds of thousands of subjects in multiple parts of the world.

My point is that it's very hard to extrapolate behavior causes (like the wealth effect) from the myriad of other factors that affect behavior in multivariate and non-independent ways, including dynamic ways that are vary with time and circumstances. For example, I'm a believer of relative ethics where unethical behavior varies with opportunity that arises and behavior of others such as fellow students or coworkers at a given point in time.

Exhibit A is recent expulsion of over 60 Harvard undergraduates for cheating. Ironically, the instructor in that political science course gives virtually all A grades each semester such that the students that were expelled were not really cheating for a top grade. It appears they instead followed the herd and avoided some work required on an assignment.

Small sample behavioral experiments rarely allow for all of the complications of real life behavior, especially aggression, crime, and ethical misbehavior. This is probably why the social sciences are the "soft" sciences that do not control experiments to the degree attempted in natural science "hard" experiments. As I quote repeatedly: "The physicists stole all the easy problems."

There's also a huge problem of extrapolating behavioral experiments in artificial settings (such as a Monopoly game) and real world settings where risks and rewards are much more complicated. For example, observing student risk behavior in a campus Bacharach-playing experiment differs greatly from a casino risk behavior among players with stacks of $10,000 chips in real world Bacharach-playing.

Anecdotally, Kellner's findings do agree with the occasional findings where multimillionaire CEOs and organized crime bosses commit new frauds and other crimes to obtain money that is no longer significant to them for the sake of just getting more money. This suggests that they become thrill seekers obsessed with living on the edge.

Respectfully, Bob Jensen


How to Mislead With Statistics:  Create a Denominator Effect

"W&L, Other Colleges Goose Rankings by Counting Incomplete Applications to Shrink Acceptance Rate," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, September 23, 2013 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/09/wapo-washington-.html

Jensen Comment
I know a Professor X who used to do something similar. Nearly 80% of his students had an A grade going into the final. On the last day of class he handed out teaching evaluations --- well in advance of the final examination scheduled late in final exam week. Then in the the final exam he clobbered them with an exam that made them happy to pass the course with any grade.

Of course, there's a difference between Professor X versus the colleges that report incomplete applications as full applications in computing admission acceptance rates. In the case of Professor X it did not take many semesters for it to become widely known across campus how he was shrinking the number of top grades in his courses. In the case of W&L and other colleges shrinking acceptance rates it might never have become known by the media how these colleges were fudging their acceptance rates.

"Law Deans in Jail," by Morgan Cloud and George B. Shepherd. SSRN, February 24, 2012 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1990746

Abstract:
A most unlikely collection of suspects - law schools, their deans, U.S. News & World Report and its employees - may have committed felonies by publishing false information as part of U.S. News' ranking of law schools. The possible federal felonies include mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and making false statements. Employees of law schools and U.S. News who committed these crimes can be punished as individuals, and under federal law the schools and U.S. News would likely be criminally liable for their agents' crimes.

Some law schools and their deans submitted false information about the schools' expenditures and their students' undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. Others submitted information that may have been literally true but was misleading. Examples include misleading statistics about recent graduates' employment rates and students' undergraduate grades and LSAT scores.

U.S. News itself may have committed mail and wire fraud. It has republished, and sold for profit, data submitted by law schools without verifying the data's accuracy, despite being aware that at least some schools were submitting false and misleading data. U.S. News refused to correct incorrect data and rankings errors and continued to sell that information even after individual schools confessed that they had submitted false information. In addition, U.S. News marketed its surveys and rankings as valid although they were riddled with fundamental methodological errors.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

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


"Wallet.AI Aims to Serve Up Location-Based Financial Advice:  An app called Wallet.AI wants to put a financial advisor in your pocket," by Rachel Metz, MIT's Technology Review, September 23, 2013 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519346/walletai-aims-to-serve-up-location-based-financial-advice/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130924

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


"Take It From an Ex-Journalist: Adapt or Die," by Byron P. White, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Take-It-From-an-Ex-Journalist-/141779/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Somewhere between our group's discussion of three-year bachelor's degrees and its deliberation over the value of general-education courses, the sensation swept over me: I've seen this before—or at least something close to it. Déjŕ vu.

The people engaged in the conversation were different this time. They were members of Cleveland State University's senior leadership team. We had gathered for President Ronald Berkman's annual two-day fall retreat, which began with an overview of the forces that are driving the need for urgent change in higher education.

Noting our industry's notorious reputation for being stuck in its ways, President Berkman baited his vice presidents and deans: "Do we really have an appetite for change?" he asked. Thus began a vigorous dialogue among my colleagues in which we delved into all manner of institutional innovation.

The scene reminded me of similar sessions at another time, in another place, concerning urgent change in another "mature" industry. That industry was the newspaper business. I began my professional career in 1984 as a newspaper reporter, and after about 10 years, I had ascended to the management ranks of the Chicago Tribune. I recall countless conversations around that time with senior staff and peers at national conferences where we would discuss the powerful forces threatening the industry and how we desperately needed to respond.

We never really did, at least not sufficiently enough to stem the onslaught of technological advancements, disruption of business models, and shifting consumer preferences that have since conspired to pretty much dismantle newspapers as we knew them. Tribune, parent company of my beloved Chicago paper, filed for bankruptcy a few years ago. In my current home, Cleveland, The Plain Dealer recently ceased home delivery on certain days in order to prolong its survival.

I moved to higher education more than a dozen years ago, just as newspapers were beginning their rapid descent. However, listening to my Cleveland State colleagues during the president's retreat, I could not help but draw comparisons between our current predicament and the one newspapers faced a few years ago.

Back then, the fundamental challenges were apparent enough and amazingly similar to those that higher education faces now, especially public institutions: Newspapers' most reliable source of revenue—classified advertising, not state subsidy—was steadily disappearing. A host of online providers had emerged that were willing to deliver information to consumers faster, more cheaply, and more conveniently. And our loyal customer base of longtime newspaper subscribers—not unlike the seemingly endless supply of high-school graduates—was starting to lose confidence in us.

And yet, our change-the-world brainstorming sessions more often than not devolved into debates over the merits of making incremental, operational adjustments. The most radical ideas were usually deemed either impossible or not really necessary. Just the exercise of entertaining the notion of a paperless edition or allowing citizens to serve as journalists (now we call them "bloggers") seemed like progress, even if we seldom followed through.

To this day, I believe the newspaper industry could have avoided such a steep decline had we made a serious commitment to adapt to change. How much better off might we have been if we had been bold enough to adopt the open-minded approach that the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos expressed upon his recent purchase of The Washington Post: "I don't want to imply that I have a worked-out plan," Bezos said. "This will be uncharted terrain, and it will require experimentation."

Looking back, I can now see why newspaper executives and journalists had trouble getting there. For the same reasons, too many university administrators, deans, and faculty members are struggling to usher in significant change as well. Perhaps this will sound familiar to you.

First, we really didn't believe we had to change. Sure, we heard all the doomsday predictions, mostly from those outside the industry­—but, come on! The Chicago Tribune had been around since 1847. Its abolitionist campaign helped lead to the founding of the Republican Party and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. The Tribune Company had just purchased the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. Sure, we might struggle a little bit, but go bankrupt? No way.

Second, despite all the evidence that the public's views of news and media were shifting, we thought the public was wrong. So what if every reader survey ranked international news coverage near the bottom of what people wanted to read? Didn't they know our Africa correspondent had just won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting? People needed international reporting even if they were too ignorant to recognize it, and we were determined to give it to them, no matter that the enormous expense of housing reporters all over the world was killing the bottom line.

Finally, we just could not envision a reality that was too far removed from the one we had experienced. Even when we finally conceded that the Internet was becoming a more popular source of news than newsprint, we thought the solution was simple: Just paste the newspaper online in the same format. We could not imagine that people would use the power of the Web essentially to assemble their own virtual newspapers, focusing on the topics that interested them and pulling from a variety of sources that they trusted most.

Continued in article

The most useless 20 college degrees," The Daily Beast, April 27, 2011 ---
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-27/useless-college-majors-from-journalism-to-psychology-to-theater/ 
As college seniors prepare to graduate, The Daily Beast crunches the numbers to determine which majors—from journalism to psychology —didn’t pay.

Some cities are better than others for college graduates. Some college courses are definitely hotter than others. Even some iPhone apps are better for college students than others. But when it comes down to it, there’s only one question that rings out in dormitories, fraternities, and dining halls across the nation: What’s your major?

Slide Show
01.Journalism
02. Horticulture
03. Agriculture
04. Advertising
05. Fashion Design
06. Child and Family Studies
07. Music
08. Mechanical Engineering Technology
09. Chemistry
10. Nutrition
11. Human Resources
12. Theatre
13. Art History
14. Photography
15. Literature
16. Art
17.Fine Arts
18. Psychology
19. English
20. Animal Science

Reviving Journalism Schools
For as long as doomsayers have predicted the decline of civic-minded reportage as we know it, reformers have sought to draft a rewrite of the institutions that train many undergraduate and graduate students pursuing a career in journalism. Criticisms of journalism schools have ranged from questioning whether the institutions are necessary in the first place (since many journalists, and most senior ones, don’t have journalism degrees) to debating the merits of teaching practical skills versus theory and whether curriculums should emphasize broad knowledge or specialization in individual fields . . . The sessions were part of an effort to evaluate the function of journalism schools in an age of new media and the public’s declining faith in the fourth estate: the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, which in 2005 enlisted top institutions in the country to bolster their curriculums with interdisciplinary studies and expose students to different areas of knowledge, including politics, economics, philosophy and the sciences. The initiative, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also works with journalism schools to incubate selected students working on national reporting projects.
Andy Guess, "Reviving the J-School," Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/10/jschools

There are an increasing number of scholarly videos on this topic at
BigThink:  YouTube for Scholars (where intellectuals may post their lectures on societal issues) --- http://www.bigthink.com/

"Georgia Tech Plays Video Games to Save Journalism," by Dan Turner, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5, 2009 ---

 

Ian Bogost, the primary investigator of the Journalism and Games project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has found the question of how journalism and games intersect to be “much bigger than I originally thought.”

Mr. Bogost, an associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, teaches in the undergraduate Media Computation and the graduate Digital Media programs. He is also a founding partner at video game developer Persuasive Games.

His goal is to investigate how video games can work within, and perhaps help rescue, the ailing field of journalism. His graduate students ask questions such as: Is there anything in the game-development process that could be applied to the practice of journalism? Can games be used to make an editorial statement? Can the lauded “citizen journalism” model be considered a game and managed as such? Would it help bring new life to a failing industry?

“If we wanted to design games to interact with journalism” — such as building one with storytelling resources that could be leveraged into longer-form articles and investigative reports, for example, or one that would explore the next equivalent of adding a crossword puzzle to raise sales — “how would one go about doing it?” Mr. Bogost said.

Mr. Bogost founded Persuasive Games, and wrote a book of the same title, to show how games can make arguments. Video games, he argued, can be a new form of rhetoric through rule-based procedures and interactions. This interactive medium can teach, cajole, challenge, and collect information.

Using this concept of games as both a medium and a tool, Mr. Bogost centered the Journalism and Games project to explore what each area has to contribute to the other, he said. And the answer may be nothing, he added. But given the number of newspaper closures and downsizings recently, he hopes to contribute something positive.

Continued in article

Do We Need Changes in J-Schools and B-Schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#JSchools


10th Graders Draw Pictures Imagining Philosophers at Work ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/10th-graders-draw-pictures-imagining-philosophers-at-work.html

Jensen Comment
It might be interesting for 10th graders to draw pictures imagining accountants at work . Some of the best outcomes might be candidates to become cartoons published in The New Yorker. For examples from professional cartoonists, go to The New Yorker and observe some cartoons in the category of "accountant" or "accounting" ---
http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons

One of my favorites of a CEO worriedly speaking to a wimpy accounting and stating:
"This company's going to be dead, Digby, unless you can come up with an accounting miracle."


Ranked:  The Best Airlines in the USA ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-best-airlines-in-america-2013-9?op=1


Joint Program Requires 129 Quarter-Hour Credits and Highly Restrictive Admission Standards for this Joint Masters Degree
"Stanford B-School Launches Computer Science Program," by Louis Lavelle, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 17, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-17/stanford-b-school-launches-computer-science-program


Death of An Adjunct: A Sobering, True Story ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/death-of-an-adjunct-a-sobering-and-true-story.html

Jensen Comment
In general, the term "adjunct" should apply both the the employer and employee. Adjuncts are advised not to become dependent upon jobs of any kind that are low paying, have almost no benefits,  and have low reappointment security amidst other workers who earn seniority (not necessarily tenure). Many "adjunct" college jobs are like minimum wage jobs at McDonalds. They really never were intended to be careers. McDonalds used to envision low paying jobs to be temporary jobs for young people and other transition workers intent on eventually moving into higher paying careers. It becomes sad when the labor economy is so rotten that people begin to look at these low paying transitional jobs as long-term careers.

Walmart is a bit different. Walmart subsidizes online training and education with the intent that unskilled workers have help in lifting themselves higher within or outside Walmart. Older workers who work at Walmart to simply supplement retirement incomes are a lot different that a very young single parent in need of opportunities for advancement. Walmart is at least offering some opportunities for low paid employees willing to take the time and effort to get an education.

A university should do the same for its adjuncts.
Older workers like retired CPA partners who simply supplement retirement incomes are a lot different than young Ph.D. graduates who cannot find a tenure-track jobs. A college that employs adjuncts should have programs to assist adjuncts find better employment in the case where these adjuncts seemingly are locking into long-term careers as adjunct teachers or low-paid research assistants.

It's an enormous problem when younger college adjunct faculty begin to look at their adjunct positions as long-term careers. In part, this explains the success of the AACSB's Bridging Program where non-business Ph.D.s have an opportunity to become qualified for employment in tenure-track business faculty opportunities where tenure-track openings are more prevalent than in many humanities and science disciplines.

Margaret Mary Vojtko is a sad case in the "gray zone" of adjunct employment.
The "gray zone" includes an adjunct employee who is perhaps not qualified for AACSB bridging such as an adjunct teacher without a Ph.D. degree. The "gray zone" includes a Ph.D. who is perhaps too old for bridging into a new career such as a 59-year old recently divorced adjunct who has almost no savings and supplemental income. The "gray zone" includes an adjunct employee who was content to live of the margin for decades and then encounters a health issue with no savings, no TIAA-CREF retirement plan, and no family safety net.

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education ---
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/death-of-an-adjunct-703773/


"Alarming Research Shows the Sorry State of US Higher Ed," by Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review Blog, July 11, 2013 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee/2013/07/alarming-research-shows-sorry.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29&cm_ite=DailyAlert-071213+%281%29&cm_lm=sp%3Arjensen%40trinity.edu&cm_ven=Spop-Email

"The Decline of College," by Victor Davis Hanson. Townhall, September 19, 2013 --- Click Here
http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2013/09/19/the-decline-of-college-n1703913?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upper-mobility and a rich shared-learning experience.

Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments logically.

The result was a more skilled workforce and a competent democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be true at our flagship universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar world rankings.

Yet most elsewhere, something went terribly wrong with that model. Almost all the old campus protocols are now tragically outdated or antithetical to their original mission.

Tenure -- virtual lifelong job security for full-time faculty after six years -- was supposed to protect free speech on campus. How, then, did campus ideology become more monotonous than diverse, more intolerant of politically unpopular views than open-minded?

Universities have so little job flexibility that campuses cannot fire the incompetent tenured or hire full-time competent newcomers.

The university is often a critic of private enterprise for its supposed absence of fairness and equality. The contemporary campus, however, is far more exploitative. It pays part-time faculty with the same degrees far less for the same work than it pays an aristocratic class of fully tenured professors.

The four-year campus experience is simply vanishing. At the California State University system, the largest university complex in the world, well under 20 percent of students graduate in four years despite massive student aid. Fewer than half graduate in six years.

Administrators used to come from among top faculty, who rotated a few years from teaching and scholarship to do the unenviable nuts-and-bolts work of running the university. Now, administrators rarely, if ever, teach. Instead, they became part of a high-paid, careerist professional caste -- one that has grown exponentially. In the CSU system, their numbers have exploded in recent years -- a 221 percent increase from 1975 to 2008. There are now more administrators in that system than full-time faculty.

College acceptance was supposed to be a reward for hard work and proven excellence in high school, not a guaranteed entitlement of open admission. Yet more than half of incoming first-year students require remediation in math and English during, rather than before attending, college. That may explain why six years and hundreds of million dollars later, about the same number never graduate.

he idea of deeply indebted college students in their 20s without degrees or even traditional reading and writing skills is something relatively new in America. Yet aggregate student debt has reached a staggering $1 trillion. More than half of recent college graduates -- who ultimately support the huge college industry -- are either unemployed or working in jobs that don't require bachelor's degrees. About a quarter of those under 25 are jobless and still seeking employment.

Apart from our elite private schools, the picture of our postmodern campus that emerges is one of increasing failure --a perception hotly denied on campus but matter-of-factly accepted off campus, where most of the reforms will have to originate.

What might we expect in the future?

Continued in article

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


"Hedge Funder Stan Druckenmiller Wants Every Young Person In America To See These Charts About How They're Getting Screwed," by Julia La Roche, Business Insider, September 20, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/stan-druckenmiller-on-generational-theft-2013-9

 Iconic hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, the founder of Duquesne Capital Management, has been vocal for the past several months about the issue of generational theft. 

Druckenmiller, who accurately called the housing crisis, has said he sees another "storm" coming due to entitlement transfer payments. Entitlements are things like Social Security and Medicare that primary go to older, retired workers.

The billionaire fund manager believes that seniors in this country are essentially stealing from the young via these entitlement transfers. What's more is he thinks it could result in a crisis even more devastating than 2008.   

Druckenmiller, 60, will be visiting various college campuses this fall to talk about this issue with the younger population. We found a video of his presentation he gave at his alma mater Bowdoin College in Maine a few months ago.   

Druckenmiller told the Bowdoin students that he started worrying back in 1994. 

"The reason was because...it was demographics because I knew that in 2011 the 'Baby Boomers'...the front end was going to turn 65 and you were going to have this huge surge in entitlement payments because again the biggest buckets of entitlements are for the elderly." 

He also shared 16 charts with the students and explained why it's such a pressing matter that should be addressed now. We've included his charts and commentary in the slides that follow. 

Continued in article

The Slide Show --- Click Here
http://www.businessinsider.com/stan-druckenmiller-on-generational-theft-2013-9#this-chart-shows-federal-entitlement-transfers-as-a-percentage-of-federal-budget-outlays-back-in-1960-they-were-28-in-the-last-two-years-theyre-up-to-68-1

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


"College Professor: I Lost Tons Of Critical Files Because Of Dropbox," by Julie Bort, Business Insider, September 18, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/professor-suffers-dropbox-nightmare-2013-9 

Bob Jensen's threads on computing and network security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection


"Tufts Bans Professor From Research on Human Subjects," Inside Higher Ed, September 19, 2013 --- 
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/09/19/tufts-bans-professor-research-human-subjects


Real estate developer Stephen Ross is giving $200 million to the University of Michigan to be split between the athletic program and the Ross School of Business, the university announced today (September 4, 2013) ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-04/stephen-ross-makes-200-million-gift-to-university-of-michigan


Google Glass --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass

"Google Glass Prompts Experiments in Journalism Schools," by Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education, September 6, 2013 ---
http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Google-Glass-Prompts-Experiments-in-Journalism-Schools.html 

Journalism professors are exploring Google Glass this year to see how it works in their field.

California State University, Chico, is one of the latest journalism and public relations programs to buy the wearable technology, which allows users to shoot video, share tweets and show the latest news, among other things. The developer version of Google Glass costs around $1,500 and is currently only available to explorers that Google selected through a contest.

"As I told Google when we entered their contest, we're training students for jobs that probably don't even exist yet," said Susan Wiesinger, associate professor and department chair of the university's Journalism and Public Relations program. "We need them to think creatively. We need to think what might be ahead. And for them to even see a device that isn't yet on the market, it makes them engage with it and not ignore it."

Some feel that the journalism field has a history of ignoring technology until it's too late. For example, few journalists took desktop Internet seriously, and as a result, classified ads went to Craigslist instead of online newspapers.

"When has the journalism industry ever benefited from dismissing or ignoring emerging technology?" asked Robert Hernandez, assistant professor of professional practice at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. "In other words, I don't know how Glass can be used for journalism on either creation, or distribution or consumption, but the only way to find out is to play with it, so I've been experimenting with it."

Hernandez already plans to bring Google Glass into a new journalism class with another technology he's been experimenting with: augmented reality. He also hopes to hire a developer who will create Glass apps for existing media brands. And this year, he'll work on a pilot with a few other people that could turn into a Glass app developing course for news and information.

At Chico State, Google Glass will spark discussions around privacy issues and technology development in a media literacy class that Wiesinger teaches. A student from Tehama Group Communications, the department's public relations firm on campus, will write a first-person story on how it could be used in the industry and another story about how the department is using it. On top of that, a digital media start-up class will allow students to develop apps for the device.

But neither of these professors say that Google Glass is groundbreaking for journalism at the moment. Right now, it's a hands-free accessory to a smartphone and still needs to be tied to that phone to tweet and post pictures.

The technology does allow students to record video while keeping their hands free for other tasks, such as taking notes. And it could provide contextual information for buildings that they're looking at, for example.

Hernandez said that context is king with journalism and technology. The storytelling has to come first, and the technology comes second in these journalism programs.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I envision that Google Glass could also revolutionize some auditing procedures and the teaching of auditing.

"Professors Envision Using Google Glass in the Classroom," by Sara Grossman, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 20, 2013 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/professors-envision-using-google-glass-in-the-classroom/44401?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


"How to Turn a Tidy Profit on a Miserable Carnival Cruise," by Kyle Stock, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 17, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-17/how-to-turn-a-tidy-profit-on-a-miserable-carnival-cruise?campaign_id=DN091713

Jensen Comment
This marketing promotion presents some interesting accounting questions. At what point does this become delayed revenue recognition versus warranty accounting? Or is this a type of repo accounting problem?

In any case this a plan offers customers all sorts of moral hazards. For example, some might pack toilet stoppers.


Tickets to a New York Giants 2013 home game are the most expensive in the NFL. The Chicago Bears and the New England Patriots have the second and third most expensive tickets. Event ticket search engine SeatGeek provided 24/7 Wall St. with the current average secondary-market ticket prices for each team for the 2013 NFL season. Based on the data, the average 2013 game for several teams costs more than $200. Home games for the New York Giants cost $292.36. These are the football teams with the most expensive tickets.
Football Teams with the Most Expensive Tickets --- Click Here
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2013/09/18/football-teams-with-the-most-expensive-tickets/?utm_source=247WallStDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=SEP182013A&utm_campaign=DailyNewsletter


Windows XP Users: Here Are Your Upgrade Options ---
http://www.howtogeek.com/172243/windows-xp-users-here-are-your-upgrade-options/

Jensen Comment
If you keep using XP it's best to install top-of-the-line virus, malware, and firewall protectors ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_antivirus_software
After studying the above page, I went with Finland's F-Secure protection

Antivirus Software --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Antivirus_software

Malware Protection --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware

Firewall Protection --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Firewall_software

How to Fix Browser Settings Changed By Malware or Other Programs ---
http://www.howtogeek.com/172141/how-to-fix-browser-settings-changed-by-malware-or-other-programs/

Why Secure File Deletion Tools Aren’t Foolproof ---
http://www.howtogeek.com/172077/why-secure-file-deletion-tools-arent-foolproof/

Bob Jensen's neglected threads on computer and networking security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection


This Map Shows Whether Your City Is Booming Or Busting ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-map-shows-whether-your-city-is-booming-or-busting-2013-9

Jensen Comment
The tax benefits of Texas, Washington State, and Indiana seem to be paying off. But the taxing monster California isn't doing so bad, proving that growth in GDP entails more than tax breaks. What in the world is going on in Iowa where taxes are also high?

One Reason the GDP in Iowa is Booming
Morgenson and Gebeloff (in The New York Times) expose the latest incarnation of the ethanol ripoff and the status of this government-created mess.
"Ethanol: Another Chapter in Scamnation," by David Kotok, Rithotz Blog, September 18, 2013 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/09/ethanol-another-chapter-in-scamnation/


"Get Over It. Math is Hard," by Tom Keene, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 17, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-17/get-over-it-dot-math-is-hard  


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on September 23, 2013

A key part of the JOBS Act kicks in today that will allow “emerging growth” companies to ask for equity investments publicly without having to register the shares for public trading, the NYT’s Jenna Worthman notes. Business owners will now be able to raise up to $1 million a year this way. CFOJ reported back in July on the SEC vote to lift the 80-year-old ban on publicizing shares in private offerings.

Entrepreneurs say the change will address a central problem they face: that raising significant capital often depends on having personal connections to investors, Worthman notes. Previously, this had to be done privately until a business was ready to enter the public markets. But critics like tech investors Fred Wilson and Rick Webb warn that by deregulating the raising of equity investment—at least in part—the legislation could open the door to abuses by luring investors into what may be risky and untenable business ventures.

How to Leverage Analytics and Social Media to Improve M&A ---
http://deloitte.wsj.com/cfo/2013/09/23/how-to-leverage-analytics-and-social-media-to-improve-ma/

Advanced analytics and social media are becoming mainstays in the M&A tool kit, but many deal professionals are struggling with how to leverage these new tools to create competitive advantage. JR Reagan, leader of the Deloitte Analytics Highly Immersive Visual Environment, discusses how touse data analytics, visualization and social media to enhance the evaluation and pricing of a target and to gain a competitive edge in business case forecasting.

Read More at CFO Journal » http://deloitte.wsj.com/cfo/

 


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on September 18, 2013

Bloomberg’s Lisa Abramowicz notes that America’s companies are saving about $700 billion in interest payments thanks to the Fed’s stimulus.
 Corporate-bond yields over the past four years have fallen to an average of 4.6% from 6.14% in the five years before Lehman Brothers’ demise, a savings equal to $15.4 million annually for every $1 billion borrowed. “The stimulus was a huge saving grace in the economy overall,” Kroger Chief Financial Officer J. Michael Schlotman tells Abramowicz. His company estimates it’s paying about $80 million less in interest than it would have before the crisis. “It probably kept some businesses from failing because they were able to refinance their debt at lower interest payments.”

Jensen Comment
This doesn't count the hundreds of millions of dollars of savings that were consumed because people who wanted safe investment returns could only get less than 1% per annum from CDs and other safe investments. Retirees were forced to consume savings to pay their bills.

Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke don't much care about losses in interest income for people who save. Their concern is to distribute more funding to people who don't save --- we're becoming a nation that assumes the government will always care for us.

GAO Report
"Social Security Overpays $1.3 Billion in Benefits," by Joel Seidman, CNBC, September 13, 2013 ---
 http://www.cnbc.com/id/101032599

An upcoming GAO report obtained by NBC News says the federal government may have paid $1.29 billion in Social Security disability benefits to 36,000 people who had too much income from work to qualify.

At least one recipient collected a potential overpayment of $90,000 without being caught by the Social Security Administration, according to the report, which will be released Sunday, while others collected $57,000 and $74,000.

The GAO also said its estimate of "potentially improper" payments, which was based on comparing federal wage data to Disability Insurance rolls between 2010 and 2013, "likely understated" the scope of the problem, but that an exact number could not be determined without case by case investigations.

More from NBC News:
Protecting social security for the next generation
Is now the worst time to retire? Not even close
Obama's fix would trim Social Security checks

To qualify for disability, recipients must show that they have a physical or mental impairment that prevents gainful employment and is either terminal or expected to last more than a year. Once approved, the average monthly payment to a recipient is just under $1,000.

(Read more: Social Security Benefits—10 Things You Must Know)

There is a five-month waiting period during which monthly income cannot exceed $1,000 before an applicant can qualify for disability, as well as a nine-month trial period during which someone who is already receiving benefits can return to work without terminating his or her disability payments.

 

The GAO said that its analysis showed that about 36,000 individuals either earned too much during the waiting period or kept collecting too long after their nine-month trial period had expired. The report recommended that "to the extent that it is cost-effective and feasible," the Social Security Administration's enforcement operation should step up efforts to detect earnings during the waiting period.
 

(Read more: How to maximize your social security benefit)
 

In fiscal 2011, more than 10 million Americans received disability benefits totaling more than $128 billion. The GAO's report estimates that less than half of one percent of recipients might be receiving improper payments.

A spokesperson for the Social Security Administration said the agency had a "more than 99 percent accuracy rate" for paying disability benefits. "While our paymen taccuracy rates are very high, we recognize that even small payment errors cost taxpayers. We are planning to do an investigation and we will recoup any improper payments from beneficiaries."

(Read more: Medicare will be exhausted in 2026)

"It is too soon to tell what caused these overpayments," said the spokesperson, "but if we determine that fraud is involved, we will refer these cases to our Office of the Inspector General for investigation."

Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting and auditing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting


Is it ethical for a (TCU) professor to hold help sessions restricted to students of color in his class?
"'Students of Color Only'," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, September 16, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/16/texas-christian-professor-sets-debate-invitation-minority-students 

It's unclear whether non-Hispanic minority students also were invited to the study session in a separate e-mail.

The student said she wondered what her friends would think, and posted it on Facebook, with the tag: “I straight up just got segregated by my own teacher. I'm 75 [percent] white.”

One friend said: "Wait is this a joke? Your professor is trying to have a study session for 'students of color' only?"

Another friend in the class wrote: "I did not get an email like that!!!!"

Another said: "Not trying to start anything, but if this had been an email saying he likes to meet with all the white students at the beginning of the semester, and then ended the email the way he did, but with WHITE STUDENTS ONLY, I guarantee you this would be all over the news in seconds."

Yet another wrote: "But what if ur Hispanic yet u have a white sounding last name. U get left out?"

The student responded: "yeah that's kind of my point. he just judged me by my last name."

. . .

“I thought, ‘Is this really happening?’” the student said. “I laughed, in shock, as my immediate reaction.”

The student said she doesn’t strongly identify as Hispanic, although her last name is of Hispanic origin and she is one-quarter Hispanic. She wondered how – so early in the year – the professor had found a group of students to approach, other than by selecting Hispanic-sounding names from the class roster. She said she also wondered, and doubted, whether her fellow "Understanding Religion: Society and Culture” students without last names of Hispanic origins had received the same offer.

That student said she liked the class and enjoyed Pińon’s teaching, but that his offer seemed unfair. She noted a visit she'd made to a Fort Worth Library exhibit on 20th-century agricultural labor activist César Chávez for Pińon’s class, which focuses on Latin American religions. "I was reading about how he was segregated because he was a Mexican, and that's what [the professor's] doing to the rest of us, in a way. I mean, it's special attention and favoring them."

It's unclear whether non-Hispanic minority students also were invited to the study session in a separate e-mail.

The student said she wondered what her friends would think, and posted it on Facebook, with the tag: “I straight up just got segregated by my own teacher. I'm 75 [percent] white.”

One friend said: "Wait is this a joke? Your professor is trying to have a study session for 'students of color' only?"

Another friend in the class wrote: "I did not get an email like that!!!!"

Another said: "Not trying to start anything, but if this had been an email saying he likes to meet with all the white students at the beginning of the semester, and then ended the email the way he did, but with WHITE STUDENTS ONLY, I guarantee you this would be all over the news in seconds."

Yet another wrote: "But what if ur Hispanic yet u have a white sounding last name. U get left out?"

The student responded: "yeah that's kind of my point. he just judged me by my last name."

Continued in article


"Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Spinoff Team Up on Remedial Math," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Carnegie-Foundation-and/141839/?cid=wc

A Stanford University spinoff and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching plan to announce a partnership on Tuesday to expand the distribution of online remedial-mathematics courses that so far have tripled students' success rates in half the time.

NovoEd, an online-learning start-up company that encourages students to work in small groups and to learn from one another, teamed up with the foundation to tackle what is widely considered a nationwide crisis in remedial math.

More than 60 percent of students entering community college require at least one remedial-math course before they can progress to credit-bearing courses. Fewer than a third of those students complete it, according to the foundation.

Over the past two years, the Carnegie Foundation has been trying to improve those numbers through a remedial-math program involving more than 40 community colleges and universities in at least 10 states.

Statway and Quantway, which together make up Carnegie's Pathways Program, have allowed students to complete in one year remedial-math sequences that used to take two years.

A Carnegie spokeswoman said that 17 percent of remedial-math students in the colleges that make up the Statway network historically have achieved math credit within three years, but 49 percent of those in the Statway program did so within a single year. Results were similar with the Quantway program.

The program's director and a senior managing partner at Carnegie, Bernadine Chuck Fong, said in an e-mail on Monday that NovoEd's focus on "student-centered, collaborative learning and pedagogy" meshed with the foundation's collaborative strategies.

A Focus on Collaborative Learning

Amin Saberi, co-founder and chief executive officer of NovoEd, agreed. "By combining forces, we can scale up the curriculum and address this national challenge head-on," he said, also in an interview on Monday. He is on leave from Stanford, where he is an associate professor of management science and engineering.

NovoEd started in January 2013 as an in-house program at Stanford called Venture Lab. Its massive open online courses have reached about 500,000 people in more than 150 countries, Mr. Saberi said.

NovoEd differs from Coursera and Udacity, two MOOC spinoffs that were also started by Stanford professors, in its focus on collaborative learning, Mr. Saberi said.

In NovoEd courses, students are typically assigned to groups of four to seven, based on their experiences and locations, to work on problems and projects together. They're also encouraged to discuss roadblocks they've faced in their own learning and how they've overcome the obstacles.

In the courses, students rate one another as team members, which gives them incentives to be active participants.

Mr. Saberi said the approach the partnership will take, which includes studying in contexts that are relevant to students, is particularly effective with first-generation and underprepared students who often struggle in online courses. Remedial-math students might, for instance, study how a 20-percent interest rate on a credit card adds up over time.

Continued in article

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

Also don't forget the wonderful free remedial and advanced math videos at the Khan Academy ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/


15 Free MOOCs That Are Actually Worth Your Time and Sweat ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-online-courses-to-take-2013-9?op=1


The top USA prestigious business schools are all offering free MOOCs (courses vary but they are free)
"Stanford B-School Jumps on the MOOC Bandwagon," by Francesca Di Meglio, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 19, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/stanford-b-school-jumps-on-the-mooc-bandwagon

The Stanford Graduate School of Business is getting into the MOOC game. Its first foray into the market for “massive open online courses” is focused on retirement finance and pension policy and will be launched Oct. 14.

“We’re living in a time when more and more people are responsible for their own retirement,” says Ranga Jayaraman, associate dean and chief information officer at the Stanford B-school. “Yet many find their retirement is not secure.”

Joshua Rauh, the professor who developed the eight-week course, will cover topics such as how much people should save for retirement, stocks and mutual funds, and the impact of public policy debates on retirement and pensions. The course, to be offered on the NovoEd platform, will differentiate itself with high-quality video content and navigation tools that will allow students to review topics that are of the most interest to them, he adds.

In addition to the 45-minute video lectures broken down into segments of five to seven minutes, the course includes quizzes, assignments, and an interactive forum moderated by Stanford GSB alumni, according to Stanford’s Sept. 17 announcement. Students will form teams to complete a final “capstone” project, and representatives from the top five teams will go to campus and present their projects to a panel of experts and faculty in January 2014. Stanford and the Hoover Institution will foot the bill for travel expenses.

Based on participation in MOOCs offered by other schools at Stanford, GSB expects tens of thousands to sign up, says Jayaraman.

GSB’s announcement comes just days after University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School announced it was putting much of its first-year MBA curriculum on the Coursera platform for free. Other business schools, including the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, also offer MOOCs.

Continued in article

"Google and edX Create a MOOC Site for the Rest of Us," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, Septe2mber 10, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/google-and-edx-create-a-mooc-site-for-the-rest-of-us/46413?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=

"How to Convert a Classroom Course Into a MOOC," by Michael Fredette, Campus Technology, August 28, 2013 ---
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/08/28/how-to-convert-a-classroom-course-int

"First Trial of Crowdsourced Grading for Computer Science Homework: The latest online crowdsourcing tool allows students to grade their classmates’ homework and receive credit for the effort they put in ," MIT's Technology Review, September 4, 2013 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519001/first-trial-of-crowdsourced-grading-for-computer-science-homework/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130904

Train Your Brain This Fall with Free Online Courses, eBooks, Audio Books, Language Lessons & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/train-your-brain-this-fall-with-free-online-courses-ebooks-audio-books-language-lessons-more.html
How to find hundreds of free MOOCs
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 

"MIT Will Offer MOOC Curricula, Not Just Single Courses, on edX," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mit-will-offer-mooc-curricula-not-just-single-courses-on-edx/46715

MOOC companies are hardly universities unto themselves, but now a provider wants to move beyond offering one-off courses.

MITx, a division of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that offers courses on the nonprofit edX’s platform, announced on Tuesday that it would soon offer special certificates to students who completed a prescribed sequence of massive open online courses from MIT. The sequences will be called XSeries.

MIT plans to offer its first XSeries sequence, Foundations of Computer Science, beginning this fall. The computer-science series will consist of seven courses that together “will cover content equivalent to two to four traditional residential courses and take between six months and two years to complete,” according to a news release.

EdX is working with SoftwareSecure, a major player in the online-proctoring industry, to make sure that students who pass each course in an XSeries are who they say they are and aren’t cheating. The fee for a proctored final examination is roughly $100 per course, meaning students who aim to earn XSeries certificates can expect to pay about $700 each, said Anant Agarwal, president of edX.

The failure of MOOCs to penetrate the traditional system of credits and degrees has made the fate of “alternative credentials” like XSeries certificates more interesting.

Continued in article

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

"Wharton (at Penn) Puts First-Year MBA Courses Online for Free," by Louis Lavelle, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 13, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-13/wharton-puts-first-year-mba-courses-online-for-free

Getting a Wharton MBA involves taking off from work for two years, moving to Philadelphia, and spending about $200,000 on tuition and expenses. Now, with the addition of three new courses on the online learning platform Coursera, you can get much of the course content for free.

While you won’t get the full Wharton on-campus experience—or an internship, career services, or alumni network, for that matter—the new courses in financial accounting, marketing, and corporate finance duplicate much of what you would learn during your first year at the elite business school, says Don Huesman, managing director of the innovation group at Wharton.

A fourth course in operations management that’s been offered since September rounds out the foundation series.” Along with five existing electives, which include courses on sports business and health care, the new offerings make it possible to learn much of what students in Wharton’s full-time MBA program learn, and from the same professors. All nine courses are massive open online courses, or MOOCs, expected to attract students from around the world.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The 2013 graduating MBA class had more females than males.

The Wharton MBA Program is nearly always ranked in the Top Five by US News.

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

"The Full Report on Udacity Experiment (at San Jose State)," by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, September 12, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/12/after-weeks-delays-san-jose-state-u-releases-research-report-online-courses

San Jose State University on Wednesday quietly released the full research report on the for-credit online courses it offered this spring through the online education company Udacity. The report, marked by delays and procedural setbacks, suggests it may be difficult for the university to deliver online education in this format to the students who need it most.

The report's release lands on the opposite end of the spectrum from the hype generated in January, when university officials, flanked by the Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun and California Governor Jerry Brown, unveiled the project during a 45-minute press conference. The pilot project, featuring two math courses and one statistics course, aimed to bring high-quality education to students for a fraction of the cost of the university's normal tuition. Wednesday's report went live on the university’s website sometime before noon Pacific time, appearing with little fanfare on the research page of the principal investigator for the project, Elaine D. Collins. Collins serves as associate dean in the College of Science.

The report provides a long-awaited look into how the pilot project has fared. The initials results from the spring pilot led the university to put its partnership with Udacity on “pause” for the fall semester. Last month, the university released results from the summer pilot, showing increased retention and student pass rates. However, those reports barely scratched the surface of the data the university collected during the project.

The report, funded by the National Science Foundation, details the setbacks the research team encountered as it began to evaluate results from the spring pilot project. In particular, it took months to obtain usable data from Udacity that tracked how students used instructional resources and accessed support services. The research team then had to spend several weeks awaiting clarifications and corrections to resolve accuracy questions.

“The result ... is that the research lagged behind the implementation whereas, ideally, it would be running alongside, providing just-in-time information about what works and where improvements can be made,” the report reads.

The Udacity team contested the research team's findings in a blog post. They said they received the first data request on May 31, which was modified on June 3. Udacity submitted the data on June 28. The RP Group asked Udacity to reformat the data on July 25, which was performed by the next day.

"[T]he reason for this is it’s the first time we’ve collaborated with an external entity," Thrun said. "Whatever picture is being drawn here, I don’t understand why this is being said."

Ellen Junn, provost at San Jose State, declined to comment on Wednesday.

Another data source, student responses to three surveys, also proved less useful than anticipated. The spring pilot produced just 213 students whose results could be used for statistical purposes -- the remaining 61 received an incomplete grade, dropped a course or were removed after data were pruned for inconsistencies. Survey response rates ranged from 32 to 34 percent, and the research team found “significant differences” between those who responded and the general student population.

“Most importantly, successful students were overrepresented among the survey population and almost no students from the partner high school completed the surveys,” the report reads.

The surveys were further complicated by internal delays. The spring pilot began before San Jose State’s institutional review board could approve the project, which meant the first survey, billed as an entry survey, was not conducted until the fifth week of classes.

The research team consisted of members from the Research and Planning Group for California Community Colleges and Sutee Sujitparapitaya, associate vice president for institutional research at San Jose State. Despite the complications, the report concludes the results provide pointers to how students enrolled in SJSU Plus courses learn.

“[M]easures of student effort eclipse all other variables examined in the study, including demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter and student use of support services,” the report reads. That means students who took charge of their own education and submitted more problem sets, logged in more often and watched more videos than the course mean were more likely to succeed than their peers were.

The importance of student effort highlights the pilot project’s difficulties in targeting disadvantaged students, who Udacity's online support providers early on felt “lacked adequate preparation for the courses and were very unlikely to succeed.”

Results from the first survey showed 39 percent of students had never before taken an online course. The unfamiliarity with the new platform meant less than half “partially understood” the online support services available to them, including video conferencing with faculty members and discussion forums.

By the end of the semester, four in every five students said they wanted more help with the content -- yet few scheduled appointments with faculty members during office hours. Instead, one faculty member said she answered “hundreds” of e-mails with questions that were answered in the syllabus. Another instructor “noted that she had out of necessity learned to write colorful boldfaced e-mails to draw students’ attention.”

During focus group sessions, student reported they were confused by having to interact with both San Jose State’s and Udacity’s websites, and that important e-mails arrived either too late or were flagged as spam.

While pass rates among students outside San Jose State in the introductory statistics course were more than double those in the two math courses, the report suggests the course’s weekly assignments “helped this group of students overcome, to some degree, their lack of online preparation.”

Research has shown that at-risk students tend to struggle in online classes, said the education consultants Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill. That disadvantaged students enrolled in SJSU Plus courses posted similarly poor pass rates suggests the spring pilot was rushed, they said.

"We have to be careful that our sense of altruism doesn’t overcome our sense of common sense," Hill said. "If we know that at-risk students don’t tend to do well in online courses, you can’t just wish away that problem. "

San Jose State and Udacity attempted to address many of the issues presented in the report on its summer pilot. Instead of being inundated by e-mails, students received more notifications while engaging with the course content online. The summer courses, which expanded to include psychology and computer programming, also featured orientation sessions.

Student pass rates from the summer pilot were superior to those in the spring pilot, with two-thirds of students receiving a C or better in four of five of the courses. Yet results in the remedial math course still lagged, with less than one-third of students receiving a passing grade.

The summer pilot also featured a vastly different student population: 53 percent of students had completed a postsecondary degree, including some doctoral degree holders. Only 15 percent were active high school students, compared to about half of the spring pilot’s students.

Continued in article

The Old Mix
Udacity Experiment at San Jose State Suspended After 56% to 76% of Students Fail Final Exams ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/udacity-experiment-at-san-jose-state-suspended.html

The New Mix
"Scores Improve in New Round of San Jose State’s Experiment With Udacity," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 28, 2013 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/scores-improve-in-new-round-of-san-jose-states-experiment-with-udacity/45997?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Earlier this year, it looked as if a high-profile online-education experiment at San Jose State University had gone on the rocks. In the first courses the university ran with technology from Udacity, the online-learning company, students’ grades were, frankly, dismal.

But now the pilot program appears to be back on course, buoyed by encouraging data from this summer’s trials, in which the university offered tweaked versions of the same courses to a much different mix of students.

In the spring, the university adapted three courses for Udacity’s platform and offered them to small groups of online students for credit. The idea was to test whether Udacity’s technology and teaching methods, which the company originally developed for its massive open online courses, could be useful in a more conventional online setting.

But the pass rates in all three Udacity-powered courses trailed far behind the rates in comparable face-to-face courses at San Jose State. The university decided not to offer any trial courses through Udacity in the fall.

The trials that had been planned for the summer went forward, however, with tweaked versions of the same three courses, plus two others. The results have been more promising. Pass rates in each of the three repeated courses leaped upward, approaching and sometimes exceeding the pass rates in the face-to-face sections.

For example, in the spring trial, only 25 percent of the students taking the “Udacified” version of a statistics course earned a C grade or higher; in the summer trial, 73 percent made at least a C. Only students in the adapted version of an entry-level mathematics course continued to lag well behind those in the face-to-face version on the San Jose State campus.

The results come with an important caveat: Unlike the spring trials, which drew on San Jose State undergraduates as well as underprivileged high-school students, the summer trials were open to anybody who wanted to register.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Udacity, said that half the students in the summer trials already held bachelor’s degrees and 20 percent had advanced degrees. In general, the summer students were older, with more work experience and higher levels of educational attainment. Given the difference in populations, trying to compare the pass rates for the spring and summer trials is probably not a particularly profitable exercise.

Continued in article

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


MOOC on Teaching With MOODLE---
http://moodle.com/moodle-launches-its-first-official-mooc-with-teachers-in-mind/

"Blackboard Announces New MOOC Platform," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/blackboard-announces-new-mooc-platform/44687?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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

It's too late for the 2013 EDUCAUSE event on MOOCs, but Many of the EDUCAUSE resources are still available

Events

EDUCAUSE Sprint 2013, July 30–August 1. During this free, online progam we explored the theme of Beyond MOOCs: Is IT Creating a New, Connected Age? Each day the community shared thoughts and ideas through webinars, articles, videos, and online discussions on the daily topics.

Looking for more sessions on MOOCs? check out our other event recordings on the topic.

Additional MOOC Resources

 
MOOCs of Interest

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, SMOCs, and Open Sharing of Course Materials Under the OKI Programs at Prestigious Universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


In the 18th and 19th Centuries rural school teachers were often paid a pittance in money wages. But it was common for children to bring food from their farms to supplement the wages of teachers when fruit trees were picked, animals were butchered, and produce was canned. But I never heard of that any of the food was poisoned in the olden days.

"Student Arrested for Trying to Poison Pregnant Professor," Inside Higher Ed, September 13, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/09/13/student-arrested-trying-poison-pregnant-professor


An Empty Desk Epidemic: Urban School Truancy is at Epidemic Proportions
As Chicago leaders battle over the future of Chicago’s failing school system, a stunning fact is being ignored: Truancy and absenteeism in the elementary grades are crippling the education of tens of thousands of students ---
http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/truancy/index.html


Question
What should be the rights of the public to access of teaching materials and research data of faculty on the public payroll?

"U. of Wisconsin Seeks Stronger Data Protections Premium Link," by Paul Basken, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/As-Open-Access-Advances-U-of/141481/

These are heady days for the disciples of open access. The Obama administration has set a one-year limit on journals' charging readers for articles derived from federally sponsored research. Some states are weighing similar steps. And a majority of peer-­reviewed articles, according to a new tally, are now in open formats.

But in other realms of public access to publicly financed research, the situation remains murky, and may be getting even more opaque.

About half the states have laws that let state universities keep some details of their research activities secret until publication or patenting. And officials at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who are eager for their state to join that list, predict the pressure for such protections will only grow stronger as states face mounting pressure to turn their university research operations into revenue.

State lawmakers must realize, said William W. Barker, the institution's director of the Office of Industrial Partnerships, that a public university is a cherished asset and needs to be treated accordingly.

The primary threat, Mr. Barker said, comes from outsiders—sometimes faculty members at other institutions—who use his state's freedom­-of-information rules to poach ideas from University of Wisconsin scientists.

It's a matter of "economic competitiveness," he said, made even more urgent by this year's change in federal law giving ownership rights to the first person to file for a patent rather than to the person who can prove the earliest development of an idea.

Others aren't so sure. Despite several months of prodding by the university, Wisconsin lawmakers have declined to act on the proposal. And a key opponent of the idea, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, a coalition of media organizations have argued that state law already lets the university keep research data secret if a release can cause harm, including economic harm.

The council's president, Bill Lue­ders, has challenged the university's rationale, saying he'd be surprised to see instances of outside faculty members' filing freedom-of-­information requests against University of Wisconsin rivals. "That seems to be poor form," he said.

Pressed on the matter, Mr. Barker could not provide specific examples involving state law. He and his staff found records of two requests from researchers at out-of-state universities seeking details of research conducted at Madison, but both were submitted to the National Institutes of Health under federal law.

Mr. Barker said that the university remained worried about the threat, especially given the change in federal patent law.

Other states agree, Mr. Barker said. University legal experts have identified at least 25 other states that have some explicit protections against the prepublication release of research information, he said.

Requests From Activists

In a memorandum prepared for state lawmakers, university officials suggested a law making clear they could withhold virtually any research data until they have been "publicly released, published, or patented."

"Nobody's talking about keeping research results secret, because we're going to publish them—it's a public institution," Mr. Barker said. "It's just a matter of timing, that's all we're talking about."

Beyond the issue of economic competitiveness, the university has made clear that animal-rights groups also factor into its thinking. Two groups, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and a Wisconsin ally, Alliance for Animals and the Environment, have been trying to pressure the university to halt experiments with animals.

They're upset by research like that carried out by Tom C. Yin, a professor of neuroscience whose work is aimed at improving human hearing. Part of Mr. Yin's work involves cats, and PETA used open-records requests to obtain and publish photographs that show a cat with metal sensors screwed into its skull.

The university wants to block such requests for reasons that include the costs, largely staff time, that it takes to process them, Mr. Barker said. There's also the risk that researchers and other university staff members, even after combing their records to answer requests from groups such as PETA, might fail to redact something of unrecognized importance that could help an economic competitor or violate an agreement with an outside partner, he said.

Mr. Lueders rejects the university's arguments. Animal-­related records processing may cost $100,000 a year—the number cited by the university in its memo to lawmakers—but that's a fraction of the university's tens of millions in annual research dollars, he said.

Mr. Barker contends that every research dollar is valuable, especially in a tight economy.

Leaders in the movement for open-access journals, waging their own battles to have articles financed by authors rather than readers, see themselves as separate from any fights over prepublication access.

"It is really contentious," said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, calling the states "all over the board" on what disclosure protections, if any, they afford their researchers.

Some of those restrictions seem understandable from a university's perspective, Ms. Joseph said. But over all, she said, they don't seem in line with the sense—demonstrated empirically in open-access studies—that everyone does better when information is more widely shared.

Economic Benefits

John W. Houghton, a professorial fellow at Victoria University, in Australia, has carried out a series of economic analyses of open-access publishing in various countries. He has found that a full open-access system produces substantial and widespread economic benefits, but that early adopters among both countries and universities bear the burden, since they have to pay for journal subscriptions while financing their own authors.

A study financed by the European Commission and released last month estimated that, in the United States and several other countries, half of all papers are now freely available within a year or two of publication.

Continued in article

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


"How Detroit went broke: The answers may surprise you - and don't blame Coleman Young," by Nathan Bomey and John Gallagher/Detroit Free Press Business Writers, Detroit Free Press, September 15, 2013 ---
http://www.freep.com/interactive/article/20130915/NEWS01/130801004/Detroit-Bankruptcy-history-1950-debt-pension-revenue

. . .

For this report, the Free Press examined about 10,000 pages of documents gathering dust in the public library’s archives. Since most of those documents have never been digitized, the Free Press created its own database of 50 years of Detroit’s financial history. Reporters also conducted dozens of interviews with participants from the last six mayoral administrations as well as city bureaucrats and outside experts. Among the highlights from the review:

 

Taxing higher and higher: City leaders tried repeatedly to reverse sliding revenue through new taxes. Despite a new income tax in 1962, a new utility tax in 1971 and a new casino revenue tax in 1999 — not to mention several tax increases along the way — revenue in today’s dollars fell 40% from 1962 to 2012. Higher taxes helped drive residents to the suburbs and drove away business. Today, Detroit still doesn’t take in as much tax revenue as it did just from property taxes in 1963.

 

 

Reconsidering Coleman Young: Serving from 1974-1994, Young was the most austere Detroit mayor since World War II, reducing the workforce, department budgets and debt during a particularly nasty national recession in the early 1980s. Young was the only Detroit mayor since 1950 to preside over a city with more income than debt, although he relied heavily on tax increases to pay for services.

 

Downsizing — too little, too late: The total assessed value of Detroit property — a good gauge of the city’s tax base and its ability to pay bills — fell a staggering 77% over the past 50 years in today’s dollars. But through 2004, the city cut only 28% of its workers, even though the money to pay them was drying up. Not until the last decade did Detroit, in desperation, cut half its workforce. The city also failed to take advantage of efficiencies, such as new technology, that enabled enormous productivity gains in the broader economy.

Skyrocketing employee benefits: City leaders allowed legacy costs — the tab for retiree pensions and health care — to spiral out of control even as the State of Michigan and private industry were pushing workers into less costly plans. That placed major stress on the budget and diverted money from services such as streetlights and public safety. Detroit’s spending on retiree health care soared 46% from 2000 to 2012, even as its general fund revenue fell 20%.

 

Gifting a billion in bonuses: Pension officials handed out about $1 billion in bonuses from the city’s two pension funds to retirees and active city workers from 1985 to 2008. That money — mostly in the form of so-called 13th checks — could have shored up the funds and possibly prevented the city from filing for bankruptcy. If that money had been saved, it would have been worth more than $1.9 billion today to the city and pension funds, by one expert’s estimate.

 

Missing chance after chance: Contrary to myth, the city has not been in free fall since the 1960s. There have been periods of economic growth and hope, such as in the 1990s when the population decline slowed, income-tax revenue increased and city leaders balanced the budget. But leaders failed to take advantage of those moments of calm to reform city government, reduce expenses and protect the city and its residents from another downturn.

 

Borrowing more and more: Detroit went on a binge starting around 2000 to close budget holes and to build infrastructure, more than doubling debt to $8 billion by 2012. Under Archer, Detroit sold water and sewer bonds. Kilpatrick, who took office in 2002, used borrowing as his stock answer to budget issues, and Bing borrowed more than $250 million.

 

Adding the last straw — Kilpatrick’s gamble: He’s best known around the globe for a sex and perjury scandal that sent him to jail and massive corruption that threatens to send him to prison next month for more than 20 years. The corruption cases further eroded Detroit’s image and distracted the city from its fiscal storm. But perhaps the greatest damage Kilpatrick did to the city’s long-term stability was with Wall Street’s help when he borrowed $1.44 billion in a flashy high-finance deal to restructure pension fund debt. That deal, which could cost $2.8 billion over the next 22 years, now represents nearly one-fifth of the city’s debt.

With all the lost opportunities over decades, with Detroit’s debt mounting, with the housing crash and Great Recession just over the horizon, 2005 turned out to be the watershed year.

Although no one could see it at the time, Detroit’s insolvency was guaranteed.

 

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
There's a difference between spending your way out of debt in the Federal Government versus spending your way out of debt Detroit. The enormous difference is that the Federal government controls the money supply, which put another way, the Federal government can print trillions of dollars under the guise of "Quantitative Easing." Detroit can't print its own dollars to spend.

Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting


Lottery Strategies for Dummies
According To Math, Here's When You Should Buy A Powerball Ticket --- Click Here
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-when-math-says-you-should-start-to-care-about-powerball-2013-9#ixzz2fBRqD3eg


"Can Money Buy Happiness?" Stanford Graduate School of Business, September August 15, 2013 ---
http://csi.gsb.stanford.edu/can-money-buy-happiness

What inspires people to act selflessly, help others, and make personal sacrifices? Each quarter, this column features one piece of scholarly research that provides insight on what motivates people to engage in what psychologists call “prosocial behavior”—things like making charitable contributions, buying gifts, volunteering one’s time, and so forth. In short, it looks at the work of some of our finest researchers on what spurs people to do something on behalf of someone else.

In this column I explore the idea that many of the ways we spend money are prosocial acts — and prosocial expenditures may, in fact, make us happier than personal expenditures. Authors Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton discuss evidence for this in their new book Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending. These behavioral scientists show that you can get more out of your money by following several principles — like spending money on others rather than yourself. Moreover, they demonstrate that these principles can be used not only by individuals, but also by companies seeking to create happier employees and more satisfying products.

According to Dunn and Norton, recent research on happiness suggests that the most satisfying way of using money is to invest in others. This can take a seemingly limitless variety of forms, from donating to a charity that helps strangers in a faraway country to buying lunch for a friend.

Witness Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two of the wealthiest people in the world. On a March day in 2010, they sat in a diner in Carter Lake, Iowa, and hatched a scheme. They would ask America’s billionaires to pledge the majority of their wealth to charity. Buffet decided to donate 99 percent of his, saying, “I couldn’t be happier with that decision.”

Continued in article


"JPMorgan's $920 Million Admission of Guilt," by Nick Summers, Blookmberg Businessweek, September 19, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/jpmorgans-920-million-admission-of-guilt 

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

Bob Jensen's threads on The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout

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


The Big Sting
"The Honey Launderers: Uncovering the Largest Food Fraud in U.S. History," by Susan Berfield, Blookmberg Businessweek, September 19, 2013 --- 
Click Here
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/how-germany-s-alw-got-busted-for-the-largest-food-fraud-in-u-dot-s-dot-history?campaign_id=DN092013

Magnus von Buddenbrock and Stefanie Giesselbach arrived in Chicago in 2006 full of hope. He was 30, she was 28, and they had both won their first overseas assignments at ALW Food Group, a family-owned food-trading company based in Hamburg. Von Buddenbrock had joined ALW—the initials stand for its founder, Alfred L. Wolff—four years earlier after earning a degree in marketing and international business, and he was expert in the buying and selling of gum arabic, a key ingredient in candy and soft drinks. Giesselbach had started at ALW as a 19-year-old apprentice. She worked hard, learned quickly, spoke five languages, and within three years had become the company’s first female product manager. Her specialty was honey. When the two colleagues began their new jobs in a small fourth-floor office a few blocks from Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, ALW’s business was growing, and all they saw was opportunity.

On March 24, 2008, von Buddenbrock came to the office around 8:30 a.m., as usual. He was expecting a quiet day: It was a holiday in Germany, and his bosses there had the day off. Giesselbach was on holiday, too; she had returned to Germany to visit her family and boyfriend. Sometime around 10 a.m., von Buddenbrock heard a commotion in the reception area and went to have a look. A half-dozen armed federal agents, all wearing bulletproof vests, had stormed in. “They made a good show, coming in with full force,” he recalls. “It was pretty scary.”

The agents asked if anybody was hiding anywhere, then separated von Buddenbrock and his assistant, the only two employees there. Agents brought von Buddenbrock into a conference room, where they questioned him about ALW’s honey business. After a couple of hours they left, taking with them stacks of paper files, copies of computer hard drives, and samples of honey.

Giesselbach returned from Germany three days later. Her flight was about to land at O’Hare when the crew announced that everyone would have to show their passports at the gate. As Giesselbach walked off the plane, federal agents pulled her aside. She, too, answered their questions about ALW’s honey shipments. After an hour, they let her leave. The agents, from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Department of Homeland Security, had begun to uncover a plot by ALW to import millions of pounds of cheap honey from China by disguising its origins.

Americans consume more honey than anyone else in the world, nearly 400 million pounds every year. About half of that is used by food companies in cereals, bread, cookies, and all sorts of other processed food. Some 60 percent of the honey is imported from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and other trading partners. Almost none comes from China. After U.S. beekeepers accused Chinese companies of selling their honey at artificially low prices, the government imposed import duties in 2001 that as much as tripled the price of Chinese honey. Since then, little enters from China legally.

Von Buddenbrock and Giesselbach continued to cooperate with the investigators, according to court documents. In September 2010, though, the junior executives were formally accused of helping ALW perpetuate a sprawling $80 million food fraud, the largest in U.S. history. Andrew Boutros, assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago, had put together the case: Eight other ALW executives, including Alexander Wolff, the chief executive officer, and a Chinese honey broker, were indicted on charges alleging a global conspiracy to illegally import Chinese honey going back to 2002. Most of the accused executives live in Germany and, for now, remain beyond the reach of the U.S. justice system. They are on Interpol’s list of wanted people. U.S. lawyers for ALW declined to comment.

In the spring of 2006, as Giesselbach, who declined requests for an interview, was preparing for her job in Chicago, she started receiving e-mail updates about various shipments of honey moving through ports around the world. According to court documents, one on May 3 was titled “Loesungmoeglichkeiten,” or “Solution possibilities.” During a rare inspection, U.S. customs agents had become suspicious about six shipping containers of honey headed for ALW’s customers. The honey came from China but had been labeled Korean White Honey.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout

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


Fraud Beat:  How Dirty are NASCAR Races?
"More Allegations Of Race “Fixing” At RIR," National Speed Sports News, September 10, 2013 ---
http://www.nationalspeedsportnews.com/nascar/sprint-cup-nascar/more-allegations-of-race-fixing-at-rir/

Jensen Comment
The big unanswered question is the degree to which organized crime has infiltrated the NASCAR races? We may never know.

An even bigger question is how much organized crime has infiltrated opera, especially Italian opera.
A finance professor friend of mine said the following:
"I'm too dumb for opera and too smart for NASCAR."

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


"What To Do When Excel Worksheet Tabs Go Missing," by David Ringstrom, AccountingWeb, September 20, 2013 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/what-do-when-excel-worksheet-tabs-go-missing/222428?source=technology


Apophasis (Paralipsis versus Proslepsis) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeteritio

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

"The ‘Times’ Tries Zeugma, and Readers’ Patience," by Ben Yagoda, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, September 10, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/09/10/the-times-tries-zeugma-and-readers-patience/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

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


"Facebook and Twitter Are Converging:  The two largest social networks are becoming more similar, as they borrow each other’s features, and search for profit," by Tim Simonite, MIT's Technology Review, September 13, 2013 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519296/facebook-and-twitter-are-converging/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130916

Bob Jensen's threads on social networking for educators ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm


You're only poor if you choose to be
Dolly Parton in the song "Coat of Many Colors"

U.S. Census Report:  Only a small percentage of impoverished adults actually say it's because they can't find employment.
"Why The Poor Don't Work, According To The Poor," by Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic, September 23, 2013 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/why-the-poor-dont-work-according-to-the-poor/279900/

Conservative Republicans have officially made it their mission to end food stamps as we know them. Such was evident last week, when the House GOP voted to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as food stamps are now known, by $39 billion over a decade and begin bulking up its work requirements, along the lines of welfare reform in the 1990s. 

Whether you believe this a good or humane idea probably boils down to your take on a single question: why don't the poor, who make up the overwhelming majority of food stamp recipients (nearly 50 million of them), go to work? In 2012, more than 26 million 18-to-64-year-old adults lived under the poverty line; about 15 million of them didn't have a job during the year. Is the economy to blame? Or are personal choices at fault? 

If you're a liberal, your answer is probably pretty cut and dry, and these days likely involves the word "recession." But conservatives tend to take a different view. They argue that whereas unemployment among middle class families rises and falls with the health of the job market, poverty is shaped and fueled mostly by cultural forces, that the poor could work if they wanted, and that the safety net lulls them into indolence. One of their key data points on this front comes from the Census. Each year, the bureau asks jobless Americans why it is they've been out of work. And traditionally, a only a small percentage of impoverished adults actually say it's because they can't find employment, a point that New York University professor Lawrence Mead, one of the intellectual architects of welfare reform, made to Congress in recent testimony

In 2007, for instance, 6.4 percent of adults who lived under the poverty line and didn't work in the past year said it was because they couldn't find a job. As of 2012, it had more than doubled, leaving it at a still-small 13.5 percent. By comparison, more than a quarter said they stayed home for family reasons and more than 30 percent cited a disability. 

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
What the article overlooks is that millions of people who are described as "not working" really are working in the underground economy where cash wages are tax free (and benefits free) to maids, farm workers, construction workers, care providers, roofers, etc. ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm#Poor


A public library keeps no intentional secrets about its mechanisms; a search engine keeps many.
"'Tip-of-the-Tongue Syndrome,' Transactive Memory, and How the Internet Is Making Us Smarter," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, September 13, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/13/clive-thompson-smarter-than-you-think/

Jensen Comment
What I found is that the Internet makes me aware of knowledge that I certainly would not have stumbled upon before the days of the Internet. Some may argue that this is like learning a little bit about a lot of things. But I'm currently writing a technical article invited by a journal. The Internet has most certainly helped me drill deeper and deeper to learn more about an angel on the head of a pin.


I saw an segment on ABC News where San Antonio has a new public library without books.

"A Bookless Library Opens in San Antonio:  The all-digital space – stocked with 10,000 e-books and 500 e-readers –resembles an Apple store. But is that really a library?" by Josh Sanburn, Time Magazine, September 13, 2013 ---
http://nation.time.com/2013/09/13/a-bookless-library-opens-in-san-antonio/ 

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


Rules for Teachers in 1872 & 1915: No Drinking, Smoking, or Trips to Barber Shops and Ice Cream Parlors ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/rules-for-teachers-in-1872-1915-no-drinking-smoking-or-trips-to-barber-shops-and-ice-cream-parlors.html


Remember when Bob Jensen was secretly married to Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe at the same time?
"An MIT grad student can find and even change memories in a mouse’s brain," by Steve Ramirez, MIT's Technology Review, September 2013 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/lists/innovators-under-35/2013/visionary/steve-ramirez/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130913

Jensen Comment
Think of how revolutionary this would be if we could make human beings remember technical things that they never learned --- like FAS 133 and IAS 39. The hardest part would be making them understand technical things they "memorized."


"How To Become A Great Teacher," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, September 5, 2013 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-to-become-great-teacher.html

Jensen Comment
What Joe does not explain is why students who really, really, really want to learn what you are teaching think you're a bad teacher. The RateMyProfessor.com site is replete with examples of students who want to learn and feel they've been given terrible teachers.

And some students who don't care two hoots about the subject matter (such as in a general education core course in anthropology) may think that the teacher is terrific for reasons other than giving out easy top grades.

I hesitate to say it's a necessary condition, but it's almost a necessary condition for a great teacher to exude enthusiasm for the subject matter of the course. Then if the course is small enough for an instructor to get to know her/his students, then genuine caring about what they learn in the course is a real plus for great teaching. The problem of course is that there are exceptions to almost every "rule" in teaching.

Always remember that what students think makes a great teacher does not always make a great teacher. Students want complicated things to learn made easy. Really great teachers will make them learn it on their own for metacognitive reasons ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Students may not appreciate that fact until years after graduation when all they can remember about a course is what they learned on their own.

The problem of course is that there are exceptions to almost every "rule" in teaching.


Respondus Monitor - online exams proctor ---
http://youtu.be/lGyc_HBchOw
Link forwarded by Richard Campbell

Bob Jensen's threads on proctoring online examinations ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline


A timely (Part II) article from an author called "Dr. Emelee" who is really not yet a "Dr."
"Getting a PhD in Accounting Isn't Really About Teaching," by Dr Emelee, Going Concern, September 12, 2013 ---
http://goingconcern.com/post/getting-phd-accounting-isnt-really-about-teaching

This is the second post from Dr. Emelee, a former Big 4 employee who is in process of obtaining his PhD. Read his first post here.
 
Now for the second statement, “The PhD is not really about teaching.”
 
You know how you thought those professors you only saw two days a week were chilling out the rest of the week? Well, some are. Especially if they have tenure. Being a professor can be a cake job, but to get to the gravy you still have to grind out around five brutal years after getting the doctorate. Many of the professors you only see two days a week are not chilling out. They are working somewhere else where students and bored colleagues can’t come by to bother them every half hour. They are at home working on research papers. And you now know that means they are reading up on psychology theory and thinking about how to design an experiment to see if financial compensation alters people’s risk tolerances. Or they are out teaching CPE to professionals hoping that some of these same professionals will allow the researcher to administer experiments to their employees. Or they are working with a dataset with millions of observations and spending weeks cleaning it up just to get it ready for some brutal statistical analysis. Or they are using multivariate calculus, sometimes with just a pencil and lots of scratch paper, to make sure they understand the behind-the-scenes workings of an econometric technique they are applying.
 
You’ll notice that teaching isn’t connected to any of that. Universities vary, but professors typically teach between one and three classes during a given semester. If profs only teach two or three classes each semester, you can do the math and see that the majority of their time is, in fact, not spent teaching. That’s why publications are the backbone of getting tenure at a university- because research truly is the main part of being a professor. 
 
It makes perfect sense that the average person’s preconceived notions of the PhD are off the mark. Think about why people go to college. People go to college to learn to do something they don’t know how to do. For accounting, people learn the accounting rules as undergrads. They then go on for master’s degrees to hone their skills even more. So, if the undergrad and masters were about becoming better accountants, doesn’t it make sense that the PhD teaches you even more about accounting and… you become…. a Super Accountant!?!? Or even a Super Accountant that’s also a Super Teacher?!?! 
 
This line of reasoning may make sense, but that’s not at all what happens in a PhD program. Your first classes as a PhD student will teach you about experimental design, threats to validity, the scientific method applied to social phenomenon, measurement theory, and statistics.
 
What about taking classes on how to teach? Do PhD programs at least train PhD students to be effective in the classroom? The answer ranges from not at all to not really. Some doctoral programs require PhD students to teach and some do not. The programs that require teaching may just make the PhD student teach without first taking any formal classes about how to teach. There are programs that require PhD students to do teaching mentorships or even take classes on teaching, but this is still rare. When classes about effective teaching are required, they are still a small fraction of what the PhD student focuses on.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on sad state of North American doctoral programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms


The analogy would be proposing to your sweetheart in June without revealing your previous marital record  until the day of the wedding in December. Why should your new bride know early on that you had five previous wives and eight children about to be released from reform school? The same goes for your own secret prison record for two statutory rapes.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on September 13, 2013

Twitter is putting the JOBS Act to work
The company fittingly
used a Tweet to announce that it has filed confidential paperwork to begin the process for its highly anticipated IPO, the WSJ reports. As MoneyBeat’s Telis Demos notes, the JOBS Act allows companies with less than $1 billion in revenue or  nonconvertible debt (known as emerging growth companies) to make an initial confidential filing that only the SEC can see. Since the law was implemented last April, the number of companies making confidential IPO filings has outpaced those submitting public filings, CFOJ noted back in May. But Twitter is the highest-profile name to do so.

The NYT’s Steven M. Davidoff says that the situation with Twitter is exactly the kind of thing opponents of the JOBS Act had warned about: A prominent company, known around the world, has filed for what will most likely be the most anticipated stock offering since Facebook—and we know precious little about its business. “No selected financial data, no information about capitalization or operations, no ‘risk factors’” or anything else you typically find in a company’s S-1. Under the Act, companies don’t have to make their public filing until 21 days before they launch a “roadshow,” and the filing doesn’t obligate Twitter to set a timeline for selling its shares, the Journal notes.

Twitter is already valued at more than $9 billion, as judged by private sales by employees of their stock to BlackRock earlier this year, people familiar with that transaction tell the WSJ. And if it goes public soon, it could reap rewards from a buoyant market and a hot period for IPOs.

 


Aside from my hero Frank Partnoy, one of my favorite writers about Wall Street frauds is Michael Lewis. Aside from being experts on frauds they are extremely humorous writers. You can find a timeline of their books and articles and
CBS Sixty Minutes interviews at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds

"Michael Lewis on the Next Crisis," by Brad Wieners, Bloomberg Businessweek, September  9, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-12/michael-lewis-on-the-next-crisis?campaign_id=DN091213

Was Lehman unjustly singled out when it was allowed to fail?
Lehman Brothers was the only one that experienced justice. They should’ve all been left to the mercy of the marketplace. I don’t feel, oh, how sad that Lehman went down. I feel, how sad that
Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) didn’t follow. I would’ve liked to have seen the crisis play itself out more. The problem is, we would’ve all paid the price. It’s a close call, but I think the long-term effects would’ve been better.

What surprised you most while reporting on the crisis?
The realization that it had actually paid for everyone to behave the way they behaved. Working on The Big Short, I first thought of it as this bet, and there were winners and losers on both sides of the bet. In one sense there was—but on Wall Street, even the losers got rich. So that was the thing I couldn’t get out of my head: that failure was so well-rewarded. It wasn’t that they’d been foolish and idiotic. They’d been incentivized to do disastrous things.

Henry Paulson, the man behind the bank bailouts, recently said, “The root cause of every financial crisis is flawed government policies.” Is that fair?
Some of the government’s policies have been idiotic. But the idea that the story begins and ends with government policy is insane. Wall Street, all by itself, orchestrated the crisis by a web of deceit that was breathtaking. If Wall Street continues to operate in that spirit, I would argue that there’s almost nothing the government can do to prevent them from doing bad things. Incentives are at the bottom of it all. At the gambling end of Wall Street, the people who are making decisions are making decisions not with their money, but with other people’s money, [so] they themselves are not personally responsible.

The other things at the bottom of it all are core to the human condition—optimism, gullibility, greed, panic. Is there any way, finally, to prevent people from behaving this way?
Yeah, what can you do? Well, you can lessen the reward for behaving this way. You can punish people more for behaving in this way. Part of this story is the story of a moral problem, and the moral problem grows out of the change in the structure of Wall Street. When there were partnerships and people’s money was on the line … they were encouraged to behave in ways that were to the long-term benefit of the organizations they belonged to. Long-term behavior is just much different from short-term behavior—it encourages a different morality. And for several decades on Wall Street, the short-term sensibility has been encouraged and compensated very highly. So what you’ve got is a culture that is all about that. Whether they say it or not, that’s sort of the water in which the fish swim. I think as a result you have, basically, total neglect of social responsibility.

Is this related to wealth inequity, the 1 Percent?
It isn’t because of what people are worth. It’s because their incentive system has changed, [which has] changed the values of people who were there. I think that’s a big problem. And the result is that people don’t trust the system. Why would you? The cost of the mistrust is hard to measure, but it’s big. If you’d asked me [in 2008], is the reform process going to play itself out the way that it has, I’d have said, No way—there’s going to be a more drastic change in the system. But there hasn’t been. I don’t know what it takes, what other crises would have to come down the pipe.

Has Silicon Valley replaced Wall Street as the place for bright young people to make their millions?
My sense is that even though the financial crisis has lessened the appeal of the big Wall Street firm, it’s still appealing to kids in school, for the simple reason that unlike Silicon Valley, where you do have to know something to break in, the barriers to entry on Wall Street are quite low once you have the [Ivy League] credentials. If you’re a certain kind of kid who doesn’t actually know anything about anything, Wall Street is still a great place to go.

Are you able to sleep easier now, or are things as tenuous as ever?
I’m in an emotionally complicated position: The worse it gets, the better it is for me. In a weird way, the worst thing that could happen is for the financial sector to figure out how to behave.

Continued in article


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on September 12, 2013

Where is Dick Fuld now? 
Almost five years ago, Lehman Brothers went into the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, the fission bomb trigger to the thermonuclear event we now call the financial crisis. Since then, many former Lehman executives have found employment on Wall Street. Not so former CEO Dick Fuld, a character so outsize—even for a Wall Street filled with such types—that peers called him “the Gorilla” for his “brutish manner and aggressiveness.” Post-Lehman, Mr. Fuld might as well be called “the Dodo” because he has disappeared from his native habitat, the big money Wall Street scene. Mr. Fuld has sold off real-estate properties and art from his wife’s collection to pay for lawsuits filed by those organizations that lost heavily when Lehman’s $40 billion real-estate business went bust.  True, he has pitched deals to Blackstone and BlackRock, among others, but to no success Wall Street insiders tell Businessweek’s Joshua Green. Mr. Fuld and his wife are now major investors in a tiny Phoenix-based chemical company that grew out a holding company for a San Francisco strip club. “His real problem is that he’s forever associated with the Lehman bankruptcy, and anyone who hires him, or even speaks up for him, risks having this connection rub off on them,” writes Green. “Fuld has become Wall Street’s Hester Prynne, forever branded.”

Jensen Comment
If the SEC had any guts this gorilla should be looking out through bars.

Bob Jensen's threads on Dick Fuld's wrong doings aided and abetted by a Big Four auditing firm are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Ernst
Scroll down to the Lehman Bros. fraudulent reporting.


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on September 12, 2013

What would Eno do? 
In 1974, English musician and composer Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, a visual artist, authored, packaged and sold Oblique Strategies, a pack of cards designed to help artists find inspiration and battle creative roadblocks. Each card in the deck held a koan-like suggestion—“go outside and shut the door,” for example—and the idea was that an artist would draw upon the deck in the face of a creative crisis. Musicians have most famously tapped Oblique Strategies over the years, but they are not the only ones. In this week’s 
Foreign Policy, Jeffrey Lewis shuffles the deck to help explain, of all things, President Obama’s Syria strategy. “Honour thy error as a hidden intention,” best explains how Secretary of State John Kerry’s verbal stumbling led to a breakthrough (possibly) on Syria’s chemical weapons, Lewis writes. All of this is just a long way of saying that if Oblique Strategies can work for President Obama and a Berlin-era David Bowie, it can certainly work for executives decades removed from their time at Harvard Business School. Imagine a world where Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman drew the card, “Would anyone want it?”…where Google CEO Larry Page turned over “Voice your suspicions”…where Apple CEO Tim Cook pulled “Make a sudden destructive unpredictable action; incorporate.”


Awe Shucks! (slide show)
"Maine Processor Has An Incredible Way Of Getting Lobster Out Of Its Shell," by Dena Spector, Business Insider, September 12, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/shucks-maine-lobster-processing-facility-tour-2013-9

Jensen Comment
With Shucks in the game the price of lobster can only go up and up and up.


Counterfactual Conditional Examples --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual#Examples

Examples

The difference between indicative and counterfactual conditionals, in a context of past time reference, can be illustrated with a pair of examples in which the if clause is in the past indicative in the first example but in the pluperfect subjunctive in the second:

The protasis (the if clause) of the first sentence may or may not be true according to the speaker, so the apodosis (the then clause) also may or may not be true; the apodosis is said by the speaker to be true if the protasis is true. In this sentence the if clause and the then clause are both in the past tense of the indicative mood. In the second sentence, the speaker is speaking with a certainty that Oswald did shoot Kennedy (according to the speaker, the protasis is false), and therefore the main clause deals with the counterfactual result — what would have happened. In this sentence the if clause is in the pluperfect subjunctive form of the subjunctive mood, and the then clause is in the conditional perfect form of the conditional mood.

A corresponding pair of examples with present time reference uses the present indicative in the if clause of the first sentence but the past subjunctive in the second sentence's if clause:

Here again, in the first sentence the if clause may or may not be true; the then clause may or may not be true but certainly (according to the speaker) is true conditional on the if clause being true. Here both the if clause and the then clause are in the present indicative. In the second sentence, the if clause is not true, while the then clause may or may not be true but certainly would be true in the counterfactual circumstance of the if clause being true. In this sentence the if clause is in the past subjunctive form of the subjunctive mood, and the then clause is in the conditional mood.

Psychology

People engage in counterfactual thinking frequently. Experimental evidence indicates that people's thoughts about counterfactual conditionals differ in important ways from their thoughts about indicative conditionals.

Comprehension

Participants in experiments were asked to read sentences, including counterfactual conditionals, e.g., 'if Mark had left home early he would have caught the train'. Afterwards they were asked to identify which sentences they had been shown. They often mistakenly believed they had been shown sentences corresponding to the presupposed facts, e.g., 'Mark did not leave home early' and 'Mark did not catch the train' (Fillenbaum, 1974). In other experiments, participants were asked to read short stories that contained counterfactual conditionals, e.g., 'if there had been roses in the flower shop then there would have been lilies'. Later in the story they read sentences corresponding to the presupposed facts, e.g., 'there were no roses and there were no lilies'. The counterfactual conditional 'primed' them to read the sentence corresponding to the presupposed facts very rapidly; no such priming effect occurred for indicative conditionals (Santamaria, Espino, and Byrne, 2005). They spend different amounts of time 'updating' a story that contains a counterfactual conditional compared to one that contains factual information (De Vega, Urrutia, and Riffo, 2007) and they focus on different parts of counterfactual conditionals (Ferguson and Sanford, 2008).

Reasoning

Experiments have compared the inferences people make from counterfactual conditionals and indicative conditionals. Given a counterfactual conditional, e.g., 'If there had been a circle on the blackboard then there would have been a triangle', and the subsequent information 'in fact there was no triangle', participants make the modus tollens inference 'there was no circle' more often than they do from an indicative conditional (Byrne and Tasso, 1999). Given the counterfactual conditional and the subsequent information 'in fact there was a circle', participants make the modus ponens inference as often as they do from an indicative conditional.

Psychological accounts

Ruth M.J. Byrne proposed in The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality that people construct mental representations that encompass two possibilities when they understand, and reason from, a counterfactual conditional, e.g., 'if Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have'. They envisage the conjecture 'Oswald did not shoot Kennedy and someone else did' and they also think about the presupposed facts 'Oswald did shoot Kennedy and someone else did not' (Byrne, 2005). According to the mental model theory of reasoning, they construct mental models of the alternative possibilities, as described in Deduction (Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 1991).


From the Scout Report on September 13, 2013

Classmint --- https://www.classmint.com/ 

What if you could create beautiful visual notes to explain various concepts quickly and without much fuss? It would be rather useful and such a thing is possible with Classmint. This application allows users to create interactive study notes with annotations, audio content, and images explaining everything from ecology to Euclidean geometry. Visitors can check out the tutorial, then create a login and go ahead and get started. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


Fileee --- https://www.fileee.com/en/

Would you like a personal assistant but are currently unable to afford such a luxury? Fileee can help you in this regard as it will help organize all of your paper and digital documents in one system. Visitors just need to sign up for a free account and then go ahead and drag and drop PDFs, word documents, and pictures of documents into their new dropbox. It's a wonderful service and it is compatible with all operating systems.


What killed off the woolly mammoths?
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/oct/05-what-killed-off-the-woolly-mammoths

Woolly mammoth extinction due to warming climate
http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2013/sep/11/woolly-mammoth-extinction-warming-climate

New woolly mammoth lineage discovered
http://www.livescience.com/39544-new-woolly-mammoth-lineage.html

Humans acquitted of mammoth murder
http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/humans-acquitted-of-mammoth-murder-130912.htm

Hendrik Poinar: Bring back the wooly mammoth!
http://www.ted.com/talks/hendrik_poinar_bring_back_the_woolly_mammoth.html

Tracking mammoths
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/125-mammoth-tusks/larmer-text

From the Scout Report on September 20, 2013

Feedly --- http://cloud.feedly.com/#welcome 

For those still mourning the loss of Google Reader, Feedly might be a good place to rebuild. Start with a particular blog or URL you would like to follow, or explore one of the suggested topics. The smooth, easy-to-use interface makes it a snap to browse the headlines or delve more deeply into particular stories of interest. Feedly is compatible with all operating systems.

StartMe --- http://www.startme.com/ 

The StartMe application gives Internet users the opportunity to create their own personal browser startpage with their favorite bookmarks and RSS feeds. The drag and drop interface is user-friendly, particularly for computer neophytes. Visitors can also incorporate extensions for popular browsers or tweak the appearance of their startpage as they see fit. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


Minimum wage and overtime protections extended this week to cover home
care workers in the United States
U.S. to include Home Care Aides in Wage and Overtime Law
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/business/us-to-include-home-care-workers-in-wage-and-overtime-law.html?_r=0

The White House is giving 2 million health-care workers a raise
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/17/the-white-house-is-giving-2-million-health-care-workers-a-raise/

OT, Minimum Wage Extended to Health Care Workers
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/rules-boost-pay-home-health-care-workers-20282093

United States Department of Labor: Press Release
http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/whd/WHD20131922.htm

CDC: Health Care Workers
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/healthcare/

National Association for Home Care & Hospice
http://www.nahc.org/
 


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


Education Tutorials

University of Wisconsin Digital Collections: Learning Resources (science and humanities) --- http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/learning-resources

Digital Library of Indigenous Science Resources (Native American, Indian) --- http://www.dlisr.org/index.html

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics --- http://www.nctm.org/resources/content.aspx?id=32702

Ascend: Aspen Institute (parent-child programs) --- http://ascend.aspeninstitute.org/

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: Lessons & Resources --- http://www.nctm.org/resources

Illinois Humanities Council --- http://www.prairie.org/

British Library: Blogs --- http://www.bl.uk/blogs

British Library: Podcasts --- http://www.bl.uk/whatson/podcasts/index.html

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

Historypin (children) --- http://www.historypin.com/

The ABC of Architects: An Animated Flipbook of Famous Architects and Their Best-Known Buildings --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/the_abc_of_architects_an_animated_flipbook_of_famous_architects_and_their_best-known_buildings.html

E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life: Free Access to All The World’s Knowledge About Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/e-o-wilsons-the-encyclopedia-of-life.html

Bob Jensen's bookmarks for multiple disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

"Get Over It. Math is Hard," by Tom Keene, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 17, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-17/get-over-it-dot-math-is-hard  

Poetry Resources (writing and reading) --- http://www.freebooknotes.com/ultimate-poetry-resource-guide/


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Darwin’s Personal Library Goes Digital: 330 Books Online --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/06/darwins_personal_library_goes_digital_330_books_online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Trace Darwin’s Footsteps with Google’s New Virtual Tour of the Galapagos Islands ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/googles-new-virtual-tour-of-the-galapagos-islands.html

Biodiversity Heritage Library: Charles Darwin's Library --- http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/darwinlibrary

Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) --- Click Here

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) --- Click Here

Richard Feynman Gets Jazzed Explaining How Rubber Bands Work ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/richard-feynman-gets-jazzed-explaining-how-rubber-bands-work.html

The Famous Feynman Lectures on Physics: The New Online Edition (in HTML5) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-famous-feynman-lectures-on-physics-now-online-in-html5.html

Chemical Education Xchange --- http://www.jce.divched.org/

American Chemical Society - Chemistry Education Resources  --- Click Here
http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_TRANSITIONMAIN&node_id=127&use_sec=false&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=53f90531-d56e-491c-9c8b-fae64f0e2f0c

Learn Chemistry: Chemistry Resources for Teachers ---
http://www.rsc.org/learn-chemistry/resource/listing?searchtext=&fcategory=all&filter=all&Audience=AUD00000001&displayname=teachers

Genetic Engineering --- http://www.discoveryeducation.com/teachers/free-lesson-plans/genetic-engineering.cfm

Endocrine System Evolution: A Textbook Example? --- http://www.icr.org/article/7673/

Sound Waves: Coastal and Marine Research News from Across the USGS --- http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/index.php

National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering  --- http://nisee2.berkeley.edu/

United States National Seismic Hazard Maps --- http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/hazmaps/

Environmental Protection Agency: Water Science --- http://www2.epa.gov/science-and-technology/water-science

Virtual Open Heart Surgery --- http://www.abc.net.au/science/lcs/heart.htm

The Human Heart: An Online Exploration from The Franklin Institute --- http://www.fi.edu/learn/heart/index.html

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute --- http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov

The Whole Brain Atlas  --- http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html

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

What Did the Continents Look Like Millions of Years Ago?
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/what-did-the-continents-look-like-millions-of-years-ago/279892/

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

E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life: Free Access to All The World’s Knowledge About Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/e-o-wilsons-the-encyclopedia-of-life.html

New American Radio --- http://somewhere.org/

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service --- http://www.fws.gov/landscape-conservation/

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: National Digital Library --- http://digitalmedia.fws.gov/

Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science


Social Science and Economics Tutorials

Working Papers: U.S. Census Bureau --- http://www.census.gov/research/working_papers/

Ascend: Aspen Institute (parent-child programs) --- http://ascend.aspeninstitute.org/

Environmental Protection Agency: Water Science --- http://www2.epa.gov/science-and-technology/water-science

United States Department of Agriculture: Marketing and Trade
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?navid=MARKETING_TRADE&navtype=SU

Illinois Humanities Council --- http://www.prairie.org/

Understanding Boston --- http://www.tbf.org/understanding-boston

Tehran Propaganda Murals ---
http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/digital_collections/tehran_murals.cfm

Iran Chamber Society (information database about Iran_ --- http://www.iranchamber.com

Women's World in Qajar Iran (1796-1926) --- http://www.qajarwomen.org/

The Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion --- http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/case/

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social


Law and Legal Studies

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


Math Tutorials

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics --- http://www.nctm.org/resources/content.aspx?id=32702

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: Lessons & Resources --- http://www.nctm.org/resources

Lottery Strategies for Dummies
According To Math, Here's When You Should Buy A Powerball Ticket --- Click Here
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-when-math-says-you-should-start-to-care-about-powerball-2013-9#ixzz2fBRqD3eg

"Get Over It. Math is Hard," by Tom Keene, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 17, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-17/get-over-it-dot-math-is-hard  

"Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Spinoff Team Up on Remedial Math," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Carnegie-Foundation-and/141839/?cid=wc

A Stanford University spinoff and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching plan to announce a partnership on Tuesday to expand the distribution of online remedial-mathematics courses that so far have tripled students' success rates in half the time.

NovoEd, an online-learning start-up company that encourages students to work in small groups and to learn from one another, teamed up with the foundation to tackle what is widely considered a nationwide crisis in remedial math.

More than 60 percent of students entering community college require at least one remedial-math course before they can progress to credit-bearing courses. Fewer than a third of those students complete it, according to the foundation.

Over the past two years, the Carnegie Foundation has been trying to improve those numbers through a remedial-math program involving more than 40 community colleges and universities in at least 10 states.

Statway and Quantway, which together make up Carnegie's Pathways Program, have allowed students to complete in one year remedial-math sequences that used to take two years.

A Carnegie spokeswoman said that 17 percent of remedial-math students in the colleges that make up the Statway network historically have achieved math credit within three years, but 49 percent of those in the Statway program did so within a single year. Results were similar with the Quantway program.

The program's director and a senior managing partner at Carnegie, Bernadine Chuck Fong, said in an e-mail on Monday that NovoEd's focus on "student-centered, collaborative learning and pedagogy" meshed with the foundation's collaborative strategies.

A Focus on Collaborative Learning

Amin Saberi, co-founder and chief executive officer of NovoEd, agreed. "By combining forces, we can scale up the curriculum and address this national challenge head-on," he said, also in an interview on Monday. He is on leave from Stanford, where he is an associate professor of management science and engineering.

NovoEd started in January 2013 as an in-house program at Stanford called Venture Lab. Its massive open online courses have reached about 500,000 people in more than 150 countries, Mr. Saberi said.

NovoEd differs from Coursera and Udacity, two MOOC spinoffs that were also started by Stanford professors, in its focus on collaborative learning, Mr. Saberi said.

In NovoEd courses, students are typically assigned to groups of four to seven, based on their experiences and locations, to work on problems and projects together. They're also encouraged to discuss roadblocks they've faced in their own learning and how they've overcome the obstacles.

In the courses, students rate one another as team members, which gives them incentives to be active participants.

Mr. Saberi said the approach the partnership will take, which includes studying in contexts that are relevant to students, is particularly effective with first-generation and underprepared students who often struggle in online courses. Remedial-math students might, for instance, study how a 20-percent interest rate on a credit card adds up over time.

Continued in article

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

Also don't forget the wonderful free remedial and advanced math videos at the Khan Academy ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/


History Tutorials

The 10 Greatest Books Ever, According to 125 Top Authors (Download Them for Free) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-10-greatest-books-ever.html

Portraits of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin & Other Literary Legends by Gisčle Freund ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/classic-portraits-of-virginia-woolf-james-joyce-walter-benjamin.html

Discover Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Version of the Bible, and Read the Curious Edition Online ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/thomas-jeffersons-cut-and-paste-bible.html

Visualizing Slavery: The Map Abraham Lincoln Spent Hours Studying During the Civil War ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/visualizing-slavery-the-map-abraham-lincoln-spent-hours-studying-during-the-civil-war.html

Historypin (children) --- http://www.historypin.com/

British Library: Blogs --- http://www.bl.uk/blogs

10 Surprising Books That Parents Have Tried To Ban From Schools ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/banned-books-in-school-libraries-2013-9

James Wallace Black, 1825-1896  (photographs) ---
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/collections/72157625067549743/

University of Wisconsin Digital Collections: Learning Resources (science and humanities) --- http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/learning-resources

Digital Library of Indigenous Science Resources (Native American, Indian) --- http://www.dlisr.org/index.html

See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Handwritten Manuscripts for The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/princeton-digitizes-f-scott-fitzgeralds-handwritten-manuscripts.html

The ABC of Architects: An Animated Flipbook of Famous Architects and Their Best-Known Buildings --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/the_abc_of_architects_an_animated_flipbook_of_famous_architects_and_their_best-known_buildings.html

Fort Collins History Connection --- http://history.poudrelibraries.org/

Colorado State University: Great Western Sugar Digital Collection --- http://lib.colostate.edu/archives/greatwestern/

Polar Oral History Program --- http://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/6039

New American Radio --- http://somewhere.org/

"Is Franz Kafka Overrated? Critics have long tended to see him as a modernist master on par with Joyce, Proust, and Picasso. Let's reconsider that," by Joseph Epstein, The Atlantic, June 19, 2013 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/is-franz-kafka-overrated/309373/

The Famous Feynman Lectures on Physics: The New Online Edition (in HTML5) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-famous-feynman-lectures-on-physics-now-online-in-html5.html

George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/george-orwells-1984-free-ebook-audio-book-study-resources.html

The Odd Habits and Curious Customs of Famous Writers ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/23/odd-type-writers/

The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/the_richard_feynman_film_trilogy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Winterthur Digital Collection (Museum of over 90,000 early American art and household objects) ---
http://museumcollection.winterthur.org/

National African American Photographic Archive
http://catalogquicksearch.memphis.edu/iii/cpro/CollectionViewPage.external?lang=eng&sp=1000011&suite=def

The State Historical Society of Missouri --- http://shs.umsystem.edu/index.shtml

National Archives at St. Louis --- http://www.archives.gov/st-louis/

Illinois Humanities Council --- http://www.prairie.org/

Curious City (Chicago) --- http://curiouscity.wbez.org

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

Tehran Propaganda Murals ---
http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/digital_collections/tehran_murals.cfm

Iran Chamber Society (information database about Iran_ --- http://www.iranchamber.com

Women's World in Qajar Iran (1796-1926) --- http://www.qajarwomen.org/

Joplin Historical Postcards (Missouri) --- http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?page=index;c=joplinic

James Joyce’s “Dirty Letters” to His Wife Nora Are Pornographic, Erotic, Romantic, and Funny (1909) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/james-joyces-dirty-letters-to-his-wife.html

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


Language Tutorials

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


Music Tutorials

Download Free Music from 150+ Classical Composers, Courtesy of Musopen.org ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/download-free-classical-music-from-150-composers-courtesy-of-musopen-org.html

Sheet Music From Canada's Past --- http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/sheetmusic/

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

Poetry Resources (writing and reading) --- http://www.freebooknotes.com/ultimate-poetry-resource-guide/

The Curious History of Punctuation: Author Reveals the Beginnings of the #, ¶, ☞, and More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the-history-of-punctuation.html

See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Handwritten Manuscripts for The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/princeton-digitizes-f-scott-fitzgeralds-handwritten-manuscripts.html

James Joyce’s “Dirty Letters” to His Wife Nora Are Pornographic, Erotic, Romantic, and Funny (1909) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/james-joyces-dirty-letters-to-his-wife.html

The Odd Habits and Curious Customs of Famous Writers ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/23/odd-type-writers/

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


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

September 12, 2013

September 13, 2013

September 14, 2013

September 17, 2013

September 18, 2013

September 18, 2013

September 23, 2013

September 24, 2013

September 25, 2013

September 26, 2013

September 27, 2013

 


Chart:  The Drugs That Cause the Most Harm ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-drugs-that-cause-the-most-harm-2013-9


8 Signs That Your Body Can't Handle Gluten ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/8-signs-of-gluten-intolerance-2013-9

 




A Bit of Humor

Australian Wild Pig Drinks 18 Beers, Gets in Fight with Cow ---
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/3981/20130914/australian-wild-pig-drinks-18-beers-gets-fight-cow.htm


10th Graders Draw Pictures Imagining Philosophers at Work ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/10th-graders-draw-pictures-imagining-philosophers-at-work.html

Jensen Comment
It might be interesting for 10th graders to draw pictures imagining accountants at work . Some of the best outcomes might be candidates to become cartoons published in The New Yorker. For examples from professional cartoonists, go to The New Yorker and observe some cartoons in the category of "accountant" or "accounting" ---
http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons

One of my favorites of a CEO worriedly speaking to a wimpy accounting and stating:
"This company's going to be dead, Digby, unless you can come up with an accounting miracle."

 




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