Tidbits on February 26 2014
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Set 5 of My All Time Favorite Snow Photographs
 http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Snow/Set05/SnowSet05.htm

 

 

Tidbits on February26, 2014
Bob Jensen

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

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


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


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

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

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

Based upon this analysis I chose F-Secure


"A Scrapbook on What's Wrong with the Past, Present and Future of Accountics Science"
Bob Jensen
February 19, 2014
SSRN Download:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2398296 

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

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

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

Old Barns --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/J8Ioa1gVVeA?showinfo=0&rel=0

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

 




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

How Wolves Change Ecosystems --- http://twistedsifter.com/videos/how-wolves-changed-an-ecosystem-trophic-cascade/

AT&T Tech Channel (exciting future of technology) --- http://techchannel.att.com/showpage.cfm?ATT-Archives

How the Economic Machine Works ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-06/charlie-rose-talks-to-bridgewaters-ray-dalio

Featured Videos: Urban Land Institute --- http://uli.org/publications/featured-videos/

Florida Citrus Industry Oral Histories --- http://guides.lib.usf.edu/content.php?pid=49131&sid=364819 

Jorge Luis Borges Chats with William F. Buckley on Firing Line (1977) ---
https://mail.google.com/_/scs/mail-static/_/js/k=gmail.main.en.sG1zGE-7pzM.O/m=m_i,t,it/am=OCsOJvn39kIx5i_0RbX__rLdp2Infq_uj3QCUGCn-m_2_4B7gBuUH2c/rt=h/d=1/rs=AItRSTM6-_eWQavCiB6pLkqrU2Rfi91x6w

Everybody needs a hole to hide in:  The hawk versus the squirrel ---
https://www.youtube.com/v/XBEyCr5AoIs
I don't know this could possibly be filmed.

Amazing Antique Desk ---
http://www.youtube.com/embed/MKikHxKeodA?rel=0

Ken Burns (PBS American History) --- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ken-burns/id723854283?mt=8

A Middle East Memorial Wall (warning this is patriotic) --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/WEPBQGu74oo


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

Riverwalk Jazz --- (vast collection of jazz recordings and links) --- http://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/home

Chicago Jazz --- http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/cja/jazzmaps/ctlframe.htm

John Falter's Jazz Portraits --- http://nebraskahistory.org/exhibits/john_falter_jazz/in

Wynton Marsalis (History of Jazz With Great Samples) --- http://joy2learn.com/jazz/index.html

Bluegrass in Space --- http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/a-bluegrass-version-of-elton-johns-1972-hit-rocket-man.html

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with a Medley of Male Pain, Selected By Collective Cadenza ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/celebrate-valentines-day-with-a-medley-of-male-pain-selected-by-collective-cadenza.html

Crime Jazz: How Miles Davis, Count Basie & Other Jazz Legends Provided the Soundtrack for Noir Films & TV ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/crime-jazz.html

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

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

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

The Conductor (even though the music bad) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7W3ICpONVs

Bob Jensen's threads on nearly all types of free music selections online ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm


Photographs and Art

21 Photos From The President Of Ukraine's Incredible Compound ---
http://www.businessinsider.com#ixzz2u9HkmwnF

19 Striking Photos Show What Nevada Brothels Are Really Like ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-mcandrews-photos-of-nevadas-legal-brothels-2014-2?op=1#ixzz2u9IJcWBq
All the quality control inspector jobs are filled.
Actually this is a depressing set of photographs.

China's Biggest Ghost City ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-ordos-ghost-city-pictures-2014-2

Luxury glass house from 80s cult classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off finally sells for $1.25 million after FOUR years on the market ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2564971/Luxury-glass-house-cult-classic-Ferris-Bueller-finally-sells-FOUR-years-market.html

A Chinese Artist Has Done Something Incredible With Paper ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-artist-paper-classic-sculptures-2014-2

Century 21 Digital Collection (1,200 photographs from the 1962 Chicago World's Fair) ---  http://cdm15015.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15015coll3

Paul Revere Collection at the American Antiquarian Society (art history) --- http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Inventories/Revere/

Isa Genzken Retrospective (Sculpture Exhibition at the MOMA) --- http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/isagenzken/

Sporting Sketches by Henry Thomas Alken ---
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=science&col_id=150

Stunning Combat Artwork Reveals WWII Fighting That Will Never Be Seen Again ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/wwii-combat-artwork-2014-2

The 58 Most Mesmerizing Photos From The Winter Olympics ---
http://www.businessinsider.com#ixzz2tzrnGq4e

Legendary Lands --- http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/17/legendary-lands-umberto-eco/

Winter in Russia --- Click Here
https://www.google.ca/search?q="Winter+in+Russia"&lr=&as_qdr=all&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=RUACU5-bKqW8yAHgyIDoAg&ved=0CCgQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=497

The 10 Most Expensive Paintings On Public Display ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-expensive-paintings-on-public-display-2014-2

President Barack Obama Visual Iconography (photographs of political history) --- http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/obama/ 

Georgians Revealed (The Georgian Era in England) --- http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/georgiansrevealed/index.html

Painters Painting: The Definitive Documentary Portrait of the New York Art World (1940-1970) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/painters-painting.html

The Haunting Final Portrait of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Part of Victoria Will’s Civil War-Era Photo Collection ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-haunting-last-portrait-of-philip-seymour-hoffman.html

An Online Gallery of 30,000 Items from The British Library, Including Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks And Mozart’s Diary ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/an-online-gallery-of-30000-items-from-the-british-library-including-leonardo-da-vincis-notebooks-and-mozarts-diary.html

Museum of Science & Industry: Education --- http://www.msichicago.org/education/

University of Oklahoma: History of Science Collections --- http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/homescience.php

Browse The Magical Worlds of Harry Houdini’s Scrapbooks ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/browse-magical-worlds-harry-houdinis-scrapbooks.html

The Postcards That Picasso Illustrated and Sent to Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire & Gertrude Stein ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/picasso-postcards.html

New photos of bighorn lamb born north of Tucson released ---
http://azstarnet.com/news/new-photos-of-bighorn-lamb-born-north-of-tucson-released/article_c54ef9e6-9b30-11e3-8252-0019bb2963f4.html

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


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

Harvard Presents Two Free Online Courses on the Old Testament ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/harvard-presents-two-free-online-courses-on-the-old-testament.html

Watch Langston Hughes Read Poetry from His First Collection, The Weary Blues (1958) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/hear-langston-hughes-read-two-poems-from-the-weary-blues.html

An Online Gallery of 30,000 Items from The British Library, Including Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks And Mozart’s Diary ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/an-online-gallery-of-30000-items-from-the-british-library-including-leonardo-da-vincis-notebooks-and-mozarts-diary.html

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life: The Oscar-Winning Film About Kafka Writing The Metamorphosis ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/franz-kafkas-its-a-wonderful-life.html

The Little Prince as a Pop-Up Book ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/12/little-prince-pop-up-book/

Legendary Lands --- http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/17/legendary-lands-umberto-eco/

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 February 26, 2014
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2014/TidbitsQuotations022614.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




David Johnstone asked me to write a paper on the following:
"A Scrapbook on What's Wrong with the Past, Present and Future of Accountics Science"
Bob Jensen
February 19, 2014
SSRN Download:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2398296 

Abstract

For operational convenience I define accountics science as research that features equations and/or statistical inference. Historically, there was a heated debate in the 1920s as to whether the main research journal of academic accounting, The Accounting Review (TAR) that commenced in 1926, should be an accountics journal with articles that mostly featured equations. Practitioners and teachers of college accounting won that debate.

TAR articles and accountancy doctoral dissertations prior to the 1970s seldom had equations.  For reasons summarized below, doctoral programs and TAR evolved to where in the 1990s there where having equations became virtually a necessary condition for a doctoral dissertation and acceptance of a TAR article. Qualitative normative and case method methodologies disappeared from doctoral programs.

What’s really meant by “featured equations” in doctoral programs is merely symbolic of the fact that North American accounting doctoral programs pushed out most of the accounting to make way for econometrics and statistics that are now keys to the kingdom for promotion and tenure in accounting schools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

The purpose of this paper is to make a case that the accountics science monopoly of our doctoral programs and published research is seriously flawed, especially its lack of concern about replication and focus on simplified artificial worlds that differ too much from reality to creatively discover findings of greater relevance to teachers of accounting and practitioners of accounting. Accountics scientists themselves became a Cargo Cult.

I'm really not an fan of motivational and inspirational books, presentations, and films --- they get to be a lot alike and boring.

I was fascinated and inspired by the upbeat writings and videos of Randy Paush in his dying days ---
http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080415.htm

In particular I compared my tough football coach (Tony Gazowski) with Randy's Coach Graham ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#Randy

There's a saying that goes something like this:
"Success if failure turned inside out."
This does not apply to me mostly because of my risk aversions. I avoided risks my entire life. My life has never been one of extreme failure or extreme success even though I'm somewhat proud of being my high school Valedictorian and graduating Summa Cum Laude in college, but it was a very small farm town graduating high school class of 78 students, and I worked like a drudge (memorized a lot) night and day in college for grades in college. My success was driven by fear of disappointing my parents who, because of deep love, never would really would have been disappointed if I got a B or even a C.

I was turned down by Stanford University for my first year of college but was later given a full-ride fellowship for six years in a new accounting Ph.D. program at Stanford. I did pass all four parts of the CPA exam while I was in my last term of an undergraduate program, but I destroyed a lot of week ends memorizing for that set of examinations. Whatever success I achieved in life was never easy for me.

9 Lessons to Learn From Failure:  Nine Stanford GSB alumni including Chip Conley (MBA ’84) of Joie de Vivre Hotels and Beth Cross (MBA ’88) of Ariat International open up about failure and how to move forward after difficult times. --- Click Here
http://stanfordbusiness.tumblr.com/post/75273351576/9-lessons-to-learn-from-failure?utm_source=Stanford+Business+Re%3AThink&utm_campaign=47b440d404-Stanford_Business_Re_Think_Issue_32_2_23_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b5214e34b-47b440d404-70265733&ct=t%28Stanford_Business_Re_Think_Issue_32_2_23_2014%29

My good friend Joe Hoyle sent me a copy of his new book.
Stack the Odds in Your Favor:  Don't Just Dream About Success
by Joe Ben Hoyle
2013
Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Just-Dream-About-Success/dp/1493581651/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393247532&sr=1-1&keywords=stack+the+odds+in+your+favor

I suspect Joe and I have a lot in common in terms of risk aversion and work ethic. As a professor his professionalism is more focused on teaching. Before retirement my focus was more on research than teaching, although I had to do both to make a living. No doubt Joe is more of an inspiration to his students. It took years following graduation before my students stopped using an adjective (that I won't repeat) in front of my name.

Joe's book to many people will be worth much more than the $8 price and the short time it takes to read this thin book. What impressed me the most is the many celebrities like Derek Jeter that are featured in the book. The book is a lot about how to monitor and reassess your progress toward Level 3 goals. It's a lot like those time management books that advise not wasting time optimizing Level 1 and Level 2 goals at the expense of never digging deep to make progress toward Level 3 goals. And there's a lot about not deluding yourself about progress toward those Level 3 goals and setting tough goals that take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to achieve.

Joe spent 23+ years of his life deeply involved in coaching classes for students trying to pass the CPA exam and is still helping pass this examination in his college accounting courses and in his updates to free helper materials. This is not an easy exam. In my day the first-time failure rate was about 85%, and I think it still not gone much below 70% in spite of the much more intense multimedia pay-to-pass coaching courses that evolved long after the year the year I took the CPA examination. All I studied were recent copies of CPA examinations. Because it's possible to retake failed parts of the examination, eventual passage rates approach 50%. It's a tough exam relative to the BAR examination where more than 50% (sometimes higher than 90%) of the graduates from most law schools pass the examination.

Joe's hypothesis is that the most important thing for CPA wannabes is building up confidence that they can pass the CPA examination.  His advice is to "stop (merely) yearning for success and start achieving it." He also talks about the "benefits of failure" that make you dig in harder to not give up being all that you really can become.

What I like toward the end of the book is the appeal to students to procrastinate less and less in courses. Procrastination becomes a bad habit that carries over into life's many projects between now and death. If something hard and maybe boring needs to be done, get it done as soon as possible and move on. Stop looking for excuses!

Joe's book is much more than mere advice about passing the CPA examination. The CPA examination is mostly an example to focus upon in the book. Joe also provides free helpers to pass technical parts of the CPA examination at a Website. However, my advice is that if you can afford it it may be better to pay the fees for more intense multimedia coaching courses since these are more complete and more up to date on new accounting, auditing, systems, ethics, and tax rules.

Alternative helpers to pass the CPA examination, including Joe's free helpers, are linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010303CPAExam


The Ideal Career for the Very Few

Hi Len,

I was fortunate in life. Aside from preparing for classes and teaching five hours per week in two "teaching days," I either drove to campus at 5:00 am (to beat traffic) or stayed home to spend the day in my home office or tending to my yard if I just felt like being outdoors.

Unlike a physician or most every other working professional or day laborer or full-time student, upon awakening in the morning I could generally ask myself: "What do I feel like doing today?" Of course there were constraints. I had to worry about keeping up with my discipline so that I did not begin to teach year after year on cruise control. I had to worry about annual performance reports where the most important line item on the form was: "What and where did you publish research (not books for money) this year and make presentations off campus on your research.?"

I had to work on building an international reputation as a scholar, but I could do that on my own time and terms. Since I enjoyed that part the most, I actually spent about 60 hours a week on average doing just that --- but only because I enjoyed it the most (and the applause after making presentations on campuses around the world) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm#Presentations 

Each day was virtually mine. I owned the day unless my wife took ownership of that particular day.

I did not have an appointment book full of patients to see, clients to tend to every day, or employees to supervise. I did not have to milk cows morning and night seven days each week or tend crops from sunrise to sunset.

My work, aside from teaching, was not routine. I could pick and choose my reading, my research topics, my research approaches, and how I wrote up my notes and papers.

My life was better than a full time researcher on projects that dictated when and how I worked or supervise others on research teams like chemists working for Dupont on assigned projects with assigned duties.

My life was better than having to solve problems that clients or patients wanted solved. I picked the problems to solve and when and where to solve them or when to shelve them permanently because they were too difficult or no longer interested me and me alone.

If that sounds like an ideal career it's because it is an ideal career as long as you enjoy becoming a better and better scholar in the your chosen discipline for teaching and research.

The majority of workers in the world probably would not enjoy having to become a better and better scholar on the head of a pin because the job is too difficult. Most of them would rather have routine jobs. If they are professors they prefer to teaching more than research and get their rewards directly from students like physicians get rewards from serving their patients.

Researchers work for the occasional, sometimes very infrequent, applause of their peers. The work is not fun when those supervising your work base their evaluations on the number of papers you published last year in JAR, TAR, and JAE even if you were only one of twelve coauthors on those three papers.

Respectfully,
Bob Jensen


"What Is the Secret to College Success? A smart roommate, says new research," by Sharique Hasan, Stanford Graduate School of Business, February 2014 --- Click Here
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/sharique-hasan-why-smart-roommate-maybe-key-college-success?utm_source=Stanford+Business+Re%3AThink&utm_campaign=47b440d404-Stanford_Business_Re_Think_Issue_32_2_23_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b5214e34b-47b440d404-70265733&ct=t%28Stanford_Business_Re_Think_Issue_32_2_23_2014%29

Jensen Comment
Personally I did not much like having a roommate in college although there were some years where I had at least one roommate or several housemates including a year that I lived (not very happily) in a sort-of Mickey Mouse national fraternity house before I changed universities. In my college days having a coed for a roommate was not an option unless you got married. Women were locked away in vaults after 10:00 p.m.

Roommates are both good and bad distractions even when they are good roommates. You can both teach to and learn from roommates. Roommates can teach you how to share both things and feelings. Roommates can be a bother if they're always wanting to borrow something like money or your car or beg you to essentially do their homework.

The important thing about having housemates is saying no when other things like studying and sleeping are more important. My fraternity house had one or more bridge tables going at almost any time of the day. I played a lot of bridge (sometimes poker) but carefully controlled my study and sleep time. I think some of my fraternity brothers flunked out of college because they mostly played cards and did social things (read that partying) most every day of every week. Of course in some cases those things may just have been excuses for young men who were going to flunk out of college no matter what stood between them and academic success.

One year five of us at Stanford shared a house in Palo Alto. That became a pain in the butt trying to prepare meals and keep the kitchen and family room and bathrooms clean. I preferred a private room in a dormitory where men and women (in separate wings) shared a central dining room with meals that I did not have to help prepare or clean up. Life was also easier when you could simply walk to other parts of the campus and not have to drive your car unless you had a hot date.

When you spend 11 full time years in college there are all sorts of things that become anecdotes to talk about in terms of roommates, fraternity brothers, dorm friends, classes, teachers, romances, and trips to the mountains, lakes, wineries, oceans, casinos, cities like San Francisco, farms, ranches, etc. In so many ways life is more full if you went to college rather than get married a few days after high school graduation and commenced working on a farm. Maybe this is why retired or semi-retired farmers are more inclined to have motor homes and bucket lists of things to see and do  --- sometimes with new roommates. Those of us that lived fuller lives when young are now content sitting at the computer in retirement communicating our memories on listservs.

In so many ways those of us who became professors never really ceased being students on campus. Spouses become roommates, and for most of us that's been good.

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


"People will come!"
Field of Dreams --- http://www.wingclips.com/movie-clips/field-of-dreams/people-will-come

Put this example in your managerial accounting/economics course.
I think most ghost towns in the USA were close to being fully depreciated before they were abandoned. There are several ghost towns in the forests of New Hampshire that were turned over to ghosts when the virgin timber played out. But I don't know of any that were turned over to ghosts before they ever occupied. This ghost city built for over a million people in China is unbelievable.

China's Biggest Ghost City ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-ordos-ghost-city-pictures-2014-2


"Loop Payment Fob Lets You Swipe Your Phone Instead of a Credit Card," by David Pogue, Yahoo Tech, February 20, 2014 ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/loop-payment-fob-lets-you-swipe-your-phone-instead-of-a-77259827533.html

Maybe you’ve heard: Big technology companies are frantically trying to get rid of credit cards.

It’s a worthy goal, actually. Many people carry around purses or wallets that are bloated and bursting with plastic cards. And for what? Each sheet of hard plastic exists solely to bear a magnetic strip that you can run through card readers at checkout.

The dream is to let you pay for things, quickly and easily, with the swipe of your phone. Or, someday, your watch. Fast, convenient, secure — and cardless.

It’s not going so well, though. The world’s shops, gas stations and restaurants already have all the equipment they care to install: standard credit-card readers. They’re not interested in buying something new just to accommodate, for example, Android phones that are compatible with Google’s Wallet payment system.

But now there’s something new called the Loop, which began life as a successful Kickstarter project. It’s instantly compatible with those hundreds of millions of existing credit-card readers. But it still lets you pay for stuff without ever extracting any plastic from your wallet or purse.

It does that by sending out a magnetic signal that tricks the credit-card reader into thinking that you’ve actually swiped a card through it.

I’ll wait here while you read that again.

This is the part that’s hard to believe. You wave the Loop near the card-reader slot, up to a couple of inches away, and — beep! — you’ve just paid. (Inside the Loop, there’s an inductive magnetic loop of wire that generates an alternating current. Hence the name.)

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Technology


"Samsung Has Two New Smart Watches Launching In April — Here's Everything They Can Do," by Steve Kovach, Business Insider, February 22, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-galaxy-gear-2-2014-2

. . .

Here's a quick breakdown of the new features in the Gear 2/Gear 2 Neo:

Other than that, the new Gears will mimic the functions of last year's model. The Gear pairs with your Samsung Galaxy phone via Bluetooth using a special Galaxy Gear app. After the pairing, you can use Gear to check incoming texts, calls, emails, tweets, etc. without having to pull out your phone. You can also make calls from the watch using a built-in speaker and microphone.

The Gear also has an app store, which includes some big-name apps like Evernote and the mobile social network Path. However, other big names like Facebook and Twitter are still missing.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-galaxy-gear-2-2014-2#ixzz2u9KEDx00
 

"Pebble Steel: Best Smartwatch So Far," by David Pogue, Yahoo Tech, February 13, 2014 ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/pebble-steel-best-smartwatch-so-far-76486495620.html

There’s nothing about the success of the new Pebble Steel smartwatch that you couldn’t have predicted by studying tech history.

Over and over again, gadgets become insanely successful when they do a few things very well. (See: PalmPilot, iPod, iPad.) And over and over again, gadgets flop when they are freighted with the wrong collection of features in a hopeless mass (Zune, ultramobile PCs and the Nokia N-Gage — a combination game console/cellphone).

Which brings us to smartwatches. A smartwatch, of course, is a wristwatch that connects wirelessly with the phone in your pocket. It can display incoming text messages right on your wrist. It can vibrate to let you know when a call comes in, even when you wouldn’t have heard your phone. It can pass along alerts — new email, Facebook messages, stock-market crashes — right to your wrist.

There are some advantages to having this information close at hand. It’s a lot less tacky to glance at your wrist during a meeting than to pull out your phone. When you’re riding a bike, it’s safer to get your next-turn GPS instructions by glancing at your wrist than it is to fumble for your phone. When your arms are full of packages or groceries … well, you get the idea.

There are lots of smartwatches available, but you probably have very few friends who own one. That’s because they’re all pretty terrible (the watches, not your friends).

The best-known one, the Samsung Gear watch, costs $300, works with only three Samsung phone models, has a camera on the watchband, lets you make phone calls by holding the watch up to your head — and looks like an HDTV strapped to your arm.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
As far as touch screen goes I give smart watches the big finger.

Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Technology


MOOC --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOCs

180 MOOCs to Start the 2014 New Year (Is This the Crest of the Wave?) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/180-moocs-to-start-the-new-year.html

800 Free MOOCs from Great Universities ---
http://www.openculture.com/free_certificate_courses

MOOC FAQ --- http://www.openculture.com/mooc_faq

Harvard Presents Two Free Online Courses on the Old Testament ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/harvard-presents-two-free-online-courses-on-the-old-testament.html

"Harvard and MIT Release Visualization Tools for Trove of MOOC Data," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2014 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/harvard-and-mit-release-visualization-tools-for-trove-of-mooc-data/50631?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have released a set of open-source visualization tools for working with a rich trove of data from more than a million people registered for 17 of the two institutions’ massive open online courses, which are offered through their edX platform.

The tools let users see and work with “near real-time” information about course registrants—minus personally identifying details—from 193 countries. A Harvard news release says the tools “showcase the potential promise” of data generated by MOOCs. The aggregated data sets that the tools use can be also downloaded.

The suite of tools, named Insights, was created by Sergiy Nesterko, a research fellow in HarvardX, the university’s instructional-technology office, and Daniel Seaton, a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT’s Office of Digital Learning. Mr. Nesterko said the tools “can help to guide instruction while courses are running and deepen our understanding of the impact of courses after they are complete.”

The Harvard tools are here, while those for MIT are here.

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs and open sharing learning materials in general ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

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

 


"The Monty Hall Problem: There's A Right Answer But Even Genius Math Geeks Get It Wrong, by  Sara Silverstein and Matt Johnston, Business Insider, February 20, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-monty-hall-math-problem-2014-2

Monty Hall Problem --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

Sources of confusion

When first presented with the Monty Hall problem an overwhelming majority of people assume that each door has an equal probability and conclude that switching does not matter (Mueser and Granberg, 1999). Out of 228 subjects in one study, only 13% chose to switch (Granberg and Brown, 1995:713). In her book The Power of Logical Thinking, vos Savant (1996, p. 15) quotes cognitive psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini as saying "... no other statistical puzzle comes so close to fooling all the people all the time" and "that even Nobel physicists systematically give the wrong answer, and that they insist on it, and they are ready to berate in print those who propose the right answer." Interestingly, pigeons make mistakes and learn from mistakes, and experiments show that they rapidly learn to always switch, unlike humans (Herbranson and Schroeder, 2010).

Most statements of the problem, notably the one in Parade Magazine, do not match the rules of the actual game show (Krauss and Wang, 2003:9), and do not fully specify the host's behavior or that the car's location is randomly selected (Granberg and Brown, 1995:712). Krauss and Wang (2003:10) conjecture that people make the standard assumptions even if they are not explicitly stated. (From the point of view of subjective probability, the standard assumptions can be derived from the problem statement: they follow from our total lack of information about how the car is hidden, how the player initially chooses a door, and how the host chooses a door to open if there's a choice.)

Although these issues are mathematically significant, even when controlling for these factors nearly all people still think each of the two unopened doors has an equal probability and conclude switching does not matter (Mueser and Granberg, 1999). This "equal probability" assumption is a deeply rooted intuition (Falk 1992:202). People strongly tend to think probability is evenly distributed across as many unknowns as are present, whether it is or not (Fox and Levav, 2004:637). Indeed, if a player believes that sticking and switching are equally successful and therefore equally often decides to switch as to stay, they will win 50% of the time, reinforcing their original belief. Missing the unequal chances of those two doors, and in not considering that (1/3+2/3) / 2 gives a chance of 50%, similar to "the little green woman" example (Marc C. Steinbach, 2000).

The problem continues to attract the attention of cognitive psychologists. The typical behaviour of the majority, i.e., not switching, may be explained by phenomena known in the psychological literature as: 1) the endowment effect (Kahneman et al., 1991); people tend to overvalue the winning probability of the already chosen – already "owned" – door; 2) the status quo bias (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988); people prefer to stick with the choice of door they have already made. Experimental evidence confirms that these are plausible explanations which do not depend on probability intuition (Morone and Fiore, 2007). Criticism of the simple solutions

As already remarked, most sources in the field of probability, including many introductory probability textbooks, solve the problem by showing the conditional probabilities the car is behind door 1 and door 2 are 1/3 and 2/3 (not 1/2 and 1/2) given the contestant initially picks door 1 and the host opens door 3; various ways to derive and understand this result were given in the previous subsections. Among these sources are several that explicitly criticize the popularly presented "simple" solutions, saying these solutions are "correct but ... shaky" (Rosenthal 2005a), or do not "address the problem posed" (Gillman 1992), or are "incomplete" (Lucas et al. 2009), or are "unconvincing and misleading" (Eisenhauer 2001) or are (most bluntly) "false" (Morgan et al. 1991). Some say that these solutions answer a slightly different question – one phrasing is "you have to announce before a door has been opened whether you plan to switch" (Gillman 1992, emphasis in the original).

The simple solutions show in various ways that a contestant who is determined to switch will win the car with probability 2/3, and hence that switching is the winning strategy, if the player has to choose in advance between "always switching", and "always staying". However, the probability of winning by always switching is a logically distinct concept from the probability of winning by switching given the player has picked door 1 and the host has opened door 3. As one source says, "the distinction between [these questions] seems to confound many" (Morgan et al. 1991). This fact that these are different can be shown by varying the problem so that these two probabilities have different numeric values. For example, assume the contestant knows that Monty does not pick the second door randomly among all legal alternatives but instead, when given an opportunity to pick between two losing doors, Monty will open the one on the right. In this situation the following two questions have different answers:

What is the probability of winning the car by always switching? What is the probability of winning the car given the player has picked door 1 and the host has opened door 3?

The answer to the first question is 2/3, as is correctly shown by the "simple" solutions. But the answer to the second question is now different: the conditional probability the car is behind door 1 or door 2 given the host has opened door 3 (the door on the right) is 1/2. This is because Monty's preference for rightmost doors means he opens door 3 if the car is behind door 1 (which it is originally with probability 1/3) or if the car is behind door 2 (also originally with probability 1/3). For this variation, the two questions yield different answers. However as long as the initial probability the car is behind each door is 1/3, it is never to the contestant's disadvantage to switch, as the conditional probability of winning by switching is always at least 1/2. (Morgan et al. 1991)

There is disagreement in the literature regarding whether vos Savant's formulation of the problem, as presented in Parade magazine, is asking the first or second question, and whether this difference is significant (Rosenhouse 2009). Behrends (2008) concludes that "One must consider the matter with care to see that both analyses are correct"; which is not to say that they are the same. One analysis for one question, another analysis for the other question. Several discussants of the paper by (Morgan et al. 1991), whose contributions were published alongside the original paper, strongly criticized the authors for altering vos Savant's wording and misinterpreting her intention (Rosenhouse 2009). One discussant (William Bell) considered it a matter of taste whether or not one explicitly mentions that (under the standard conditions), which door is opened by the host is independent of whether or not one should want to switch.

Among the simple solutions, the "combined doors solution" comes closest to a conditional solution, as we saw in the discussion of approaches using the concept of odds and Bayes theorem. It is based on the deeply rooted intuition that revealing information that is already known does not affect probabilities. But knowing the host can open one of the two unchosen doors to show a goat does not mean that opening a specific door would not affect the probability that the car is behind the initially chosen door. The point is, though we know in advance that the host will open a door and reveal a goat, we do not know which door he will open. If the host chooses uniformly at random between doors hiding a goat (as is the case in the standard interpretation) this probability indeed remains unchanged, but if the host can choose non-randomly between such doors then the specific door that the host opens reveals additional information. The host can always open a door revealing a goat and (in the standard interpretation of the problem) the probability that the car is behind the initially chosen door does not change, but it is not because of the former that the latter is true. Solutions based on the assertion that the host's actions cannot affect the probability that the car is behind the initially chosen appear persuasive, but the assertion is simply untrue unless each of the host's two choices are equally likely, if he has a choice (Falk 1992:207,213). The assertion therefore needs to be justified; without justification being given, the solution is at best incomplete. The answer can be correct but the reasoning used to justify it is defective.

Some of the confusion in the literature undoubtedly arises because the writers are using different concepts of probability, in particular, Bayesian versus frequentist probability. For the Bayesian, probability represents knowledge. For us and for the player, the car is initially equally likely to be behind each of the three doors because we know absolutely nothing about how the organizers of the show decided where to place it. For us and for the player, the host is equally likely to make either choice (when he has one) because we know absolutely nothing about how he makes his choice. These "equally likely" probability assignments are determined by symmetries in the problem. The same symmetry can be used to argue in advance that specific door numbers are irrelevant, as we saw above.

 


Decisive Moments in Teaching and Learning
"THE DECISIVE MOMENT," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, February 23, 2014 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-decisive-moment.html

Professional photographers sometimes talk about the “decisive moment.” It is that one essential point in time when the photo needs to be taken to capture the true essence of the events that are taking place and the people that are involved.

I strongly believe that there are decisive moments in teaching and learning. If you make the most of those decisive moments, the students can learn much and learn deeply. If you miss those moments, learning becomes more of a superficial affair.

Continued in article

 
"Critical Points in the Learning Process," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Financial Accounting Blog, January 21, 2010 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/search?q=Critical+Points+in+the+Learning+Process

"CONVERSATION WITH BOB JENSEN," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, October 8, 2013 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2013/10/conversation-with-bob-jensen.html


"The 2008 FOMC Laugh Track: Gallows Humor at the Federal Reserve," The Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2014 ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/02/21/the-2008-fomc-laugh-track-gallows-humor-at-the-federal-reserve/ 

Federal Reserve policy meetings typically feature 19 central bank officials sitting around a table for a day or two, discussing the state of the economy at great length. They’re important gatherings, but they also can be long and dull affairs. So it’s only natural for officials to crack a joke or two.

The Fed’s transcripts include a convenient [Laughter] tag to mark when central bank officials acted amused by a colleague’s comment — whether it was intended as a joke or not. We’ve been compiling them for years in our coverage of Federal Open Market Committee transcripts (read last year’s edition off the 2007 transcripts). Here are some of the best – and worst – jokes from the 2008 Fed meetings as officials moved out of and then back into a crisis mentality.

(Note: FOMC meetings can run on for days, and except for these jokes they’re almost entirely serious. Read our comprehensive coverage of the serious discussions here on Real Time Economics.)

- Compiled by Eric Morath, Sarah Portlock, Sudeep Reddy and Jeffrey Sparshott

* * *

January 2008

St. Louis Fed President William Poole, at his final committee meeting (his 81st, according to Chairman Ben Bernanke), referenced the fact that his term spanned from the solid economic growth of the late 1990s to early 2008 when the economy was sluggish:

Mr. Poole: I came here 10 years ago with a boom. I’m going out with a pause. [Laughter]

During a discussion about the economy, Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser said it was “hard to put a good face” on recent readings.

Mr. Plosser: You know, listening to the staff discussion I have certainly come to understand why everyone continues to believe that economics is a dismal science. [Laughter] It is quite a dismal picture.

Fed Governor Frederic Mishkin pointed to housing as one of the most significant downside risks that worried him – and that he was “stupidly” in the midst of buying a house.

Mr. Mishkin: As somebody who stupidly is just going to contract on a new house because I have to please my wife, I actually thought exactly along these lines and was thinking about pulling out but then decided that my marriage was more important.
Minneapolis Fed President Gary Stern: It was close. [Laughter]
Mr. Mishkin: By the way, if you know my wife, no it wasn’t close.

* * *

March 2008

Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, in a soliloquy about the philosophy of central banking, offered this metaphor: “I liken the fed funds rate to a good single malt whiskey—it takes time to have its ameliorative or stimulative effect.” [Laughter]

Officials were discussing the merits of various programs they’d initiated, including the Term Auction Facility, Term Securities Lending Facility and Primary Dealer Credit Facility.

Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser: I am very concerned about the developments in the financial markets. I’ve been supportive of the steps we’ve taken to enhance liquidity in the markets through the TAF, the TSLF, the PDCF, or whatever.
Mr. Bernanke: AEIOU.
New York Fed President Tim Geithner: Don’t say IOU. [Laughter]

 

The day marked Richard Fisher’s 59th birthday, which gave officials a chance to reference a classic Fed metaphor: the punch bowl.

Mr. Fisher: I can’t think of a better group of people to spend it with—or a less happy time to do it.
Fed Governor Randall Kroszner: We sure know how to take the punch bowl away from this party. [Laughter]
Mr. Fisher: Well, listen, I know we are suffering because our Deputy Secretary here sitting to your right, Mr. Chairman, just gave me a candle and had me blow it out with no cake attached. [Laughter]

 

San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen offers a rather dire rundown of her economic outlook:

As a final anecdote, a banker in my District who lends to wineries noted that high-end boutique producers face a distinctly softening market for their products, although sales of cheap wine are soaring. [Laughter]

* * *

April 2008

Mr. Mishkin: Also, if you ask people what TV shows they are watching, they will tell you that they are watching PBS and something classy, but you know they are watching “Desperate Housewives.” [Laughter]

Chairman Bernanke: What is wrong with “Desperate Housewives”? [Laughter]

 

Fed officials discussed a request from members of Congress, including former Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), to expand the collateral in the emergency Term Securities Lending Facility to include student loans, auto loans and other consumer credit.

Chairman Bernanke: On the one hand, we would get, I would call it for short, a Wall Street Journal editorial that the Federal Reserve is once again the craven cur and the spineless—boy, I am getting good at this—[laughter] lackey of the Congress by accommodating this request…  On the other side, I suppose that there would be what I could call the USA Today editorial, which is, “Why won’t the Fed, which is bailing out Wall Street left and right, include asset-backed paper in their facilities, even though it is consistent with all of their other practices and they take it in all of their other facilities?” and so on. So I think there are PR and political risks on both sides of this.

Continued in article

 

Global recession?  What global recession?
Hilarious Transcripts of Fed Minutes Reveal Completely Clueless Fed ---
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/mikeshedlock/2014/02/22/hilarious-transcripts-of-fed-minutes-reveal-completely-clueless-fed-n1798911

"Which macroeconomists missed the Global Financial Collapse and when did they miss it," by Karl Smith, Financial Times Alphaville, February 18, 2014 ---
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/02/18/1774262/which-macroeconomists-missed-the-global-financial-collapse-and-when-did-they-miss-it/

Jensen Comment
Also read the comments. Macroeconomists are still groping about in the dark.

Bob Jensen's threads on the global recession, the bailout, and the largest fraud, according the The Nation magazine, in human history ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm


"Five Really Dumb Money Moves Retirees Make:  How to Avoid Ever Having to Say 'I Lost the Nest Egg'," by Tom Lauricella, The Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303775504579394930456252714

After decades of saving for retirement, you never want to end up saying, "I lost the nest egg."

For most people, retirement savings will need to be carefully tended if they are to last two or three decades, a typical life span after collecting one's final full-time paycheck.

But there are plenty of mistakes that can be made. Some can deplete that nest egg in one fell swoop, while others can result in a slow bleed that becomes apparent only over time.

Some missteps to avoid:

1. Big purchases.

It's a natural instinct for new retirees to want to kick back and treat themselves following decades of hard work.

Ronald Myers, an adviser at Associated Financial Consultants in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., talks about clients who see some of their retirement funds as their "YOLO money"—You Only Live Once.

"I'm the first guy to say go out and enjoy yourself early on—you aren't going to get any healthier," says Mr. Myers. But it's crucial, he says, to avoid blowing a hole in a retirement plan at the get-go. And given the uncertainty of the market, the depth of that hole may not become apparent until much later in life.

He points to example of a retiree who plans to withdraw $25,000 a year from a $500,000 nest egg starting off by taking $50,000 to buy a boat—two years of income.

Should that big withdrawal be followed by a market decline, the result could be many years shaved off the time those savings will last.

 

2. No cushion.

In retirement, a major, unexpected expense can quickly send a financial plan off the rails. But that doesn't have to happen.

"I see a lot of people cutting it really close and living paycheck to paycheck, even though they are really paying themselves" out of their savings, says Blair duQuesnay, director of investments at ThirtyNorth Investments in New Orleans.

The problem comes when an emergency crops up that requires laying out extra cash on short notice. If that outlay requires selling investments in the middle of a market downturn, the retiree could be locking in losses that can't be recovered.

"It takes planning ahead," says Ms. duQuesnay. Her firm advises clients to keep six months to one year's worth of cash on hand for replenishing that stockpile.

3. Forgetting common sense.

Remember: "There's no such thing as a free lunch."

That's especially the case with investments promising big payoffs with low risk.

People "have a unique ability to suspend common sense, believing that strangers want to let us in on deals that are too good to be true, which of course, are," says Alan Roth, a financial planner in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Mr. Roth says there are often telltale signs it's time to hang up the phone on a sales pitch. They include: a sense of urgency ("The deal is only good today!"), using a church or fraternal organization to vouch for its credibility or a play on emotions.

 

4. Reaching for yield.

The "no free lunch" risk to a nest egg also applies to investors who have cut back on holdings of relatively safe but low-yielding government bonds and bulked up on riskier investments that offer meatier yields—like high-yielding junk bonds, bank-loan funds or dividend-paying stocks.

"When you substitute a fixed-income, low-volatility investment for a higher-volatility investment, the risk of a loss of principal in a down market is much higher," says Ms. duQuesnay.

A simple litmus test for how well that higher-yielding investment will act are returns from during the financial crisis. Bank-loan funds, for example, lost an average of 29.7% in 2008.

 

5. Letting emotions rule.

"Acting emotionally in a down market could be mistake No. 1" when it comes to wrecking a nest egg, says Mr. Myers.

He acknowledges that retirees who need their savings to help pay the bills will feel the pull of reacting to short-term losses. "During retirement, it's behavioral economics on steroids," he says.

Retirees should build a portfolio that meets their long-term goals and one where they can withstand watching the inevitable downs in the markets that come with the ups.

To put it another way, says Mr. Roth: "It's dumb to buy high and sell low."

Frontline broadcast on "The Retirement Gamble,"April 23, 2013 ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement-gamble/
For details see
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/retirement-gamble/the-retirement-gamble-facing-us-all/

If you’ve been watching any commercial television lately, you are well aware that the financial services industry is very busy running expensive ads imploring us to worry about our retirement futures. Open a new account today, they say.

They are not wrong that we should be doing something: America is facing a retirement crisis. One in three Americans has no retirement savings at all. One in two reports that they can’t save enough. On top of that, we are living longer, and health care costs, as we all know, are increasing.

But, as I found when investigating the retirement planning and mutual funds industries in The Retirement Gamble, which airs tonight on FRONTLINE, those advertisements are imploring us to start saving for one simple reason. Retirement is big business — and very profitable. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the more we save into the industry’s financial products, the more money they make in fees and commissions trading our hard-earned cash. And as long as they don’t run away with our money or invest it in a Ponzi scheme, they have little in the way of accountability to us when something goes wrong. And even then it can be hard to fight back.

Big banks, brokerages, insurance companies and other financial service providers operate under something called a suitability standard — which says they don’t have to give you the best advice, just advice that isn’t too egregiously terrible.

Let’s say you sit down with an adviser at your brokerage or bank and ask for some advice on how you should allocate your retirement savings, or which funds you might want to choose for your IRA.

You’ll get lots of advice, but chances are it won’t be worth much. Eighty five percent of all financial advisers and financial planners are really just brokers or salesman. Their incentive is to sell you a product that makes them a higher commission, not necessarily a product that maximizes your chances of saving more. Only 15 percent of advisers are “fiduciaries” — advisers who by law must operate with your best interests in mind.

Last year, the Obama administration proposed a rule to mandate that all financial advisers, financial planners and other assorted financial wizards would have to adopt a fiduciary standard when it came to employee retirement accounts such as your 401(k) or IRA account. The financial services industry, which today manages something upwards of $10 trillion of our retirement nest eggs, thought this was a bad idea and pushed back hard. Scores of their protest letters poured into the U.S. Labor Department, the branch of our government responsible for regulating employee retirement accounts.

Congress, too, was hit with a furious lobbying campaign. This would be way too expensive, the industry said; if we have to provide such a standard of service, we will either have to pack up and find another business line, or have to pass the increased costs on to our customers. The Obama administration pulled their proposal last fall.

How would a new fiduciary rule change things? Chances are you would be sold less expensive products, not only in your IRA accounts but inside your company 401(k) as well. It’s all about fees. While reporting on retirement plans for FRONTLINE, nothing has been more surprising to me than the corrosive effect of fees on our retirement savings.

It’s this simple: Fund fees can erode as much as half or more of your prospective gains.

For the sake of dramatizing the point, John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, the world’s largest mutual fund company and pioneer of low-cost index funds, gave me a startling example while we were filming. Assume you are invested in a mutual fund, he says, with a gross return of 7 percent, but that the mutual fund charges you an annual fee of 2 percent.

Over a 50-year investing lifetime, that little 2 percent fee will erode 63 percent of what you would have had. As Bogle puts it, “the tyranny of compounding costs” is overwhelming.

In short, fees matter. So what can you do? You aren’t going to find a fund that invests your money for free, but experts say you can come close by buying index funds. Their fees can be a tenth of what the average mutual funds charges. And over time, in bull and bear markets, on average, index funds perform better than their more expensive actively managed fund cousins. This is no secret to anyone who is paying attention.

So why aren’t our trusted financial advisers and those ads telling us to buy index funds? Why do some 401(k) plans not even offer them on their menus?

It’s because even though an index fund might be a better option for you and me, a broker operating under a suitability standard has no incentive to sell it to us. He or she will make higher commissions from options that have higher fees.

Sadly, a recent AARP study reported that 70 percent of mutual fund savers were not even aware that they were paying any fees at all.

Continued in article

Dan Stone's summary of the above Frontline show:

Enjoyed it though didn't find much new here. Basic messages:

1. index funds are cheaper and, in the long run, preferred (Jack Bogle)
2. managed funds are a scam to generate fees for the mutual fund industry
(which some would certainly debate)
3. most Americans don't have enough for retirement
4. mutual funds make it hard to determine their fees
5. the financial services industry, through massive donations, prevents any
attempts to increase transparency in the financial services industry.

I've bought Pound Foolish, after hearing an interview with its author, but haven't
started reading it yet

(http://www.amazon.com/Pound-Foolish-Exposing-
Personal-Industry/dp/1591844894
)

Dan Stone

Jensen Comment
It's hard to advise future retirees without knowing what they really do enjoy. For example, I think it's dumb to invest in retirement businesses unless you really, really enjoy retirement businesses or really, really need the income from retirement businesses. For example, a widow purchased a three-story house just down the road when she was a widow over 60 years of age. For a while making jewelry to pay for her mortgage payments seemed like a good idea. Now taking her truck and camper all alone to out-of-state jewelry shows has become a drag, but she needs the income in part because revaluations of her home have really clobbered her with higher property taxes in a down market (at least up here). Tax appraisers care more about village and school expenses than what property will realistically sell for up here in the remote White Mountains.

It's probably a good idea that she invested in her jewelry business, but at her present age it's become more depressing. I don't think she's enjoying her "retirement," especially since she must do most of the house maintenance by herself. Last summer she was on a huge 40-foot extension ladder scraping and painting by herself  almost every sunny day.

She also splits her own wood to heat that big house. What was her mistake? It was probably a mistake to purchase such a big house without the annual cash flow to cushion the expenses of taxes and maintenance while thinking she would forever enjoy making jewelry and traveling to shows.

There's also a couple that I know who both retired from the military and invested $2 million in a bed and breakfast (mostly financed with three mortgages). Running a B&B sounded like fun until the reality of cooking breakfast for guests seven days a week became a drag year after year after year. Even with hired maid service, there are endless days of maintaining the grounds, keeping the plumbing working in 26 bathrooms, painting and papering 24 rooms, washing windows, fixing roof leaks, patching an ancient heating system, operating the front desk, dealing with happy and not-so-happy happy guests, and on and on and on. Retirement? What's that? They were more retired while on active duty.

Then there's a retiree friend down on the highway who purchased a $180,000 motor home hoping to entice a woman friend into marrying him and touring all over North America. She considered the idea for 20 minutes and then said no way. The motor home with less than 500 miles on the odometer sat in his front yard with a "For Sale" sign for over five years (he lives on a state highway where drivers passing by could see the thing year after year). At long last he sold the thing, but I don't want to embarrass him by asking how much he lost on this dream (beside losing his would-be bride). He had 12 nice cabins and land out back that our village took over due to defaulted property tax payments.

I paid too much for a retirement acreage, but I do enjoy this type isolated rural living. It would be a risk if my health failed and I had to hire everything done around here. However, I'm fortunate to have the retirement cash flow to do so if I must eventually hire everything done. And the outdoor work winter and summer is currently much more enjoyable than boring exercise routines in a gym. If and when I become gaga and have to go into a nursing home my estate will take a huge hit because it's impossible to recover much more than half of what I paid for this property in an up market before the real estate crash.

However, in spite of contentment with my own retirement, it's important to note that many of those things you dreamed about all your working years may change over the course of your retirement. Firstly, you may lose some of your good health. Secondly, you may lose your spouse that was part of your retirement dreams all those years. And yet at age 65 when you're both in good health it probably would be a bummer moving into an assisted living apartment too soon. You both might quickly become depressed and bored to death in a small apartment if you have good health for the next 10-25 years.

My own parents started their marriage in the Great Depression and never really got over feeling that saving was much, much more important than consumption. Being an only child I eventually inherited their life savings. But all the while they were retired I argued in vain that they should spend more to enjoy their retirement. But then again if they were spending more to enjoy their retirement they would probably would not have enjoyed their retirement. They were more happy living a very modest life beneath what they could well have afforded. Unlike me they did not enjoy expensive restaurants and hotels. They ordered the cheapest things on menus in small farm town restaurants and pretended those were the selections they enjoyed the most as long as there was a salad bar.

My mother always said:  "If you're going to buy big, buy black dirt." She remembers when the investments and markets crashed in the Great Depression an her father raised navy beans and potatoes on the farm to feed his family and half the starving folks in the small town of Swea City Iowa.

Bob Jensen's personal finance helpers (but not his advice which is free and not worth the money) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers

 


Question
Why do we whip the "1%" in the media for becoming so much richer when it's mostly the 0.01%?

"The Rise (and Rise and Rise) of the 0.01 Percent in America The average 1 percenter is quite rich. But she lives in a state of relative poverty compared to the astronomical wealth of "the 1 percent of the 1 percent."
by Derek Thompson
The Atlantic
February 13, 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-rise-and-rise-and-rise-of-the-001-percent-in-america/283793/

. . .

Who even are these people—the 1 percent of the 1 percent?

As Tim Noah explained, they're mostly executives and bankers. A 2010 study of the top 0.1 percent found that 61 percent of this group is either a banker or an executive/manager another big corporation. The rest are mostly lawyers (7 percent), doctors (6 percent), and real estate people (4 percent).

How'd they all get so rich? It wasn't the way the rest of us get rich. It wasn't their wages. It was something else.

The richer you are, the more likely your riches come from stocks, not salary. For the three groups graphed above—1 percent, 0.1 percent, and 0.01 percent—capital gains account for 22, 33 and 42 percent (respectively) of their average income. At the very tippy-top of the economy, the 400 richest tax returns analyzed by the IRS take home about 50 percent of their income from capital gains. 

Practically all the growth in average income at the top comes from stocks. Between 1992 and 2007, the average salary of a top-400 tax return doubled, but average capital gains haul increased 13X. Wages are for normal people. The richest get richer from their investments.

As Matt O'Brien explained, the incomes of top-earners ride a roller coaster, and that roller coaster is the stock and bond market. Just look at top incomes compared with gyrations in the S&P 500.

Continued in article

Also see https://medium.com/the-nib/700c51a43a4


"The Myth of Excess Enrollments in College-Becker," by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, The Becker-Posner Blog, February 17, 2014 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2014/02/the-myth-of-excess-enrollments-in-college-becker.html "

"Excess Enrollments in College? Could Be," Judge Richard Posner, The Becker-Posner Blog, February 17, 2014 --- 
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2014/02/excess-enrollments-in-college-could-be-posner.html

Jensen Comment
Shame on Gary Becker. He fails to warn that correlation is not causation. In particular, college graduates probably would have higher average earnings if they did not go to college. Firstly, they are often the most motivated students with high work ethic while still in high school. On average they have higher intelligence and aptitude however measured.

Secondly, many of them come from higher income families that can give a boost to income success, including helping them start small businesses.

Thirdly, some of the highest paying professions make college graduation (and often graduate degrees) necessary entry-level conditions. Even the worst colleges may not prevent a graduate from having a high GMAT, MCAT, or LSAT score that overcomes a lousy college education for great self-learners.

Judge Posner raises some other objections.

"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

Personal Note
We have a son and his wife that went deeply in debt to graduate from college (he in business and she in law enforcement). They did this at a time when both became unemployed. They had high grades, but when they struggled to find employment they both ended up in jobs that do not require any college education.

In Germany only about 25% of the population is allowed into college. Germany takes great pride in the economic opportunities for people in the skilled trades. In the USA there's a shortage of workers in the skilled trades because your a nobody unless you learn to read after graduating from high school and go on to college.

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


"How to Explore Cause and Effect Like a Data Scientist," by Thomas C. Redman, Harvard Business Review Blog, February 19, 2014 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/how-to-explore-cause-and-effect-like-a-data-scientist/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29&cm_ite=DailyAlert-022014+%281%29&cm_lm=sp%3Arjensen%40trinity.edu&cm_ven=Spop-Email

Jensen Comment
This is the way analysts mislead readers about studies that imply if you get a college degree your chances (as one person) are increased for substantially higher income. That is true if you become licensed in one of the professions that require college degrees such as law, medicine, and the CPA profession that now requires 150 credits of college.

But it is not necessarily true in general. How the analysts mislead is that they imply college is the cause of higher lifetime earnings. Actually the college degrees are correlated with income generating attributes such a work ethic, motivation, intelligence, family financial support (say to start a business). and lots of serendipity and luck. Those are the underlying causal factors of success that are correlated with college performance. In research, to find causal factors we have to drill down deeper that what big data can provide in the way of underlying causes.


Question
How extensive was the University of North Carolina athletics phony course and grade change cheating scandal?

Answer
Even though I made tidbits about this scandal early on, including that about 10% of the athletes could not read at a third-grade level. I guess it never sunk in how many years UNC officials were aware of the cheating and how many athletes were part of this scandal.

. . . since the 1990s Nang' Oris' department offered hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never actually met.  Some 500 grades had been changed without authorization . . .

"UNC officials apologize for a huge sports scandal, while attacking the woman who brought it to light," Bloomberg Businessweek, February 3-9, 2014 ---
 

After trying for years to minimize an academic corruption scandal on its prestigious Chapel Hill campus, the University of North Carolina has abruptly switched strategies---form obfuscation to mea culpa. The apologia comes with a bitter footnote, though in the form of vilification of a campus whistle-blower.

. . .

UNC called the police after an internal university inquiry concluded that that since the 1990s Nang' Oris' department offered hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never actually met.  Some 500 grades had been changed without authorization, . . .

 

Also see
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-27/university-of-north-carolina-apologizes-for-fake-classes-promises-real-change 

Bob Jensen's threads on academic scandals in higher education athletics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics


A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending February 14, 2014) --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/524696/recommended-from-around-the-web-week-ending-february-14-2014/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140217

Jensen Comment
This includes a link to the reasons why Oakland built a wall to keep out Google employees and other highly paid tech workers. Reminds me a bit of the famous story (fiction) about how France boarded up windows of houses to keep out the sunlight (to preserve the jobs of candle workers).

In this case Oakland wants to have a city of the poor, for the poor, and welfare and food stamp preservation. Those villages, towns, and cities that want prosperous taxpayers can move somewhere other than Oakland. It must upset Oakland greatly to be unable to stop itself from becoming a commuting suburb for prospering San Francisco. But prospering commuters under the Bay on BART are probably not enrolling their children in the lousy Oakland public schools. Lousy schools are prices paid for wanting to be a city of the poor and for the poor.

Actually some of those commuters from Oakland are like newly-hired graduates working for San Francisco accounting firms --- newly hired staff accountants who are unable to afford the San Francisco gold-plated rental leases. Many of them do not have kids, and by the time they marry and have kids they will have grown tired of commuting under the Bay and will have moved on to places like Des Moines.


Largest University of Florida gift ever is dedicated to the previously-named Warrington College of Business
"Warrington gives record $75 million gift to UF," by Jeff Schweers, Gainsville.com, February 21, 2014 ---
http://www.gainesville.com/article/20140221/ARTICLES/140229882/1002/news01?Title=Warrington-gives-record-75-million-gift-to-UF

l and Judy Warrington have just become the University of Florida’s biggest Gator boosters.

Their $75 million pledge to Al Warrington’s namesake — the Warrington College of Business Administration — is the largest gift in UF’s history, Tom Mitchell, vice president of Development and Alumni Affairs, announced Friday.

It also makes Warrington — at age 78 — UF’s first $100 million donor, Mitchell said.

“Their unprecedented and relentless commitment to quality and excellence … is a testimony and endorsement to not only the university but the Warrington College of Business,” Mitchell said, noting that people who make such significant gifts have long, deep ties to the university.

The Warringtons have a 40-year-long track record of giving their time, their energy and their money to the university — not only in the business college but in other areas including athletics, stadium expansion, scholarships and research.

Thirty-eight years after Al Warrington graduated from the College of Business Administration in 1958, he became its benefactor and namesake after he created a $12 million endowment for the college in 1996.

In 2009, he pledged another $16 million to endow four professorships in the business college. The latest gift will be added to that endowment available to all business college faculty expenses, support for summer graduate students and research expenses, said Dean John Kraft of the business college.

“This is something the state doesn’t provide, and we have to provide in other ways,” Kraft said.

Continued in article

 


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 21, 2014

USPS CFO on the future of the Post Office
USPS Chief Financial Officer Joe Corbett
tells FierceGovernment about how the Postal Service is adapting to a changing environment. “We’re in the process of putting all new handheld scanners in the field,” Mr. Corbett says. “At the end of the day there’ll be 250,000 or so of those and they’ll enable various new applications for us in terms of package redirect, package pickup, notification, communication with our mail carriers so they can do real time type of work as well as just real-time delivery scans.” Mr. Corbett notes some of the partnerships with private industry, including FedEx and UPS. “We deliver a ton of their packages last mile,” he says. “And at the same time FedEx and UPS fly a lot of our mail, primarily Priority Mail, and that’s a very large contract also with each of those.”


From WebMD

February 18, 2014

  • Talking' Medical Devices, Apps Continue to Evolve
  • Jensen Comment
    Wouldn't it be neat if such devices could also talk back to students about assignments, quiz questions, as well as test for ignorance.


    Bitcoin Virtual Currency --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

    "The First US Bitcoin ATMs Will Open Soon In Seattle And Austin," by Phil Wahba, Reuters via Business Insider, February 18, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/the-first-us-bitcoin-atms-will-soon-open-in-seattle-and-austin-2014-2


    "Can You Tell the Difference Between Poetry Written by a Computer and a Human?" by Rob Walker, Yahoo Tech, February 14, 2014 ---
    https://www.yahoo.com/tech/who-wrote-the-poem-eat-when-you-feel-sad-76630383667.html
    Or go directly to http://www.botpoet.com/


    David Foster Wallace --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

    David Foster Wallace’s Surprising List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clancy ---
    www.openculture.com/2014/02/david-foster-wallaces-surprising-list-of-his-10-favorite-books.html


    "Microfinance Has Been A Huge Disappointment Around The World The Conversation Kamal Munir," University of Cambridge
    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/microfinance-has-been-a-huge-disappointment-around-the-world-2014-2#ixzz2tgNKlCBC

    . . .

    Painting all the women in the world as heroic entrepreneurs doesn’t actually make them so. They are heroic all right, given the struggle they lead against brutal poverty – but entrepreneurial ventures have always had a high mortality rate. And there aren’t that many which can deliver the kind of returns one requires to be able to pay back interest rates in excess of 40%. Given that much of the loaned money is actually used for consumption, the chances of getting into debt are always high.

    Realising that poverty alleviation was an unsustainable and unachievable goal, the micro-credit industry shifted the goal posts. “Financial inclusion” was the new aspiration, which in practice meant access to credit, insurance and other financial products. This was based on the old Milton Friedman claim that the only difference between the poor and the rich was access to capital.

    The term micro-credit became microfinance and poverty alleviation quietly moved out of the spotlight. The fact that most borrowers were using the loans for consumption rather than production was not taken as a failure to achieve the original goal either. Instead, this “consumption smoothing” was celebrated as another achievement.

    Microfinance then had two different realities. One was the global celebration of this market-based model for poverty alleviation. The other was the cruel reality of many borrowers caught up in debt cycles and struggling against an oppressive neoliberal world order where the proportion of incomes spent on health, education and food kept going up.

    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/microfinance-has-been-a-huge-disappointment-around-the-world-2014-2#ixzz2tgNvkHQn

    Jensen Comment
    Corruption at all levels of government merely adds more pain to misery built upon a foundation of over population.


    "Harvard Professor Attacking Google Thrives as Web Sheriff," by John Hechinger, Bloomberg Businessweek, February 14, 2014 ---
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-14/harvard-professor-attacking-google-thrives-as-web-sheriff.html

    . . .

    Edelman, a 33-year-old associate professor, mixes scholarship, lucrative consulting and a digital version of the 1960s-style activism of his family, including his aunt, Marian Wright Edelman, the civil-rights and children’s advocate. While he ferrets out misdeeds on the Internet, his multiple roles have put his own work under scrutiny.

    “The Internet is what we make of it,” said Edelman, who arrived at his Ivy League office in jeans and sneakers this week after commuting by bicycle through Boston’s snowy streets. “We can shape it through diligence, by exposing the folks who are making it less good than it ought to be, like the neighborhood watch, or the busybody neighbor who yells at you when you throw your cigarette butt on the street.”

    Paid Crusades

    Unlike bloggers who have long formed a volunteer police force on the Internet, Edelman embarks on paid crusades that raise questions about whether he can remain objective in his academic roles as scholar and teacher.

    In a move that elevated his profile in the stock market and prompted a dispute about his financial disclosures, he published a blog on Jan. 28 that accused Internet video and advertising purveyor Blinkx Plc of using hidden software to inflate traffic counts. His posting caused Blinkx shares to fall the most in the company’s history.

    Blinkx responded to Edelman’s broadside with a statement saying the company “strongly refutes” his assertions and conclusions. Harvard pressed Edelman to say more about his clients, prompting him to disclose that they included two U.S. investors. Their names still aren’t known.

    While taking on some giants, such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc., Edelman has worked for others, including Microsoft Corp. Google has said that he’s biased and hasn’t been forthright enough in disclosing that he’s a paid consultant to Microsoft.

    FTC Crackdown

    Edelman earns more from his outside activities than from his salary as a professor, which isn’t unusual among business school faculty, he said. His work has influenced the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General’s Office, among other regulators, in their crackdown on companies.

    “He’s part academic and part cyber sleuth,” said Ken Dreifach, former chief of the Internet bureau of the New York Attorney General’s Office, whose prosecutors tracked Edelman’s blog posts as they filed cases against companies using malicious software.

    Edelman is expected to come up for tenure, academia’s guarantee of job security, at the end of 2015. While his credentials include a law degree and economics doctorate, both from Harvard, his attacks on companies are unusual at the business school, an institution better known for case studies celebrating successes.

    Critical Letter

    When he was considered for promotion to associate professor from assistant a few years ago, Edelman said an outside reviewer contacted by the school wrote a critical letter: “Ben seems not to like businesses. I thought this was a business school.” He was promoted anyway.

    Edelman’s outside consulting work has been encouraged by Harvard and is helping make the Internet a better place, said Brian Kenny, Harvard Business School’s chief marketing and communications officer.

    Since his Blinkx post, entitled “The Darker Side of Blinkx,” the shares have declined 37 percent. After its initial statement reacting on Jan. 30, the company has declined to comment.

    Edelman initially wrote that he prepared the research for an unnamed client. Harvard Business School said that disclosure wasn’t enough under its conflict-of-interest rules, which require professors to disclose paid and unpaid outside activities related to work available to the public. Harvard asked Edelman to say more.

    Revised Disclosure

    In his enhanced disclosure, Edelman said last week he was paid by two U.S. investors that jointly hired him. He didn’t name them, say how much he was paid or whether they were betting against, or shorting, the stock.

    In interviews, Edelman said his contract prohibited him from disclosing that information. Harvard is satisfied with his revised disclosure, Kenny said.

    Continued in article

    "The Shadowy World of Wikipedia's Editing Bots," MIT's Technology Review, February 13, 2014 ---
    http://www.technologyreview.com/view/524751/the-shadowy-world-of-wikipedias-editing-bots/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140214

    Much of the editing work on Wikipedia is too mind-numbingly repetitive for humans, so automated bots do it instead. But keeping track of automated editing has always been hard … until now.

    In a little over a decade, Wikipedia has evolved from an Internet experiment into a global crowdsourcing phenomenon. Today, this online encyclopedia provides free access to more than 30 million articles in 287 languages.

    Less well known is Wikidata, an information repository designed to share basic facts for use on different language versions of Wikipedia. Wikidata therefore plays a crucial role in lubricating the flow of information between these online communities.

    Maintaining all this data is a difficult job. It requires significant editing and polishing, mostly involving mindless, repetitive tasks such as formatting links and sources but also adding basic facts.

    So much of this kind of work is automated. Behind the scenes, automated bots scan Wikipedia and Wikidata pages continually polishing the content for human consumption.

    But that raises an important question. How much bot activity is there? What are these bots doing and how does it compare to human activity?

    Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Thomas Steiner at Google’s German operation in Hamburg. Steiner has created an application that monitors editing activity across all 287 language versions of Wikipedia and on Wikidata. And he publishes the results in real time online so that anybody can see exactly how many bots and humans are editing any of these sites at any instant.

    For example, at the time of writing, across all language version of Wikipedia there are 10,407 edits being carried out by Bots and 11,148 by human Wikipedians. So that’s a 49/51 split between bots and humans.

    But a closer look at the data reveals some interesting variations. For example, only 5 percent of the edits to the English language version of Wikipedia are being done by bots right now. By contrast, 94 percent of the edits to the Vietnamese version are by bots.

    And on Wikidata, 77 percent of the 15,000 edits are being done by bots.

    Steiner’s page also lists the most active bots. Wikipedia and Wikidata have long recognized the damage that bots can do and so have strict guidelines about their behavior. Wikidata even lists bots with approved tasks.

    What’s curious about the automated edits on Wikidata is that the most active bots are not on this list. For example, at the time of writing a bot called Succubot is making 5797 edits to Wikidata entries and yet appears to be unknown to Wikidata. What is this bot doing?

    Steiner’s page will give administrators a useful window into this seemingly shadowy behavior. In truth, any nefarious activity is usually spotted quickly and the perpetrator blocked. But this kind of oversight will still be hugely useful.

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's threads on Google and other search engines ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm


    "The Crushingly Expensive Mistake Killing Your Retirement:   401(k) fees are costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime," by Matthew O'Brien, The Atlantic, February 15, 2014 ---
    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-crushingly-expensive-mistake-killing-your-retirement/283866/

    Jensen Comment
    Investors should probably question whether they need to pay a financial advisor on top of the unavoidable expenses of managing a mutual fund. Investors should also seek out lower cost fund management funds such as Fidelity, Vanguard, and TIAA/CREF. Most of the more expensive funds are delivering addedreturns that justify the added costs unless they have taken you into financial risks you don't understand.

    The big funds offer a lot of free advising services that you should investigate before running down to a personal advisor in a glitzy office building.

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


    "An Innovation Stifler?" by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, February 17, 2014 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/17/u-people-earns-accreditation-challenging-view-agencies-stifle-innovation

    An accrediting agency just approved a free, online university with a largely volunteer faculty. Is accreditation really the squelcher of experimentation it is made out to be?

    Jensen Comment
    I think accreditation became somewhat of a joke when for-profit universities commenced to buy up small, remote, and bankrupt colleges for no reason other than to buy the accreditations of those bankrupt colleges. Then the for-profit universities declared that their massive online education programs were also  "accredited."

    Accreditation does indeed stifle some "innovation." When a diploma mill does "innovate" and let you buy a baccalaureate degree in two weeks or even a year lack of accreditation is stifling such "innovation."

    The gray zone is indeed the serious University of the Free People. What would help to lend credibility is to publish the resumes of faculty, syllabi, and grading distributions (or at least median course grades). Not all prestigious universities meet these criteria, but when you are doing something truly innovative like the University of the Free People you have to try harder to prove your case.

    Personally, I don't have a lot of hope for the long-term of a university comprised of volunteer faculty. It will be really tough to sustain a core faculty for the long term. And with faculty coming and going through a revolving door it will be very hard to maintain academic standards and reputation. A college's reputation is built upon its faculty and student admissions criteria. A revolving door faculty with open admi8ssions will be very hard to sustain, and reliance on a few huge donors creates problems of independence, especially when in terms of academic standards when the donors favor certain types of applicants.

    Another problem will be to have a balanced curriculum. For example, it may be possible to have some great volunteer faculty in the humanities, but when it comes down to faculty of the professions like computer science, information technology, systems engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, accounting, premed, etc. it may be very tough to recruit volunteer faculty having great employment opportunities in traditional colleges and universities.

    At some point, it would seem that taxpayers or student tuition funding will eventually have to provide steady employment opportunities. The days of church support are numbered except for seminaries and some colleges with a very long history of support from a church. And most of those church-supported colleges are no longer tuition free for all students. Some states are now seriously trying to make community colleges tuition free, but these colleges are taxpayer funded.

    And I hate to sound arrogant, but volunteer universities also have to beware of offering false hopes. Universities having low admissions standards that promise careers in the professions can mislead students. For example, suppose such a university has a a premed program for low SAT students. If those students graduate and have MCAT scores too low for medical school, a college is misleading those students. Some colleges have accounting programs that rarely, if ever, have CPA alumni. Some law schools that offer promising careers in law have less than 50% passage rates on the BAR exam due in large measure to low admission standards.

    Bob Jensen's threads on accreditation issues are at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#AccreditationIssues


    An Innovation Stifler
    "Professor Told to Remove Blow-Up Dolls From Office," Inside Higher Ed, February 17. 2014 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/02/17/professor-told-remove-blow-dolls-office 


    "Why It Makes Sense for Students to Grade One Another’s Papers," by Barry Peddycord, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/future/2014/02/12/why-it-makes-sense-for-students-to-grade-one-anothers-papers/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    By the time this post appears, the first peer-graded assignment in Cathy Davidson’s Coursera MOOC, “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education,” will have come and gone, and students will be well into the second. Unlike programming projects, algebra exercises, and multiple-choice questions that can all be reliably graded by a computer, Coursera offloads the task of evaluating essays to students. After the deadline for an assignment has passed, students have a week to evaluate five of their classmates’ essays using a rubric developed by the teaching staff. A student who fails to evaluate his or her classmates does not get a grade for the assignment, and in our course will not be able to achieve the statement of accomplishment “with distinction.” Whether students see that as a chore, duty, or opportunity, the necessary assessment is eventually done—for better or for worse.

    Peer grading can be a controversial proposition. When students’ scholarships and internships are riding on their grades, it isn’t surprising that they hesitate to allow their classmates—who know as much as they do about the course material—to have any effect on their final assessment. Instructors scoff at the idea that students can be left to evaluate one another, certain that they will collude so that everyone will receive an A without doing any of the work. In its worst incarnation, peer grading can be a scheme for lazy professors to offload on students the boring work of assessment.

    With all of those concerns, one might wonder why we would ever want to try peer grading, but from a logistical point of view, it makes plenty of sense. The major benefit is that it provides quick feedback. Feedback that isn’t timely is next to useless, and even in a traditional classroom, the time it takes an instructor to produce and return feedback to students can vary widely, depending on the instructor’s workload. When it takes one or two weeks to return feedback, a system in which students go through multiple rounds of drafts and revisions simply isn’t feasible.

    Peer grading has been used in software systems like SWoRD and Expertiza (developed by my Ph.D. co-adviser), so that students can go through multiple rounds of revisions interleaved with rapid feedback cycles, encouraging higher-quality final submissions that scale with the size of the class. Students get more reviews, more rapidly, from more points of view. Not only are the reviewees getting extra feedback; the act of reviewing itself has metacognitive benefits because students get to see other submissions of varying quality and have to articulate in their feedback what the other students are doing wrong.

    Critics have questioned whether student-assigned grades can be consistent or valid, but numerous studies have found that such concerns are unlikely to be an issue in practice. While it is true that students lack the nuance that an expert grader can provide, most student-assigned scores hover around the scores given by experts on the same papers. Some students may be harsher or easier graders than others, but they often apply those biases consistently enough for them to be normalized (of course, such biases apply to instructors as well).

    Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, presented some of the exploratory results of the first peer-reviewed Coursera assignments when she spoke at Duke in the fall of 2012. At a glance, the findings appeared to replicate those earlier studies, hinting that the results are consistent even on a massive scale (though I haven’t seen anything published on it yet).

    Peer grading isn’t a silver bullet and doesn’t work by magic. Research shows that successful peer grading arises only from a well-articulated grading philosophy, training for the would-be reviewers, and high-quality rubrics that very clearly show what’s right, what’s wrong, and why that is. Without careful planning and scaffolding, it comes across as a half-hearted attempt to reduce the tedium of grading. Peer grading already starts at a disadvantage from having to compete with the internalized expectations of how authority in the classroom should be distributed.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    There are of course ranges of peer grading assignments ranging from grading of homework to term papers. I cannot imagine peer grading of examinations, although panels of students might participate in oral examinations where the course instructor also is present.

    Aside from saving instructors from some of the tedium of grading, the main pedagogical advantage is that grading and even teaching assignments can be extremely beneficial to learning.

    One disadvantage is that problem answers, take-home essays, and term papers need to be screened these days for plagiarism.

    Peer grading should probably be anonymous to avoid pallsywellsies.

    When I taught AIS the Murthy and Groomer online textbook also had online customized quizzes that were graded by the Murthy and Groomer online system for each chapter. All of my students were full-time and on-campus students. What I needed to verify is that each student took her or his own quiz on line and that the student did not cheat by using the textbook or course notes while taking the quiz.

    Each week I changed partners where one student was assigned to "attest to" the quiz of another student.  The attest form that I used is at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/attest.htm


    "How to Tell if Someone Is Lying," by David DeSteno, Harvard Business Review Blog, February 12, 2014 ---
    http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/how-to-tell-if-someone-is-lying/ 

    Researchers in the academic, business, and military communities have spent years trying to uncover a few simple methods for detecting trustworthiness but, despite their best efforts, continue to come up short. All those books promising to teach you how to spot liars through body language? None has empirical support.

    The temptation, of course, is to look for one “tell” that indicates someone can’t be trusted. Is it a false smile? Shifty eyes? The reality, though, is that any single cue is ambiguous. If someone touches her face, she might subconsciously be trying to hide something — or she might have an itch.

    To accurately infer another’s intentions, you need to look for a set of cues — gestures that together can more accurately predict or reveal motivation. Here’s how my colleagues and I identified the four key ones (with the help of a robot, of course):

    Watch the video

    Jensen Comment
    The problems with these systems is that they are all like lie detector machines. They work for many people, but there are too many outliers who give false negative or false positive outcomes. As a result they can be very misleading at times when need for reliability is greatest.

    For example, probably the hardest thing to detect is lying by sociopaths and psychopaths that typically become experts at deceiving even the most professionally trained investigators and psychiatrists.

    Video:  Inside Cornell: Analyzing the words of psychopaths ---
    http://www.cornell.edu/video/inside-cornell-analyzing-the-words-of-psychopaths
    Thank you Dennis Huber for the heads up.


    Yesterday on February 19 I had my annual physical in a doctor's office in the Littleton Regional Hospital. He's a talker and usually loses track of time. One story he related is about filing his tax returns himself using Turbo Tax. Last year when his electronic filing was rejected because the IRS claimed somebody had already filed a 2012 tax return using his social security number. No details were revealed to him, but chances are high that the data in the ID thief's tax return were phony and the IRS paid out an enormous refund to that thief.

    The IRS did accept my doctor's mailed in tax return and cashed his check for taxes due. To date he's not heard another word from the IRS.

    The IRS has an Identity Theft Web Page at
    http://www.irs.gov/uac/Identity-Protection

    "IRS is overwhelmed by identity theft fraud:   Billions wrongly paid out as scammers find agency an easy target," by Michael Kranish, Boston Globe, February 16, 2014 ---
    http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/02/16/identity-theft-taxpayer-information-major-problem-for-irs/7SC0BarZMDvy07bbhDXwvN/story.html

    Rashia Wilson bought a $92,000 Audi, proclaimed herself a millionaire, and announced on her Facebook page that she was “the queen of IRS tax fraud,” as prosecutors told the story.

    But even more than her flamboyance, it was the seeming ease of her crime that was most stunning: She and an accomplice were alleged to have hijacked the identities of other taxpayers to get fraudulent refunds. They used stolen Social Security numbers, a computer, and basic knowledge of how to file a tax return, according to the government.

    After the Florida mother of three was caught and pleaded guilty last year to crimes totaling at least $3 million, her defense attorney, Mark O’Brien, made his own plea. He said in court that he hoped the “IRS will figure out a way to prevent this from happening in the future, so someone with a sixth-grade education can’t defraud them so easily.”

    cross the country, the theft of taxpayer identities has taken off, while receiving far less attention than the loss of credit card information. Even some drug dealers, always with an eye out for easy profits, have turned to taxpayer identity theft after hearing how uncomplicated it was to scam the IRS. A medical assistant at a nursing home stole the identities of hundreds of patients. A prison guard stole the identities of inmates and filed false returns under their names.

    All told, in just the first six months of last year, 1.6 million taxpayers were affected by identity theft, compared with 271,000 for all of 2010, according to a recent audit by the Treasury Department’s inspector general. While the IRS said it discovered many of the incidents, the cumulative thefts have resulted in billions of dollars in potentially fraudulent refunds, according to an array of government reports.

    “I’ve had a police chief tell me ‘street crime is down because everybody is now filing false IRS returns,’ ” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen,who took office last month, said in an interview.

    While Koskinen stressed that the IRS uses a series of “filters” that are increasingly successful in catching identity thefts before refunds are paid, he acknowledged that “this problem has exploded’’ and that the agency is in a constant race to keep its detection techniques a step ahead of the thieves. “It is,’’ he said, “a little like ‘Whac-a-Mole,’ knock them down here and they come up over there.”

    Kathryn Keneally, US Assistant Attorney General for the tax division, said her office has an increasing number of prosecutions of taxpayer identity theft underway. She listed one heart-wrenching case after another: military personnel who had their identities stolen while deployed, and parents who learned that their recently deceased child’s identity had been pilfered.

    “We have seen drug dealers go into this because it is easy access to money. Gangs go into this because it is easy access to money. Or at least they perceive it that way,” Keneally said, while adding: “Please, if you quote me on saying ‘It is easy access to money,’ include: ‘We are changing that equation and we are adding risk to that.’ ” The average prison sentence for taxpayer identity theft last year was more than three years, and the longest was 26 years.

    The problem is that even as prosecutions increase and the IRS improves its ability to stop many false tax returns up front, identity thieves also are increasing their efforts.

    “What the identity thieves do is play on volume,” Keneally said. “So if they file 10 returns and 9 are stopped, the 10th one went through and they got the money.”

    In case after case, court records show criminals have used tax-filing software to obtain refunds that are in the thousands of dollars, often receiving the funds paid via the US Treasury on debit cards or by direct deposit.

    Prisoners at jails across the country have obtained stolen Social Security numbers and filed thousands of false returns. Criminals in foreign locales have pilfered the personal information of Americans and received refunds. Thieves have even stolen the Social Security numbers of thousands of children, as well as tens of thousands of dead people, to obtain fraudulent tax refunds.

    A US Treasury audit released last September said that “billions of dollars in potentially fraudulent refunds continue to be paid” as a result of identity theft. If the problem is not stopped, the IRS could issue $21 billion in fraudulent refunds in the next five years, according to testimony by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax policy, J. Russell George.

    The IRS has disputed that estimate, saying it has improved its ability to detect identity theft. But a spokesman said the agency doesn’t have enough information to provide its own estimate of how much has been paid so far in fraudulent refunds.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    I used to wait until April to file my tax returns. Not anymore! For the past two years I filed a soon as the IRS will accept electronic filings. I hope to beat the bad guys who might want a phony tax refund using my ID information.

    IRS ID theft is one of those frauds that will probably forever be a major problem. The problem is that there is so much of this fraud that our prisons cannot hold all the crooks, and most of the crooks are so poor that fines are a sick joke. Many of them are not even citizens of the USA. Deport them one day, and they're back in the USA the next day.

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


    Just in Time to File for Illegal Tax Refunds
    "Hackers Make Off With 300,000 Personnel Records at U. of Maryland," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2013 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/hackers-make-off-with-300000-personnel-records-at-u-of-maryland/73213?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en


    Not Necessarily "All" --- But This is a Good Listing
    "Here Are All The Things You Can't Deduct On Your Taxes," Robert E. Flach, Business Insider, February 20, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/non-deductable-items-taxes-2014-2 


    If you teach about valuation, you might want to add this to your teaching notes.
    "The Chart That Shows WhatsApp Was A Bargain At $19 Billion"

    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/price-per-user-for-whatsapp-2014-2#ixzz2ttINByKq

    Bob Jensen's threads on valuation the old fashioned way ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/roi.htm


    "'Dirty Dozen' tax scam list now includes telephone scams," by Alistair M. Nevius, Journal of Accountancy, February 19, 2014 ---
    http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/News/20149633.htm

    The IRS also warns that some telephone scams target recent immigrants, who are threatened with arrest or deportation if they do not pay up promptly. The IRS asks that taxpayers who think they are being targeted by phone scammers to contact the Service at 800-829-1040, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration at 800-366-4484, and the Federal Trade Commission using the FTC Complaint Assistant at FTC.gov.

    The rest of the “Dirty Dozen” is similar to last year’s list:

    Bob Jensen's tax helpers are at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation


    How to Mislead With Statistics
    From the 24/7 Wall Street Newsletter on February 17, 2014

    Although a little late this year, due largely to the federal government’s 17-day shutdown in 2013, tax season is here. And, according to a new report, what you owe in taxes could be largely determined by where you live. The report, released by the Office of Revenue Analysis of the government of the District of Columbia, reviewed the estimated property, sales, auto and income taxes for a hypothetical family at various income levels in 2012 in the largest city within each state. City tax burdens vary widely. A family of three earning $75,000 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, paid just $3,475, or 4.6% of its income, in state and local taxes. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a family of three earning $75,000 paid $16,333, or 21.8% of its income -- a total that does not even include federal taxes.

    These are the cities with the highest (and lowest) taxes ---
    http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/02/14/cities-paying-the-most-and-least-in-taxes/?utm_source=247WallStDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FEB172014A&utm_campaign=DailyNewsletter

    We have tracked the composition of, and major changes to, the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio. Meet the 2014 Warren Buffett stocks.

    Jensen Comment
    Be careful of how tax burdens are computed in this analysis. For example the parameters are based heavily on $25,000 versus $150,000 family income parameters. Trying to live on $150,000 in Manhattan is like trying to live on a poverty wage. Those families well above the $150,000 parameter such as those in Manhattan earning well above the median get clobbered with much higher city taxes than those above the median in Bridgeport, Connecticut because high incomes in Manhattan are so much higher for multimillionaires living in Manhattan as opposed to Bridgeport.

    Medians and means can be very misleading when the data are extremely bimodal such as having a lot of lower income people combined with a lot of extremely high income people paying city income taxes and property taxes. In Manhattan the two modes are so extreme that the median family income number is virtual nonsense. High income people that choose to live in Manhattan in very expensive housing pay a very dear price in terms of taxes imposed by the city on top of the income taxes of the state and federal governments. This is one of the main reasons high income people working in Manhattan elect to live outside Manhattan --- often in villages towns that do not impose income taxes on top of state and federal income taxes.

    In other words, Manhattan looks like a good tax deal only because the parameter of $150,000 is so low for Manhattan.
    Living on $150,000 in Manhattan would be relatively lousy living in small, dingy, and possibly rat-infested brownstone apartment where children are warned not to venture out at night. If this study was revised by replacing the $150,000 parameter with a $500,000 parameter that is reasonable for Manhattan, San Francisco, and Honolulu the rankings towns and city tax burdens would be totally different. Goodbye Bridgetown and hello Manhattan, San Francisco, and Honolulu.

    This is just one of those many ways that "figures don't lie but liars figure."


    Competency-Based Learning --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_learning

    "Competency-Based Degrees: Coming Soon to a Campus Near You," by Joel Shapiro, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Competency-Based-Degrees-/144769/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

    Has distance education significantly affected the business and teaching models of higher education? Certainly. Is it today’s biggest disrupter of the higher-education industry? Not quite. In fact, the greatest risk to traditional higher education as we know it may be posed by competency-based education models.

    Competency-based programs allow students to gain academic credit by demonstrating academic competence through a combination of assessment and documentation of experience. The model is already used by institutions including Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, Excelsior College, and others, and is a recent addition to the University of Wisconsin system.

    Traditional educators often find competency programs alarming—and understandably so. Earning college credit by virtue of life experience runs afoul of classroom experience, which many educators believe to be sacred. As a colleague recently said, "Life is not college. Life is what prepares you for college."

    In fact, traditional educators should be alarmed. If more institutions gravitate toward competency-based models, more and more students will earn degrees from institutions at which they take few courses and perhaps interact minimally with professors. Then what will a college degree mean?

    It may no longer mean that a student has taken predetermined required and elective courses taught by approved faculty members. Rather, it would mean that a student has demonstrated a defined set of proficiencies and mastery of knowledge and content.

    Competency models recognize the value of experiential learning, in which students can develop and hone skill sets in real-world contexts. For instance, a student with a background in web design may be able to provide an institution with a portfolio that demonstrates mastery of computer coding or digital design. If coding or digital design is a discipline in which the institution gives credit, and the mastery demonstrated is sufficiently similar to that achieved in the classroom, then the institution may grant credit based on that portfolio.

    The logic of competency-based credit is compelling. After all, colleges and universities hire most people to teach so that students learn. If students can achieve the desired learning in other ways, then why not provide them with the same credential as those who sat in the traditional classrooms with the traditional faculty members?

    Additionally, the competency-based model, so often cast aside by traditional institutions, already exists within their walls. Not only do many colleges give credit for 
real-world learning through (sometimes mandatory) internships, but a version of the competency model has long been part of traditional assessment practices.

    Most professors grade students on the basis of their performance on particular assignments, such as papers, tests, and projects. If a student’s final paper reflects a sufficient degree of sophistication and mastery, then the professor gives the student a passing grade, thus conferring credit. But how much can the professor really know about how the student learned the material? If the end is achieved, how much do the means matter?

    In primary and secondary education, much is made of measuring students’ growth. A successful teacher moves a student from Point A to Point B. The greater the difference between A and B, arguably, the more effective the teacher. But in higher education, rarely is any effort made to formally assess student growth. Rather, professors typically give grades based on final performance, regardless of students’ starting point. In the classroom, competency models rule, even at traditional institutions.

    The primary weakness of competency models, however, is that they can be only as good as the assessment mechanisms they employ, and, unfortunately, no assessment can be a perfect proxy for deep and meaningful learning. Certainly, great education isn’t just about content. It challenges students to consider others’ viewpoints, provides conflicting information, and forces students to reconcile, set priorities, and choose. In the best cases, it engenders a growth of intellect and curiosity that is not easily definable.

    Higher-end learning remains the defining value proposition of great teaching within a formal classroom setting. But because it is exceedingly hard to assess, it cannot easily be incorporated into competency models.

    Nonetheless, competency models will make significant headway at the growing number of institutions that offer skill-based programs with clearly delineated and easily assessed learning outcomes. They will also appeal to students who want to save time and money by getting credit applied to past experience. Institutions that serve these students will thus find competency models to be a competitive advantage.

    Meanwhile, institutions that are unwilling or unable to incorporate elements of a competency model will be forced to defend the value of learning that cannot be easily assessed and demonstrated. That will be a hard message to communicate and sell, especially given that students with mastery of applied and technical skill sets tend to be rewarded with jobs upon graduation. Additionally, noncompetency tuition will almost certainly rise relative to competency-based credit models, which require less instruction and thus can be delivered at lower cost.

    The marketplace rarely reacts well to perceived low marginal benefit at high marginal price.

    Continued in article

    "The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, January 3, 2014 ---
    http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/

    Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based assessment and assessment of deep understanding:
    Concept Knowledge and Assessment of Deep Understanding ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge


    Because of Amazon
    From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 14, 2014

    Words are cheap
    Here it’s 2014 and the 
    New Yorker’s George Packer is writing about Amazon.com Inc. and its impact on… publishing? While few notice when Amazon prices an electronics store out of business, he writes, the “influential, self-conscious world” of book people keeps the e-commerce giant’s impact on the clubby world of publishing front and center. Amazon has helped keep book prices low, accelerated digitization and allowed more people to publish their own stuff—for better or worse. But cheaper books don’t mean better books. Publishers tell Packer that book advances are in decline, meaning that true literary talent can’t afford to write. “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value,” says one small publisher. “It’s a widget.” Publishing’s best hope may be to play the disintermediation game themselves. If the behemoth Penguin Random House sold directly to customers, it would lose 30% of sales, but be able to keep the 30% per copy handed over to Amazon, said literary agent Andrew Wylie. “The industry thinks of itself as Procter & Gamble. What gave publishers the idea that this was some big goddam business?” he said. “It’s not—it’s a tiny little business, selling to a bunch of odd people who read.”


    "Book Review: 'The Value of the Humanities' by Helen Small Professors who were eager to throw over the canon now find it difficult to defend their own job" by Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2014 ---
    http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579374740405172228?mod=djemMER_h


    This Map Renames Each US State With A Country Generating The Same GDP ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/countries-vs-us-states-gdp-map-2014-2

    Jensen Comment
    I knew nothing about Belarus until I studied this chart. The GDP may be the same as that of New Hampshire, but Belarus has over 7 times as many people.

    Latvia has about the same GDP as Vermont with nearly three times as many people.

    Luxembourg with only s 500,000 population has about a third of the population of Maine with roughly the same GDP.

    New York has about the same GDP as Mexico, although Mexico probably does not count one major industry --- narcotics. Also Mexico has nearly six times as many people, many more of whom are now welcome with open arms to NYC under the new mayor. I find this a little inconsistent since it is hard to be pro labor union and pro illegal immigration at the same time.


    Question
    Should colleges wanting to avoid having to provide health insurance to adjunct teachers rush to cap their total work hours to less than 30 hours per week in order to avoid the requirements of the Affordable Health Care Act more commonly known as Obamacare? There is considerable ambiguity about how many hours adjuncts "work" outside of class for course preparation and for helping students outside of class (e.g., via email).

    "Caps Untouched," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed,  February 25, 2014 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/25/some-colleges-consider-changes-adjunct-caps-wake-irs-guidance

    When the Internal Revenue Service offered guidance earlier this month on how college and universities should count adjuncts’ hours in relations to the Affordable Care Act, the agency raised at least as many questions as it answered.

    Chief among them was whether the guidance would make any real difference in the lives of adjuncts. Would colleges and universities stop capping adjuncts’ workloads to prevent them from qualifying as eligible for benefits under the law? Would institutions that already had done so rethink their caps? And would administrators even follow the guidance, which offers a “safe harbor” formula of 2.25 hours worked for each classroom contact hour, but still allows them to count total hours worked based on a decidedly ambiguous “reasonable” standard?

    . . .

    Starting about 18 months ago, colleges moved in droves to cap their adjuncts’ course loads ahead of the health care law’s so-called “employer mandate” taking effect. Large employers under the law must offer full-time employees – those who work 30 hours or more per week – health care benefits or face fines, so institutions all over the country moved to lower their course load caps for adjuncts or create them where they hadn’t existed before.

    College associations warned institutions that they may be acting too soon, without explicit guidance from the federal government about how to count adjuncts’ total hours worked per week to determine if they were benefits-eligible under the law. Since adjuncts work outside of class to prepare for contact time with students, they said, it was unclear how to count adjuncts’ hours. Different adjuncts groups, college associations and unions proposed various formulas, but there was nothing concrete.

    Many of the institutions were working off a kind of “worst case scenario” scenario formula, from the perspective of wanting to provide as few adjuncts health care as possible. Under that formula, which was supported by the American Federation of Teachers and some adjunct groups, one hour of contact time equaled two hours of outside preparation time, for a total of three hours. So Community College of Allegheny County, followed by many other institutions, announced a 10-credit-per-semester cap. It replaced a previous 12-credit cap, essentially meaning that most adjuncts could now teach three courses (nine credits) instead of four per semester in the fall and summer, for 27 hours per week total.

    Allegheny did not respond to a request for comment on whether it would rethink its policy in light of the IRS guidance. Various institutions also are staying mum. A spokesman for the College of DuPage, which last year created some full-time positions for adjuncts while capping other adjuncts’ workload at 27 credits per, said the guidance wouldn’t change anything, and showed that the college’s policy is “appropriate within the clarified guidelines.”

    The Virginia Community College system, however, is reviewing a course load cap it instituted last year for all adjuncts: 10 credits each in the fall and spring and 7 in the summer, a spokesman said. That cap resulted in sections being taken away from or limited for about 25 percent of the system’s some 7,000 adjuncts at 23 campuses, and could change based on a pending review of the IRS guidance and the Virginia “Manpower Control Program.” The state policy limits adjunct faculty at public institutions to 29 hours per week. Still, at least one college within the system has announced that new course loads of 12 credits and contact hourseach for the fall and spring, and 8 in the summer, soon will be adopted, based on the relatively “relaxed” IRS guidance, The Washington Post reported. The college system spokesman said that announcement was premature.

    Josh Ulman, chief government relations officer for the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, said he expected more and more colleges to follow the IRS model, to be in compliance should the guidelines change going forward.

    Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in email that whether or not colleges would follow the guidelines was "simple." Employers that "embrace the sprit of the [law] -- which is rooted in the idea that everyone deserves access to high-quality and affordable healthcare -- will work with us to make it happen. Those who oppose the law or put cutting costs above high-quality education probably won't."

    Indiana's Ivy Tech Community College, a large community college system, won’t change the ACA-related course load caps it instituted regardless of the guidance, President Tom Snyder said. Under the new caps, adjuncts can work 12 credit hours per semester, or about 27 hours total based on the IRS formula. Snyder, who recently offered  Congressional testimony on what he saw as the disproportionate impact of the new health care law on community colleges, given their high rates of employment of adjunct faculty, said he would continue to lobby for the possible exemption of colleges from the law. Snyder said the law "penalizes" adjunct faculty who want to teach more hours but must adhere to new course load caps, and the "school misses out on a skilled adjunct." And providing health care to all adjuncts teaching beyond the new caps would be prohibitively expensive, at the cost of $10 million annually, he said. To do that, Ivy Tech would have to downgrade health care plans for everyone else.

    No college has yet announced it will offer more adjuncts health insurance as a result of the guidance. That didn’t come as a surprise to adjunct advocates, who often cite health insurance and other benefits as a kind of “last nut” to be cracked in organizing and other advocacy efforts that in many places already have led to better pay and job security, for example.

    Because many institutions still recognize adjuncts as working only during contact classroom hours, Kezar said the guidelines “certainly should make more adjuncts qualify.” But, she said, “Institutions that are dead-set against providing them [with health insurance] will find ways around it."

    Baime noted that the guidelines offer flexibility to colleges to offer "robust employment" of adjuncts without necessarily providing health insurance. Weingarten said that adjuncts who don't get insurance through their institutions are counting on expanded opportunities for coverage elsewhere in the law.

    Ulman said that at the very least, the IRS guidance will make it clearer who might qualify for benefits so that institutions and employees can have more “honest discussions” about coverage.

    Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, said there was more work to be done to make sure that those kinds of honest discussions were happening on campuses. And given the lack of obvious enforcement mechanism in the guidance, she said, it’s up to adjuncts to demand it.

    Despite the tumult of the past 18 months for adjuncts, advocates have said there’s a silver lining, to which the new IRS guidance adds: It’s brought the contingent academic labor issue out of the sector and into the broader policy debate.

    Rhoades said the guidance is “official recognition that adjunct faculty work outside the class, as part of contributing to a quality education for the students, and that will create additional pressure on institutions to not just acknowledge that, but to actually remunerate these faculty for that work.”

    Kezar agreed, saying, “the legislation and guidance have been really instrumental in bringing adjuncts’ plight to light." She noted Democratic Rep. George Miller’s recent report on adjunct labor issues, which was sparked by Maisto’s November testimony to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “He learned all that through the [Affordable Care Act] discussions.”

    Ultimately, she said, the debate’s greatest impact “may not be on health care but on drawing attention to the slew of problems related to this work force model that has been grown beyond capacity to serve higher education well.”


    "(More) Clarity on Adjunct Hours (including healthcare insurance guidance)," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, February 11, 2014 ---
    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/11/irs-guidance-health-care-law-clarifies-formula-counting-adjunct-hours 

    The Obama administration on Monday released its long-awaited final guidance on how colleges should calculate the hours of adjunct instructors and student workers for purposes of the new federal mandate that employers provide health insurance to those who work more than 30 hours a week.

    The upshot of the complicated regulation from the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service:

    Adjunct Hours

    The issues of how to count the hours of part-time instructors and student workers have consumed college officials and faculty groups for much of the last 18 months, ever since it became clear that the Affordable Care Act definition of a full-time employee as working 30 hours or more a week was leading some colleges to limit the hours of adjunct faculty members, so they fell short of the 30-hour mark.

    All that the government said in its initial January 2013 guidance about the employer mandate under the health care law was that colleges needed to use "reasonable" methods to count adjuncts' hours.

    In federal testimony and at conferences, college administrators and faculty advocates have debated the appropriate definition of "reasonable," with a focus on calculating the time that instructors spend on their jobs beyond their actual hours in the classroom. The American Council on Education, higher education's umbrella association and main lobbying group, proposed a ratio of one hour of outside time for each classroom hour, while many faculty advocates have pushed for a ratio of 2:1 or more.

    In its new regulation, published as part of a complex 227-page final rule in today's Federal Register, the government said that it would be too complex to count actual hours, and it rejected proposals to treat instructors as full time only if they were assigned course loads equivalent or close to those of full-time instructors at their institutions.

    The administration continued to say that given the "wide variation of work patterns, duties, and circumstances" at different colleges, institutions should continue to have a good deal of flexibility in defining what counts as "reasonable."

    But in the "interest of predictability and ease of administration in crediting hours of service for purposes" of the health care law, the agencies said, the regulation establishes as "one (but not the only)" reasonable definition a count of 2.25 hours of work for each classroom hour taught. "[I]n addition to crediting an hour of service for each hour teaching in the classroom, this method would credit an additional 1 ¼ hours service" for "related tasks such as class preparation and grading of examinations or papers."

    Separately, instructors should also be credited with an hour of service for each additional hour they spend outside of the classroom on duties they are "required to perform (such as required office hours or required attendance at faculty meetings," the regulation states.

    The guidance states that the ratio -- which would essentially serve as a "safe harbor" under which institutions can qualify under the law -- "may be relied upon at least through the end of 2015."

    By choosing a ratio of 1 ¼ hours of additional service for each classroom hour, the government comes slightly higher than the 1:1 ratio that the higher education associations sought, and quite a bit lower than the ratio of 2:1 or higher promoted by many faculty advocates.

    David S. Baime, vice president for government relations and research at the American Association of Community Colleges, praised administration officials for paying "very close attention to the institutional and financial realities that our colleges are facing." He said community colleges appreciated both the continued flexibility and the setting of a safe harbor under which, in the association's initial analysis, "the vast majority of our adjunct faculty, under currernt teaching loads, would not be qualifying" for health insurance, Baime said.

    Maria Maisto, president and executive director of New Faculty Majority, said she, too, appreciated that the administration had left lots of room for flexibility, which she hoped would "force a lot of really interesting conversations" on campuses. "I think most people would agree that it is reasonable for employers to actually talk to and involve employees in thinking about how those workers can, and do, perform their work most effectively, and not to simply mandate from above how that work is understood and performed," she added.

    Maisto said she was also pleased that the administration appeared to have set the floor for a "reasonable" ratio above the lower 1:1 ratio that the college associations were suggesting.

    She envisioned a good deal of confusion on the provision granting an hour of time for all required non-teaching activities, however, noting that her own contract at Cuyahoga Community College requires her to participate in professional development and to respond to students' questions and requests on an "as-needed basis." "How does this regulation account for requirements like that?" she wondered.

    Student Workers

    The adjunct issue has received most of the higher education-related attention about the employer mandate, but the final regulations have significant implications for campuses that employ significant numbers of undergraduate and graduate students, too.

    Higher education groups had urged the administration to exempt student workers altogether from the employer mandate, given that many of them would be covered under the health care law's policies governing student health plans and coverage for those up to age 26 on their parents' policies. The groups also requested an exemption for students involved in work study programs.

    The updated guidance grants the latter exemption for hours of work study, given, it states, that "the federal work study program, as a federally subsidized financial aid program, is distinct from traditional employment in that its primary purpose is to advance education."

    But all other student work for an educational organization must be counted as hours of service for purposes of the health care mandate, Treasury and IRS said.

    Steven Bloom, director of federal relations at the American Council on Education, said higher ed groups thought it made sense to exempt graduate student workers, given that their work as teaching assistants and lab workers is generally treated as part of their education under the Fair Labor Standards Act. He said the new guidance is likely to force institutions that employ graduate students as TAs or research assistants -- and don't currently offer them health insurance as part of their graduate student packages -- to start counting their hours.

    The guidance also includes a potentially confounding approach to students who work as interns. The new regulation exempts work conducted by interns as hours of service under the health care employer mandate -- but only "to the extent that the student does not receive, and is not entitled to, payment in connection with those hours."

    Continued in article

    Also see
    http://info.ballardspahr.com/rs/vm.ashx?ct=24F7661FD7E00AEDC1D180A5D22E941DDDBE7BB3D38714DD4CF371647BF8D90DDD78034

    Jensen Question
    How should a university account for a doctoral student who happens to teach 33 hours one semester and works less than 30 hours in all other semesters of the doctoral program? Is the university required to provide health coverage for zero, one, or more years while the student is a full time student in the doctoral program? I assume the university must provide health insurance for one year, but I'm no authority on this issue.

    There also is a huge difference in hours of work required for teaching. A doctoral student who only teaches recitation sections under a professor who provides the lecture sections, writes the syllabus, writes the examinations, and essentially owns a course versus a doctoral student who owns only section of governmental accounting with no supervision from a senior instructor.

    When I was Chair of the Accounting Department at Florida State University, the wife (Debbie) of one of our doctoral students (Chuck Mulford) had total control of the lectures and 33 recitation sections of basic accounting each semester where most of the recitation "instructors" were accounting doctoral students. Debbie had her CPA license and a masters degree, but she was not a doctoral student. She was very good at this job. The recitation instructors had almost no preparation time and did not design or grade the examinations. They did not own all 33 sections like Debbie owned all 33 sections. It would be a bit unfair to give the recitation instructors as much pay for preparation as the selected doctoral students who taught more advanced courses and essentially owned those courses in terms of classroom preparation and examinations.

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

    Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education (including use of adjuncts) ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm


    Some Questions Are Too Difficult to Answer

    "Evaluating the Payoff of a College Degree:  Is college worth it?" by Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 24, 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/bottomline/embargoed-till-10am-monday-evaluating-the-payoff-of-a-college-degree/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

    Is college worth it?

    News articles raising that question, and reports meant to answer it, are piling up at a steady clip.

    And the answer has real consequences for anyone advising a student about whether and where to go to college, and for policy makers wondering if the country has too many degree holders, or too few.

    A paper released on Monday by the Urban Institute seeks to add context to the debate over whether college pays off. The paper, “Higher Education Earnings Premium: Value, Variation, and Trends,” was written by Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the research organization.

    The paper’s main takeaway: “The payoff is high, and rising,” Ms. Baum says. “But it’s not as simple as that.”

    Calculating the payoff of a degree requires a series of choices that lead to different results.

    The earnings premium of a college degree looks different depending on how the data are cut. For instance, the earnings gap between workers with and without four-year college degrees will be larger in a study that examines everyone in the labor force than in one that considers only full-time workers. That’s because college graduates are more likely to be employed and to work full time than people with less education.

    Another choice is whether to look at the earnings of recent graduates or to consider graduates’ whole working lives. The earnings gap between workers with and without college degrees is higher for older workers, so focusing on recent graduates paints an incomplete picture.

    But looking at lifetime earnings also introduces a problem: There’s no guarantee that the labor market will treat today’s young workers in the same way it treated their predecessors.

    If researchers are comparing workers with and without bachelor’s degrees, they must also decide how to treat graduate degrees. Including workers with advanced degrees will overstate the payoff of a bachelor’s degree, the paper says. But excluding them will understate it because bachelor’s degrees open the door to graduate school.

    In the end, there’s “no one answer” for how to look at this set of dilemmas, Ms. Baum says. But it is important to understand the pros and cons of any approach.

    Jensen Comment
    To the extent that people who do not go to college are on average less intelligent, less motivated, and do not have financial support of family for careers such as starting a new business or carrying on with the family farm, there's a huge problem of attributing cause from correlation outcomes when comparing college graduates from those who only graduated from high school.

    High school graduates who are on average more intelligent, more motivated, and have financial support of family for careers such as starting a new business or carrying on with the family farm are likely to do well in life even if they did not go to college. In other words the causes of economic success may be more fundamental than simply having a college diploma. Many college graduates would have done well in life even if they had not gone to college.

    Personal Note
    We have a son and his wife that went deeply in debt to graduate from college (he in business and she in law enforcement). They did this at a time when both became unemployed. They had high grades, but when they struggled to find employment they both ended up in jobs that do not require any college education.

    In Germany only about 25% of the population is allowed into college. Germany takes great pride in the economic opportunities for people in the skilled trades. In the USA there's a shortage of workers in the skilled trades because your a nobody unless you learn to read after graduating from high school and go on to college.

    Tertiary education --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education

    Tertiary education, also referred to as third stage, third level, and post-secondary education, is the educational level following the completion of a school providing a secondary education. The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers.[1] Higher education is taken to include undergraduate and postgraduate education, while vocational education and training beyond secondary education is known as further education in the United Kingdom, or continuing education in the United States.

    Tertiary education generally culminates in the receipt of certificates, diplomas, or academic degrees.

    Education by Country --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_education_articles_by_country

    Education in Germany --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany

    The Most Educated Countries in the World (in terms of "tertiary education") ---
    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-most-educated-countries-in-the-world.html?page=all

    1. Canada
    2. Israel
    3. Japan
    4. United States
    5. New Zealand
    6. South Korea
    7. United Kingdom
    8. Finland
    9. Australia
    10. Ireland

    Countries with the highest proportions of  college graduates ---
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/22/countries-with-the-most-c_n_655393.html#s117378&title=Russian_Federation_54

    1. Russian Federation 54.0% (quality varies due to rampant cheating and corruption where students can buy course grades and admission)
    2. Canada 48.3%
    3. Israel 43.6%
    4. Japan 41.0%
    5. New Zealand 41.0%
    6. United States 40.3% (colleges vary greatly in terms of admissions standards and rigor for graduation)
    7. Finland 36.4%
    8. South Korea 34.3%
    9. Norway 34.2%
    10. Australia 33.7%

    Germany is still under the OECD average in terms of proportions of college graduates at 23.9% ---
    http://andrewhammel.typepad.com/german_joys/2010/09/education-governments-should-expand-tertiary-studies-to-boost-jobs-and-tax-revenues.html .

    Jensen Comment
    This tidbit was inspired by reference to the fact that tertiary education in Germany was free and is now returning to virtually free. Note, however, that getting into college in Germany is extremely competitive based mostly upon examinations along the way in what we call K-12 schools ---
    http://www.german-way.com/history-and-culture/education/

    Note there's a huge difference between free tuition and free college education covering tuition, room, board, transportation, computers, books, etc. It's much more likely in the USA that students can both live at home and get college degrees due to higher numbers of nearby college campuses all across the USA and the increasing prevalence online college degree opportunities relative to all of Europe, especially in Germany. Germans may get free tuition, but they may have to leave home and pay for their own relatively expensive room and board in large cities.

    Germany has a smaller proportion of college graduates in large measure due somewhat to both the status and the wages of people that elect to go into the skilled trades rather than college where salaries may often be lower.

    But the primary reason is the limited space in German universities and the competitiveness of the qualifying examinations to get in. Unlike the USA, first year German college students are good in reading, writing, and college-level mathematics. In the USA colleges increasingly are faced with students needing to have remedial courses in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

    Germany is still under the OECD average in terms of proportions of college graduates at 23.9% ---
    http://andrewhammel.typepad.com/german_joys/2010/09/education-governments-should-expand-tertiary-studies-to-boost-jobs-and-tax-revenues.html .

    The study's setting off the usual alarm bells (g) in Germany. I speculated on the cause of Germany's low college-graduation rates a while ago, but I think one factor I forgot to mention is cost. It's not that some German universities have introduced tuition fees -- in international comparison, these tuition fees are negligible. The problem is rather that Germany has a woefully inadequate system for financing higher education. Germany does have a loan/grant scheme for students (called Bafoeg), but it's extremely complex and miserly (g). Not that I'm a big fan of student loans, but a well-regulated system of affordable student loans is much better than Germany's current system of measly scholarships, half-time university posts, and help from relatives.

    Even if simple, affordable loans were available, the problem would remained that lots of young Germans are reluctant to face what students in most other countries have long accepted: college costs money, and that means debt. I'm consistently surprised to meet Germans who could have gone to college but didn't, and instead decided to become hairdressers, chimney sweeps, butchers, or machinists. There are ads all over my university right now which advise university students who "don't like studying" to drop out of college and train to become air-traffic controllers.
     

    The rationale behind people who choose these professions is that "we'll always need" people to do these jobs, so they offer steadier employment. I'm not so sure. In fact, something tells me that 15 years from now or so, we're going to need a whole lot fewer human air-traffic controllers than we do now...

    In comparison say in the USA and Australia, the skilled trades may pay better in many instances but the social status of college graduates is generally higher relative to the status of skilled trades workers in Germany. Also in the USA college graduates are less bounded due to the American Dream of reaching almost unheard of salaries as physicians, veterinarians, corporate executives, etc. relative to counterparts in Germany where white collar salaries are more bounded by taxes and culture relative to living expenses (that are generally higher, especially for big houses luxury condos, and acreages).

    There is an increasing and long-delayed initiative to open up the German education system to be more like the North American dreams.

    Berlin's Gymnasium Lottery
    In 2009 the Berlin Senate decided that Berlin's gymnasium schools should no longer be allowed to pick all of their students. It was ruled that while they would be able to pick 70% to 65% of their students, the other places were to be allocated by lottery. Every child is able to enter the lottery, no matter how he or she performed in primary school. It is hoped that this policy will increase the number of working class students attending a gymnasium. The Left proposed that Berlin gymnasiums should no longer be allowed to expel students who perform poorly, so that students who won a gymnasium place in the lottery have a higher chance of graduating from that school. It is not clear yet whether Berlin's senate will decide in favor of The Left's proposal.


    "American High Schools Are A Complete Disaster," by Laurence Steinberg, Slate via Business Insider, February 13, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/american-high-schools-are-a-disaster-2014-2

    Every once in a while, education policy squeezes its way onto President Obama's public agenda, as it did in during last month's State of the Union address.

    Lately, two issues have grabbed his (and just about everyone else's) attention: early-childhood education and access to college.

    But while these scholastic bookends are important, there is an awful lot of room for improvement between them.

    American high schools, in particular, are a disaster.

    In international assessments, our elementary school students generally score toward the top of the distribution, and our middle school students usually place somewhat above the average. But our high school students score well below the international average, and they fare especially badly in math and science compared with our country's chief economic rivals.

    What's holding back our teenagers?

    One clue comes from a little-known 2003 study based on OECD data that compares the world’s 15-year-olds on two measures of student engagement: participation and “belongingness.” The measure of participation was based on how often students attended school, arrived on time, and showed up for class. The measure of belongingness was based on how much students felt they fit in to the student body, were liked by their schoolmates, and felt that they had friends in school. We might think of the first measure as an index of academic engagement and the second as a measure of social engagement.

    On the measure of academic engagement, the U.S. scored only at the international average, and far lower than our chief economic rivals: China, Korea, Japan, and Germany. In these countries, students show up for school and attend their classes more reliably than almost anywhere else in the world. But on the measure of social engagement, the United States topped China, Korea, and Japan.

    In Americahigh school is for socializing. It's a convenient gathering place, where the really important activities are interrupted by all those annoying classes. For all but the very best American students—the ones in AP classes bound for the nation’s most selective colleges and universities—high school is tedious and unchallenging. Studies that have tracked American adolescents’ moods over the course of the day find that levels of boredom are highest during their time in school.

    It's not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents—it's every single thing we have tried.

    One might be tempted to write these findings off as mere confirmation of the well-known fact that adolescents find everything boring. In fact, a huge proportion of the world's high school students say that school is boring. But American high schools are even more boring than schools in nearly every other country, according to OECD surveys. And surveys of exchange students who have studied in America, as well as surveys of American adolescents who have studied abroad, confirm this. More than half of American high school students who have studied in another country agree that our schools are easier. Objectively, they are probably correct: American high school students spend far less time on schoolwork than their counterparts in the rest of the world.

    Trends in achievement within the U.S. reveal just how bad our high schools are relative to our schools for younger students. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, routinely tests three age groups: 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds. Over the past 40 years, reading scores rose by 6 percent among 9-year-olds and 3 percent among 13-year-olds. Math scores rose by 11 percent among 9-year-olds and 7 percent among 13-year-olds.

    By contrast, high school students haven’t made any progress at all. Reading and math scores have remained flat among 17-year-olds, as have their scores on subject area tests in science, writing, geography, and history. And by absolute, rather than relative, standards, American high school students’ achievement is scandalous.

    In other words, over the past 40 years, despite endless debates about curricula, testing, teacher training, teachers’ salaries, and performance standards, and despite billions of dollars invested in school reform, there has been no improvement—none—in the academic proficiency of American high school students.

    It's not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents—it's every single thing we have tried. The list of unsuccessful experiments is long and dispiriting. Charter high schools don’t perform any better than standard public high schools, at least with respect to student achievement. Students whose teachers “teach for America” don’t achieve any more than those whose teachers came out of conventional teacher certification programs.

    Once one accounts for differences in the family backgrounds of students who attend public and private high schools,
     there is no advantage to going to private school, either. Vouchers make no difference in student outcomes. No wonder school administrators and teachers from Atlanta to Chicago to my hometown of Philadelphia have been caught fudging data on student performance. It's the only education strategy that consistently gets results.

    The especially poor showing of high schools in America is perplexing. It has nothing to do with high schools having a more ethnically diverse population than elementary schools. In fact, elementary schools are more ethnically diverse than high schools, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Nor do high schools have more poor students. Elementary schools in America are more than twice as likelyto be classified as “high-poverty” than secondary schools.

    Salaries are about the same for secondary and elementary school teachers. They have comparable years of education and similar years of experience. Student-teacher ratios are the same in our elementary and high schools. So are the amounts of time that students spend in the classroom. We don't shortchange high schools financially either; American school districts actually spend a little more per capita on
     high school students thanelementary school students.

    Our high school classrooms are not understaffed, underfunded, or underutilized, by international standards. According to a 2013 OECD report, only Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland spend more per student. Contrary to widespread belief, American high school teachers’ salaries are comparable to those in most European and Asian countries, as are American class sizes and student-teacher ratios. And American high school students actually spend as many or more hours in the classroom each year than their counterparts in other developed countries.

    This underachievement is costly: One-fifth of four-year college entrants and one-half of those entering community college need remedial education, at a cost of $3 billion each year.

    The president's call for expanding access to higher education by making college more affordable, while laudable on the face of it, is not going to solve our problem. The president and his education advisers have misdiagnosed things. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of college entry in the industrialized world.

    Yet it is tied for last in the rate of college completion. More than one-third of U.S. students who enter a full-time, two-year college program 
    drop out just after one year, as do about one fifth of students who enter a four-year college. In other words, getting our adolescents to go to college isn't the issue. It's getting them to graduate.

    If this is what we hope to accomplish, we need to rethink high school in America. It is true that providing high-quality preschool to all children is an important component of comprehensive education reform. But we can't just do this, cross our fingers, and hope for the best. Early intervention is an investment, not an inoculation.

    In recent years experts in early-child development have called for programs designed to strengthen children's “non-cognitive” skills, pointing to research that demonstrates that later scholastic success hinges not only on conventional academic abilities but on capacities like self-control. Research on the determinants of success in adolescence and beyond has come to a similar conclusion: If we want our teenagers to thrive, we need to help them develop the non-cognitive traits it takes to complete a college degree—traits like determination, self-control, and grit.

    This means classes that really challenge students to work hard—something that fewer than one in six high school students report experiencing, according to Diploma to Nowhere, a 2008 report published by Strong American Schools. Unfortunately, our high schools demand so little of students that these essential capacities aren’t nurtured. As a consequence, many high school graduates, even those who have acquired the necessary academic skills to pursue college coursework, lack the wherewithal to persevere in college. Making college more affordable will not fix this problem, though we should do that too.

    Continued in article

     


    In Canada
    "Shift to Applied Research Triggers Protests," by Karen Birchard 
and Jennifer Lewington, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 9. 2014 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Shift-to-Applied-Research/144659/

    What is the purpose of university research? Should it be driven by intellectual curiosity or focused on satisfying immediate national needs? American higher education has long grappled with those questions, and today it is a global debate. Academics worldwide are becoming more vocal about their concerns.

    Many agree that a proper balance can be struck between research that has an immediate benefit to the economy and research that opens the door for future discoveries. But for now, the balance may be off. In the following collection of articles, read more about three countries where scholars are taking steps to fight what they believe is a troubling focus on short-term, economic gains: Canada, Germany, and Britain.

    Canada’s National Research Council has long been the country’s premier scientific institution, with its researchers helping to produce such inventions as the pacemaker and the robotic arm used on the American space shuttle. But last year its mission changed.

    The Canadian government announced a transformation of the 98-year-old agency, once focused largely on basic research, into a one-stop "concierge service" to bolster historically weak technological innovation by industry and generate high-quality jobs.

    The move has set off a row over the future of Canada’s capacity to carry out fundamental research, with university scientists and academic organizations uncharacteristically vocal about the government’s blunt preference to harness research for commercial needs.

    "We are not sure the government appreciates the role that basic research plays," says Kenneth Ragan, a McGill University physicist and president of the Canadian Association of Physicists. "The real question is: How does it view not-​­directed, nonindustrial, curiosity-driven blue-sky research? I worry the view is that it is irrelevant at best and that in many cases they actually dislike it."

    The remodeling of the research council is one in a series of policy changes that have generated fierce pushback by Canadian academe in recent years. The Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is also under fire for closing research libraries, shutting down research facilities like the world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area, and restricting when government scientists can speak publicly about their work.

    Last year the Canadian Association of University Teachers began a national campaign, "Get Science Right," with town-hall meetings across the country to mobilize public opposition to the policies. Scientists have even taken to the streets of several Canadian cities in protest.

    While the transformation of the National Research Council has been criticized, the government as well as some science-policy analysts say better connecting businesses with research is an important step for Canada.

    Having examined models in other countries, the National Research Council chose to streamline its operations to act as "the pivot between the two worlds" of industry and academics, with an eye toward new products and innovations, says Charles Drouin, a spokesman for the council. He says the agency has not moved away from support for fundamental research, but wants to focus such efforts better. "There is basic research, but it is directed as opposed to undirected as you would find it in universities."

    Another battleground for the future of basic research has been the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, a federal granting agency that serves as the first stop for support of fundamental research by Canadian scientists.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    In the USA collegiate applied research varies greatly by discipline. Schools of engineering, medicine, and law have invented countless things of keep interest to the practicing professions. It is less so for schools of business and much, much less so for schools of accounting.

    The Pathways Commission makes a concerted effort for academic accounting researchers to become more engaged in doing research of practitioner needs. This, in my viewpoint, is less likely than growing coconut palm trees in New Hampshire ten years from now.

    I would like to challenge subscribers of the AECM to fill out the following table:

      Practitioner
    Clinical
    Application

    Invented by
    Accounting Professor

    1 Balanced Scorecard ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard
    Bob Kaplan (shared invention)
    2 REA ---
    https://www.msu.edu/~mccarth4/McCarthy.pdf
    Bill McCarthy
    3 Business Budgeting in 1922
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budgeting
    James O. McKinsey
    4    
    5    
    6    
    7    
    8    
    9    
    10    

     

    This challenge is very easy for practitioner clinical applications in medicine, natural science, social science, computer science, engineering, and finance. It's not so easy to find where inventions/discoveries by accounting professors made splashes in the practitioner pond. It might be questioned whether Bob Kaplan invented all the components of the popular Balanced Scorecard widely applied by corporations around the world. An earlier version in 1987 was invented by a practitioner named Art Schneiderman. But I think Bob Kaplan beginning in 1990 made so many seminal contributions to the scorecard that I will give him credit for the invention that made a huge splash in the practitioner pond.

    When I was the 1986 Program Director for NYC Annual Meetings of American Accounting Association I posed this challenge to Joel Demski to address in his plenary session (shared with Bob Kaplan). Joel suggested the practitioner applications of Dollar-Value LIFO. Subsequently, accounting historian Dale Flesher dug into this and discovered that DVL was invented by Herbert T. McAnly who retired in 1964 as a partner at Ernst & Ernst after 44 years with the firm

    The Seminal Contributions to Accounting Literature Award of the American Accounting Association are as follows ---
    http://aaahq.org/awards/awrd2win.htm

    2007 � "Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting"
    by H. Thomas Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan
    Harvard Business School Press 1987

    2004 � "Towards a Positive Theory of the Determination of Accounting Standards"
    by Ross L. Watts and Jerold L. Zimmerman
    The Accounting Review (January) 1978

    1994 � "Economic Incentives in budgetary Control Systems"
    by Joel S. Demski and Gerald A. Feltham
    The Accounting Review (April) 1978

    1989 � "Information Content of Annual Earnings Announcements"
    by William H. Beaver
    Journal of Accounting Research 1968

    1986 � "An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers"
    by Ray Ball and Philip Brown
    Journal of Accounting Research 1968

    These are all tremendous contributions to the academic side of accountancy. However, none of the inventions of Professors Demski and Feltham to my knowledge made a splash in the practitioner pond. ABC costing focused upon by Johnson and Kaplan made a splash in the practitioner pond, but ABC costing was invented by cost accountants at John Deere.

    The contributions of Watts, Zimmerman, Beaver, Ball, and Brown made splashes of sorts in the practice pond, but I have difficulty calling them seminal "inventions." In these instances the authors were extending into accounting inventions attributed earlier to professors and practitioners in economics and finance.

    There are many other accounting professors who made seminal contributions to the academic side of accountancy. For example, Yuji Ijiri is a Hall of Famer who had many noteworthy accountancy inventions. However, to my knowledge Yuji did not make a ripple in the practitioner pond except maybe for selected practitioners trying to fend against the takeover of historical cost accounting by fair value accounting. Many seminal inventions of Yuji, like the "Force," were just not deemed practical.

    My own published research is best described as extensions and/or applications invented by others ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm#Published
    To my knowledge none of my extensions made so much as a ripple in the practitioner pond.

    January 19, 2013 reply from Dan Stone

    A great idea.... which would probably be better in a research paper than on a list.

    Anna Cianci and Bob Ashton published a paper a few years ago demonstrating how the KPMG audit research support initiative led to changes in auditor / audit firm practices.

    So maybe:

    idea: the application of cognitive biases and decision aiding to audit practice Professors: a large cast many of whom got their PhD at Univ. of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s including Bob Ashton, Bob Libby, Kathryn Kadous, and many, many others

    idea: the risk based audit Professors: KPMG monograph by Howard Thomas, Ira Solomon, Marc Peecher (along with many others)

    Dan Stone

     

    January 20, 2013 reply from Bob Jensen

    Hi Dan,

    Thanks for the added considerations.

    Among other things, your post suggests that some "inventions" do not have short names.

    Some of your suggestions do need further research into where credit can be given for the very first inventions of what eventually made a splash in the practitioner pond.

    For example, does anybody (Miklos?) on the AECM know of where the concept of Risk-Based Auditing had its original starting point? I fear that it may be like Dollar Based LIFO where accounting professors picked up on the seminal idea of a practitioner. For example, did some employee of the  Arthur Andersen accounting firm, that took risk-based auditing to its own demise, also invent the concept itself?

    Robert Knechel (University of Florida) supposedly traced the history of risk-based auditing, but I've not seen his paper in this regard.

    Respectfully,
    Bob Jensen

    "Academic Research With Mass Appeal," by Erin Zlome, Bloomberg Business Week, January 28, 2013 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-28/academic-research-with-mass-appeal

    Business professors are great at writing jargon-filled, hard-to-digest research papers. But every once and a while, they knock it out of the park with the general public. A small pool of research achieved such blockbuster status in 2012 by becoming the most read, most downloaded, or most written-about pieces authored by professors at top business schools. Tax evasion, finding a job, and the benefits of teaching employees Spanish are some of the topics that got non-students reading.

    At Harvard Business School, an excerpt from Clayton Christensen�s book How Will You Measure Your Life? was the year�s most read preview of forthcoming research. The passage uses the downfall of Blockbuster and the rise of Netflix (NFLX) as an analogy for how we may end up paying a high cost for small decisions.

    Continued in article

    January 31, 2013 reply from Dale Flesher

    Bob:

    Although they didn�t invent it, Johnson and Kaplan deserve credit for rediscovering and popularizing Activity-Based Costing.  As I recall, Alexander Hamilton Church described ABC as early as 1908, but without computers it wasn�t practical.

    Also, James O. McKinsey, an accounting professor at the University of Chicago and 1924 AAA president who later founded McKinsey & Co., is credited with inventing the concept of business budgeting with the publication of his 1922 book on the subject.  Previously, budgeting had been considered a governmental topic.  Industry accountants (such as Donaldson Brown at General Motors, who had previously invented the DuPont Formula) applied McKinsey�s concepts and developed them further.  For example, GM (and also Westinghouse) developed flexible budgeting by 1928, which was not considered by McKinsey.

    Dale

    February 5, 2013 reply from Steve Zeff

    In 1989, Nick Dopuch wrote, "Because of its practical implications, audit judgement research is regarded as having had the biggest impact on practice of any area of research in accounting/auditing" - p. 54 in Frecka (editor), The State of Accounting Research As We Enter the 1990's - Illinois PhD Jubilee 1939-1959 (University of Illinois, 1989).

    Steve.

    February 6, 2013 reply from Bob Jensen

    My problem, in terms of my table, is that virtually all judgment research in accounting that I've encountered applies earlier inventions from other disciplines. Another problem with judgment research is that except in rare instances like Balanced Scorecard the practitioners applying judgment models have no clue as to a link between an academic accounting researcher and practice.

    This shortage of academic seminal inventions seems to be unique to the accounting profession. In nearly every other profession like engineering, medicine, economics, finance, marketing, management, sociology, psychology, education, etc. the table that I proposed filling could be filled in a New York minute with names of academic professor inventions and inventors linked to the practice of these professions.

    For example, eigenvector scaling of paired-comparison decision alternatives is somewhat widely applied in business. Those practitioners applying it most likely recall the seminal contributions of mathematician Tom Saaty to what is now termed the Analytical Hierarchy Process (Tom's terminology) of business judgment. But those of us who applied AHP in accounting judgment research are long forgotten --- search for "eigenvector" at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm#Published

    Analytic Hierarchy Process ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_hierarchy_process

    I'm probably stretching it to add a third name to the table below:

      Practitioner
    Clinical
    Application

    Invented by
    Accounting Professor

    1 Balanced Scorecard ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard
    Bob Kaplan (shared invention)
    2 REA ---
    https://www.msu.edu/~mccarth4/McCarthy.pdf
    Bill McCarthy
    3 Business Budgeting in 1922
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budgeting
    James O. McKinsey
    4    
    5    
    6    
    7    
    8    
    9    
    10    

     

    Bob Jensen's threads on how accountics scientists need to change ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm


    "University of Leeds Plans to Capture 50,000 Hours of Video Annually With Mediasite," by Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, February 10, 2014 ---
    http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/02/10/university-of-leeds-plans-to-capture-50000-hours-of-video-annually-with-mediasite.aspx?=ct21

    The University of Leeds in the United Kingdom is deploying Sonic Foundry's Mediasite Enterprise Video Platform for lecture capture and multimedia management. The Mediasite system automates the capture, management, delivery and search of live and on-demand videos and rich media.

    "This is a significant investment which will transform teaching and learning here at Leeds," said Neil Morris, director of digital learning at the university, in a prepared statement. "Not only can we capture all our audio and video assets, but Mediasite will allow us to store, manage and publish content across multiple channels."

    While the university had previously captured lectures on a limited scale, it wanted to scale up its efforts with a single video platform that integrates with its Blackboard learning management system. Expecting to capture about 50,000 hours of content annually, the school plans to record lectures and other teaching activities to give students a flexible and personalized approach to learning. All content will be searchable, secure and managed in one place via Mediasite.

    "We know our students learn in different ways, so as well as attending lectures, this gives them the opportunity to engage with the materials wherever they may be and at their own pace," continued Morris. "Whether that's going over topics that are particularly complex or using recordings to help with revision, this new system will provide over 30,000 students with outstanding resources to support their learning."

    Continued in article

    Bob Jensen's video helpers are at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Video

    Also note that BYU teaches the first two accounting courses almost entirely on video with only infrequent classroom meetings ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo


    The Trillion Dollar Farm Bill's Lifeline to the 1% (many of whom don't even live on the farm or even in the USA)
     http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303973704579353064008442176?mod=djemMER_h

    "New Data Shows Fewer Farms, Richer Farmers," by Andrew Martin, Bloomberg Businessweek, February 20, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-20/u-dot-s-dot-agriculture-by-the-numbers-fewer-farms-richer-farmers?campaign_id=DN022114

    What's Not to Love About Agribusiness Pork

    "A Farm Bill Only a Lobbyist Could Love," by Alan Bjerga and Julie Bykowicz, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 30m 2014 ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-30/farm-bill-draws-lobbyist-horde

    "Strassel: So God Made a Farm Bill:  A famous speech about those who toil in the fields gets an update," by Kimberly A. Strassel, The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2014 ---
    http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303973704579353064008442176?mod=djemMER_h


    Bootstrapping --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28statistics%29

    In statistics, bootstrapping is a method for assigning measures of accuracy (defined in terms of bias, variance, confidence intervals, prediction error or some other such measure) to sample estimates. This technique allows estimation of the sampling distribution of almost any statistic using only very simple methods.Generally, it falls in the broader class of resampling methods.

    Bootstrapping is the practice of estimating properties of an estimator (such as its variance) by measuring those properties when sampling from an approximating distribution. One standard choice for an approximating distribution is the empirical distribution of the observed data. In the case where a set of observations can be assumed to be from an independent and identically distributed population, this can be implemented by constructing a number of resamples of the observed dataset (and of equal size to the observed dataset), each of which is obtained by random sampling with replacement from the original dataset.

    It may also be used for constructing hypothesis tests. It is often used as an alternative to inference based on parametric assumptions when those assumptions are in doubt, or where parametric inference is impossible or requires very complicated formulas for the calculation of standard errors.

    The bootstrap was introduced in 1979 by Bradley Efron. It was inspired by earlier work on the jackknife. Improved estimates of the variance were developed later. A Bayesian extension was developed in 1981. The ABC procedure was developed in 1992[ and the BCA procedure in 1996.

    Bradley Efron --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Efron

    Video:  Interview Brad Efron --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l9V1sINzhE&feature=youtu.be


    Professors Correcting Grammar May Be Racist
    "Poorly educated and lied to, Blacks at UCLA call correcting their grammar and punctuation racist," by Kevin Collins, Coach is Right, February 10, 2014 ---
    http://www.coachisright.com/poorly-educated-lied-blacks-ucla-call-correcting-grammar-punctuation-racist/

    It’s hard to figure out what to make of the people in this story.  Should these people be laughed at or pitied?

    Recently a group of 25 self-described “Students of Color” held a sit-in to support poor English writing skills. They whined about the “racism” of being offered constructive criticism of their lack of grammar, spelling and punctuation abilities.   

    As products of dysfunctional government schools, many if not all of them have little or no writing skill.  Many of them don’t know they have no writing skills. They have been lied to and had their heads patted so often by paternalistic liberals they can no longer recognize the truth about their shortcomings. 

    We can expect little else from students who have never been dealt with honestly.      

    What makes this situation still more ridiculous is that the target of their protest was a professor of Education and Information. Apparently the poorly educated students who registered for this course expected more lies and head pats rather than actual instruction. Claiming to be, “aggrieved minority students,” these spoiled brats proved they haven’t enough brains to realize the value of authentic education.

    Using the psycho-babble phrase “micro-aggression” to characterize the professor’s “insulting” act, the Black spoiled brats issued a statement which was likely written by someone who was not offended by being taught how to construct a few sentences in standard American English.  Reading their childishly injected “big” words certainly makes the point that most of them don’t get it.

    They said, “A hostile campus climate has been the norm for Students of Color in this class throughout the quarter as our epistemological and methodological commitments have been repeatedly questioned by our classmates and our instructor. The barrage of questions by white colleagues and the grammar ‘lessons’ by the professor have contributed to a hostile class climate.”

    Continued in article

    Source:
    http://downtrend.com/71superb/professor-called-racist-for-correcting-black-students-grammar-and-punctuation/?utm_source=Outbrain 


    Will the government just give up on antitrust efforts on our behalf?

    From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 13, 2014

    The takeover battle for Time Warner Cable is finally over. Comcast has agreed to buy TWC for $45 billion in stock, in a deal that would combine the nation’s two biggest cable operators, the WSJ reports. Time Warner Cable shareholders will receive $158.82 a share in stock for their shares, about $23 a share above where TWC has been trading. News of the deal comes just a couple of days after Charter Communications ratcheted up the pressure on TWC by nominating a group of 13 people as candidates for TWC’s board. But Time Warner Cable had long seen Comcast as a preferred partner. Last year, Time Warner Cable approached Comcast about a deal, hoping to ward off Charter. And the two companies had talks off and on. But until a week ago there were signs that Comcast was leaning toward striking a deal with Charter instead.

    That’s when Comcast approached TWC with an offer to buy the entire company at about $150 a share, the Journal reports—close to the $160 a share TWC was looking for. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts at times negotiated with top Time Warner Cable brass including CEO Rob Marcus and CFO Artie Minson on the phone from Sochi, where Mr. Roberts has been visiting for the Winter Olympics.

    The deal still needs approval from the FCC and the DOJ, which hasn’t been shy about bringing antitrust enforcement actions against would-be mergers that it thinks will harm competition. But the deal may benefit from the perception of some regulators that cable is a natural monopoly whose primary competition comes from satellite providers and telephone companies like Verizon and AT&T.

    From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 13, 2014

    For Venezuela, bonds create a bind
    Venezuela pays its overseas bondholders right on time. But the cash-strapped government is in hock to the tune of $50 billion to the private companies that service its economy, causing widespread shortages of basic goods,
    the WSJ reports. “They've forgone paying private companies because they feel the cost of not doing so is manageable, but they’ve continued paying the bonds,” said Asdrubal Oliveros, head of consultancy Ecoanalitica. He refers to it as a selective default. “The people suffer consequences of the shortages,” Mr. Oliveros added. The overdue tab to private companies includes $14 billion owed to partners and contractors in the oil industry, $9 billion to importers and more than $4 billion to services companies like airlines. There also are more than $10 billion in profits that foreign companies have wanted to convert from bolívares to dollars but have been unable to since 2008
    .

    Jensen Comment
    Venezuela sits on the largest pool of oil reserves in the world. Think of how well off the poorest people in Venezuela would be if the political leaders had thought more like Chile and less like Cuba. One difference between Venezuela and Cuba is that violent crime is rampant in Venezuela where the prisoners run the prisons to a point where prisoners come and go and carry guns in prisons filled with wine, women, and song.


    "David Foster Wallace on Leadership, Illustrated and Read by Debbie Millman, Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, February 17, 2014 ---
    http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/17/dfw-leadership-debbie-millman/


    "8th Circuit Oral Argument in Unsuccessful Faculty Candidate's Suit Claiming Discrimination by Iowa Law School Due to Her Conservative Views," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, February 14, 2014 ---
    http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/02/8th-circuit-oral-argument.html

    Update on the Iowa University Law School Biased Hiring Lawsuit (after three years of delay):  46 Democrats and One Republican
    "Case of Faculty Discrimination Based on Politics Teresa Wagner was qualified but anti-abortion. The law school at the University of Iowa denied her a job, so she took them to court," by Peter Berkowitz, The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2014 ---
    http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304691904579346401360317462?mod=djemMER_h

    On Feb. 13 in St. Paul, Minn., the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in Wagner v. Jones. The appeal is procedurally complex. But the legal question at the heart of the original case has potentially far-reaching implications for public and private legal education. To wit, whether a state law-school may deny employment to faculty candidates because of their political beliefs.

    In a trial concluded 15 months ago, Teresa Wagner accused the University of Iowa College of Law of violating her First Amendment right of free expression and 14th Amendment right of equal protection under the law when the school's dean, Carolyn Jones, refused to hire her for its legal analysis, writing and research program.

    Ms. Wagner was hired initially in August 2006 and was serving on a part-time basis as the associate director of the law school's writing center when two full-time positions for legal-writing instructors opened up that fall. She became one of the two finalists for the openings.

    . . .

    She had impressive qualifications. Ms. Wagner had taught legal writing at George Mason University Law School in Virginia, edited three books, practiced as a trial attorney in Iowa, and written several legal briefs, including one in a U.S. Supreme Court case, Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), which struck down a Nebraska law criminalizing partial-birth abortions. The faculty-appointments committee at the University of Iowa College of Law enthusiastically recommended her appointment as a full-time instructor.

    There was a catch, however. Teresa Wagner is a pro-life conservative. Her résumé showed prior employment with the National Right to Life Committee and the Family Research Council, both socially conservative organizations in Washington, D.C.

    The University of Iowa's law-school faculty, like most law-school faculties, is overwhelmingly liberal. When Ms. Wagner was considered for the job, the law school had only one Republican on its 50-member faculty, according to party registration records obtained from the Iowa Secretary of State, and he had joined the faculty 25 years earlier.

    . . .

    She sued in federal court in January 2009. At the trial three years later, the law school's principal defense was that Ms. Wagner had "flunked" her interview when she refused to teach the "analysis" component of the class, which involves methods of legal reasoning. Ms. Wagner disputed the allegation. But the law school destroyed the videotape of her job interview, as court testimony confirmed, within a month of its decision not to hire her.

    Faculty emails also contradicted the law school's allegations about her poor interview. For example, shortly after Ms. Wagner's job talk, Prof. Sheldon Kurtz, respected for his work on trusts and estates, emailed Mark Janis, chairman of the faculty-appointments committee: "Great. Lets [sic] hire her." Nevertheless, more than a dozen law professors who took the stand supported the law school's story.

    Ms. Wagner convinced the jury that her rights had been violated. After the trial, on Nov. 20, 2012, the jury foreman told the Des Moines Register, "Everyone in that jury room believed she had been discriminated against." But after three days of deliberation, the jury could not agree on whether to hold Dean Jones exclusively responsible.

    Presiding Judge William Pratt and his magistrate, Thomas Shields, phoned counsel to say the jury was hung and the case would be retried. However, according to court records, after thanking and discharging the jury, Mr. Shields, in an extraordinary move, called jurors back from the coatroom. Despite the trial having ended, he instructed the foreman to sign a verdict form that next to Count 1 had an "X," indicating that Dean Jones was not liable for a First Amendment violation. Later, Judge Pratt dismissed Count II, the 14th Amendment violation.

    Now, with her appeal next week, Ms. Wagner is asking the Eighth Circuit to grant her a new trial.

    Since the lawsuit, the law school has hired at least four faculty members who are Republicans, including former Congressman James Leach and the Republican governor's chief legal counsel, Brenna Findley, who was appointed as an adjunct professor. The hirings perhaps gave the school cover from charges of ideological bias during the Wagner affair, but taking such steps just perpetuates the idea that it's proper to subject job candidates to a political litmus test.

    Instead, state boards of regents and state legislatures have a responsibility to ensure that their law-school faculties do not discriminate on the basis of political persuasion. Procedural transparency in hiring practices would be a help, beginning with the retention for a reasonable period of all relevant documents, including video recordings of interviews. Private university trustees should implement the same safeguards at their institutions.

    Hiring decisions should be based on candidates' merits, including their ability to vigorously present in the classroom and criticize conservative as well as progressive views. If the Eighth Circuit protects Teresa Wagner's constitutional rights, the court will also bolster legal education in America by promoting its depoliticization.

    Continued in article

    "U. of Iowa Staff Member Sues Law School for Discrimination," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2009 --- Click Here

    A staff member in the law-school writing center at the University of Iowa has sued the school and its dean, saying she was turned down for teaching positions because of her conservative political views, Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.

    Teresa Wagner filed the lawsuit against the school and its dean, Carolyn Jones, on Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

    In the lawsuit, she states that in 2006, she applied for an advertised job as a full-time writing instructor, and that later, she applied for a part-time adjunct position teaching writing. She was rejected for both positions, even though she had collegiate teaching experience and strong academic credentials, the lawsuit says. She argues that affiliations listed on her résumé, including stints with groups like the National Right to Life Committee, did her in with a liberal-leaning faculty.

    To bolster her case, the lawsuit dissects the political affiliations of the approximately 50 faculty members who vote on law-school faculty hires; 46 of them are registered as Democrats and only one, hired 20 years ago, is a Republican, the lawsuit states. Ms. Wagner also says that a law-school associate dean suggested that she conceal her affiliation with a conservative law school and later told her not to apply for any more faculty positions.

    Steve Parrott, a spokesman for the University of Iowa, says the discrimination claim is “without merit.”

     

    Liberal Bias in Academic Hiring ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias


    Purportedly the best is Harvard University and the worst is Tilburg University in The Netherlands
    "The Best And Worst Business Schools, According To Alumni," by  John A. Byrne, Financial Times via Business Insider, February 10, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/alumni-review-best-and-worst-business-schools-2014-2

    . . .

    This year, some 10,986 alumni completed the survey — a response rate of 47%. But The Financial Times says that it also added the views of respondents from one or two preceding years when available. In other words, these recommendations are the basis of tens of thousands of alumni over several years.

    Which schools consistently are most highly recommended? Rather than look at one-year results, we crunched the numbers on the last five years from 2014 to 2010 to give a far more reliable look at the best and the worst. By taking that longer view, applicants can also see schools that may be trending up or down in satisfaction. Yale University’s School of Management is definitely doing better, improving its recommendation rank to 17 this year from 23 in 2010. UCLA’s Anderson School is going the other way, ranking 24th this year from 17 five years ago.

    Surprisingly, though, there was remarkable consistency for the best schools over the five-year period. Many schools stayed within a range of two to three places over the entire span. This was less true for the schools in the bottom 10% where MBA programs are far more likely to pop in and out of the FT’s ranking of the Top 100 schools. It’s relatively rare for a school near the bottom to have a full five-year data set.

    What we especially like about the results is that they are intuitive which suggests a high degree of reliability. After all, if a school like Hult International was ahead of a school like INSEAD you would have to scratch your head. That’s certainly not the case here. In fact, the top five schools scoring the best recommendations from their alumni are all familiar prestige names: No. 1 Harvard Business School, which has been ranked first for each of the past five years, No. 2 Stanford Graduate School of Business, No. 3 UPenn’s Wharton School, No. 4 London Business School, and No. 5 Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

    U.S. business schools dominate the top quartile of these highly recommended schools, with 19 of the top 25 based in America. Five European schools make the list. After London, it’s INSEAD in France and Singapore, IMD in Switzerland, IESE Business School in Spain, and HEC Paris in France. Only one Canadian school makes the cut: The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

    And the schools at the bottom? They’re led by Tilburg University in The Netherlands which this year was ranked dead last in recommendations at 100th. Portugal’s Lisbon MBA is next, followed by University College Dublin’s Smurfit School, Hult International, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School in the bottom 10%.

    John Delaney, the dean of Katz, acknowledges the disappointing survey results for his school but notes that he and his staff have been working especially hard in the past two to three years to improve things. The school has made a concerted effort to focus on processes that make it easier for students to change courses and to get into high-demand classes as well as processes related to careers and employment. He says that Katz’s internal surveys show improvement in student satisfaction which he expects to be reflected in future surveys of alumni.

    To be fair, it’s worth pointing out that these schools are among the top 1% in the world. Otherwise, they would even be ranked among the top 100 by The Financial Times. So even those that are scoring at the bottom of the recommendation file are very good programs. Against this peer set, however, the competition is extremely tough and unrelenting.

    For the best of the bunch, we imposed one rule: That each school received a recommendation rank in each of the five years studied. That rule brings a greater degree of confidence that these MBA programs are the most recommended in the world. For the group of schools in the bottom 10%, we insured that every MBA program had at least two years worth of rankings data. Obviously, these schools tend to move on and off the FT’s radar screen, a natural consequence of being near the bottom of the list.

    Bob Jensen's threads on university rankings controversies ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings


    From the Scout Report on February 14, 2014

    SumAll --- https://sumall.com/

    Interested in learning about your social media reach? You may want to check out SumAll which is a rather nice way to do just that. After signing up for the free version, visitors will receive a daily digest of their social media influence on over a dozen platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and others. It's a powerful tool that is compatible with all operating systems.


    Vocabulary Notebook --- https://www.vocabularynotebook.com/

    If you're looking for a fine way to get your vocabulary up to speed, you should definitely check out Vocabulary Notebook. Teachers can use the program to study words with their students in the classroom and individuals can use it to craft their own personalized vocabulary lists for reviewing while on the go. This version is compatible with all operating systems.

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


    It was 50 years ago today (or so), that the Beatles came to play
    The Beatles: 50 years after 'Ed Sullivan' they're everywhere, in everything
    http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2014/0209/The-Beatles-50-years-after-Ed-Sullivan-they-re-everywhere-in-everything-video

    CBS's 'Grammy Salute' Belongs to McCartney and Starr
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/arts/television/cbs-grammy-salute-belongs-to-mccartney-and-starr.html?_r=0

    The guy who brought The Beatles to America
    http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/09/opinion/greene-ed-sullivan-beatles/

    A Rare Look at the Origins of Beatlemania: Watch the Throwback Footage
    http://entertainment.time.com/2014/02/09/beatles-50th-anniversary-ed-sullivan-show-beatlemania/

    What the critics wrote about the Beatles in 1964
    http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-beatles-quotes-20140209,0,1146431.story#axzz2sxo48rHT

    The Beatles "White Album:" The Untold Story
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobbyowsinski/2014/02/09/the-beatles-white-album-the-untold-story/

    From the Scout Report on February 21, 2014

  • Ken Burns --- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ken-burns/id723854283?mt=8 

    Ken Burns is a popular documentarian and, as it turns out, he is now a popular app, in a manner of speaking. This particular app gives interested parties the ability to view scenes from his documentaries (such as "Baseball" and "Jazz") in a variety of settings. The latest version allows visitors to access the Innovation playlist absolutely free while other playlists containing clips from his other programs are available for a small fee. This version is compatible with all devices running iOS 7.0 and newer.


    World Weather --- http://www.clicktorelease.com/code/weather/ 

    What's going on in the world of weather? Are there storms around Sri Lanka? What about the snows of Kilimanjaro? These can be pressing questions, indeed, and the World Weather app is a great way to stay in touch with weather patterns around the globe. Users will find that they can just type in a city name to see the current weather and also zoom around the globe as they see fit. It's a remarkable addition to the world of existing weather tracking apps and is compatible with all operating systems.


    Who exactly owns the moon?
    Bigelow: Moon property rights would help create a lunar industry
    http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/02/bigelow-moon-property-create-lunar-industry/

    Bigelow: Lunar private property rights covered by Outer Space Treaty
    http://www.examiner.com/article/bigelow-lunar-private-property-rights-covered-by-outer-space-treaty

    Moon Mining Rush Ahead?
    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131113-lunar-property-rights-bigelow-nasa/

    No one owns the moon says scientist
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10563369/No-one-owns-the-moon-says-scientist.html

    NASA: Earth's Moon
    http://moon.nasa.gov/home.cfm

    Moon facts
    http://lro.gsfc.nasa.gov/moonfacts.html

     


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


    Education Tutorials

    AT&T Tech Channel (exciting future of technology) --- http://techchannel.att.com/showpage.cfm?ATT-Archives

    The Futures Channel (Science and Engineering) --- http://www.thefutureschannel.com/index.php

    Museum of Science & Industry: Education --- http://www.msichicago.org/education/

    University of Oklahoma: History of Science Collections --- http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/homescience.php

    Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century ---
    http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13398

    From the Scout Report on February 14, 2014

    University of Central Florida Libraries: Research Guides
    http://guides.ucf.edu/homepage

    Many academic libraries pride themselves on their online research guides on
    a variety of interests, including comparative literature, chemistry, and
    dozens of other subjects. The University of Central Florida Libraries has
    just such a collection and it covers fourteen different topical areas,
    including Engineering, Florida, and Public Affairs & Law. Each of these
    areas contains additional subtopics, complete with detailed annotations and
    references. The Florida section is a true gem as it covers topics such as
    GLBTQ resources, cartography, and weather. Additionally, each heading also
    includes specific references to other digital collections created by the
    University of Central Florida Libraries.

    Jensen Comment
    Note there are guides for research in business disciplines, including "Accounting," But the coverage is weak to nonexistent. Accounting researchers are better off with sites like those linked at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Threads.htm
    This illustrates how librarian guides to research are often highly variable in coverage.

    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

    How Wolves Change Ecosystems --- http://twistedsifter.com/videos/how-wolves-changed-an-ecosystem-trophic-cascade/

    AT&T Tech Channel (exciting future of technology) --- http://techchannel.att.com/showpage.cfm?ATT-Archives

    The Futures Channel (Science and Engineering) --- http://www.thefutureschannel.com/index.php

    Century 21 Digital Collection (1,200 photographs from the 1962 Chicago World's Fair) ---  http://cdm15015.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15015coll3

    The Physics Front: Technology Tool Archive ---
    http://www.compadre.org/precollege/features/FeatureArchive.cfm?Type=TechTool&C=Precollege

    Physics Education Research Central --- http://www.compadre.org/per/

    NSF:  Physics Discoveries --- http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/index.jsp?prio_area=11

    The Physics Front: Technology Tool Archive ---
    http://www.compadre.org/precollege/features/FeatureArchive.cfm?Type=TechTool&C=Precollege

    The Hagstromer Medico-Historical Library --- http://www.hagstromerlibrary.ki.se/

    Geology and Earth Science Educational Materials, Lesson Plans, and Other Resources ---
    http://www.geo.umass.edu/stategeologist/frame_edu.htm

    USGS Publications Warehouse (Geology and Earth Science) http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/

    Adirondack Architectural Heritage --- http://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16694coll9

    The Digital Archaeological Record --- http://www.tdar.org/

    Society of Architectural Historians --- http://www.sah.org/

    Kindred Britain (ancestors, genetic history)  http://kindred.stanford.edu/

    March to the Moon --- http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu 

    NASA’s Stunning Tour of the Moon --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/nasas_stunning_tour_of_the_moon.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Video
    The Moon Up Close in High Definition --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2011/08/the_moon_up_close_in_hd.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    From the Scout Report on February 21, 2014

  • World Weather --- http://www.clicktorelease.com/code/weather/ 

    What's going on in the world of weather? Are there storms around Sri Lanka? What about the snows of Kilimanjaro? These can be pressing questions, indeed, and the World Weather app is a great way to stay in touch with weather patterns around the globe. Users will find that they can just type in a city name to see the current weather and also zoom around the globe as they see fit. It's a remarkable addition to the world of existing weather tracking apps and is compatible with all operating systems.


    Who exactly owns the moon?
    Bigelow: Moon property rights would help create a lunar industry
    http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/02/bigelow-moon-property-create-lunar-industry/

    Bigelow: Lunar private property rights covered by Outer Space Treaty
    http://www.examiner.com/article/bigelow-lunar-private-property-rights-covered-by-outer-space-treaty

    Moon Mining Rush Ahead?
    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131113-lunar-property-rights-bigelow-nasa/

    No one owns the moon says scientist
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10563369/No-one-owns-the-moon-says-scientist.html

    NASA: Earth's Moon
    http://moon.nasa.gov/home.cfm

    Moon facts
    http://lro.gsfc.nasa.gov/moonfacts.html

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


    Social Science and Economics Tutorials

    Studs Terkel Interviews Bob Dylan, Shel Silverstein, Maya Angelou & More in New Audio Trove ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/studs-terkel-interviews.html

    How the Economic Machine Works ---
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-06/charlie-rose-talks-to-bridgewaters-ray-dalio

    The New Role of Safety Nets in Africa (poverty alleviation) ---
    http://www.worldbank.org/en/region/afr/publication/the-new-role-of-safety-nets-in-africa

    UN-Habitat: Best Practices Database (for urban centers) --- http://www.unhabitat.org/bp/bp.list.aspx

    Confronting Suburban Poverty --- http://confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org/

    Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century ---
    http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13398

    Featured Videos: Urban Land Institute --- http://uli.org/publications/featured-videos/

    The Avenue: The New Republic (Brookings, Urban Planning and Policy) --- http://www.tnr.com/blogs/the-avenue

    President Barack Obama Visual Iconography (photographs of political history) --- http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/obama/ 

    GO TO 2040 (Chicago) --- http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/about/2040

    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

    Project Laboratory in Mathematics ---
    http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-821-project-laboratory-in-mathematics-spring-2013/

    Math Bits --- http://mathbits.com/

    Get the Math (real world uses of math) --- http://www.thirteen.org/get-the-math/

    MathDL Mathematical Communication --- http://mathcomm.org/

    A Mathematical Way To Think About Biology --- http://qbio.lookatphysics.com/

    Plus Magazine (practical applications of mathematics) --- http://plus.maths.org/content/

    Pedagogy in Action: the SERC portal for Educators (Carleton College's resources for science, engineering, and math Teachers) ---
    http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/studentresearch/index.html

    Saylor.org: Free Education --- http://www.saylor.org/

    MAA: Curriculum Inspirations --- http://www.maa.org/math-competitions/teachers/curriculum-inspirations

    New Jersey Institute of Technology: OpenCourseWare --- http://ocw.njit.edu/index.php

    Mathematics Assessment: A Video Library --- http://www.learner.org/resources/series31.html

    A Gentle Introduction to Statistics Hosted by Harvard Geneticist Pardis Sabet ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/a-gentle-introduction-to-statistics-hosted-by-harvard-geneticist.html

    Statistics Explained Through Modern Dance: A New Way of Teaching a Tough Subject ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/statistics-explained-with-modern-dance.html

    Mathematical Association of America: Student Resources --- http://www.maa.org/math-competitions/student-resources

    Mathematics in Movies: Harvard Prof Curates 150+ Scenes --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/mathematics_in_movies.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    Bates College Online Resources for Calculus and Linear Algebra --- http://abacus.bates.edu/~etowne/mathresources.html

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

    Iowa State University: Center for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Education ---
    http://www.cesmee.hs.iastate.edu/

    Numberphile --- http://www.youtube.com/numberphile

    Carleton Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge Initiative --- http://serc.carleton.edu/quirk/index.html

    Launchings (mathematics education happenings)) ---  http://launchings.blogspot.com/

    Who's That Mathematician? Images from the Paul R. Halmos Photograph Collection ---
    http://www.maa.org/publications/periodicals/convergence/whos-that-mathematician-images-from-the-paul-r-halmos-photograph-collection 

    Mathematical Association of America: Reviews
    http://www.maa.org/publications/maa-reviews

    Georgians Revealed (The Georgian Era in England) --- http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/georgiansrevealed/index.html
    Learning Geometry in Georgian England --- 
    http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/46/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=3930 

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


    History Tutorials

    Ken Burns (PBS American History) --- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ken-burns/id723854283?mt=8

    Paul Revere Collection at the American Antiquarian Society (art history) --- http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Inventories/Revere/

    Museum of Science & Industry: Education --- http://www.msichicago.org/education/

    The Goldfinch (Iowa History Magazine)  http://ir.uiowa.edu/goldfinch/

    The 10 worst stock market crashes in U.S. History ---
    http://dprogram.net/2008/10/08/the-10-worst-stock-market-crashes-in-us-history/

    The Daily Palette Digital Collection (Iowa Artists) ---  http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/dp/index.php

    The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa --- http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/uipress/bdi/

    Poweshiek History Preservation Project (Iowa History) ---http://digital.grinnell.edu/drupal/content/about-phpp

    Adirondack Architectural Heritage --- http://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16694coll9

    The Digital Archaeological Record --- http://www.tdar.org/

    Society of Architectural Historians --- http://www.sah.org/

    Iowa Folklife --- http://www.uni.edu/iowaonline/folklife_v2/ 

    2nd Avenue Online (Jewish History in NYC Theater) ---  http://2ndave.nyu.edu/

    The Haunting Final Portrait of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Part of Victoria Will’s Civil War-Era Photo Collection ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-haunting-last-portrait-of-philip-seymour-hoffman.html

    The 10 Most Expensive Paintings On Public Display ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-expensive-paintings-on-public-display-2014-2

    President Barack Obama Visual Iconography (photographs of political history) ---
    http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/obama/

    Sporting Sketches by Henry Thomas Alken ---
    http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=science&col_id=150

    An Online Gallery of 30,000 Items from The British Library, Including Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks And Mozart’s Diary ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/an-online-gallery-of-30000-items-from-the-british-library-including-leonardo-da-vincis-notebooks-and-mozarts-diary.html

    Watch Langston Hughes Read Poetry from His First Collection, The Weary Blues (1958) ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/hear-langston-hughes-read-two-poems-from-the-weary-blues.html

    Florida Citrus Industry Oral Histories --- http://guides.lib.usf.edu/content.php?pid=49131&sid=364819

    The Hagstromer Medico-Historical Library --- http://www.hagstromerlibrary.ki.se/

    The Little Prince as a Pop-Up Book ---
    http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/12/little-prince-pop-up-book/

    British History Online (History of England, UK History) --- http://www.british-history.ac.uk/

    Georgians Revealed (The Georgian Era in England) --- http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/georgiansrevealed/index.html

    Learning Geometry in Georgian England --- 
    http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/46/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=3930 

    Georgians Revealed (The Georgian Era in England) --- http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/georgiansrevealed/index.html

    Ruskin at Walkley (English History Museum) --- http://www.ruskinatwalkley.org/

    History Extra (English History) --- http://www.historyextra.com/podcasts

    Canterbury and St. Albans: Treasures from Church and Cloister --- http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/canterbury/

    Isa Genzken Retrospective (Sculpture Exhibition at the MOMA) --- http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/isagenzken/

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


    Language Tutorials

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


    Music Tutorials

    Riverwalk Jazz --- (vast collection of jazz recordings and links) --- http://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/home

    Chicago Jazz --- http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/cja/jazzmaps/ctlframe.htm

    John Falter's Jazz Portraits --- http://nebraskahistory.org/exhibits/john_falter_jazz/in

    Wynton Marsalis (History of Jazz With Great Samples) --- http://joy2learn.com/jazz/index.html

    UCLA Library: James Arkatov Photograph Collection (music history and profiles) ---
    http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz001dzc12

    The Story of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music History in 8 Minutes ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/the-story-of-the-bass.html

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

    From the Scout Report on February 14, 2014

    It was 50 years ago today (or so), that the Beatles came to play
    The Beatles: 50 years after 'Ed Sullivan' they're everywhere, in everything
    http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2014/0209/The-Beatles-50-years-after-Ed-Sullivan-they-re-everywhere-in-everything-video

    CBS's 'Grammy Salute' Belongs to McCartney and Starr
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/arts/television/cbs-grammy-salute-belongs-to-mccartney-and-starr.html?_r=0

    The guy who brought The Beatles to America
    http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/09/opinion/greene-ed-sullivan-beatles/

    A Rare Look at the Origins of Beatlemania: Watch the Throwback Footage
    http://entertainment.time.com/2014/02/09/beatles-50th-anniversary-ed-sullivan-show-beatlemania/

    What the critics wrote about the Beatles in 1964
    http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-beatles-quotes-20140209,0,1146431.story#axzz2sxo48rHT

    The Beatles "White Album:" The Untold Story
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobbyowsinski/2014/02/09/the-beatles-white-album-the-untold-story/

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


    Writing Tutorials

    New “Hemingway” App Promises to Make Your Writing “Strong and Clear” ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/new-hemingway-app-promises-make-writing-strong-clear.html

    From the Scout Report on February 14, 2014

    Vocabulary Notebook --- https://www.vocabularynotebook.com/

    If you're looking for a fine way to get your vocabulary up to speed, you should definitely check out Vocabulary Notebook. Teachers can use the program to study words with their students in the classroom and individuals can use it to craft their own personalized vocabulary lists for reviewing while on the go. This version is compatible with all operating systems.

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



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

    February 15, 2014

    February 17, 2014

    February 18, 2014

  • Talking' Medical Devices, Apps Continue to Evolve
  • Kids With ADHD May Benefit From 'Brain Wave' Training in School: Study
  • Can Vitamin C Ward Off Stroke?
  • Sleep Apnea May Worsen Fatigue in MS Patients
  • Food Price Hikes and Type 2 Diabetes
  • Ovary Removal Might Raise Odds for Bone Loss
  • Supportive Mate a Good Match for Your Heart
  • Flu Hits Unvaccinated Hardest, Study Finds
  • Libraries Serve As Health Insurance Info Hubs
  • It’s Hot Springs Vs. Ski Slopes In Colorado Insurance Battle
  • Febryary 20, 2014

    February 21, 2014

    February 22, 2014

    February 24, 2014

    February 25, 2014

    February 26, 2014

     

     


    "A Simple Exercise to Increase Well-Being and Lower Depression from Martin Seligman, Founding Father of Positive Psychology," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, February 18, 2014 ---
    http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/18/martin-seligman-gratitude-visit-three-blessings/


    "UK Scientists Found The First Biomarker For Boys At Risk Of Major Depression," by Kate Kelland, Business Insider, February 18, 2014 ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/first-biomarker-for-boys-at-risk-of-major-depression-2014-2





    A Bit of Humor

    Yakov Smirnoff Remembers “The Soviet Department of Jokes” & Other Staples of Communist Comedy ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/yakov-smirnoff-remembers-the-soviet-department-of-jokes.html

    Bob Hope Entertaining the Troops --- http://biggeekdad.com/2011/02/bob-hope-christmas/

    A Bit of Humor

    How To Piss Off A Texan --- http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-piss-off-a-texan-2014-2 

    The Conductor (even though the music bad) ---
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7W3ICpONVs

    19 Striking Photos Show What Nevada Brothels Are Really Like ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-mcandrews-photos-of-nevadas-legal-brothels-2014-2?op=1#ixzz2u9IJcWBq
    All the quality control inspector jobs are filled.
    Actually this is a depressing set of photographs.


    Forwarded by Dr. Wolff

    Here are some little known, very interesting facts about Texas:

    1. Port Arthur to El Paso: 889 miles. Port Arthur to Chicago: 770 miles.

    2. Brownsville to Texline (north of Amarillo): 956 miles. Texline to Canada: 960 miles.

    3. El Paso is closer to California than to Dallas.

    4. World's first rodeo was in Pecos, Texas, July 4, 1883.

    5. The Flagship Hotel in Galveston is the only hotel in North America built over water. Destroyed by Hurricane Ike - 2008!

    6. The Heisman Trophy was named after John William Heisman who was the first full-time coach at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

    7. Brazoria County has more species of birds than any other area in North America.

    8. Aransas Wildlife Refuge is the winter home of North America's only remaining flock of whooping cranes.

    9. Jalapeno jelly originated in Lake Jackson in 1978.

    10. The worst natural disaster in US history was in 1900, caused by a hurricane in which over 8,000 lives were lost on Galveston Island.

    11. The first word spoken from the moon, July 20, 1969, was "Houston", but the Space Center was actually in Clear Lake City at the time.

    12. The King Ranch in South Texas is larger than the state of Rhode Island.

    13. Tropical Storm Claudette brought a US rainfall record of 43" in 24 hours in and around Alvin in July of 1979.

    14. Texas is the only state to enter the US by TREATY, (known as the Constitution of 1845 by the Republic of Texas to enter the Union) instead of by annexation. This allows the Texas Flag to fly at the same height as the US Flag, and Texas may choose to divide into 5 states.

    15. A Live Oak tree near Fulton is estimated to be 1500 years old.

    16. Caddo Lake is the only natural lake in the state.

    17. Dr Pepper was invented in Waco in 1885. There is no period in Dr Pepper.

    18. Texas has had six capital cities: Washington-on-the Brazos, Harrisburg, Galveston, Velasco, West Columbia, and Austin.

    19. The Capitol Dome in Austin is the only dome in the US which is taller than the Capitol Building in Washington, DC (by 7 feet).

    20. The San Jacinto Monument is the tallest free standing monument in the world and it is taller than the Washington Monument.

    21. The name 'Texas' comes from the Hasini Indian word 'tejas' meaning "friends". Tejas is NOT Spanish for Texas.

    22. The State Mascot is the Armadillo. An interesting bit of trivia about the Armadillo is they always have four babies. They have one egg, which splits into four, and they either have four males or four females.

    23. The first domed stadium in the US was the Astrodome in Houston.

    24. The Beck family ranch land grant is one days ride by horse (25 miles) in each direction from the headquarters.


     

    Humor Between January 1-31, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q1.htm#Humor013114

    Humor Between December 1-31, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q4.htm#Humor123113

    Humor Between November 1-30, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q4.htm#Humor113013

    Humor Between October 1-31, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q4.htm#Humor103113

    Humor Between September 1-30, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q3.htm#Humor093013

    Humor Between July 1 and August 31, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q3.htm#Humor083113

    Humor Between June 1-30, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q2.htm#Humor063013

    Humor Between May 1-31, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q2.htm#Humor053113

    Humor Between April 1-30, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q2.htm#Humor043013

    Humor Between March 1-31, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q1.htm#Humor033113

     




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

    Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

    CPA Examination --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
    Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle --- http://cpareviewforfree.com/

    Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at http://iaed.wordpress.com/

    Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social Networking ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

    Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 
    Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
    Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
    Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

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

    Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

    Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
    Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting educators.
    Any college may post a news item.

    Accounting  and Taxation News Sites ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

     

    For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
    AECM (Educators) http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
    AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.

    Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing, doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics) research, publication, replication, and validity testing.

     

    CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/  (Closed Down)
    CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.
    Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
    This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.
    AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1 
    This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.
    Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com 
    This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM
    FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
    Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
    FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
    www.financialexecutives.org/blog

    Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board on this financial reporting blog from Financial Executives International. The site, updated daily, compiles regulatory news, rulings and statements, comment letters on standards, and hot topics from the Web’s largest business and accounting publications and organizations. Look for continuing coverage of SOX requirements, fair value reporting and the Alternative Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such as the subprime mortgage crisis, international convergence, and rules for tax return preparers.
    The CAlCPA Tax Listserv

    September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@bonackers.com]
    Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as well as a practicing CPA)

    I found another listserve that is exceptional -

    CalCPA maintains http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/  and they let almost anyone join it.
    Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.

    There are several highly capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and the answers are often in depth.

    Scott

    Scott forwarded the following message from Jim Counts

    Yes you may mention info on your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not have access to the files and other items posted.

    Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I will get the request to join.

    Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.

    We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in California.... ]

    Please encourage your members to join our listserve.

    If any questions let me know.

    Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
    Hemet, CA
    Moderator TaxTalk

     

     

     

     

    Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) --- http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm

     

    Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
    Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
    Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
    Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

    Some Accounting History Sites

    Bob Jensen's Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
     

    Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
    The above libraries include international accounting history.
    The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

    MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

    Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
    http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

    Sage Accounting History --- http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269

    A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
    "The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
    Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm 

    A nice timeline of accounting history --- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING

    From Texas A&M University
    Accounting History Outline --- http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html

    Bob Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds

    History of Fraud in America --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
    Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

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

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

    All my online pictures --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/

     

    Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
    190 Sunset Hill Road
    Sugar Hill, NH 03586
    Phone:  603-823-8482 
    Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu