Set 5 of My Favorite Cartoons and
Humor Photographs
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Humor/Set05/HumorSet05.htm
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Tidbits on November 14,, 2013
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
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/.
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
Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the
World: Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/watch-footage-from-the-psychology-experiment-that-shocked-the-world-milgrams-obedience-study-1961.html
The Case for Studying Physics in a Charming Animated Video ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/animated-video-makes-the-case-for-studying-physics.html
Video: Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama on how the Fed's
Quantitative Easing Doesn’t do Much ---
http://pragcap.com/eugene-fama-qe-doesnt-do-much
Video: Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama on QE, Tapering, and
Volatility
http://video.cnbc.cohttp://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000211021
m/gallery/?video=3000211021
Prize-Winning Animation Lets You Fly Through 17th Century
London ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/fly-through-17th-century-london.html
This film reminded me of the time we
watched actors swinging out above the audience in a live performance of Phantom
of the Opera.
However, this film is much more spectacular in terms of trapeze performers ---
http://telly.com/embed.php?guid=L558O&autoplay=0
A Television Commercial Forwarded by
Auntie Bev ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoABty_zE00
Vintage Film Shows How the Oxford English Dictionary Was Made
in 1925 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/how-the-oxford-english-dictionary-was-made-in-1925.html
Watch a 44-Minute Supercut of Every Woody Allen Stammer, From
Every Woody Allen Film ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/watch-a-44-minute-supercut-of-every-woody-allen-stammer.html
German Trapeze Couple ---
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Die+Maiers+trapeze+act+youtube&FORM=VIRE1#view=detail&mid=F02C520B7E45137004E5F02C520B7E45137004E5
Free audio and music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a
Reconstruction That is ‘100% Accurate’ ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/what-ancient-greek-music-sounded-like.html
Free: Listen to 298 Episodes of the Vintage Crime
Radio Series, Dragnet ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/free-listen-to-298-episodes-of-the-vintage-crime-radio-series-dragnet.html
Watch The New America, a Stop Motion Animation
Starring 800+ Laser Engraved Wood Blocks ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/watch-the-new-america-a-stop-motion-animation-starring-800-laser-engraved-wood-blocks.html
Forte on America's Got Talent ---
http://www.flixxy.com/forte-americas-got-talent.htm?utm_source=nl
Charlie Parker Plays with Jazz Greats Coleman
Hawkins, Buddy Rich, Lester Young & Ella Fitzgerald (1950) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/charlie-parker-plays-with-jazz-greats-coleman-hawkins-buddy-rich-lester-young-ella-fitzgerald-1950.html
Watch Rare Film of Richard Pryor Singing the
Blues: No Joke, All Heart ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/watch-rare-film-of-richard-pryor-singing-the-blues-no-joke-all-heart.html
Benefits of Welfare ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRRwZDSmTVI&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DwRRwZDSmTVI&app=desktop
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
This Is Mars: Mesmerizing Ultra-High-Resolution NASA Photos at
the Intersection of Art and Science ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/31/this-is-mars-xavier-barral/
Tour the Red Planet In 3D On The Mars Express ---
http://readwrite.com/2013/11/05/tour-the-red-planet-in-3d-on-the-mars-express#awesm=~omqhJFr8G6B4Ir
29 Awesome Pictures Of The US Navy Through History ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-navy-history-photos-2013-10
The Navy's Most Advanced Carrier Ever ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/navys-most-advanced-carrier-launches-2013-11
Northwestern University World War 2 Poster Collection ---
http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/wwii-posters/
Harry Ransom Center: Circus Collection ---
http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15878coll6#nav_top
PBS: Circus ---
http://www.pbs.org/opb/circus/
The University of Michigan Museum of Art ---
http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Chrysler Museum of Art ---
http://www.chrysler.org/
MIT: Public Art ---
http://listart.mit.edu/public_art
Public Art Archive ---
http://www.publicartarchive.org/
Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective (pop art) ---
http://roy.artic.edu/
The Warhol: Time Capsule 21 ---
http://www.warhol.org/tc21/main.html
Brooklyn Museum: Andy Warhol: The Last Decade ---
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/andy_warhol/index.php
Wolfsonian Museum: Collections (art nouveau and art deco) ---
http://www.wolfsonian.org/explore/collections/browse
The Warhol: Heroes & Villains: The Comic Book Art of Alex Ross ---
http://www.warhol.org/exhibitions/2011/heroesandvillains/
Eerie Photos Of Once-Majestic Bank Buildings Around The United States ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/vahrenwald-the-peoples-trust-2013-11
"Sylvia Plath’s Unseen Drawings, Edited by Her Daughter and
Illuminated in Her Private Letters," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings,
November 6, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/06/sylvia-plath-drawings-2/
The Art of Sylvia Plath: Revisit Her Sketches,
Self-Portraits, Drawings & Illustrated Letters ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/the_art_of_sylvia_plath_revisit_her_sketches_self-portraits_drawings_illustrated_letters_.html
A Fascinating Glimpse Of Ordinary Life In North Korea ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/sam-gellmans-amazingly-normal-photos-of-north-korea-2013-11
Alberto Martini’s Haunting Illustrations of Dante’s Divine
Comedy (1901-1944) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/alberto-martinis-shocking-illustrations-of-dantes-divine-comedy-1901-1944.html
James Joyce’s Dublin Captured in Vintage Photos from 1897 to
1904 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/james-joyces-dublin-captured-in-vintage-photos.html
Pennell Photography Collection (6,000 photos from the 1920s)---
http://luna.ku.edu:8180/luna/servlet/kuluna01kui~15~15
John Hensel Photograph Collection ---
http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/hensel.html
Travel Diaries and Scrapbooks of Harrison Forman 1932-1973 ---
http://collections.lib.uwm.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/forman/
How The Hardest Hit Areas From Hurricane Sandy Look One Year
Later ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/then-and-now-hurricane-sandy-photos-2013-10
Vino Sans Snobbery: A Charming Illustrated Scratch-and-Sniff Guide to
Becoming a Wine Expert ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/15/scratch-and-sniff-guide-to-becoming-a-wine-expert/
Stunning Images From The Best Wildlife Photo Competition Of
The Year ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-2013-competition-2013-10
The Most Beautiful Places In The World ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-beautiful-places-in-the-world-pictures-2013-10
The Earliest Photos Of 12 Major US Cities ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/earliest-photos-of-big-cities-2013-10
Travel Diaries and Scrapbooks of Harrison Forman
1932-1973 ---
http://collections.lib.uwm.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/forman/
The US Navy's Most Intimidating Creation Yet Just Hit The
Water ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/zumwalt-destroyer-navy-2013-10
USS NORTH DAKOTA: Here's Why This Is The Most Advanced
Submarine In The World ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-navys-expanding-submarine-program-2013-11
Robert McCloskey Sketches for "Make Way for
Ducklings" ---
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/sets/72157636871888613/with/10441859545/
Digital Comic Museum ---
http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/
The British Library: Victorians ---
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/victorians/victorianhome.html
Victorian
Britain: Early photographically illustrated books ---
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/earlyphotos/index.html
King County Earthworks: Land Reclamation as
Sculpture ---
http://www.kingcounty.gov/operations/archives/exhibits/Earthworks.aspx
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
"Finding Time to Read," by Shane Parrish, Farnam
Street, September 2, 2013 ---
http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2013/09/finding-time-to-read/
Thomas Addis Emmet Collection (Over 10,000 historical manuscripts) ---
http://archives.nypl.org/mss/927
Neglected Books You Should Read ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/neglected-books-you-should-read-heres-our-list-now-we-want-yours.html
Including the free Confidence Man by Herman Melville ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/neglected-books-you-should-read-heres-our-list-now-we-want-yours.html
"Little Boy Brown: The Loveliest
Ode to Childhood and Loneliness Ever Written, Illustrated by Legendary Graphic
Designer André François," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, November 11,
2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/05/little-boy-brown-enchanted-lion/
"Sylvia Plath’s Unseen Drawings, Edited by Her Daughter and
Illuminated in Her Private Letters," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings,
November 6, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/06/sylvia-plath-drawings-2/
The Art of Sylvia Plath: Revisit Her Sketches,
Self-Portraits, Drawings & Illustrated Letters ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/the_art_of_sylvia_plath_revisit_her_sketches_self-portraits_drawings_illustrated_letters_.html
For Readers With Limited Attention Spans When Reading Popular
Business Books
15 Famous Business Books Summarized In One Sentence Each ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/famous-business-book-summaries-2013-10
In some instances I don't have the attention span needed for the one-liner. Most
state what is intuitively obvious to me! Like I know success in most instances
depends somewhat on luck and serendipity. What's new?
Vintage Film Shows How the Oxford English Dictionary Was Made in 1925 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/how-the-oxford-english-dictionary-was-made-in-1925.html
The British Library: Victorians ---
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/victorians/victorianhome.html
Victorian
Britain: Early photographically illustrated books ---
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/earlyphotos/index.html
Prickly Ernest Hemingway Returns Letter to Critic: “Wipe Your
Royal Irish Ass On It. You Are Stupid” (1931) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/hemingway-returns-letter-to-critic-1931.html
Free Electronic Literature ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on November 14, 2013
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2013/TidbitsQuotations111413.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
Research Guides at Harvard Library ---
http://guides.library.harvard.edu/hcl
Every Breath You Take
Here's an anti-Bernanke musical
performance by the Dean of Columbia Business School ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u2qRXb4xCU
Ben Bernanke (Chairman of the Federal Reserve and a great friend of big banks)
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke
R. Glenn Hubbard (Dean of the Columbia Business School) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Hubbard_(economics)
Quantitative Easing (QE) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
"Fed Official Who Helped Orchestrate QE: 'I'm Sorry, America,' QE Really
Was A Huge Wall Street Bailout," by Steven Perlberg, Business Insider,
November 12, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/fed-official-sorry-about-qe-2013-11
Andrew Huszar, a former Federal Reserve employee who
executed QE, has written a
Wall Street Journal op-ed apologizing for the
"unprecedented shopping spree."Huszar worked
at the Fed for seven years before leaving for Wall Street. The central bank
recruited him back in 2009 to manage "what was at the heart of QE’s
bond-buying spree–a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in
12 months."
"I can only say: I'm sorry, America," Huszar
writes.
From the Journal:
It wasn't long before
my old doubts resurfaced. Despite the Fed's rhetoric, my program wasn't
helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The
banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever
credit they were extending wasn't getting much cheaper. QE may have been
driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was
pocketing most of the extra cash.
From the trenches,
several other Fed managers also began voicing the concern that QE wasn't
working as planned. Our warnings fell on deaf ears. In the past, Fed
leaders—even if they ultimately erred—would have worried obsessively about
the costs versus the benefits of any major initiative. Now the only
obsession seemed to be with the newest survey of financial-market
expectations or the latest in-person feedback from Wall Street's leading
bankers and hedge-fund managers. Sorry, U.S. taxpayer.
Huszar argues that QE, while "dutifully
compensating for the rest of Washington's dysfunction," has become Wall
Street's new "too big to fail."
Video: Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama on how the Fed's
Quantitative Easing Doesn’t do Much ---
http://pragcap.com/eugene-fama-qe-doesnt-do-much
Video: Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama on QE, Tapering, and
Volatility
http://video.cnbc.cohttp://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000211021
m/gallery/?video=3000211021
Jensen Comment
Where QE has been monumentally successful is in compensating the savings of
older people. Many could previously retire and have saving supplemented by safe
Certificate Deposit interest income. Thanks to QE the CDs and other save savings
alternatives pay virtually zero interest such that these old folks must more of
their savings capital for living expenses. Thanks Ben. You wiped out the old
folks and provide zero incentives for younger folks to save early in the career
for compounded interest. Compounded interest? What's that?
Banks, Bailouts & Irish Literature ---
http://ocw.nd.edu/irish-studies/banks-bailouts-and-irish-literature
Librarians Accuse Harvard Business Publishing of Unfair Prices ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Librarians-Accuse-Harvard/142947/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
The Harvard Business School is operating on the margin and cannot afford to open
share or price fairly. Yeah right!
At any price I view most HBS books and the Harvard Business Review as
best used in place of sleeping aids.
Bob Jensen's threads on other library rip offs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals
Saving Our Top Medical Schools
"Saving Academic Medicine from Obsolescence," by Benjamin P. Sachs, Ralph
Maurer, Steven A. Wartman and Marc J. Kahn, Harvard Business Review Blog,
November 8, 2013 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/saving-academic-medicine-from-obsolescence/
The United States spent 17.9% of the GDP on
healthcare in 2012. Academic medicine, which makes up, approximately, 20% of
these costs ($540 billion), is under profound threat. Teaching hospitals and
medical schools are faced with declining clinical revenue, dwindling
research dollars and increasing tuition costs. To meet these challenges, we
believe
academic medicine must embrace disruptive innovation
in its core missions: educating the next generation of
health professionals, offering comprehensive cutting-edge patient care, and
leading biomedical and clinical research. Medical schools and academic
health centers will need to significantly adapt in each of these areas in
order to ensure the long-term health of the medical profession. The
following are a few examples of disruptive innovations Tulane School of
Medicine has embraced.
Medical information
doubles roughly every five years, making it
impossible for physicians to stay current. Computing power has also
increased to the point that machines like
IBM’s Watson, first programed to play chess and
Jeopardy, are now used to diagnose and recommend treatment for patients.
Mary Cummings, one of the first women aviators to land a plane on an
aircraft carrier, faced a similar situation when she left the navy; a
computer was replacing many of the skills she had acquired in order to fly.
Today, as the Director of the Human and Automation Lab at MIT, she poses an
important and related question: “Are we in Medicine teaching the next
generation of physicians skills or are we teaching them expertise?” If we
are teaching the former, then academic medicine faces obsolescence. However,
if we emphasize the latter, our mission is durable. Skills equip people to
respond to specific well-understood circumstances; expertise provides
the capability to respond to highly complex, dynamic and uncertain
environments.
At Tulane University School of Medicine, we believe
that the focus of medical education should be on how we teach; because what
we teach will be largely out of date by the time students finish their
training. The expertise required for the next generation of physicians is to
be lifelong learners, team players, educators and problem solvers. We teach
expertise through an “inverted” learning model. Students are expected to
have reviewed the subject material before class. During class-time the
students work in small groups to solve problems and explain to their
colleagues issues they did not understand. Master teachers are still needed
to facilitate students’ synthesis of material in a collaborative
discussion-oriented environment, but this structure has the advantage of
allowing investment in the areas where hands-on teaching adds value while
providing cost savings in the areas where it does not. The organization that
is likely to play a major role in providing on-line medical education is the
Kahn Academy under Dr. Rishi Desai. A newly established three and a half
year program for medical students with PhDs in the biomedical sciences
leverages these adult learning principles. This program shortens the time to
get a degree and so reduces the cost of tuition.
Business models for patient care, a key source of
revenue for medical schools, are also undergoing enormous change. Driven by
the need to lower costs, and aided by new technologies, patient care is
moving from the hospital to the outpatient setting and ultimately to
wherever the patient happens to be located. For example, when the ACA
(Affordable Care Act) is fully implemented in 2014 with a substantial
increase in Medicaid recipients, the need for more primary care, as
experienced in Massachusetts, will overwhelm the available capacity to
provide such care.
One solution to this problem is moving the majority
of primary and secondary healthcare delivery into the community. After
Hurricane Katrina, Tulane partnered with a network of Federally Qualified
Health Centers in order to provide services to low and middle-income
patients in community-based clinics designated as medical homes. These not
only provide less expensive care, but also provide the kind of experiential
learning necessary to teach expertise to trainees. Expansion into
telemedicine, which has been shown to reduce the cost of Medicaid in
California and has had a dramatic impact in the United Kingdom on patients
with diabetes, heart failure, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,
will further reduce costs while
improving the quality of care.
Yet another driver of disruption in academic
medicine is the changing nature of how research is performed. It has been
estimated that for every research grant dollar received by an academic
health center, the institution must spend an additional 25 to 40 cents to
support that research. Given declining clinical revenues and the relative
flattening of the NIH budget, the ability to garner research funding is
increasingly competitive and difficult to sustain. For most medichttp://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htmal
schools, this makes traditional research models inefficient and some
institutions that have traditionally been primarily research focused will
have to change their emphases.
An additional disruptive technology in research is
using “big data,” large data sets that can be analyzed in distributed and
cloud computing environments. In 2011, the 3-dimensional structure of a
retrovirus protease was finally determined after eluding scientists for over
a decade. The configuration was not discovered by a computer, by a single
scientist or even by a group of scientists working in a laboratory. Rather,
the
structure was determined by a group of gamers
working in the cloud with a program called Foldit that was developed by
computer scientists at the University of Washington in only three weeks. The
ability to collaborate without physical interaction using a variety of skill
sets challenges the definition and funding models of research (not to
mention who gets credit), but has vastly superior economies of scale.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One thing about top university hospitals is that they are being overwhelmed with
patients. I'm most familiar with the great Dartmouth (Hitchcock) University
Hospital that serves New Hampshire and surrounding states, including Canada. Yes
Canada since Canada's National Health plan might delay some elective surgeries
(think new knees and hips) for months or even years. All hospitals, including
Hitchcock, like Canadians who pay up front cash at full prices.
It seems to Erika and me that getting access to some of the Hitchcock's
specialty services is getting harder and harder. One way of cutting down on
demand is for those specialty departments (Ophthalmology, Dermatology, etc.) to
insist upon referrals from doctors/hospitals and refusing patients who are not
given strong referrals. And when you finally get in you may not see a
full-qualified doctor. My wife has had great service from Cardiology and
Ophthalmology and poor service from Gastrology where she never has been able to
get access to a real MD. Dermatology put off her appointment for seven
months. The Orthopedics Department refused to do her spine surgeries --- which
is how we ended up with a top surgeon in Boston. I forgive Hitchcock for this
since no hospital, including a university hospital, can be expected to have a
nationally-acclaimed surgeon in every department ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Erika2007.htm
Erika spent a few nights in Hitchcock's hospital (after a heart attack) and was
not impressed with that hospital relative to the New England Baptist Hospital in
Boston and San Antonio's North East Baptist Hospital and several other hospitals
in San Antonio. One problem at Hitchcock is the pod design that greatly
increases the noise level in the patient rooms. It saves steps for the nurses
but prevents patients from sleeping nights.
Hopefully, we will never have to seek out psychiatric services from Dartmouth
Hitchcock. That must be a nightmare given the increased demand amidst huge
shortages of psychiatrists.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education
controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Wind Turbines Blamed in Death of Estimated 600,000-900,000 Bats in 2012
---
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/11/09/Wind-turbines-blamed-in-death-of-estimated-600-000-bats-in-2012
"How To Fight CryptoLocker And Evade Its Ransomware Demands," by Lauren
Osini, ReadWriteWeb, November 8, 2013 ---
http://readwrite.com/2013/11/08/cryptolocker-prevent-remove-eradicate#awesm=~omJDczL2zJaMMO
CryptoPrevent ---
http://www.foolishit.com/vb6-projects/cryptoprevent/
Jensen Note: Before buying you should check for other solutions
Comparisons of Antivirus Software ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_antivirus_software#Microsoft_Windows
Bob Jensen's threads on computing and network security ---
http://readwrite.com/2013/11/08/cryptolocker-prevent-remove-eradicate#awesm=~omJDczL2zJaMMO
At 3,100 Colleges and Universities
Tuition and Fees, 1998-99 Through 2013-14 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/TuitionFees-1998-99/142511/
Edspire Search Engine for MOOCs ---
http://edspire.com/
The Almanac of Higher Education 2013-14 (not free)
Chronicle of Higher Education
https://www.chronicle-store.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ID=80261&WG=350
The book in her hand pretty much says it all ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/kathleen-sebelius-websites-for-dummies-obamacare-healthcare-gov-tennessee-brian-kelsey-2013-11
"How to Choose a Charity Wisely," by John F. Wasik, The New York Times,
November 7, 2013 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/giving/how-to-choose-a-charity-wisely.html?ref=giving&pagewanted=all&_r=0
DONATING to charities this time of year used to be
relatively efficient and painless. After watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving
Day Parade, you plunked some money into a Salvation Army bucket, wrote some
checks, contributed some household items and were done.
Yet with charities increasingly involved in awareness
campaigns, complex networks of cause marketing and often exorbitant
overhead, donating to the most effective charity has never been more
challenging.
If you are a discriminating giver, you will need a set
of guidelines that can tell you if your donation will mostly be spent on a
charity’s mission and not peripheral activities. These days you have to use
your head far more than your heart to see that your charitable dollars are
well spent on causes you care about.
There are services and strategies that you can use to
make an informed decision. Most of them can help you determine if your
dollars will reach the charity’s “mission” — and whether a nonprofit
organization is effective in what it is striving to do.
Charities are already witnessing greater selectivity
among donors, probably driven by the pinch of a sluggish economy. According
to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a trade newspaper for the nonprofit
sector, donations to the top 400 fund-raising charities are slowing this
year after gaining 4 percent in 2012. Last year, the top nonprofits took in
about $81 billion.
Although such things are hard to measure, it is
possible that donors have become more sophisticated in their giving as
useful information on charities has become more detailed. Yet it is easy to
get distracted by ubiquitous causes that blanket every corner of society.
Herewith, a guide to navigating the thicket.
The Major Services
One of the first stops in searching for charities is
GuideStar,
which contains records from 1.8 million nonprofits
registered with the Internal Revenue Service.
The free component of the GuideStar website provides
access to each organization’s Form 990, the basic I.R.S. filing document for
nonprofits. That is useful on the front end if you want basic information on
a charity’s income, spending, mission and executive salaries.
As with the other services, you can also pay for
“premium” services from GuideStar that provide more financial analysis and
access to a nonprofit’s contractors. This would help if you wanted to
perform detailed comparisons of charities or to explore their financial
ratios or
executive compensation in greater depth.
What GuideStar does not do is give a qualified rating
of a charity. It tries to remain neutral and “is not a charity evaluator,”
says Lindsay J. K. Nichols, a spokeswoman. For more intensive evaluations,
you need to go to the BBB Wise Giving Alliance or Charity Navigator.
The
BBB Wise Giving Alliance, affiliated with the
Council of Better Business Bureaus, has free reviews of 1,300 national
charities; local BBBs have evaluations on an additional 10,000. The group
applies 20 “accountability” standards — governance, oversight, effectiveness
and the like — once every two years at no charge to the charities, but it
does not explicitly rate them using a star or letter system.
The alliance will specify if a charity does not meet
BBB standards or “did not disclose the requested information.” About 40
percent of the charities evaluated meet
all 20 benchmarks; ones that do are designated a
“BBB Accredited Charity.”
Organizations accredited by the alliance can then pay
a sliding-scale fee based on their size to obtain a license to use the BBB
Charity Seal on websites and fund-raising material. About 60 percent of
those qualifying elect to pay the fee for the seal.
Like GuideStar and Charity Navigator, the alliance
cautions against paying too much attention to the percentage spent on
nonprogram expenses, also known as the “overhead ratio.”
The alliance’s approach appears to be more rigorous
than the other two services’, although its findings are not compiled into an
overall rating. Organizations are deemed “accredited” (met standards),
“standards not met,” “unable to verify,” “did not disclose” and “review in
progress.”
Still, the group’s focus on audited financial
statements and accountability — it also publishes in-depth newsletter
articles on the subject — is a pragmatic way to view a charity’s operations.
Art Taylor, the alliance’s president, said the group
“sees where the charity is at on our 20 standards, which goes to the heart
of how a charity functions.”
To customize a search and get charity-specific
ratings, Charity Navigator, which evaluates about 7,000 nonprofits, has an
easy-to-use interface to find charities that match your interests.
Focusing on financial health, accountability and
transparency,
Charity Navigator applies an analysis to each of
its charities to come up with its star ratings (with four stars as the
highest rank). It examines federal Form 990s to see how much of a charity’s
income goes toward programs and what percentage is spent on administration
and fund-raising. Of the three major services, Charity Navigator is the
easiest to use.
Generally, a good benchmark for a worthwhile charity
is having at least 75 percent of income spent on programs, or the
nonprofit’s mission, according to Sandra Miniutti, a spokeswoman for Charity
Navigator.
Aside from vetting a charity’s financials, Ms.
Miniutti suggests, donors should “understand the charity’s mission — pick
just a few, do your research and stick with them over time.”
Getting Granular
Want to dig deeper and go beyond the charity
information services? You can use them to find basic information on revenue,
fund-raising and spending, but you will need to go several layers deeper if
you want additional scrutiny. Here are some major issues to consider:
■ Have you compared the charity’s Form 990 with
its annual report and audited financial statements?
The 990 can often be opaque and may not tell you
particulars on an organization’s specific programs. You may need an
accountant or
financial adviser acquainted with nonprofit
accounting to review these documents; the audited financials contain much
more detail.
■ Does the charity practice “joint cost
allocation?”
This is accounting jargon for lumping in fund-raising
or solicitation with the charity’s program expenses. According to the BBB
Wise Giving Alliance, more than 20 percent of nationally solicited charities
it reviews employ this practice, which could muddy the waters in gauging how
much is really being spent on the charity’s mission. To get a clearer
picture, you will need to identify the charity’s primary purpose. If it is
mainly a grass-roots lobbying or public awareness organization (which means
you may not be able to deduct your donation), then joint cost allocation may
make sense. If it devotes its efforts to financing research, then the
allocation may be a red flag.
■ How does the charity evaluate its effectiveness?
You should be able to see some examples in its annual
reports. Also, ask the charity directly about its successes. Does the
organization use independent auditors to benchmark its performance? Where
has it failed? A transparent charity should provide this information along
with progress reports.
Eric Friedman, author of “Reinventing Philanthropy”
(Potomac Books, 2013), says charities that cannot gauge their effectiveness
through benchmarks “may have effective programs, but it’s hard for donors to
understand how effective or compare them to other options. I’ve stopped
focusing on financial measures, which can be misleading.”
■ Is the mission supported by academic research?
Organizations may be funding ineffective ways of
addressing their mission. A boutique charity information service like
GiveWell
recommends only three organizations a year out of the hundreds it has
considered since its founding in 2007. GiveWell performs extensive research
to show that recommended charities are “proven, cost-effective, scalable and
transparent,” said Alexander Berger, its senior research analyst. “Because
we’re aiming to find the best giving opportunities possible — not to rate
every charity — we don’t research charities that are unlikely to excel on
our criteria.”
■ Watch out for red flags.
Because nonprofit accounting and reporting can be
incomplete, suspicious activity can be hidden. Daniel Borochoff, president
of
CharityWatch, formerly known as the
American Institute of Philanthropy, rates 600 charities with a grading
system from A to F — and takes a watchdog approach that tries to expose
nonprofit abuses. “There’s a lot of sneaky reporting going on,” Mr.
Borochoff said. He said chicanery could often be found in “gifts in kind,”
where donations may be overvalued, or in organizations with emotional
appeals — some charities involving animals, children, first responders and
veterans. They may be little more than aggressive fund-raising operations
that do little for their missions, or funds that are diverted to officers or
other purposes.
■ Do you need comprehensive advice?
If you are also concerned about tax or
estate planning considerations, it would make
sense to work with a wealth manager, estate-planning lawyer or certified
financial planner. Many advisers also have insights into nonprofit
accounting that can help you vet a charity on a deeper level. Robert J.
DiQuollo, chief executive of Brinton Eaton Wealth Advisors in Madison, N.J.,
said he could scrutinize nonprofit line items like executive salaries and
program-related expenses. “We always approach the charity directly,” Mr.
DiQuollo said, “to make sure that the charity is spending money on what the
donor wants.”
■ Is the charity sitting on too much cash?
You need to know if the charity is putting its cash to
good use or reserving it for some other purpose. According to Wise Giving
Alliance standards, “the charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use
should not be more than three times the size of the past year’s expenses or
three times the size of the current year’s budget, whichever is higher.”
This is something you may need an experienced accountant to evaluate. The
bottom line: As a donor, you need to know if your money will be put to work
immediately or sidelined.
Due Diligence
¶ What can you do with these ratings and reams of
financial information? Although you can become immersed in nonprofit
accounting arcana and employ all of the charity research services, your
efforts may still not tell you if a charity is worthwhile.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's personal finance helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
How Economics Can Help You Find Love Online
"Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned from Online
Dating," by Paul Oyer, Stanford University, October 18, 2013 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1wMPW5p4AU&utm_source=Stanford+Business+Re%3AThink&utm_campaign=37fb04377d-Re_Think_Issue_26_New_Template_11_5_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b5214e34b-37fb04377d-70265733&ct=t%28Re_Think_Issue_26_New_Template_11_5_2013%29
Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s
Obedience Study (1961) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/watch-footage-from-the-psychology-experiment-that-shocked-the-world-milgrams-obedience-study-1961.html
United's New Frequent Flyer Rules Are Terrible News For Travelers ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/uniteds-new-frequent-flyer-rules-are-brutal-2013-11
Jensen Comment
And that's assuming that seats on a given day are even available for a frequent
flyer redemption. Good luck on that one!
One time when I was on teaching leave, Erika and I wanted to redeem frequent
flyer miles on American Airlines to Germany (Frankfort or Munich). After about
20 rejections, I finally asked if there were any available seats between January
1 and June 1. American Airlines actually found one day leaving and one day
returning --- all other days were taken. So we got to Germany for two weeks to
visit Erika's relatives.
In fairness, however, we did get five such round trips to Germany over the
years on frequent flier miles. It was a better deal in those days when most of
the miles came as rewards for flying rather than credit card points.
Mostly at other times when I wanted to fly on given days there were never
frequent flier seats available for some leg of the trip. The airlines can take
their frequent flier miles and put them where the sun does not shine. I'll take
my cash-back Discover cards any day.
PS If you shop at Sam's Clubs, the new Sam's free Discover Card is a pretty
good deal for cash back purchases.
"How I Became An Alcoholic And Failed Out Of Dartmouth College."
Business Insider, November 8, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/three-for-ship-by-crispus-knight-2013-11
Jensen Comment
It's nice (in a cynical way) to hear that in this era of grade inflation
flunking out of a college is still an option, except at Chicago State University
where students were retained semester after semester with a 0.0 grade average. I
think an investigation by the Chicago Tribune finally brought this
scandal to light and put an end to this money-grubbing policy somewhat.
AC = Air Conditioning ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_conditioning
Note that industry and economic development may never have moved in the USA from
north to south without AC.
Note that AC transformed some industries such killing off mountain, lake, and
ocean resorts in the north like I illustrate at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/CottageHistory/Hotel/Brochure/Brochure1900.htm
My point is that AC is not just for comfort --- it's also imperative to economic
prosperity of many parts of the earth.
I can think of some obvious jokes about the
Wristband body cooling controller and some obvious objections, but in both cases
I will keep them to myself on this one
"MIT Wristband Could Make AC Obsolete," by Kyle VanHemer, Wired
News, October 13, 2013 ---
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/10/an-ingenious-wristband-that-keeps-your-body-at-the-perfect-temperature-no-ac-required/
Here’s a scary statistic: In 2007, 87 percent of
households in the U.S. used air conditioning, compared to just 11 percent of
households in Brazil and a mere 2 percent in India. Another one: By 2025,
booming nations like those are projected to account for a billion new
consumers worldwide, with a corresponding explosion in demand for air
conditioning expected to arrive along with them. Keeping indoor spaces at
comfortable temperatures requires a huge amount of electricity–especially in
sweltering climates like India and Brazil–and in the U.S. alone it accounts
for a full 16.5 percent of energy use.
All of that adds up to a big problem. At a point
when humans need to take a sober look at our energy use, we’re poised to use
a devastating amount of it keeping our homes and offices at the right
temperatures in years to come. A team of students at MIT, however, is busy
working on a prototype device that could eliminate much of that demand, and
they’re doing it by asking one compelling question: Why not just heat and
cool our bodies instead?
Wristify, as they call
their device, is a thermoelectric bracelet that regulates the temperature of
the person wearing it by subjecting their skin to alternating pulses of hot
or cold, depending on what’s needed. The prototype
recently won first place at this year’s MADMEC, an annual competition put on
by the school’s Materials Science and Engineering program, netting the group
a $10,000 prize, which they’ll use to continue its development. It’s a
promising start to a clever approach that could help alleviate a serious
energy crisis. But as Sam Shames, the MIT senior who helped invent the
technology, explains, the team was motivated by a more prosaic problem:
keeping everyone happy in a room where no one can agree where to set the
thermostat.
Shames runs hot. His mom runs cold. He figured
there must be a way for them to coexist peacefully. So he started
researching, digging into physiology journals to get a better understanding
of how we experience temperature. One paper held the key to the Wristify
concept. It detailed how locally heating and cooling different parts of the
body has all sorts of effects on how hot or cold we are–or, more accurately,
how hot or cold we think we are. “There’s a big perceptual component to it,”
Shames says.
“The human body and human skin is not like a
thermometer. If I put something cold directly on your body at a constant
temperature, the body acclimates and no longer perceives it as cold.” Think
of what happens when you jump in a lake. At first, it’s bracingly cold, but
after a while, you get used to it. By continually introducing that sudden
jolt of cold, Shames discovered, you could essentially trick the body into
feeling cold. Wristify basically makes you feel like you’re continually
jumping into the lake–or submerging into a hot bath.
In building the prototype, Shames and his
co-inventors–Mike Gibson, a second-year Ph.D. student; David Cohen-Tanugi, a
fourth-year Ph.D. student, and Matt Smith, a postdoctoral researcher–had the
challenge of figuring out how to best exploit that perceptual tick. The
research suggested that anything with a temperature change greater than 0.1
degree Celsius per second would produce the effect. Their wristband, which
harnesses thermoelectrics to both heat and cool a patch of skin, is capable
of changing that surface at a rate of 0.4 degrees Celsius per second.
They’re still refining the cycles used to deliver
that temperature change–right now, Shames says, they’ve settled on roughly 5
seconds on, 10 seconds off. Along the way they had the chance to test it on
all sorts of friends, family and classmates, and Shames says that people
could definitely feel the technology at work. “The most common reaction you
get is that you see someone smile,” he says.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Sorry but I just cannot resist mentioning a few concerns. Having lived in both
Florida (four years) and Texas (24 years) I am well aware that air conditioning
does much, much more than cool human bodies. Air conditioners and their related
dehumidifiers take the clammy moisture out of the air. Heavy moisture can be
very damaging and lead to wood rot, textile rot, carpet rot, and lung rot to say
nothing of the many devastating types of mold.
Our basement up here in the New Hampshire's White Mountains would be dripping in
soggy air without a summer dehumidifier even when air conditioning is not needed
above ground. Basements are damp because ... well because they're basements
without things that dry the air like sunlight and large open windows that let in
the wind. In Florida and Texas the upper floors would also be dripping in wet
air without the AC units.
Damp basements, walls, and attics lead to that dreaded mildew and mold, some
types of which can destroy a house like the luxury house lawyer Erin Brockovich
innocently purchased and then had to tear down because it was infected with the
dreaded black mold ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich
Perhaps energy could be saved with AC units that dry the air at higher
temperatures because humans have their own Wristbands described above. But
elimination of home and business air conditioning entirely is an unrealistic
dream even in the north.
"Haas (business school at UC Berkeley) Puts Executive MBA Program
(books and other learning aterials) on the iPad," by Francesca Di Meglio,
Bloomberg Businessweek, November 5, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-05/haas-puts-executive-mba-program-on-the-ipad
Getting senior executives to trade in their
hardbound textbooks for digital copies is a challenge. But University of
California, Berkeley’s
Haas School of Business has had 68 of them doing
just that as part of a pilot program using a learning platform on
school-issued iPads
(AAPL)
this fall.
Students in the Berkeley MBA for Executives program
are testing a learning platform by EmpoweredU, which aims to consolidate
school materials in one source on an iPad. Essentially, the platform is an
app via which students can find pretty much all they need to complete their
coursework, including syllabi, readings, access to their
Facebook (FB) groups
and teams, and school and faculty information.
Reading textbooks on iPads was the issue that
caused the most discussion during this pilot phase, says Ashish Joshi, a
student in the MBA for Executives’ Class of 2014 and a senior director of
product management at
Oracle (ORCL).
Haas’ solution was to give students both hardbound
books and digital versions on their iPads.
Continued in article
"Textbooks Offered for
iPod, iPhones CourseSmart Applications Will Let Students Access 7,000-Plus
Titles," by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal,
August 10, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124985423101217817.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
A provider of subscription e-textbooks for
college students is making its 7,000-plus titles accessible on Apple Inc.'s
iPhone and iPod Touch as interest heats up in the digital-textbook arena.
The new applications, free for subscribers
to CourseSmart LLC, will let students access their full electronic
textbooks, read their digital notes and search for specific words and
phrases.
"Nobody is going to use their iPhone to do
their homework, but this does provide real mobile learning," said Frank
Lyman, CourseSmart's executive vice president. "If you're in a study group
and you have a question, you can immediately access your text."
The move comes as Amazon.com Inc. is
shipping its $489 large-screen Kindle DX e-reader, which is aimed in part at
college students. Amazon is overseeing a DX pilot program at seven colleges
this fall involving hundreds of students who will experiment with reading
textbooks digitally. Last week, McGraw-Hill Education, a unit of McGraw-Hill
Cos., said it is making about 100 college textbooks available for use on
Amazon's Kindle and Kindle DX.
CourseSmart's titles aren't available on
either Amazon device. Mr. Lyman said he would like to see his books
available wherever college students want them but that the two companies
haven't yet had any conversations.
CourseSmart, which was created in 2007 as a
joint venture of six higher-education publishers, including McGraw-Hill
Education and Pearson PLC's Pearson Education, operates on a subscription
model. Typically students rent a book for 180 days; when their subscription
expires, they lose access to the title.
The company, which doesn't release financial
results, offers its digital books at about 50% of the retail price of the
corresponding physical textbook. Although students can't resell their
e-textbooks, Mr. Lyman said they typically don't get more than 50% of what
they paid for a new book when they resell it.
"Textbooks are the missing link in the
e-reader content base," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst with Forrester
Research, Inc. "The problem so far is that college students haven't really
been interested in reading on their laptops. The iPhone will help create
excitement and generate awareness of e-textbooks."
Mr. Lyman said he believes that lack of
awareness has been the largest barrier to students trying e-textbooks.
Albert N. Greco, a professor at the Fordham
Graduate School of Business Administration who studies the book industry,
estimates that sales of printed college textbook this year will reach $5.02
billion, up 3.5% from last year. He expects college e-textbooks to hit
$117.5 million in sales in 2009, up 10.3%. "Once the recession ends, we will
see a major, national push to make all higher education textbooks available
in digital formats, as well as a move in that direction for high-school
textbooks," Mr. Greco said.
Free online
textbooks, cases, and videos ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Teaching Without Textbooks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#NoTextbooks
Bob Jensen's threads on technologies for aiding handicapped
learners ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
"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 electronic books ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
From 24/7 Wallstreet Newsletter on November 9, 2013
Gasoline prices are close to their lowest levels in
nearly three years. They have plummeted from more than $3.60 per gallon at
the end of the summer to just $3.22 per gallon. The cost of a gallon is
roughly a quarter cheaper than it was this time last year. There may be
several reasons behind the falling gas prices. Some point to the decreasing
threat of United States involvement in Syria. A more likely factor is that
North American oil production and better rail transportation to refineries
are forcing crude prices down. Also, it has been suggested that, in the long
term, the increasing fuel efficiency of cars is driving down demand, and
therefore prices at the pump.These
are the states with the cheapest gas.
Maria's advice on living and writing
Thank you Maria Popova
I like the one about being willing to change your mind --- that one is
especially hard for every writer, including me
"Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading,
Writing, and Living," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, October 23, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/23/7-lessons-from-7-years/
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Bob Jensen's helpers for learning and living ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
A Whitehouse Website That Does Work (almost entirely)
College Scorecard ---
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/higher-education/college-score-card
College Scorecards
in the U.S. Department of Education’s College Affordability and
Transparency Center make it easier for you to search for a college that
is a good fit for you. You can use the College Scorecard to find out
more about a college’s affordability and value so you can make more
informed decisions about which college to attend.
To start, enter
the name of a college of interest to you or select factors that are
important in your college search. You can find scorecards for colleges
based on factors such as programs or majors offered, location, and
enrollment size
Jensen Comment
Note that at the above site you can also search for a college by name. Some data
like average earnings of graduates is still being compiled by the Department of
Education. Average earnings of graduates will probably be a misleading number.
Firstly, the most successful graduates might track into other colleges to
complete their undergraduate and/or graduate degrees. Hence feeder colleges may
be given too much or too little credit in terms of earnings success.
Secondly, I think earnings "averages" are misleading statistics unless they
are accompanied by analysis of standard deviations and kurtosis.
Thirdly, high earnings averages cannot all be attributed to where a degree is
earned. For example, students with stellar SAT scores on average are more likely
to have higher earnings no matter where they got their undergraduate
engineering, science, business or whatever baccalaureate degrees. Students with
low SAT scores may be likely to earn less in lower paying jobs like elementary
school teaching because of lower academic abilities as opposed to their
particular alma maters. And yes I know that some high SAT graduates who might
have made it to medical school teach first graders because they are dedicated to
teaching and/or want summers free to raise their own children.
Fourthly, a high percentage of college graduates become parents and full-time
homemakers. This might distort earnings statistics unless somehow factored out
of the calculation of averages. However, it's difficult to factor out in many
instances. For example, CPA firms now hire more female than male graduates from
accounting masters degree programs (undergraduates are not allowed to take the
CPA examination). This will raise a college's average earnings for graduates
before a significant number of those women drop out of the workforce --- often
for only a decade or two before somehow returning to their accounting careers.
In other instances the male spouses they married in college drop out of their
jobs to be homemakers so their traveling wives can carry on as auditors and tax
accountants and accounting information systems experts. My point is that those
starting salaries are not necessarily for lifelong continuous careers for many
mothers or sometimes fathers.
And there's the problem of debt burdens. Last night our furnace quit when the
temperature was headed toward an 10 degree night. We recently changed plumbing
companies, and a very nice and very skilled young man arrived on a Sunday night
(right after the Patriots clobbered the Steelers) to instantly identify the part
(the controller) that failed on our furnace. He had a replacement part in his
truck.
In the meantime our conversation drifted to the topic of student loans. We
mentioned how our son and his wife both amassed over $60,000 in debt and had to
remain at their old jobs after graduating from college --- meaning their college
degrees burdened with debt did not help them in the least to find better jobs.
Our new plumber then explained how his wife amassed a student debt of $88,000
which he's now paying off. She has two masters degrees and cannot find a job.
One of these degrees is in political science and the other is in international
relations. If she moved to Boston she could possibly find work, but the last
thing either of them want is to leave the White Mountains to live in Boston or
any other mega city.
I think what he was saying is that before taking on
such heavy student debt she should perhaps have done better planning about where
she wanted to live --- or more importantly where she did not want to live.
"Prospective Adult Students Miss Key Data on College Options, Report Says,"
by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Prospective-Adult-Students/142815/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Most adults who are
considering college—either completing a degree or starting one for
the first time—aren't tapping into the wealth of information about
costs, graduation rates, and job prospects, and as a result they
aren't finding the right fit, according to a report released on
Monday by Public Agenda, a nonprofit research group.
The
report, "Is College Worth It for Me? How
Adults Without Degrees Think About Going (Back) to School," says
that most prospective adult students worry about the cost of college
and how to balance studies with families and careers. They're
looking for colleges with practical programs that will help them
land jobs, as well as personalized support from caring faculty
members and advisers.
The report, which
was financially supported by the Kresge Foundation, was based on a
survey this past spring of 803 adults, ages 18 to 55, who lack
college degrees but expect to start earning a certificate or degree
in the next two years. The group, which excludes students coming
straight from high school, accounts for about a third of first-time
college students in the United States, according to the report.
The survey found
that adults ages 25 to 55 have more doubts about going to college
and are less likely to have concrete plans. Those under 25 worry
more about whether they can succeed at college and land a job
afterward.
Continued in article
Information Technology Jobs are Available, But
Are These Jobs for You?
Survey Finds IT Professionals Unhappy with Their Jobs ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/one-third-it-pros-looking-greener-pastures/222677?source=technology
Jensen Comment
I know one recent graduate who is very unhappy. His job is to provide tech
support worldwide for a particular type of software. He says the questions are
all the same. He's not sure he wants to spend a few years doing this, let alone
his lifetime.
Bob Jensen's career helpers (and yes I know
education is important for reasons other than a career) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Apple takes away too much of a customer's lifetime and savings forcing so
many upgrades on that customer
"An Unhappy Lawrence Lessig (Harvard Law) Takes on Apple," by
Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 6, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-an-unhappy-lawrence-lessig-takes-on-apple/48105?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
"The Effect of Employment Protection on Teacher Effort," by Brian A.
Jacob, University of Michigan, March 2012 ---
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/seminarpapers/07-05-13-BJ.pdf
As reported in the Harvard Business Review Blog on November 9, 2013
After the Chicago teachers’ union signed a 2004
contract allowing principals to bypass a cumbersome dismissal process and
fire recently hired teachers for any reason, faculty absences fell by about
10% and the prevalence of educators with 15 or more annual absences declined
by 25%, according to a study by Brian A. Jacob of the University of
Michigan. The effect was driven by the voluntary departure of certain
teachers after the new policy was announced, he says. Nevertheless,
principals were reluctant to enforce the policy: 40% of schools, including
many that were low-performing, didn’t dismiss any teachers.
Jensen Comment
This might be extrapolated somewhat to tenure protections in higher education.
For example, to what extent to always-out-of-town "researchers" and
"consultants: abuse the system with the use of teaching assistants and guest
speakers? Some universities like the Harvard put the kabash on faculty missing
classes. The reason is that students are paying high tuition for an education
from Harvard's highly paid faculty who are required to show up for class. As a
result Harvard professors miss a lot of conferences even when they were
initially invited to be speakers. Or they show just before their speech and
catch a plane back to Boston just after the speech. So much for questions and
answers.
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#TeachingVsResearch
"The 33 Whitest Jobs In America," by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic,
November 6, 2013 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/the-workforce-is-even-more-divided-by-race-than-you-think/281175/
Academe does not appear in the
90%+ white chart. Perhaps this is because academic disciplines vary
so much in terms of having minority professors --- especially in disciplines
(like mathematics and accounting) having increasing proportions of Asian
Americans but not African Americans and Latinos. Also academe is confounded by
having "minorities" who are still on Green Cards and are otherwise non-native
Americans. Although the proportion of white professors of accounting is
declining due mostly to a growing number of Asian accounting professors, the
proportion African American and Latino accounting professors is miserably low.
The KPMG Foundation for decades has taken on a serious funding initiative to
increase the number of African Americans in accountancy doctoral programs. But
the number of graduates is still a drop in the proverbial bucket.
"Whatever Happened to All Those Plans to Hire
More Minority Professors?" by Ben Gose, Chronicle of Higher Education,
September 26, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i05/05b00101.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
CPA firms increased their hiring of minorities to over 30% at the entry
level, but the retention level drops back down to the neighborhood of 20% ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/2012/Jun/20114925.htm
Reasons for lower retention rates include failure of new hires to pass the CPA
Examination after being hired. Another perhaps more important reason is the
traditionally high turnover of more recent employees in the larger CPA firms
where most of those employees move into higher paying jobs (often with clients)
or move out of the labor force to become full-time parents. Top minority
employees of CPA firms are especially likely to receive attractive job offers
from clients.
Law schools have been especially aggressive in recruiting top African
American and Latino students.
This competition especially hurts when recruiting minority students for masters
programs in accountancy (most CPA Examination candidates now graduate from such
masters programs). One reason for law school minority recruitment success is
that students can major in virtually any discipline in college and later be
admitted to law school if they have the required LSAT scores. Most masters of
accounting programs require what is tantamount to an undergraduate accounting
major. This greatly reduces the number of minorities eligible to take the CPA
Examination. However, students can still be business accountants without having
passed the CPA examination. It's much harder, however, to get entry-level
experience without first working for either a CPA firm or the IRS.
Occupations with tough licensing examinations tend to have lower lower
percentages of blacks and Latinos.
More than half of the black and Latino students who
take the state teacher licensing exam in Massachusetts fail, at rates that are
high enough that many minority college students
are starting to avoid teacher training programs,
The Boston Globe reported. The failure rates
are 54 percent (black), 52 percent (Latino) and 23 percent (white).
Inside Higher Ed, August 20, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/20/qt
Certification Examinations
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#CertificationExams
Bob Jensen's threads on careers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Gender Pay Gap
From 24/7 Wall Street newsletter on November 6, 2013
The gender wage gap has narrowed over the years. In
1979, women made an estimated 62% of what men earned. In 2012, the wage of a
full-time female employee was roughly 81% of her male counterpart. While
that is good news, in the past 10 years, the gap has remained more or less
unchanged. The size of the remaining pay inequality depends a great deal on
the job. In many of the largest occupations in the country, women earn close
to what men do on a weekly basis. In others, however, the disparity remains
closer to the 1979 levels. For example, the typical female insurance agent
brought in just 62.5% of her male counterpart in 2012. These
are the jobs with the widest pay gaps between men and women.
Jensen Comment
I don't want to get into hot-button reasons for the gender gap in pay other than
to note that there's considerable evidence in some fields that the higher pay
for men is sometimes due to the male willingness to work longer hours and/or
endure more years of frequent overnight travel for days on end. Female doctors
are more likely to apply for emergency room duty purportedly when there are
eight-hour shifts as opposed to having to endure long days plus many nights and
weekends of on-call duty endured by non-emergency room physicians. For example,
private-practice physicians cannot always control what time of day their
patients have babies or heart attacks or post-surgery complications.
"Humanities Jobs Decline," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed,
October 30, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/30/mla-sees-decline-job-listings-english-and-languages
Question
What is the world like for some many Ph.D. graduates in medieval history?
"From Welfare to the Tenure Track," by Stacey Patton, Chronicle of
Higher Education, October 25, 2013 ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/97-from-welfare-to-the-tenure-track?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on the job prospect differences between new
accounting doctoral graduates and history doctoral graduates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#HistoryVsAccountancy
"Legal Education: The Worst Is Yet to Come," by Paul Caron, TaxProf
Blog, November 5, 2013 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/11/muller-legal-.html
Jensen Comment
The further decline of law schools and career opportunities of law school
graduates rams head on into what economists call externalities. In this case one
type of externality is the impact the "worst to come" for law schools will also
have upon the feeder undergraduate degree programs. Law schools especially give
hope to humanities, science, and even business graduates who when faced with
poor career outlooks in their undergraduate majors intended early on in college
to attend law schools. For example, a large proportion of history and political
science majors have plans for law schools. The demise of law schools has these
students already contemplating changing their majors.
By the way, undergraduate business majors do not necessarily have very good job
prospects unless they have some specialties that give them an edge at the entry
level like accounting, finance, information technology, and computer science. A
surprising number of undergraduate general business majors intended to go to law
school.
How to Mislead With Statistics
The 10 Purported 10 Best Jobs for a College
Graduate ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-best-careers-recent-college-graduates-2013-10?op=1
Jensen Comment
Accountant/Auditor is Number 4 on the list even though it requires 150 approved
credits (usually 2-4 extra semesters in an accounting masters program) to get
permission to take the CPA examination. The list is a bit misleading in that it
does not base the rankings on how hard it is to successfully break into the jobs
on the list.
For example, elementary school teachers have
relatively easy times finding entry-level jobs relative to management
consultants who almost never land entry-level jobs before they gain years of
experience in business and earn one of more specialty certifications. The
majority of graduates from prestigious MBA programs do not necessarily become
management consultants without experience, some of who were experienced in
business or engineering before they entered the MBA programs.
There's also a difference between landing a job and
landing a job in a top firm. For example, the top accounting firms generally
offer entry-level jobs to only the top graduates of a masters program although
the proportion of the class hired varies considerably with the prestige of the
program and the black book maintained by accounting firms on schools where they
recruit. In recent years more women than men are hired by the top accounting
firms. Business firms and small CPA firms tend not to hire new accounting
graduates and wait for moments when prospects have more accounting experience
such as experience as auditors and tax accountants in respected accounting
firms.
The IRS offers great opportunities to new
accounting graduates whereas the FBI hires a lot of accounting graduates only
after they are experienced in business or government.
Bob Jensen's career helpers (and yes I know
education is important for reasons other than a career) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
How to Mislead With Statistics
16 Prestigious Jobs With Surprisingly Low Pay ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-with-surprisingly-low-pay-2013-11?op=1
- Head chef
- Post-doctoral fellow
- Dietitians/nutritionists
- Legislators
- Graphic designer
- Zoologists and marine/wildlife biologists
- Professor
- Accountants and auditors
- Psychologist
- Architect
- Credit analysts
- Chemist
- Budget analysts
- Network systems and data communications analysts
- Biomedical engineer
- Optometrist
Jensen Comment
There are so many things wrong with this listing that I don't know where to
begin.
Post-doctoral Fellows are still in the learning stages of there careers and
can hardly be full professionals until they no longer have temporary jobs with
the adjective "post-doctoral" in their job titles.
Next consider the $59,860 (Cultural Studies Professors) compared with $67,953
(English Professors) where Mathematics and Science Professors fall in the
middle at $64,955. How many ways can this be misleading? Firstly, these are only
a few categories of many, many types of professors where the highest paid
disciplines are ignored such as professors of accounting, finance, management
marketing, engineering, education, and law where averages are higher. Secondly,
there's a huge standard deviation around the averages that are reported for each
and every profession listed above. Top universities pay much higher salaries,
and the reported averages for professors are drawn down by the thousands
of colleges that are on the margin financially.
How many colleges do you know that pay English professors on average more
than math and science professors? Lastly the article ignores the supplemental
summer pay, the book royalties, the consulting fees, and the research grants of
professors.
What are chemists? What are psychologists? Do they have doctorate/masters
degrees or do they only have undergraduate degrees? More importantly where to
they work? Are the chemists only working from grant-to-grant or are they in
institutes with more permanent jobs. Are the psychologists working on their own
our of an old Volkswagon van as drug counselors or are they in tower offices of
big hospitals? Once again, what is a "Psychologist?" What is a "Chemist?"
Accountants and auditors vary from partners making a million dollars or more
a year to a time-card clerk living on $12,500 plus food stamps and Medicaid.
There may even be that struggling tax accountant working out an apartment made
$1,865 full time while watching the infant and living on the $250,000 salary of
the spouse of the household.
Is there such a thing as a "Legislator" career? Virtually all legislators had
successful or failed careers prior to being elected to office. Most only hold
office for 4-16 years for which they often get free travel (including hotels and
meals), bribes/kickbacks, free sexual favors, and free medical services and
medications for the rest of their lives even though they only served for four
years before being booted out of office.
What is a budget analyst and how does this differ from being an accountant or
finance professional? Are budget analysts simply lower paid accountants?
There's a world of difference between being "Head Chef" at a Pizza Hut
franchise versus being "Head Chef" at a Hilton Hotel. Also top quality head
chefs are often on profit sharing plans or even own the restaurant such that
incomes vary dramatically with annual profits. And they eat free. Sometimes they
even get free apartments on the premises.
Do most optometrists work for a wage? I doubt it. They probably work on some
type of profit sharing contract until they become established enough to commence
practicing on their own.
My point is that many of these so-called jobs are really transitional posts
where the intent is to move on into much more lucrative careers later on in
life. Many of these so-called averages are distorted by lower-end outliers that
are not reflective of most the professionals that move on in life. For example,
new auditors fresh out of college join large CPA firms for the training and
experience before leaving the CPA firms to move into other firms or government
agencies who give them other job titles in management or FBI Agent or whatever.
The FBI hires more accountants than lawyers --- at least the last time I looked.
Bob Jensen's career helpers (and yes I know
education is important for reasons other than a career) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"Science-Driven Innovation: The Final Frontier," by Donald Ingber,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Science-Driven-Innovation-The/142785/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
There has been a great deal of discussion
recently—much of it fraught with frustration—about the challenges facing our
nation's academic communities: How do we support basic curiosity-driven
research and maintain our position as the global leader in innovation and
technology at a time of rapidly dwindling government funds? This dilemma was
at the heart of a workshop convened by the National Academies that I
attended in September in Washington.
One potential solution, much discussed at the
conference, is through the creation of a new model of transdisciplinary
research that pulls together investigators from many disciplines to focus,
or converge, on high-value, near-term goals. This excites the industrial
sector because it generates information that can more quickly translate into
commercial innovation, but many people in the scientific community are
frankly terrified by this approach. They feel that focusing on solving
specific problems in the short term could steal funds from fundamental,
investigator-driven research that delves into new terrain—essentially, the
scientific equivalent of Captain Kirk's "final frontier"—and which often
uncovers high-value problems and solutions that no one knew existed.
There is a solution to this conundrum. I serve as
founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired
Engineering at Harvard University, which develops engineering innovations by
emulating how nature builds. With support from a major philanthropic gift,
and from visionary leadership at Harvard and our affiliated hospitals and
universities, we developed a new model of innovation, collaboration, and
technology translation that has attracted more than $125-million in research
support from federal agencies, private foundations, and for-profit
companies.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Some of this article applies to accountics science. In recent decades accountics
scientists have discovered virtually zero inventions for the practicing
side of the accounting and business profession ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm#Inventors
Practitioners literally ignore the findings of accountics science, findings
that they either think discover the obvious or discover irrelevant findings of
little or little use to the profession:
Essays on thhe State of Accounting Scholarship
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm#Essays
Especially note the Cargo Cult Accountics Scientists
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm#CargoCult
One potential solution ... is through the
creation of a new model of transdisciplinary research that pulls together
investigators from many disciplines to focus, or converge, on high-value,
near-term goals. This excites the industrial sector because it generates
information that can more quickly translate into commercial innovation, but many
people in the scientific community are frankly terrified by this approach. They
feel that focusing on solving specific problems in the short term could steal
funds from fundamental, investigator-driven research that delves into new
terrain—essentially, the scientific equivalent of Captain Kirk's "final
frontier"—and which often uncovers high-value problems and solutions that no one
knew existed.
What is different about accountics science versus real science is that in
real science "this excites the industrial sector
because it generates information that can more quickly translate into commercial
innovation," Not so in accountics science. The track record to date
of accountics scientists in generating findings tht translate into professional
innovation is so lousy it is doubtful that an accountics science initiative for
similar "transdisciplinary research" is not likely to generate much
excitement among accounting practitioners.
However, I would applaud loudly if accountics scientists would make an
attempt to excite the profession of accountancy with a similar proposal for "transdisciplinary
research." But I don't have much hope.
I wrote the following on December 1, 2004 at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession
Faculty interest in a professor’s
“academic” research may be greater for a number of reasons. Academic
research fits into a methodology that other professors like to hear about
and critique. Since academic accounting and finance journals are methodology
driven, there is potential benefit from being inspired to conduct a follow
up study using the same or similar methods. In contrast, practitioners are
more apt to look at relevant (big) problems for which there are no research
methods accepted by the top journals.
Accounting
Research Farmers Are More Interested in Their Tractors Than in Their
Harvests
For a long time I’ve argued that
top accounting research journals are just not interested in the relevance of
their findings (except in the areas of tax and AIS). If the journals were
primarily interested in the findings themselves, they would abandon their
policies about not publishing replications of published research findings.
If accounting researchers were more interested in relevance, they would
conduct more replication studies. In countless instances in our top
accounting research journals, the findings themselves just aren’t
interesting enough to replicate. This is something that I attacked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book02q4.htm#Replication
At one point back in the 1980s
there was a chance for accounting programs that were becoming “Schools of
Accountancy” to become more like law schools and to have their elite
professors become more closely aligned with the legal profession. Law
schools and top law journals are less concerned about science than they are
about case methodology driven by the practice of law. But the elite
professors of accounting who already had vested interest in scientific
methodology (e.g., positivism) and analytical modeling beat down case
methodology. I once heard Bob Kaplan say to an audience that no elite
accounting research journal would publish his case research. Science
methodologies work great in the natural sciences. They are problematic in
the psychology and sociology. They are even more problematic in the
professions of accounting, law, journalism/communications, and political
“science.”
Question
Will it ever be possible to top Walt Mossberg (WSJ) and David Pogue (NYT)?
"Waiting for the Next Great Technology Critic," by Matt Buchanan,
The New Yorker, October 30. 2013 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/after-walt-mossberg-and-david-pogue-waiting-for-the-next-great-technology-critic.html
For Readers With Limited Attention Spans When Reading Popular Business Books
15 Famous Business Books Summarized In One Sentence Each ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/famous-business-book-summaries-2013-10
In some instances I don't have the attention span needed for the one-liner. Most
state what is intuitively obvious to me! Like I know success in most instances
depends somewhat on luck and serendipity. What's new?
Jensen Comment
One of the one liners reads:
"Being effective is as much about what you choose not to do as to what
you actually do every day."
This reminded me of something one of Erika's surgeons said before a spine
surgery"
"I get paid more for knowing what not to cut than for
knowing what to cut."
"Business School Offers Case Study for Tenure Debate," by Peter
Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 11, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Business-School-Offers-Case/142883/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
. . .
Mr. Wetherbe went on to earn a doctorate from Texas
Tech in management-information systems, organizational behavior, and
computer-science management, and to succeed in both business and academe.
His life with one foot in the accountability-focused business world caused
his reservations about tenure to grow stronger over time. He gave up tenure
as a professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in the mid-1990s
and has not sought it since.
Now, as a professor of management-information
systems at Texas Tech's business school, Mr. Wetherbe has been waging a
tenure-related legal battle that upends many common assumptions about
relations between colleges and their faculty members. In a world in which
many faculty members sue over tenure denials, Mr. Wetherbe is suing over the
right to reject tenure without harming his career prospects in academe.
He sees himself as charting a new path for
academics at a time when the share of the professoriate working on the
tenure track is on the wane.
His federal lawsuit accuses Texas Tech of violating
his First Amendment rights by holding his views on tenure against him in
denying him both a post as the business school's dean and an honorary
professorial title. Texas Tech is arguing that what has disqualified Mr.
Wetherbe is his lack of tenure rather than his opinion of it.
The case is headed for the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Fifth Circuit as a result of the university's decision last month to
appeal a lower-court ruling that found some basis to Mr. Wetherbe's claims.
The decision also denied qualified legal immunity to one defendant, Robert
Smith, a former provost at Texas Tech.
Since taking Texas Tech to court last year, Mr.
Wetherbe has become a vocal and high-profile opponent of tenure, attacking
it in opinion pieces for Huffington Post and business publications as mainly
a means of providing job security that some professors abuse.
"I am trying to debunk that tenure is about
academic freedom," he said in an interview. Speaking of his own experience
in academe, Mr. Wetherbe, a highly rated instructor and the author or
co-author of numerous books, said, "I think I have been a better professor—a
better scholar, a better teacher—operating without a net." Security Concerns
Mr. Wetherbe, 65, describes his views on tenure as
being formed by his experiences in both academe, where he has taught at a
series of universities since the mid-1970s, and in the business world, where
he has prospered as a manager, consultant, paid speaker, and board member
for companies such as Best Buy.
Continued in article
Gaming for Tenure as an Accounting Professor
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems from Linda Kidwell)
Bob Jensen's threads on tenure ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Tenure
Question
Was Edward Snowden recruited to be a Russian spy from get go, after becoming an
employee at Booz Allen Hamilton, or after landing in Moscow on his Hong Kong
flight?
"It's Now Clear That Edward Snowden's Life Is Dictated By Russian
Intelligence," by Michael Kelley, Business Insider, November 1, 2013
---
http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden-is-supervised-by-russian-intelligence-2013-11
Jensen Comment
What is clear is that no low-level intelligence employee should be given access
to such a vast amount of archived intelligence. Where were the internal
controls? Does Booz Allen Hamilton consult on internal control? If so any price
is too high for this consulting!
Khan Academy ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/about
Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCAT
"Khan Academy Launches First Round of MCAT Videos," Inside Higher
Ed, October 28, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/10/28/khan-academy-launches-first-round-mcat-videos
Bob Jensen's threads on with wonderful free Khan Academy that now partners
with selected schools to provide free video tutorials that fit into curricula
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Scroll down to find tidbits on the Khan Academy
Video: Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama on QE, Tapering, and Volatility
---
http://video.cnbc.cohttp://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000211021
m/gallery/?video=3000211021
This is a multimillion lawsuit that could become a multibillion class action
lawsuit, but damages may be hard to prove
"ACT and College Board Sued for Selling Student Information," Inside
Higher Ed, November 1, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/11/01/act-and-college-board-sued-selling-student-information
How to Mislead With Statistics
Foreign Kidnapping Numbers ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/countries-with-kidnapping-risk-2013-11
The data do not necessarily translate well to probabilities of being
kidnapped. As the article notes, the data are likely to be underreported for
various reasons. Firstly, nations vary as to integrity in reporting data.
Exhibit A is China. Secondly, nations may not be aware of some kidnappings that
were never reported to authorities before or after payoffs, particularly payoffs
for kidnapped employees of multinational companies.
The higher risk nations vary as to population and size such as when comparing
India with Haiti. Risks vary with regions within a country such as in Mexico
where kidnapping risks are higher in Mexico City than in popular coastal tourist
centers. In other nations like Nigeria and Pakistan the risks are greater in
rural parts of the nation where enemies of the USA are more concentrated.
Lots of people go to Mexico for a holiday. but the tourists are selective
about where they visit. Who goes to Nigeria or Venezuela for a holiday? Bolivia
is not mentioned in this study, but Bolivia is a USA-hating nation that's
becoming South America's safe haven for Jihadists.
The risks are higher with wealthy tourists and employees of multinational
corporate piñatas. Volunteers helping the poor are less at risk even though
there are always risks that should not be ignored. What I'm saying is that
kidnapping risks are lower for Habitat for Humanity volunteers building
houses in Haiti than for oil company executives working in Nigeria who do not
dare to let their guards down in this nation of poverty and vicious hate and
Jihad.
Kidnapping statistics can be very costly to developing nations.
I know quite a few people in San Antonio who used to travel back and forth quite
often to Mexico. Most of them are more hesitant to cross the border these days.
Just a few years ago these folks would visit family living in Mexico and/or
cross the border to provide teaching and research services to colleges and
businesses in Mexico. I myself taught for short periods at the high technology
university called
Monterrey
Tech. I also did some consulting in Pueblo. Now I hate to admit it but I
would be very hesitant to go it alone to work in Mexico even if the probability
is really negligible that I would be kidnapped. Fear can play tricks even with
statisticians. On the other hand I don't know any persons who fear going to
India because of kidnapping risks. The hot weather, congested public
transportation, and plumbing are probably more worrisome.
"Federal Trade Commission Warns Veterans About For-Profit Colleges,"
by Kelly Field, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Federal-Trade-Commission-Warns/142767/
The Federal Trade Commission is warning military
veterans to be cautious when choosing to spend their GI Bill benefits at a
for-profit college.
In a
recent post on "8 Questions to Ask" when picking a
college, the agency urges veterans to "be aware that some for-profit schools
may not have your best interest in mind."
"They may want to use your Post-9/11 GI Bill
benefits to boost their bottom line and may not help you achieve your
education goals," the post reads. "They may stretch the truth to persuade
you to enroll, either by pressuring you to sign up for courses that don't
suit your needs or to take out loans that will be a challenge to pay off."
The post recommends that veterans consult the
Education Department's
College Navigator to
determine whether an institution is for-profit or not-for-profit.
The warning suggests the federal agency is
continuing to pay close attention to the for-profit sector. In an appearance
at June's annual meeting of the sector's main lobbying group, the
Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, a top FTC official
said the agency was "actively engaged" in
monitoring the marketing practices of for-profit
colleges.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit universities operating in the gray zone
of fraud ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
For-Profit Declines
"Strayer to Close 20 Campuses As Enrollment Falls," Inside
Higher Ed, November 1, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/11/01/strayer-close-20-campuses-enrollment-falls
Question
Where do those college graduates with GMAT scores well in excess of 700 get
their MBA degrees?
"This May Be The Most Impressive Business School Class Ever ," by John
Byrne, Business Insider, November 1, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/mba-class-of-2015-admissions-numbers-2013-10
Jensen Comment
Remember that a high GMAT score is only one criterion for getting into a
prestigious MBA program. Other criteria include years of qualified experience
between the time of getting an undergraduate degree and applying for admission
into an MBA program. There are also affirmative action considerations for
applicants with lower GMAT scores and work experience, especially in terms of
both admission and financial aid. Most prestigious MBA programs want a high
diversity mix in terms of race, ethnic background, gender, and academic
background. A Native American history major might be given priority over a
Caucasian computer science major from the same undergraduate college.
Most of the prestigious MBA programs are not looking for undergraduate
business majors. There are of course less prestigious MBA programs that have
lower standards, including some that only have a standard that applicants are
still able to breathe.
I suspect that prestigious MBA programs are less aggressive when recruiting
learning disabled applicants such as those that have sight and hearing
impairments. Of course it would be legal suicide deny admission on only those
criteria.
Vino Sans Snobbery: A Charming Illustrated Scratch-and-Sniff Guide to
Becoming a Wine Expert ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/15/scratch-and-sniff-guide-to-becoming-a-wine-expert/
The Winners and Losers in the NFL draft ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-nfl-draft-busts-ryan-leaf-jamarcus-russell-today-2013-10?op=1
"New England Law Faculty Face 8-Course Teaching Loads, Mandatory Office
Presence (M-F, 9-5) Unless 35% Accept Buyouts," by Paul Carone, TaxProf
Blog, October 25, 2013 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/10/new-england-.html
"Change from Friend Connect to Google+ Followers Gadget," by Jim
Martin, MAAW's Blog, October 26, 2013 ---
http://maaw.blogspot.com/2013/10/change-from-friend-connect-to-google.html
The couple, both scientists, who bought our San Antonio home now must move to
Washington DC. Thus our former house at 9010 Village Drive in San Antonio has
been on the market for over a year and is price reduced. View the slide show at
http://www.trulia.com/property/3117191386-9010-Village-Dr-San-Antonio-TX-78217
I think they bought the house because at the time they had two children in St.
Mary's Hall Academy down the street.
"To Buy, or Not to Buy? That’s the Question For New Employees," by
Gene Fant, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 30, 2013 ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/99-to-buy-or-not-to-buy-that-s-the-question-for-new-employees?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
This is a pretty good summary of things to consider when moving into a new town.
There are, however, some things that are not adequately covered in the above
article.
- Transactions Costs
Transactions costs at the time of purchase and at the time of selling are
serious, especially at the time of selling. These can vary with location
regionally and locally. For example, local sales commissions may vary for
town versus rural property (some agents selling rural property only do so
for a 10% commission). Although New Hampshire has no sales tax in general,
it does have a sales tax on real estate transfers. The tax is a serious 15%
that is usually divided 7% to the buyer and 8% to the seller. Hence the
hapless faculty member who purchased a house gets hit with a 7% sales tax on
the date of purchase, an 8% sales tax on the date of sale, plus a 6%-10%
sales commission if sold through a broker. Also in New Hampshire there's an
annual view tax if your home has a decent views. Most other states do not
have such a high real estate sales tax and view tax. My view tax is about
$5,000 per year on top of my annual property taxes paid twice a year.
Please weep for me!
One transactions cost that is often neglected is the opportunity loss of
equity capital tied up in a house that possibly takes years to sell. Thanks
to the Fed's quantitative easing (QE) opportunity losses are lower now that
Certificates of Deposit earn close to zero percent. In the good old days
opportunity losses were much more significant back when CDs earned six or
more percent per year.
- Psychological Costs
One of the most depressing things that can hit a home owner is continuing to
own a turkey house that won't sell after having moved to another town. In
theory the house can be rented, but if the house is for sale it's hard to
get a decent rent without providing the renter with a lease term of
something like a year. In the meantime, costs of property taxes, mortgage
payments, casualty insurance, and maintenance carry on whether the house is
rented or empty. Also being a distant landlord can be headaches for the
lessors and the lessees. Also there's always a worry that the lessee will
carelessly damage the house and any furniture temporarily left behind.
Before buying a house in a new locale, chances are that the temporary rental
housing will not hold all the furniture that you bought for the big turkey
that now will not sell. Do you leave that extra furniture in the old turkey
or do you pay for storage. If you pay a moving van company to store your
furniture, the monthly payments for this insured storage may exceed the
monthly rent you pay for temporary housing.
In the meantime the owner of a turkey house for sale must either rent or buy
a house in a new locale. One of the biggest frustrations is to end up with
two owned houses, one of which won't sell. When our minister moved here to
Sugar Hill from Grand Junction, it took over a year to get a prospect to
even look at his expensive home in Colorado. It took nearly five years to
finally sell that property. In the meantime he had to find housing for his
lovely wife and seven of their ten children who still live at home. He ended
up buying a failed bed and breakfast house near the church. He then had
years of agony being an owner of two houses that were separated by over
2,000 miles. After at last having sold the turkey house in Colorado
he's spending a fortune to fix up his new residence that was badly in need
of a new roof, new siding, new windows, new wiring, new plumbing, a new
heating system and on and on and on. What he'd originally hoped to do if he
sold his Colorado quickly was to buy some land and build a new house from
scratch. The years of not being able to sell his Colorado house dashed those
hopes.
After moving to a new locale while still owning a former residence can be
psychologically frustrating when a new house cannot be purchased until
recovering the the equity invested in the house that takes forever to sell
in a former locale.
One solution to a turkey house situation is to leave the turkey spouse and
the turkey kids behind and become a homeless person. Sadly the bills will
follow you wherever you go, and it can be darn cold sleeping on the curb. I
suspect the morning back pains are also excruciating.
A friend of mine was recently denied tenure, had to move, and then faced a
situation where the spouse refused to move. I think it's otherwise a very
solid and loving marriage that's now a commuting marriage via expensive
airlines with lots of frequent flier miles.
I recall a similar situation years ago where the professor and the children
remained back in Florida while his wife graduated from medical school at
Stanford University and joined the medical school faculty. Throughout all of
this I think it remained a very good marriage.
Over the 40 years of my faculty career in four universities, I owned five
houses, a farm, and a vacation cottage near Acadia National Park. Back in
the good old days when real estate was a hot item I sold all but one of
those properties within a month without a sales broker after putting them
for sale (probably sold them too cheap). When planning to retire I
listed my big San Antonio house for sale with a broker in a cold market. I
even gambled and bought our retirement home in New Hampshire before selling
the San Antonio house. In San Antonio we only had one viable prospect after
nearly a year. Just before my retirement date that one prospect made a
reasonable offer. Thereby, I avoided the psychological agony of owning a
turnkey home in San Antonio and a retirement cottage in New Hampshire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm
The couple, both scientists, who bought our San Antonio home now must move
to Washington DC. Thus our former house at 9010 Village Drive in San Antonio
has been on the market for over a year and is price reduced. View the slide
show at
http://www.trulia.com/property/3117191386-9010-Village-Dr-San-Antonio-TX-78217
I think they bought the house because at the time they had two children in
St. Mary's Hall Academy down the street.
"Those Comics in Your Basement? Probably Worthless," y Eric Spitznagel,
Bloomberg Businessweek, October 30, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-30/those-comics-in-your-basement-probably-worthless?campaign_id=DN103013
Question
What is the common mistake made by people who invest in items they store in
their houses or safe deposit boxes?
Answer
The mistake they make is in not understanding how markets differ.
Just because items in your home or safe deposit box are independently appraised
at $10,000 does not mean that you can find a buyer willing to pay more than
$4,000 or less. If dealers buy the items they usually expect to make a 50% mark
up or higher.
We have a friend who paid a fortune for a 1955 Chevy in mint condition as a
gift to his wife. The handsome car took up space in the garage for eight years
and was never driven. When they finally decided that the garage space was worth
more than the car they sold it for less that 20% of the purchase price.
Paying top dollar for gold and silver coins can be a big mistake. My wife
inherited a gold coin bracelet from her aunt (Tante Pepe) in Germany. It's a
beautiful piece of jewelry that she estimates is worth thousands. But where's
she going to sell it without taking a huge markdown on what she thinks its
worth? First she will have to incur a relatively expensive appraisal fee. Second
she will have to try to find a buyer who will pay close to the appraised value.
My guess is that it will almost be impossible to find a buyer paying that kind
of price unless she's really lucky on EBay. In the meantime it just sits in a
safe deposit box like it did in Germany before Tante Pepe died.
Equity stock investment in a gold company traded on a stock exchange is a
whole lot different than investing in gold coins. First there is that serious
gold appraisal cost. Second there's probably a much smaller spread between
equity stock bid and ask prices than gold coin and jewelry prices. The stock
market is much more liquid than the coin and jewelry market.
And coin coin investments are probably better than financial
investments in baseball cards, comic books, antiques, and other items you can
enjoy every day in ways other than selling, e.g., by adding to the decor of your
living room. But selling may be huge disappointment as illustrated in the comic
book sale mentioned in the article above. Perhaps those investments at home
items should be purchased for enjoyment of possessing but not for serious
investment --- at least that's my opinion. My wife neither enjoys the gold
bracelet in a bank deposit box nor enjoys the cash she thinks hopelessly that
she should get for the bracelet. The bracelet will probably pass down from Erika
to a daughter and then a granddaughter in the same manner it passed on from
Tante Pepe from Erika. What's the use?
My advice if you want to invest in gold is to buy equity shares in a gold
company. My advice is also to avoid gold as an investment unless you want to tie
your money up for years and years and years. Of course if you live in India
there are cultural reasons to hoard gold for reasons other than investment.
Most Iowa framers think that corn field black dirt is much more valuable
than gold both as a long term inflation hedge and as a cash cow year after year
of ownership. Some investors think muni bond funds are better than black
dirt because the cash inflow each year is tax free. Perhaps investors choosing
between black dirt or municipal bond or gold stock or Microsoft stock
investments should seek professional help because what is the best choice for
one investor is suboptimal for another investor.
Please don't consider me to be a professional or even a good amateur
personal finance adviser.
Be that as it may, my personal investment helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
"Finding Time to Read," by Shane Parrish, Farnam Street,
September 2, 2013 ---
http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2013/09/finding-time-to-read/
Jensen Comment
I'm impatient during my endless hours of reading time and speed-read a vast
amount of items, especially on the Web. In retirement I have to force myself to
read a book cover-to-cover. It has been nearly a year, and I'm still working on
William Trevor's wonderful 80+ short stories at a pace of one-per-week. I have,
of course, read other books on my Kindle Fire. But I'm not a fanatic book reader
like Denny Beresford.
I rarely watch anything but news on television, although Erika and I usually
watch one non-current BBC or PBS movie per day on streaming NetFlix. This
has become our daily afternoon date. Occasionally she begs off because she's
just too busy for our date. I never beg off when it comes to our afternoon movie
dates. Rather than watch a lot of new Hollywood junk we watch an amazing number
of favorite movies for the second or even third times.
It helps to be going old.
Mostly we watch mystery series. Neither of us remember who committed the murders
in most movies we watched a year or two earlier. If we do remember we simply
shift to another movie.
I also spend quite a lot of time outdoors working this big yard. For two days
now I've been digging out my 200+ annuals that have died in the hard-freeze
nights. I haul these to the mulch pile in our recycling center three miles down
from our ridge. I've also had to sweep up a ton of leaves with my sweeper
behind my tractor. This $300 sweeper works much better than my $4,000 mulcher
attachment.
Ph.D. in medieval history
"How Our Minds Mislead Us: The Marvels and Flaws of Our Intuition," by
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, October 30, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/30/daniel-kahneman-intuition/
Jensen Comment
There are many interesting brain hypotheses in this article. For example,
performance failures may tell us more than performance successes. Extrapolated
into behavior tasks, the same thing might happen such as when students learn
more from audit failures than they do from audit successes.
"Avoiding the Power Grid: A cheaper fuel cell could provide affordable
power for microgrids," by David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review,
October 22, 2013 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/demo/520451/avoiding-the-power-grid/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20131028
"All Around The World, Labor Is Losing Out To Capital," The
Economist, November 3, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/all-around-the-world-labor-is-losing-out-to-capital-2013-11
. . .
Cheaper and more powerful equipment, in robotics
and computing, has allowed firms to automate an ever larger array of tasks.
New research by Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman of the University of
Chicago illustrates the point. They reckon that the cost of investment
goods, relative to consumption goods, has dropped 25% over the past 35
years. That made it attractive for firms to swap labour for software
whenever possible, which has contributed to a decline in the labour share of
five percentage points. In places and industries where the cost of
investment goods fell by more, the drop in the labour share was
correspondingly larger.
Other work reinforces their conclusion. Despite
their emphasis on trade, Messrs Elsby and Hobijn and Ms Sahin note that
American labour productivity grew faster than worker compensation in the
1980s and 1990s, before the period of the most rapid growth in imports.
Studies looking at the increasing inequality among workers tell a similar
story. In recent decades jobs requiring middling skills have declined
sharply as a share of total employment, while employment in high- and
low-skill occupations has increased. Work by David Autor of MIT, David Dorn
of the Centre for Monetary and Financial Studies and Gordon Hanson of the
University of California, San Diego, shows that computerisation and
automation laid waste mid-level jobs in the 1990s. Trade, by contrast, only
became an important cause of the growing disparity in wages in the 2000s.
Trade and technology’s toll on wages has in some
cases been abetted by changes in employment laws. In the late 1970s European
workers enjoyed high labour shares thanks to stiff labour-market regulation.
The labour share topped 75% in Spain and 80% in France. When labour- and
product-market liberalisation swept Europe in the early 1980s—motivated in
part by stubbornly high unemployment—labour shares tumbled. Privatisation
has further weakened labour’s hold.
Such trends may tempt governments to adopt new
protections for workers as a means to support the labour share. Yet
regulation might instead lead to more unemployment, or to an even faster
shift to automation. Trade’s impact could become more benign in future as
emerging-market wages rise, but that too could simply hasten automation, as
at Foxconn.
Accelerating technological change and rising
productivity create the potential for rapid improvements in living
standards. Yet if the resulting income gains prove elusive to wage and
salary workers, that promise may not be realised.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The word sabot is a French word for a wooden shoe (not necessarily a shoe
for a human foot).
Sabotage ---
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sabotage
Deliberate destruction of property or slowing down of work with the
intention of damaging a business or economic system or weakening a
government or nation in a time of national emergency.
The word is said to date from a French railway strike
of 1910 when workers destroyed the wooden shoes (sabots) that held the rails
in place.
I wonder when sabotage of robotics displacing labor might become commonplace
in some nations.
"When Students Rate Teachers, Standards Drop: Why do colleges tie
academic careers to winning the approval of teenagers? Something is seriously
amiss," by Lyell Asher, The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304176904579115971990673400?mod=djemEditorialPage_h
These are reasonable questions, and professors
often benefit from what their students say. Professors don't simply inspect.
They teach, and it's helpful to know how things might have gone better from
the students' point of view. The problem is that, for the vast majority of
colleges and universities, student opinion is the only means by which
administrators evaluate teaching. How demanding the course was—how hard it
pushed students to develop their minds, expand their imaginations, and
refine their understanding of complexity and beauty—is largely invisible to
the one mechanism that is supposed to measure quality.
It would be one thing if student evaluations did no
harm: then they'd be the equivalent of a thermometer on the fritz —a
nuisance, but incapable of making things worse. Evaluations do make things
worse, though, by encouraging professors to be less rigorous in grading and
less demanding in their requirements. That's because for any given course,
easing up on demands and raising grades will get you better reviews at the
end.
How much better? It's hard to say. But it isn't as
if most teachers are consciously calculating the grade-to-evaluation
exchange rate anyway. Lenient grading is always the path of least resistance
with or without student reviews: Fewer students show up in your office if
you tell them everything is OK, and essays can be graded in half the time if
you pretend they're twice as good.
There's also a natural tendency to avoid delivering
bad news if you don't have to. So the prospect of end-of-term student
reviews, which are increasingly tied to job security and salary increases,
is another current of upward pressure on professors to relax standards.
There is no downward pressure. College
administrators have little interest in solving or even acknowledging the
problem. They're focused on student retention and graduation rates, both of
which they assume might suffer if the college required more of its students.
Meanwhile, studies show that the average
undergraduate is down to 12 hours of coursework per week outside the
classroom, even as grades continue to rise. One of these studies,
"Academically Adrift" (2011) by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa,
suggests a couple of steps that could help remedy the problem: "high
expectations for students and increased academic requirements in syllabi . .
. coupled with rigorous grading standards that encourage students to spend
more time studying."
Colleges can change this culture, in other words,
without spending a dime. The first thing they can do is adopt a version of
the Hippocratic oath: Stop doing harm. Stop encouraging low standards with
student evaluations that largely ignore academic rigor and difficulty.
Reward faculty for expecting more of students, for pushing them out of their
comfort zone and for requiring them to put academics back at the center of
college life.
Accrediting agencies could initiate this reform,
but they too would first have to stop doing harm. They would have to
acknowledge, for example, that since "learning outcomes" are calculated by
professors in the exact same way that grades are, it's a distinction without
a difference, save for the uptick in pseudo-technical jargon.
Then the accrediting agencies should insist that
colleges take concrete steps to make courses more uniformly demanding across
the board, and to decouple faculty wages and job security from student
opinion. The latter is an especially critical issue now, given the increase
in adjuncts and part-time faculty, whose job security often hangs by the
thread of student reviews.
President Obama's plan for higher education,
released in August, does not inspire confidence that this or any other issue
related to educational quality will become a central concern. On the
contrary, his emphasis on degree completion through "accelerated learning
opportunities," online courses, credit for "prior learning" and the like is
a recipe for making things worse. Pressing colleges to increase graduation
rates is every bit as shortsighted as it was to encourage banks to increase
mortgage-approval rates.
But if that's what the president wants to do, he
can rest assured that colleges and universities have an incentive structure
already in place to make it easier for students to get the degree they want,
rather than the education they need.
Mr. Asher is an associate professor of English at Lewis and Clark
College.
Jensen Comment
The biggest disgrace in education over the past five decades is grade inflation,
and in my opinion teaching evaluations are the primary cause. In the above
article Professor Asher states his opinions. For harder evidence (such as the
study at Duke) go to:
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
The easy grading problem, in my viewpoint, is mainly caused when schools rely
mostly on required student evaluations for teaching evaluations in general. It
was much different when required student evaluations were only seen by the
instructors themselves.
I might add that the college-required evaluations are only part of the cause
of easy grading. What has become a huge factor is the Rate My Professors Website
where over a million students have sent in evaluations of their instructors. The
praises and criticisms of instructors are now available for the world to view.
Easy graders tend to get higher evaluations, although this is not always the
case. Tough graders as a rule get hammered ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/
Hence even if a school reverts to the old system where only instructors see
student evaluations, some of those students will likely post their praises and
criticisms at the above link. This is especially problematic since only a small
nonrandom subset of every instructor's students send their evaluations to the
above link.
UC Berkeley Business School's Effort to Hold Back the Tide of Grade Inflation
Appears to Have Failed
"Higher Grades for Haas Undergrads," by Louis Lavelle, Bloomberg
Businessweek, May 13, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-13/higher-grades-for-haas-undergrads
Two years after instituting grading caps for
undergraduate business students, the
Haas School of Business at the University of
California, Berkeley is relaxing its unpopular policy, making it possible
for students to earn higher grades.
In 2011, the school capped the mean GPA at 3.2 for
core classes and 3.4 for electives. Effective May 3, the
caps
have been raised to 3.4 for core classes and 3.6
for electives, according to the Daily Californian, the UC-Berkeley
student newspaper.
Haas says the
new cap for core classes “more closely reflects
the historical mean.” The goal of the new caps is to “establish clear and
consistent academic standards” across degree programs and multiple sections
of the same course, and “to encourage students to come to class, and to come
to class prepared.”
After Haas
scrapped its grading curve in 2011, the caps put
in place were not popular with students. Tyler Wishnoff, president of the
Haas Business School Association, said those caps left many students feeling
that it was too difficult to get the grades they thought they deserved and
may put them at a disadvantage when competing for jobs with graduates of
schools without such a policy. Some students felt there was little point in
trying hard for mediocre grades.
“There was definitely a lot of mixed feelings about
the caps,” Wishnoff says. “There was a perception that it was just too hard
to do well. … I definitely talked to students who stopped trying because the
policy was too oppressive.”
The new policy, Wishnoff says, is a big
improvement, giving faculty the flexibility they need to award grades that
accurately reflect a student’s performance. The new policy—while it won’t be
retroactive, as some students had wanted—is fair and maintains the school’s
academic rigor, he says.
A Scary Article That Has Nothing to Do With 2013 Halloween --- This Scare is
for Real!
"I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling,"
by Professor Adam L. Penenberg (NYU), Pandodaily, October 26, 2013 ---
http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/26/i-challenged-hackers-to-investigate-me-and-what-they-found-out-is-chilling/
. . .
The detective, Dan Cohn, owned and operated
Docusearch, a website that trafficked in personal information, and at the
time, he was charging $35 to dig up someone’s driving record, $45 for his
bank account balances, $49 for a social security number, $84 to trace a
mobile number, and $209 to compile his stocks, bonds, and securities. The
site offered a simple clickable interface and Amazon-like shopping cart.
It’s still around today, boasting similar services. “Licensed Investigators
for Accurate Results” reads the tag line, calling itself “America’s premier
provider of on-line investigative solutions.”
For Cohn, digging through what I had assumed was
personal information, was less challenging than filling in a crossword
puzzle. He was able to collect this amalgam of data on me without leaving
the air-conditioned cool of his office in Boca Raton, Florida. In addition
to maintaining access to myriad databases stuffed with Americans’ personal
information, he was a master of “pre-texting.” That is, he tricked people
into handing over personal information, usually over the telephone. Simple
and devilishly effective. When the story hit newsstands with a photo of Cohn
on the cover and the eerie caption: “I know what you did last night,” it
caused quite a stir. It was even read into the Congressional Record during
hearings on privacy.
A decade and a half later, and given the recent
Edward Snowden-fueled brouhaha over the National Security Agency’s snooping
on Americans, I wondered how much had changed. Today, about 250 million
Americans are on the Internet, and spend an average of 23 hours a week
online and texting, with 27 percent of that engaged in social media. Like
most people, I’m on the Internet, in some fashion, most of my waking hours,
if not through a computer then via a tablet or smart phone.
With so much of my life reduced to microscopic bits
and bytes bouncing around in a netherworld of digital data, how much could
Nick Percoco and a determined team of hackers find out about me? Worse, how
much damage could they potentially cause?
What I learned is that virtually all of us are
vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping and are easy hack targets. Most of us
have adopted the credo “security by obscurity,” but all it takes is a person
or persons with enough patience and know-how to pierce anyone’s privacy —
and, if they choose, to wreak havoc on your finances and destroy your
reputation.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on computing and networking security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
"The Clever Circuit That Doubles Bandwidth," by David Talbot, MIT's
Technology Review, October 26, 2013 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520586/the-clever-circuit-that-doubles-bandwidth/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20131029
Teaching Case
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on November 1, 2013
Game Makers Lift Forecasts
by:
Ian Sherr
Oct 30, 2013
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Revenue Forecast, Revenue Recognition
SUMMARY: The article describes expected growth for the first time
in several years during the upcoming Christmas season for video game
manufacturers because of new gaming systems just coming out, the Sony
PlayStation4 and Microsoft Xbox One systems. The article examines
profitability of Electronic Arts and Take-two Interactive relative to
expectations based on analysts' forecasts. Revenue is also examined; the
amount is adjusted to include deferred revenue stemming from accounting
practices based on software revenue recognition requirements. Questions ask
students to access the financial statements to understand the companies'
revenue recognition practices and resulting deferred revenue liability
balances.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is an excellent way to introduce
software revenue recognition with products likely to be of interest to a
good number of students in class. NOTE: INSTRUCTORS SHOULD REMOVE THE
FOLLOWING DISCUSSION BEFORE DISTRIBUTING TO STUDENTS AS IT ANSWERS SEVERAL
OF THE QUESTIONS. Take-Two Interactive Software's disclosure about
significant accounting policies related to revenue recognition states that
their multiple element arrangements provide "a combination of game software,
additional content, maintenance or support." They use vendor specific
objective evidence (VSOE) of fair value of each of these components to
allocate the price of product sold. "Absent VSOE, revenue is deferred until
the earlier of the point at which VSOE of fair value exists for any
undelivered element or until all elements of the arrangement have been
delivered. However, if the only undelivered element is maintenance and
support, the entire arrangement fee is recognized ratably over the
performance period." For Electronic Arts, disclosure about similar issues is
made under Note 10: Balance Sheet Details. Discussion of deferred net
revenue indicates that the balance is related to online-enabled games. This
balance "generally includes the unrecognized revenue from bundled sales of
certain online-enabled games for which we do not have VSOE for the
obligation to provide unspecified updates. We recognize revenue from the
sales of online-enabled games for which we do not have...[this] VSOE ...on a
straight-line basis, generally over an estimated six-month period beginning
in the month after shipment. " The most interesting is the difference
between the two companies' treatment of the related COGS. Take-Two
Interactive states, "For arrangements which require that revenue recognition
is deferred, the cost of goods sold is deferred and recognized as the
related net revenue is recognized. Deferred cost of goods sold includes
product costs, software development costs and royalties, internal royalties
and license amortization and royalties." Electronic Arts, on the other hand,
expenses "...the cost of revenue related to these transactions during the
period in which the product is delivered (rather than on a deferred basis)."
Questions ask the students to identify this issue and speculate as to the
companies' reasons for the differing treatment of related costs. The
questions also ask students to state the source of the requirements for
treatment of these items which can be found in ASC 985-605-25-5 through 7
and 25-10 as well as in the general revenue recognition sections of
605-25-30-6a through 30-7. Take-Two Interactive has made its filing on Form
10-Q for the quarter ended 9/30/13 on 10/30/13 and is available at
http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=946581&accession_number=0001047469-13-010066&xbrl_type=v#
For Electronic Arts, only the Filing of the press release on Form 8-K has
been made as of this writing; its most recent 10-Q was for the quarter ended
June 30, 2013 and is available at
http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=712515&accession_number=0000712515-13-000037&xbrl_type=v#
QUESTIONS:
1. (Advanced) Describe the businesses of game makers Electronic
Arts and Take-Two. How are their products similar? Do they differ in any
way? (Hint: if you are unfamiliar with video game products, proceed to the
companies' most recently filed financial statements with the SEC on Form
10-Q or 10-K and click on "Description of Business.") For Take-Two
Interactive, the most recent 10-Q is available at
http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=946581&accession_number=0001047469-13-010066&xbrl_type=v#
For Electronic Arts, as of this writing, the most recent 10-Q filing was for
the quarter ended June 30, 2013 and is available at
http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=712515&accession_number=0000712515-13-000037&xbrl_type=v#
2. (Introductory) The article forecasts growth for these two
companies this Christmas season. What is the major reason for expecting that
growth?
3. (Introductory) How is the growth expected to affect the two
companies' earnings as described in the article?
4. (Introductory) The author also compares revenues by the two
companies. How is this comparison affected by deferred revenues? In your
answer, define the term deferred revenue.
5. (Advanced) Access the two companies' quarterly filings on Form
10-Q for the most recent period available (see above). Locate the amounts of
deferred revenue on each companies' balance sheet. State the amounts you
find and describe the size of these balances relative to the overall
business.
6. (Advanced) Again access the Electronic Arts quarterly filing on
Form 10-Q for the most recent period available and Click on "Balance Sheet
Details" under "Notes Tables." For what types of products does Electronic
Arts defer revenue?
7. (Advanced) Now access the Take-Two Interactive filing on Form
10-Q for the most recent period available and Click on Accounting Policies
in the left hand column, then scroll down to Revenue Recognition. Again
describe the type of products for which the company defers revenue
8. (Advanced) What do you notice that is different about the two
companies' policies? Why do you think the companies have this difference in
accounting practices? How do you think this difference will affect quarterly
profitability comparisons between the two companies, as is done in this
article?
9. (Introductory) What accounting standard requires EA and TTI to
defer these components of revenue? Provide specific references to a section
or sections of the FASB's Accounting Standards Codification.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
"Game Makers Lift Forecasts," by Ian Sherr, The Wall Street
Journal, October 30, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB20001424052702304655104579166153884234062?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
Videogame makers Electronic Arts Inc. EA +0.96% and
Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. TTWO +4.49% raised their full-year
outlooks following strong sales of their products and early indications of
robust holiday sales.
The forecasts indicate the industry is upbeat that
new hardware releases from Sony Corp. 6758.TO -11.13% and Microsoft Corp.
MSFT -0.38% in November will jump-start videogame sales after years of
struggling to find growth.
EA raised its adjusted profit view by a nickel to
$1.25 a share, while Take-Two raised its per-share outlook to between $3.50
to $3.75. Both were above average analyst expectations.
EA reported its loss narrowed by 28% to $273
million in its fiscal second quarter, thanks to cost-cutting efforts and
successful launches of new big-name new titles, such as its "Madden"
football game and "Plants vs. Zombies 2" strategy game for mobile devices.
EA said sales fell about 2% to $695 million.
Adjusted for items such as deferred revenue, sales tallied $1.04 billion,
down slightly from the $1.08 billion a year prior.
Take-Two Interactive, meanwhile, posted a wider
loss in its fiscal second quarter, due in part to increased marketing costs
for its games. Take-Two said sales fell more than 45% to $148.9
million—though when adjusted for items such as deferred revenue, the tally
jumped to $1.27 billion, up significantly from the $288 million it reported
a year ago.
Behind that jump was the company's latest "Grand
Theft Auto" crime-drama videogame, which was released in September, right
before the end of the quarter. Take-Two said sales of the game topped $1
billion in its first three days on the market, a record for the videogame
industry.
Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two's chief executive, said
sales of that game and its other top-tier titles "demonstrate consumers'
enduring appetite for groundbreaking interactive entertainment."
Both firms are increasingly expecting a bounty from
consumer enthusiasm for the new consoles. Blake Jorgensen, EA's chief
financial officer, said the company is still cautious about how the market
will receive Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, but he said
customers appeared enthusiastic. "There's a huge amount of excitement," he
said.
Continued in article
Jensen Comments
I think video games are for idiot addictions unless they are designed with
specific educational objectives in mind such as a Jeopardy-like video game.
"Games in the Classroom (part 4)," by Anastasia Salter, Chronicle
of Higher Education, October 6, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/games-in-the-classroom-part-4/36294?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Throughout this series, we’ve talked about
why you might want to use games in the classroom,
how you can find them, and
how to start making your own.
But games can also inspire us to
rethink our classrooms at a structural level, and
particularly as sites for collaboration and playful learning that can extend
long beyond a single lesson plan. Game designers are pointing out the
similarities between games and the classroom.
Extra Credits, a video series by game designers
taking a deeper look at the form, recently did an episode on
Gamifying Education that provides a great starting
point for a conversation on game-inspired classroom design.
For ideas on getting started, I recently spoke with
Lee Sheldon, author of the recently released The Multiplayer
Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (Cengage
Learning 2011), whose book chronicles both his own
and others’ experiments with taking the structures, terminology, and
concepts of a massive multiplayer role-playing game and applying them to the
classroom. You can check out Lee Sheldon’s syllabus at his blog on Gaming
the Classroom, along with more of his reflections
on the experiment, which divided his students into guilds and encouraged
them to “level up” through the semester. After using the course model in its
latest iteration, he reported perfect attendance. He also notes the value in
his system of “grading by attrition”—students are not being punished for
failing, but instead rewarded for progressing and thus less likely to be
defeated early.
As a professional game designer teaching courses on
game design, Lee Sheldon has a natural environment for innovation–but his
concepts open the door for a conversation across disciplines. Lee Sheldon
describes his model as “designing the class as a game”—so not just focusing
on extrinsic rewards (the typical focus of gamification), but instead trying
to promote “opportunities for collaboration” and “intrinsic rewards from
helping others.” As game designers, like teachers, are focused on creating
an experience, many of the strategies for building a class as game are
similar to more traditional preparation. And he advises that these ideas can
work for anyone: “You don’t have to a be a game designer…you can prep like
putting together a lesson plan, but learn the terminology.” Lee Sheldon
explains that one of the benefits of using games as a model is that a game
is abstracted—it has to “feel real”, but you get to “take out the stuff
that isn’t fun.” He also notes that “You can do just about anything in a
game that you can do in real life,” and the wealth of games today is a
testament to that range of possibilities.
Lee Sheldon and his team at RPI are now working on
an experiment with their new
Emergent Reality Lab that offers a possible future
for courses as games. He explained their current project, teaching Mandarin
Chinese as an alternate reality game, as a “Maltese Falcon-esque mystery”
narrative—the class will start out as usual, in a normal classroom, but it
will be interrupted and move into the lab as the students take a virtual
journey across China aided by motion-aware Kinect interfaces in an immersive
environment. Lee Sheldon said that his ideal outcome would be for students
to learn more Chinese than they would in a traditional class.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on gaming and simulation in education Gamification
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Winners and losers
On October 28, 2013 you take 80 friends to see the Rams for the price of one
Cardinals ticket ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-28/world-series-ticket-prices-are-killing-the-st-dot-louis-football-market?campaign_id=DN102813
It is not common, however, for baseball fans to pay more than football fans at
professional team stadiums.
TexMex ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texmex
"For American Restaurant Chains, the Future Is Mexican (food)," by
Venessa Wong, Bloomberg Businessweek, October 28, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-28/for-american-restaurant-chains-the-future-is-mexican?campaign_id=DN102813
Jensen Comment
Firstly, I should note that what is called "Mexican food" in the USA is usually
more like "TexMex" food served up in Texas. South of the Rio Grande what people
eat is somewhat different, often with higher calorie counts from cheese dishes.
Ironically, for 24 years I lived in San Antonio where a majority of expensive
and low-priced restaurants provide TexMex items on the menu unless they are fast
food chains like McDonalds with standardized menus across the USA.
I recently had a superb Mexican (not really TexMex) dinner at a restaurant
called Frieda's in downtown Stowe, Vermont. I liked this restaurant better than
any other Mexican or TexMex restaurant I've ever tried. It did not serve
items that you would expect like Fajitas or hard-shell tacos.
The best TexMex restaurants have mostly handmade items like tortillas patted
into a ball and then flattened and cooked before your eyes. This is true
because it usually adds to the ambiance of a cheerful and fun-loving TexMex
restaurant. They become more fun-loving after the third Margarita.
I like Taco salads, and the Taco salad at Taco Bell is usually very good.
However, not all Taco Bells are created equal. The Taco Bell restaurant near the
Sacramento Airport is much better than the Taco Bell in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
All Taco Bells are fast food restaurants that cannot hold a candle to Frieda's
in Stowe.
There's no TexMex or Mexican restaurant among the restaurants near our
cottage ---not even a Taco Bell. Sigh!
Actually, even the high-priced restaurants near where we live are not very
good. That's a price we pay for living in the boon docks.
From the Scout Report on November 1, 2013
Page2Images: Mobile Emulator ---
http://www.page2images.com/mobile_phone_emulator
If you're a website designer, you are probably very
interested in how your site appears on mobile devices. The Page2Images site
makes this entire process quite seamless. Visitors just need to type in the
desired URL, choose the device, screen size, and orientation and voila: a
no-frills but reliable thumbnail of what the site will look like. This
version is browser-based and thus compatible with all operating systems.
Feed Sifter ---
http://feedsifter.com/create.php
The concept behind Feed Sifter is quite simple.
Most people subscribe to a number of feeds and it can be difficult keeping
track of all this information. Feed Sifter makes this a bit easier by
offering a quick and easy filter for looking for specific information in a
specific feed. Visitors can type in any permutation or combination of words
and receive immediate results. This version is compatible with all operating
systems.
The home of a computer pioneer gets the historic designation nod in
California Steve Jobs' California Homes Gets Historic Designation
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/steve-jobs-calif-home-historic-designation-20713336
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' childhood home in California gets historic
designation
http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/229696091.html
Computer History Museum
http://www.computerhistory.org/
California State Parks: Office of Historic Preservation
http://ohp.parks.ca.gov/
Hearst Castle
http://www.hearstcastle.org/
Steve Jobs 1995 Interview
http://vimeo.com/31813340
From the Scout Report on November 8, 2013
Uber ---
http://uber.com
Uber is a helpful app that seamlessly connects
riders with drivers in more than 50 cities and 20 countries. It's a rather
innovative way to travel, allowing users to request a ride and pay via their
mobile phones. The application includes the ability to compare rates for
different vehicles, split payments, and get fare quotes as well. On the
site, visitors can begin their journey by selecting their city, then proceed
to pick their preferred vehicle and end destination. This version is
compatible with iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.
For Tom Selling and other enthusiasts
of the bicycle
Cycle Route ---
http://cycleroute.org/
If you're an avid cyclist or just a neophyte,
you'll find this rather unique app most useful. Cycle Route can assist those
with a passion for cycling plan out their route based on topography,
elevation, main roads, and a range of other variables. Visitors just need to
enter their origin and destination and they will be all set. The app returns
a range of routes that users can take advantage of and there's also a mobile
version as well. This version is compatible with all operating systems.
Interest in nanomedicine continues to grow
Nanomedicine: Particle physiology
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/11/nanomedicine
Singapore university sets up nanomedicine research institute
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/sci/2013-11/05/c_132861629.htm
Winners of the first-ever nanomedicine award revealed at BIO-Europe
http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=48455
Thanh Nien News: Vietnam announces first nanomedicine success
http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/20131030-vietnam-announces-first-nanomedicine-success.aspx
Nanomedicine, benefits and risks
http://www.nanopinion.eu/da/node/343
European Technology Platform: Nanomedicine
http://www.etp-nanomedicine.eu/public
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Research Guides at Harvard Library ---
http://guides.library.harvard.edu/hcl
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Bob Jensen's bookmarks for multiple disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
The Case for Studying Physics in a Charming Animated Video ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/animated-video-makes-the-case-for-studying-physics.html
Understanding Science: Teaching Resources ---
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/teaching/index.php
Smithsonian Science Education Center ---
http://www.ssec.si.edu/
National Library of of Medicine: Disaster Information Management Research
Center ---
http://disasterinfo.nlm.nih.gov/
Planting Science ---
http://www.plantingscience.org/
Purdue Agriculture: Botany and Plant Pathology Teaching Resources ---
https://ag.purdue.edu/btny/pages/teachingresources.aspx
EcoMOBILE (ecologby) ---
http://ecomobile.gse.harvard.edu/
Tour the Red Planet In 3D On The Mars Express ---
http://readwrite.com/2013/11/05/tour-the-red-planet-in-3d-on-the-mars-express#awesm=~omqhJFr8G6B4Ir
This Is Mars: Mesmerizing Ultra-High-Resolution NASA Photos at the
Intersection of Art and Science ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/31/this-is-mars-xavier-barral/
USGS: Energy & Minerals ---
http://www.usgs.gov/energy_minerals/
U.S. Energy Information Administration ---
http://www.eia.gov/
Bob Jensen's threads on free online science,
engineering, and medicine tutorials are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Engineering is Elementary ---
http://www.eie.org/
Landscape Architecture Magazine ---
http://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/
National Association for Olmsted Parks (landscape design history) ---
http://www.olmsted.org/
King County Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture ---
http://www.kingcounty.gov/operations/archives/exhibits/Earthworks.aspx
American Society for Engineering Education: PRISM ---
http://www.prism-magazine.org
Nanotechnology Center for Teaching and Learning ---
http://community.nsee.us/
Nanotechnology Curriculum Materials ---
http://www.nnin.org/education-training/k-12-teachers/nanotechnology-curriculum-materials
National Science Foundation: Nanoscience ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/overviews/nano/index.jsp
CTE Resource Center: Nanotechnology ---
http://www.cteresource.org/featured/nanotechnology.html
NanoTeachers: Bringing Nanoscience into the Classroom ---
http://teachers.stanford.edu/
nanoHUB.org: Simulation, Education, and Community for Nanotechnology ---
http://nanohub.org/
Nano.gov ---
http://www.nano.gov/
Nanobiotechnology Center ---
http://www.nbtc.cornell.edu/
From the
Scout Report on November 8, 2013
Interest in nanomedicine continues to grow
Nanomedicine: Particle physiology
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/11/nanomedicine
Singapore university sets up nanomedicine research institute
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/sci/2013-11/05/c_132861629.htm
Winners of the first-ever nanomedicine award revealed at BIO-Europe
http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=48455
Thanh Nien News: Vietnam announces first nanomedicine success
http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/20131030-vietnam-announces-first-nanomedicine-success.aspx
Nanomedicine, benefits and risks
http://www.nanopinion.eu/da/node/343
European Technology Platform: Nanomedicine
http://www.etp-nanomedicine.eu/public
Social Science and Economics Tutorials
Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World:
Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/watch-footage-from-the-psychology-experiment-that-shocked-the-world-milgrams-obedience-study-1961.html
Take Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test (1921) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/take-hermann-rorschachs-original-rorschach-test-1921.html
Banks, Bailouts & Irish Literature ---
http://ocw.nd.edu/irish-studies/banks-bailouts-and-irish-literature
Center for Business and Economic Research: University of Alabama ---
http://cber.cba.ua.edu/
A Fascinating Glimpse Of Ordinary Life In North Korea ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/sam-gellmans-amazingly-normal-photos-of-north-korea-2013-11
Visions of Freedom: New Documents from the Closed Cuban Archives ---
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/visions-freedom-new-documents-the-closed-cuban-archives
Latino USA ---
http://latinousa.org/
Latino Settlement in the New Century ---
http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/96.pdf
MOMA: Modern Women ---
http://www.moma.org/explore/publications/modern_women
National Library of of Medicine: Disaster Information Management Research
Center ---
http://disasterinfo.nlm.nih.gov/
Places Wire (urban parks and planning) ---
http://placeswire.designobserver.com/zine/100pctbuilt
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
An Introduction to Teaching Mathematics at the College Level ---
http://www.ams.org/profession/career-info/grad-school/Kelton-TEACH.pdf
Numberphile ---
http://www.youtube.com/numberphile
Launchings (mathematics education happenings)) ---
http://launchings.blogspot.com/
\
Mathematical Association of America: Reviews
http://www.maa.org/publications/maa-reviews
Don't forget the following wonderful math sites:
Wolfram Alpha ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha
Khan Academy ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
The British Library: Victorians ---
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/victorians/victorianhome.html
Take Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test (1921) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/take-hermann-rorschachs-original-rorschach-test-1921.html
The Earliest Photos Of 12 Major US Cities ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/earliest-photos-of-big-cities-2013-10
Pennell Photography Collection (6,000 photos from the 1920s)---
http://luna.ku.edu:8180/luna/servlet/kuluna01kui~15~15
John Hensel Photograph Collection ---
http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/hensel.html
Thomas Addis Emmet Collection (Over 10,000 historical manuscripts) ---
http://archives.nypl.org/mss/927
James Joyce’s Dublin Captured in Vintage Photos from 1897 to 1904 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/james-joyces-dublin-captured-in-vintage-photos.html
Travel Diaries and Scrapbooks of Harrison Forman 1932-1973 ---
http://collections.lib.uwm.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/forman/
"Little Boy Brown: The Loveliest Ode to Childhood and Loneliness Ever
Written, Illustrated by Legendary Graphic Designer André François," by Maria
Popova, Brain Pickings, November 11, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/05/little-boy-brown-enchanted-lion/
"Sylvia Plath’s Unseen Drawings, Edited by Her Daughter and Illuminated in
Her Private Letters," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, November 6, 2013
---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/06/sylvia-plath-drawings-2/
MOMA: Modern Women ---
http://www.moma.org/explore/publications/modern_women
Harry Ransom Center: Circus Collection ---
http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15878coll6#nav_top
Turnabout Theatre (marionettes and puppets and comedy) ---
http://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/visual-collections/turnabout-theatre
Watch The New America, a Stop Motion Animation Starring 800+ Laser Engraved
Wood Blocks ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/watch-the-new-america-a-stop-motion-animation-starring-800-laser-engraved-wood-blocks.html
29 Awesome Pictures Of The US Navy Through History ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-navy-history-photos-2013-10
Alberto Martini’s Haunting Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1901-1944)
---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/alberto-martinis-shocking-illustrations-of-dantes-divine-comedy-1901-1944.html
Prize-Winning Animation Lets You Fly Through 17th Century London ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/fly-through-17th-century-london.html
Places Wire (urban parks and planning) ---
http://placeswire.designobserver.com/zine/100pctbuilt
Town Greens ---
http://www.towngreens.com/
City of New York Parks & Recreation ---
http://www.nycgovparks.org/
Parks Canada ---
http://www.pc.gc.ca/progs/np-pn/pr-sp/index_e.asp
Vintage Film Shows How the Oxford English Dictionary Was Made in 1925 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/how-the-oxford-english-dictionary-was-made-in-1925.html
Wolfsonian Museum: Collections (art nouveau and art deco) ---
http://www.wolfsonian.org/explore/collections/browse
MIT: Public Art ---
http://listart.mit.edu/public_art
Baseball and Jackie Robinson ---
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/robinson/
Shiloh Museum of Ozark History ---
http://www.shilohmuseum.org/
Visions of Freedom: New Documents from the Closed Cuban Archives ---
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/visions-freedom-new-documents-the-closed-cuban-archives
Robert McCloskey Sketches for "Make Way for Ducklings" ---
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/sets/72157636871888613/with/10441859545/
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
The University of Michigan Museum of Art ---
http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Chrysler Museum of Art ---
http://www.chrysler.org/
Public Art Archive ---
http://www.publicartarchive.org/
Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective (pop art) ---
http://roy.artic.edu/
The Warhol: Time Capsule 21 ---
http://www.warhol.org/tc21/main.html
Brooklyn Museum: Andy Warhol: The Last Decade ---
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/andy_warhol/index.php
Wolfsonian Museum: Collections (art nouveau and art deco) ---
http://www.wolfsonian.org/explore/collections/browse
The Warhol: Heroes & Villains: The Comic Book Art of Alex Ross ---
http://www.warhol.org/exhibitions/2011/heroesandvillains/
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction That is ‘100%
Accurate’ ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/what-ancient-greek-music-sounded-like.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Music
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
October 29, 2013
October 30, 2013
October 31, 2013
November 1, 2013
November 2, 2013
November 4, 2013
November 5, 2013
November 6, 2013
November 7, 2013
November 8, 2013
November 11, 2013
November 12, 2013
November 13, 2013
Note the Khan Academy module explaining Obamacare ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/american-civics-subject/american-civics/v/ppaca--or--obamacare
Take Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test (1921) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/take-hermann-rorschachs-original-rorschach-test-1921.html
Three very smart coders who say the HealthCare.gov site was designed wrong
from get go.
What users first want is a listing of exchange alternatives before feeding in
any personal data.
"S.F. programmers build alternative to HealthCare.gov," CBS News,
November 8, 2013 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57611592/s.f-programmers-build-alternative-to-healthcare.gov/
(CBS News) On Friday, President Obama had this to
say about problems with the Obamcare website during
a speech in New Orleans:
"I promise you, nobody's been more frustrated. I
wanted to go in and fix it myself, but I don't write code."
But plenty of programmers do write code. And three
of them have created their own website that addresses some of the most
annoying
problems with HealthCare.gov.
In a San Francisco office shared with other tech
start-ups, three 20-year-olds saw HealthCare.gov as a challenge.
With a few late nights, Ning Liang, George
Kalogeropoulos and Michael Wasser built "thehealthsherpa.com,"
a two-week-old website that solves one of the biggest
problems with the government's site.
"They got it completely backwards in terms of what
people want up front," said Liang. He added: "They want prices and benefits,
so that they could make the decision."
Liang showed CBS News how it worked. "You come to
our website and you put in your zip code -- in this case a California zip
code. You hit 'find plans,' and you immediately see the exchange plans that
are available for that zip code."
They have plenty of experience working at places
like Twitter and Microsoft before setting out to build their own Internet
companies. But this project is a public service.
"There was no thought of, 'How do we make money
this time?'" said Wasser. "It was like, 'This is a problem that we know we
can solve in a really short period of time. So let's just do it.'"
Using information buried in the government's own
website built by high-priced government contractors, they found a simpler
way to present it to users.
"That's the great thing about having such a small
team," said Kalogeropoulos. "You sit around a table and say, 'Okay, how does
this work?' There's no coordination meetings, there's no planning sessions.
It's like, 'Well, let's read the document and let's implement this.'"
And the features keep on coming. CBS News looked at
the team's website Thursday and pointed out that the tax subsidy wasn't in
there, which is supposed to be one of the most complicated parts of the
HealthCare.gov site. But as Liang explained: "Yes, we added this last
night...the subsidy calculation is fairly complicated, but it wasn't too
bad."
You can't actually enroll on the HealthSherpa site,
but they do provide contact information for companies offering the plans.
Users who find a plan they like can go directly to the insurance companies
without ever using HealthCare.gov.
Health Sherpa ---
http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/
This site is unbelievably easy. It does discuss subsidy options. But it is not
so great regarding discussion of the real sticking point of these plans ---
the deductibles that will probably be the main reason many individuals will go
uninsured --- if they can't afford the deductibles.
Bob
Jensen's universal health care messaging ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
"Report: IRS sent out billions of dollars in fraudulent returns,"
The Hill, November 7, 2013 ---
http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/189621-report-irs-sent-out-billions-of-dollars-in-fraudulent
The IRS sent billions of dollars' worth of refunds
to tax cheats around the globe in 2011, according to a new federal report.
Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration
found that well over 1 million fraudulent tax returns made their way through
the IRS’s defenses, costing the Treasury just under $4 billion. That
includes more than $1 million sent to far-flung locales like Bulgaria,
China, Ireland and Lithuania.
Still, the inspector general also noted that the
IRS had improved its efforts to stop tax cheats who file returns using real
Social Security numbers or other tax identification numbers.
The IRS reduced the amount it lost to identity
thieves by around 30 percent in 2011, from more than $5 billion in 2010.
“Identity theft continues to be a serious problem
with devastating consequences for taxpayers and an enormous impact on tax
administration,” Russell George, the tax administration inspector general,
said in a statement.
“Undetected tax refund fraud results in significant
unintended federal outlays and erodes taxpayer confidence in the federal tax
system.”
The IRS has long acknowledged that identity theft
is a big problem, and has made battling it a top priority. Taxpayers who
file after an identity thief uses their Social Security number can face
significant delays in the processing of their legitimate return.
For instance, the agency has more than twice as
many employees working on identity theft cases now – around 3,000 – than it
did in 2011, and has trained roughly 35,000 employees to deal with the
issue. The IRS has also put new filters into place to weed out potential
fraudulent returns, and beefed up its cooperation with local law
enforcement.
But in a statement, the IRS also acknowledged that
it was a challenge to keep up with “constantly evolving tactics used by
scammers” while it had fewer resources at its disposal.
“Given significant budget cuts, the IRS continues
to balance and shift our limited resources as our work on identity theft and
refund fraud continues to grow, touching nearly every part of the
organization to better protect taxpayers and help victims,” the agency said.
“Over the past two years, we have continued to
improve our processes and systems for helping identity theft victims and
have considerably decreased the time it takes to resolve these complex
cases.”
Jensen Comment
To add pain to misery, many of those refunds went to cheats who receive cash
income in the underground economy that's not reported to the IRS. Thus the
cheats get a good deal both ways due to IRS failures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
To add tragedy on top of misery about 68 million of 137 million taxpayers in the
USA pay no income tax, 98% of whom have reported earnings less than
$100,000 according to Bloomberg. Sounds like even more of a free ride now the
the government will also subsidize medical insurance for these taxpayers who
either pay no tax or receive a net refund on their tax returns.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
How to Lie With Naive Politically Correct Estimates
"Affordable Care Act: 17 Million Can Get Subsidies," by Mary Agnes
Carey, WebMD News from Kaiser Health News, November 5, 2013 ---
http://www.webmd.com/health-insurance/20131105/17-million-people-eligible-for-premium-subsidies-study-finds
Jensen Comment
Fraud is inevitable and cannot be prevented when it comes to giving out
subsidies to to insured that are not legally entitled to such subsidies.
Firstly, there's the $2 trillion underground economy where people are receiving
income that even the IRS cannot detect --- those folks who work for unreported
cash earnings. We're talking about millions of people who do not report any
income to the IRS or greatly under report their incomes ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
Secondly, the 17 million reported above does not jive with the estimated
49.5% (of 130 million) of taxpayers who file tax returns but do not pay any
income taxes. Some of them have incomes offset by credits such as credits for
dependents, but its likely that the nearly all of 50% of taxpayers who pay no
qualify, at least on paper, for subsidies ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
Most of those making more than $100,000 pay some income taxes. Bloomberg
reports that 98% of those that pay no income taxes have less than $100,000 in
earnings. Most are availing themselves of recent tax breaks such as energy
credits, tax breaks from employer contributions to medical insurance, increased
tax breaks for dependents, and deferred tax breaks such as breaks professors get
for employer contributions to TIAA-CREF.
Watch the April 3, 2012 Bloomberg Video ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/89503501/
A family of four making less than $98,000 qualifies for a health insurance
subsidy from the government.
Hence I think the 17 million estimate is wildly inaccurate unless tens of
millions of those eligible for subsidies simply go uninsured because they cannot
afford the deductibles even if the premiums with subsidies are affordable.
One added qualifier is the huge unknown (at least to me) number of Medicaid
and Medicare recipients who are scoped out of the Affordable Health Care Act.
Those on Medicaid do not pay income taxes. Most of those on Medicare do pay
income taxes such that the sources of error in estimating the number of others
who will actually claim subsidies under the Affordable Health Care Act is
probably impossible to estimate within a 10 million range of error or more.
The enormous source of error that cannot be eliminated is that $2 trillion
underground cash-only economy that takes place under the noses of the IRS
enforcers of taxes.
A Bit of Humor
The book in her hand pretty much says it all ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/kathleen-sebelius-websites-for-dummies-obamacare-healthcare-gov-tennessee-brian-kelsey-2013-11
Watch a 44-Minute Supercut of Every Woody Allen Stammer, From Every Woody Allen
Film ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/watch-a-44-minute-supercut-of-every-woody-allen-stammer.html
Video: I Think You Might Be Sitting on My Phone ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbdoO8IiyrQ&feature=youtu.be
10 Figures of Speech Illustrated by Monty Python: Paradiastole, Epanorthosis,
Syncatabasis & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/10-figures-of-speech-illustrated-by-monty-python-paradiastole-epanorthosis-syncatabasis-more.html
If you got rid of your cat(s) but really miss the stench of a urine-soaked
litter box, Dell makes a Kitty Litter Laptop just for you.
"Dell users get claws out over laptops that stink of cat pee: Computer maker
forced to offer replacements after buyers complain of smell from Latitude E6430u
like 'tomcat's litter box'," by Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian, October 30,
2013 ---
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/dell-laptop-cat-pee-urine-smell-latitude-e6430u
Jensen Comment
Don't turn Dell's Kitty Litter Laptop in for new a replacement until you thought
of how such a computer can improve your life.
- One day soon your Kitty Litter Laptop will be a collector's item.
- Speed up that vote to adjourn. Turn it on during what's becoming a very
long and boring committee meeting.
- If your research stinks you now have a better excuse.
- Waste less time in chit chat. Visitors to your office will do their
business quickly and zoom out holding their breath.
- You can smell better. This beats that deodorant that wears off after the
first 20 minutes. Now you've got a long-lasting cover up.
- More cats. If you really miss your old cats, new cats will work every
which way to move in with you. Campus police might even turn on these
laptops in traps for stray cats.
- Less dog pooh. If the neighborhood dogs are doing their messes in your
yard, this could be the answer to keeping them away. Dogs can even smell
this laptop when it's inside your house.
- When turned on while walking downtown or in the woods you're less likely
to be mugged, especially by bad guys who are lurking nearby and have second
thoughts about stealing your stinking laptop.
- If your laptop is stolen police dogs will more easily sniff out the
trail.
- Maybe Dell should share this odorous patent with smart-phone
manufacturing firms.
Please forward advertisements for the Dell Kitty Litter Laptop to
https://www.facebook.com/CatHumor101
Bob Jensen's threads on ubiquitous computing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ubiquit.htm
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
The Cult of Statistical Significance:
How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
How Accountics Scientists Should Change:
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review
I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accounting and Taxation News Sites ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for
free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM
(Educators)
http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.
Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for
accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting
education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial
accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing,
doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics)
research, publication, replication, and validity testing.
|
CPAS-L
(Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ (Closed
Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo (Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB
and the International Accounting
Standards Board on this financial
reporting blog from Financial Executives
International. The site, updated daily,
compiles regulatory news, rulings and
statements, comment letters on
standards, and hot topics from the Web’s
largest business and accounting
publications and organizations. Look for
continuing coverage of SOX requirements,
fair value reporting and the Alternative
Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such
as the subprime mortgage crisis,
international convergence, and rules for
tax return preparers. |
|
|
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker
[lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as
well as a practicing CPA)
I found another listserve
that is exceptional -
CalCPA maintains
http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/
and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.
There are several highly
capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and
the answers are often in depth.
Scott
Scott forwarded the following message from Jim
Counts
Yes you may mention info on
your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any
CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is
possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not
have access to the files and other items posted.
Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in
top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and
in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I
will get the request to join.
Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage
people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then
via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in
your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the
inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.
We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in
California.... ]
Please encourage your members
to join our listserve.
If any questions let me know.
Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk
|
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's
Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
All
my online pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu