Tidbits on July 30, 2014
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Set 2 Photographs of New England Lakes --- Lake Champlain
Plus a few older personal photographs
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Lakes/Set02/LakesSet02.htm

Tidbits on July 30,, 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/

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

Guinness: Great beer ad tribute to the military  ---
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/ad-day-guinness-has-made-only-ad-you-need-see-fourth-july-158760

Animated: Winston Churchill’s Top 10 Sayings About Failure, Courage, Setbacks, Haters & Success ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/animated-winston-churchills-top-10-sayings.html

God bless America! ~ Cool-----------in Sheboygan
http://mortenson.wistia.com/medias/tejnwpitig

That saluting boy on Omaha Beach ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k9Si28k0Fk&app=desktop

The New Wolves in Yellowstone Park ---
http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/how-wolves-change-rivers

The Touching Moment When Nicholas Winton Met the Children He Saved During the Holocaust ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/nicholas-winton-met-the-children-he-saved-during-the-holocaust.html

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

Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock: The Complete Performance in Video & Audio (1969) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/jimi-hendrix-at-woodstock-the-complete-performance-in-video-audio-1969.html

Blues Guitar Legend Johnny Winter Shines Live on Danish TV (1970) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/blues-guitar-legend-johnny-winter-shines-live-on-danish-tv-1970.html

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

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

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

Photographs and Art

Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/tour-the-worlds-street-art-with-google-street-art.html

WW II Pictures --- http://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/2014/apr/image-opacity-slider-master/index.html?ww2-dday

Versailles La grotte de Versailles (French Art History) ---  http://pudl.princeton.edu/collections/versailles2

25 Of The Most Creative Sculptures And Statues From Around The World ---
http://www.boredpanda.com/worlds-most-creative-statues-sculptures/

Paul Rudolph & His Architecture --- http://prudolph.lib.umassd.edu/

‘Andrew D. Lytle's Baton Rouge’ Photograph Collection ---
 http://cdm16313.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15140coll12/

This Photographer Captures The Incredible Human Side Of Animals ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-flach-more-than-human-animals-2014-7  

LA Liber Amicorum (art history) ---
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/digital_collections/notable/aiseborn_liber_amicorum.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

Dante’s Divine Comedy Illustrated in a Remarkable Illuminated Medieval Manuscript (c. 1450) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/dantes-divine-comedy-illustrated-in-a-illuminated-manuscript.html

Greek Myth Comix Presents Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey In Graphic Form ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/greek-myth-comix-presents-homers-iliad-odyssey-in-graphic-form.html

Dante Worlds (Multimedia) --- http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/

William Blake's Sublime Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy, Over Which He Labored Until His Dying Day ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/17/william-blake-dante-divine-comedy/

Animated: Winston Churchill’s Top 10 Sayings About Failure, Courage, Setbacks, Haters & Success ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/animated-winston-churchills-top-10-sayings.html

T.S. Eliot Reads Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats & Other Classic Poems (75 Minutes, 1955) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/t-s-eliot-reads-old-possums-book-of-practical-cats-other-classic-poems.html

Mocha Dick: The Story of the Real-Life Whale That Inspired Moby-Dick, Illustrated ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/07/14/mocha-dick-brian-heinz-randall-enos/

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 July 30, 2014
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2014/TidbitsQuotations073014.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

LIBRARIAN AS FUTURIST: Changing the Way Libraries Think About the Future
The Ubiquotous Librarian
July 24, 2014, 8:51 pm
By Brian Mathews

DID AMAZON JUST CHANGE THE LIBRARY WORLD (including the textbook world)?
Unlimited Kindle Books is a Game Changer (if they can license everything)
The Ubiquotous Librarian
July 18, 2014, 8:51 pm
By Brian Mathews

Amazon just announced an All-You-Can-Read service: Unlimited Kindle. It offers a collection of over 600,000 eBook titles for a low price of $9.99 per month. If this truly includes all Kindle books—it is a game changer.

Continued in article

"The Kindle Conundrum: Should You Rent or Buy Digital Stuff?" by Rob Pegoraro, Yahoo Tech, July 22, 2014 ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/the-kindle-conundrum-should-you-rent-or-buy-digital-92475429404.html

Jensen Comment
This may well change the world eventually for over a million newer books, but it is not quite the game changer for millions of older books as Google Books ---
http://books.google.com/
 

Handicaps and Uneven Playing Fields in Data Analysis:  How Good Is Andrew Luck?

Jensen Comment
It is really difficult to compare greatness on unequal playing fields. In terms of military commanders, Robert E. Lee is rated by some analysts as better than Ulysses S. Grant even though Lee went down in devastating defeat.

Uneven playing fields greatly complicate statistical data analysis. There are various terminologies that essentially mean the same thing such as "varying circumstances" and "handicaps." A handicap horse race means that extra weights are placed on each favored horse. Afterwards it's very difficult to compare the outcomes for any two horses carrying different handicap weightings. In golf the handicapped winners can later be compared on the basis of their non-handicapped scores. In a horse race, however, this is impossible since the horses on a given day on given track conditions did not carry equal wights.

Quarterback comparisons are more like comparing handicapped race horses than golfers since each quarterback has a different supporting case of offensive linemen, wide receivers, tight ends, running backs, blocking backs, and on and on and on.

However, even even handicapped golfers are a bit difficult to compare in terms of handicapped versus non-handicapped tournaments. The reason is that how they play the game may be different in a handicapped tournament. A very great and steady great player in a non-handicapped tournament may be inclined to take more risks in a handicapped tournament, and not all great golfers are equal when motivated to take risks.

Alas, there are more uneven playing fields (handicaps) in both sports and life in general than perfectly even playing fields.

"How Good Is Andrew Luck?" by Neil Paine, Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog, July 28, 2014 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-good-is-andrew-luck/

This article is a great summary of how difficult it is to compare performance data from uneven playing fields.

Bob Jensen's links to helpers in mathematics and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

Technopanics: Moral Panics about Technology ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/comparative-media-studies/cms-s60-technopanics-moral-panics-about-technology-spring-2013/

Community College Pathways: Summative Assessments and Student Learning ---  http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/sites/default/files/pathways/CCP_Assessment_Report_2014.pdf

"Evaluating the Ethics of Affirmative Action Policies on University Campuses," by Steven Mintz, Ethics Sage, July 22, 2014 ---
http://www.ethicssage.com/2014/07/evaluating-the-ethics-of-affirmative-action-policies-on-university-campuses.html

Guide to the Old University of Chicago Records 1856-1890 ---
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.OLDUOFC

Jensen Comment
I got 24 hits when searching on the word "accounting." In those days many accounting in the curriculum was taught in economics courses. There was actually very little accounting taught in higher education except as related to macroeconomic accounting statistics. The records archived at the link above, however, do have some very old business records on file that were apparently donated to the Old University of Chicago.

Bookkeeping in those days could be learned by apprenticeship and/or trade schools known as commercial colleges, colleges of commerce, and business colleges that also taught typing and business arithmetic.

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting and accounting education history are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory

3D Printing in Space  --- http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18871

Additive manufacturing has the potential to positively affect human spaceflight operations by enabling the in-orbit manufacture of replacement parts and tools, which could reduce existing logistics requirements for the International Space Station and future long-duration human space missions. The benefits of in-space additive manufacturing for robotic spacecraft are far less clear, although this rapidly advancing technology can also potentially enable space-based construction of large structures and, perhaps someday, substantially in the future, entire spacecraft. Additive manufacturing can also help to reimagine a new space architecture that is . . .

Where to Get the Best Retirement Location Deals

July 25, 2014 message from Scott Bonacker

Looks like only one of the eight best is among the two lists of states with the lowest taxes on retirees -
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/the-8-least-expensive-states-to-live-in-the-u-s.html/?ref=OB

Low tax states –
http://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/retirement/T006-S001-10-most-tax-friendly-states-for-retirees/index.html

 I think this one is the Powell article cited by Bob below that is no longer linked in Yahoo:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-most-tax-friendly-states-for-retirees-2013-02-21

Scott Bonacker CPA –
McCullough and Associates LLC –
Springfield, MO

July 25, 2014 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Scott,
 

A big difference between the two listings is cost of living apart from taxation. Cost of living comparisons can be very misleading such as comparing the cost of retiring in Swea City, Iowa versus the cost of retiring in Des Moines, Iowa.
 

This begs the question of why Midwestern states like Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas can be, but are not necessarily, attractive for retirement cost of living.
 

I think a lot of cost of living comparisons are greatly impacted by real estate prices.
What will $10,000 buy you in the way of a retirement home in Florida, South Texas, Arizona, Nevada, California, or Des Moines, Iowa?
It probably won't even buy a decent mobile home. But it may buy you a five-bedroom retirement house on a great lot with huge shade trees in Swea City,  Iowa.

Rural farm towns in the Midwest have been hammered by the disappearance of small family farms. When I was a kid in Iowa rural farm towns like Swea City (where my grandparents lived) prospered amidst all the small surrounding farms. Farm families could make a good living on a mere 80-acre farm like the dairy farm owned by my Uncle George with his wife and four children in the 1950s.
 

Today downtown Swea City is almost all boarded up because it's nearly impossible to make a living on a mere 160 acres or even 240 acres. It's literally impossible to make a living on Uncle George's old 80-acre farm. His buildings were torn down years ago, and his land is now a small part of a 1,600 acre farm.
 

The fact of the matter is that it takes over $1 million in equipment (big tractors, combines, planters, chemical sprayers, and even 18-wheel trucks) to farm in Iowa, and that kind of investment is just not justified for a small farm. Small Iowa farmers either sold their land or rent their land to big farms. Nearly all the farm houses and buildings surrounding Swea City are now torn down. And the many surrounding farm families are long gone.
 

But Swea City with it's boarded up downtown is not a ghost town.
It's a very low-cost retirement community.
In the early 1900s my grandfather built a big Swea City home with five bedrooms and a huge front porch where people cooled off on hot summer nights before the days of air conditioning. Over the years subsequent owners (mostly retired farmers) of this home took good care of the house and lot.  The house is in great shape, and it's most recent sales price was $10,000.
 

Not many people think of retiring in Swea City, Iowa. But if you're looking for a great retirement house for $10,000 in a small town then retire in Swea City. But don't move there looking for a job. It's the lack of jobs in Iowa's old and remote farm towns that keeps real estate so cheap.

Real estate is not cheap in Ames, Iowa City, or Des Moines where there are jobs. But real estate is cheap in Swea City, Iowa.
 

My point is that cost of living comparisons are much more misleading than tax comparisons in general. Iowa state income and property taxes are relatively high, but this does not much matter to the low-income retirees living in my grandfather's old house in Swea City.

What matters more is that the price of the house was $10,000 and the property taxes accordingly are less than $500 per year because the house has so little resale value. You just have to enjoy the big maple trees rather than the palm trees and look out over a sea of corn rather than a sea of ocean water.

And the K-Mart in Algona is 30 miles away.
 

My short story about growing up in Iowa ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/max01.htm

Jensen Comment
"Cassius Clay"  (or Mohammad Ali) Shouted to the media:  "I am the greatest!"
Perhaps so. At least he supposedly did not rig his own championship fight outcomes.
This does not appear to be the case for media shouts by the Henry W. Bloch School of Business at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

"For Business School’s No. 1 Ranking, Big Asterisk Looms," by Mitch Gerber, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/for-business-schools-no-1-ranking-big-asterisk-looms/82737?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

When a study found that the business school at the University of Missouri at Kansas City boasted the world’s No. 1 program in innovation-management research, officials from the chancellor on down basked publicly in the news.

Now an investigation by The Kansas City Star has cast substantial doubt on that glowing result.

The two authors of the 2011 paper, who were visiting scholars at the school when they did the study, apparently structured it to ensure the top ranking, the newspaper reports. Administrators at the school were aware of the reshaping of the data, the Star adds.

“I just think this paper is fatally flawed,” said Ivan Oransky, of the blog Retraction Watch.

A likely motive for the effort, the newspaper says, was to meet the expectations of Henry W. Bloch, the benefactor for whom the school is named.

The university told the Star that it stands by the study.

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

Teaching Case
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on July 25, 2014

For Apple, iPhone Roars and iPad Whimpers
by: Daisuke Wakabayashi
Jul 23, 2014
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
 

TOPICS: Financial Statement Analysis, Managerial Accounting, Segment Analysis

SUMMARY: Ahead of a refresh of the iPhone, Apple Inc. reported 12% profit growth and strong sales of its current handset, especially in markets far afield from its traditional customer base in the U.S. The iPhone results stood in contrast to iPad sales, which slid for the second consecutive quarter, raising questions about the future of Apple's tablet as the company gears up to launch bigger-screen iPhone models.

CLASSROOM APPLICATION: This article offers a variety of managerial accounting aspects, as well as an opportunity to discuss some financial statement analysis with a real company.

QUESTIONS: 
1. (Introductory) What are Apple's various business segments? Which of those segments are growing? Are any of them stagnant or in decline?

2. (Advanced) What is segment reporting? What is the value of segment analysis? How is Apple using segment analysis in the information in this article? What additional value could Apple be gleaning from segment analysis that is not presented in this article?

3. (Advanced) What strategies and plans is Apple employing based on the conclusions it has reached from segment data? Do you think the company is making the right moves? Why or why not?

4. (Advanced) What is gross margin? What did the company report regarding year-to-year gross margin? How did that compare with analyst's expectations? What factors likely contributed to the change in gross margin?

5. (Advanced) What new segments is the company considering or expanding? Why are these segments attractive to Apple?
 

Reviewed By: Linda Christiansen, Indiana University Southeast
 

RELATED ARTICLES: 
Tim Cook on Apple's iPad Declines: 'This Isn't Something That Worries Us'
by Daisuke Wakabayashi
Jul 22, 2014
Online Exclusive

Apple's New Product Hit: the Mac
by Daisuke Wakabayashi
Jul 22, 2014

"For Apple, iPhone Roars and iPad Whimpers," by Daisuke Wakabayashi, The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/articles/apple-reports-strong-iphone-sales-1406061049?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid

Ahead of a refresh of the iPhone, Apple Inc. AAPL -0.16% reported 12% profit growth and strong sales of its current handset, especially in markets far afield from its traditional customer base in the U.S.

The iPhone results stood in contrast to iPad sales, which slid for the second consecutive quarter, raising questions about the future of Apple's tablet as the company gears up to launch bigger-screen iPhone models.

The consumer electronics giant said it sold 35.2 million iPhones in the quarter ended June 28, up 12.7% from a year earlier and just shy of analysts' estimates. Apple said the growth was helped by demand from Brazil, Russia, India, and China—collectively known as the BRIC countries—where iPhone sales rose 55%.

The iPhone growth propelled Apple's profit in its third quarter to $7.75 billion, up from $6.9 billion in the year-ago period. Revenue rose 6% to $37.4 billion.

"We're thrilled with the results, and we're thrilled with where we are going," Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an interview. "The momentum is really strong."

Shares of Apple, which closed at $94.72 on Tuesday, were little changed after the report.

Apple has entered into a period of steady growth and efficient earnings, generating billions of dollars of cash every quarter. But it will likely need to enter new product categories to reignite earnings that have flattened after more than a decade of remarkable growth.

This year, the Cupertino, Calif., company is banking on an expected new product push of larger iPhones and a series of smartwatches before year-end, people familiar with the matter have said. In the past few years, the June quarter has been the slowest for Apple as the company gears up with new products ahead of the year-end.

Despite what new Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri characterized on the analysts' conference call as "new product rumors" pushing customers to hold off on potential purchases, iPhone sales were at the high end of Apple's expectations, he said.

But Apple struggled for the second consecutive quarter to sell iPads, with unit sales falling 9.2% after a 16% drop three months earlier. In the quarter just two years ago, iPad sales were up 84%.

Apple appears to be struggling, like other tablet makers, with sluggish demand overall in North America and Europe—the base of iPad growth in recent years. Apple said this runs contrary to strong demand in emerging markets, especially in China and the Middle East.

On the call, Mr. Cook said iPad sales met his expectations and that the iPad is still in its early days. "This isn't something that worries us," he said in an interview.

Macintosh sales showed growth for the third straight quarter, with units rising 18% to 4.4 million units. Undescoring the diverging trajectory of iPads and Macs, the gap in revenue between the two products is fast closing: Apple sold $5.44 billion worth of Macs in the quarter, compared with $5.9 billion in iPads. The last time Mac revenue topped iPad's was in 2011 when the tablet was still in its early days.

Continued in article

Apple announced that its tablet sales fell 1.4 million from a year earlier. The coming iPhone 6, which is bigger and more powerful than all the iPhones before it, will be the iPad's biggest competition ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-22/the-ipad-continues-to-struggle-and-a-new-iphone-could-make-it-worse?campaign_id=DN072314

Jensen Comment
I have two laptops and a MS Surface tablet. The tablet mostly collects dust.

"House Overhauls Tax Breaks," by Michael Stratford, Inside Higher Ed, July 25, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/07/25/us-house-votes-change-college-tax-breaks-boost-student-loan-counseling#sthash.ZmfLJ6zR.dpbs

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved an overhaul of higher education tax breaks and passed legislation changing how federal student loan counseling works.

The tax measure, which is part of the House Republicans' overall effort to make changes to the tax code, contains some provisions that colleges and universities strongly support.

For instance, the bill makes permanent the American Opportunity Tax Credit, something that higher education advocates have pushed for since it was created as part of the 2009 economic stimulus law.

It would also change how the tax credit is calculated to more fully account for Pell Grant recipients. Currently, the value of a Pell Grant counts against a student as he or she calculates the tuition and expenses that count toward the tax break. The legislation would exempt a Pell Grant from that calculation, allowing more low-income students to benefit from the AOTC.  

The Obama administration proposed such a change earlier this year in its 2015 fiscal year budget.

Community colleges, which enroll large numbers of students who use Pell Grants, had urged lawmakers to support the bill.

"The legislation achieves several important objectives for the nation’s college students, who continue to face substantial financing challenges, even at low-cost community colleges," wrote the presidents of the two main community college associations. Still, they acknowledged that the legislation "embodies certain tradeoffs."

Such tradeoffs went too far for the American Council on Education, the umbrella lobbying group for higher education, which opposed the bill.

The group said that the House proposal to consolidate tax credits and eliminate some credits and deductions would disproportionately hurt nontraditional students who take advantage of the Lifetime Learning Credit. It would also take away benefits for graduate students.  

“We are in favor of reform, but the devil really is in the details,” Steven Bloom, the group’s director of federal relations, said in an interview. “If you’re going to fix these credits and deductions -- which you don’t get a chance to do very often -- you need to make sure you address the needs of students now and in the future, keeping in mind the way the demographics of student populations are changing.”

The legislation cleared the House on a 227-187 vote. House Democrats and the White House opposed the bill because they said it would add to the deficit and was not offset by increases in revenue elsewhere in the federal budget. It is not expected to gain much traction in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Student Loan Counseling Bill

Separately, the House approved a bill aimed at bolstered the counseling provided to student loan borrowers.

The measure, the third in a series of House proposals to rewrite the Higher Education Act, would increase the amount of information that the Education Department must provide to students before and after they take out federal loans to pay for college.  

Under the plan, students seeking federal loans would receive a host of new disclosures before they commit to the debt, including a recommendation that they exhaust federal loans before taking out private loans. In addition, students would see a college’s default rate compared to the national average and sector average. They would also be warned about how and when their Pell Grant eligibility expires.

Like the tax measure, the student loan counseling bill -- at least on its own -- is unlikely to move in the Senate. Senator Tom Harkin, the chair of the Senate education committee, has said that he wants to reauthorize the Higher Education Act through a comprehensive measure, not smaller individual bills. 

This tidbit absolutely astounds me
After choosing a major in the first year, a student may be locked into that major forever or be forced to choose among the least popular majors in the university.

What kind of Big Brother university is this?
Actually we don't really know because the recommendations are so vague that it's not clear that any of the controversial Big Brother recommendations will be implemented.

Suppose there were a surge of interest in a high demand field such as computer science. Under the “equity” policy, it seems that some of those who want to study this field would be told that they’ll have to choose another major because computer science already has “enough” students from their “difference” group.  
"University of Wisconsin Diversity Plan Requires 'Proportional Participation' in Grades, Majors," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, July 19, 2014 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/07/university-of-wisconsin.html
Also see http://allenbwest.com/2014/07/achievement-redistribution-university-wisconsin-distribute-grades-based-race-ethnicity/

The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, Madness in Madison:

The University of Wisconsin's latest diversity plan calls for "equity" in high-demand majors and the distribution of grades. 

Many American colleges and universities are in the thrall of “diversity,” but none more so than my institution, the University of Wisconsin. This spring, the university adopted a new plan [Framework for Diversity and Inclusive Excellence] that, according to Board of Regents policy, “[p]laces the mission of diversity at the center of institutional life so that it becomes a core organizing principle.” ...

Let us take a closer look at one of these working definitions included, namely “representational equity.” It calls for “proportional participation of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups at all levels of an institution, including high status special programs, high-demand majors, and in the distribution of grades.” 

We are not told exactly what adherence to this will entail. It appears to mean that directors of programs and departmental chairs will have to somehow ensure that they have a mix of students with just the right percentages of individuals who embody the various “differences” included in the definition of diversity. I cannot see how that is possible and even if it were, how it improves any student’s education.

Suppose there were a surge of interest in a high demand field such as computer science. Under the “equity” policy, it seems that some of those who want to study this field would be told that they’ll have to choose another major because computer science already has “enough” students from their “difference” group.  

Especially shocking is the language about “equity” in the distribution of grades. Professors, instead of just awarding the grade that each student earns, would apparently have to adjust them so that academically weaker, “historically underrepresented racial/ethnic” students perform at the same level and receive the same grades as academically stronger students.  

At the very least, this means even greater expenditures on special tutoring for weaker targeted minority students. It is also likely to trigger a new outbreak of grade inflation, as professors find out that they can avoid trouble over “inequitable” grade distributions by giving every student a high grade.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I'm not so concerned about "giving everybody a high grade." With grade inflation, everybody has been getting a high grade for years ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
That's an enormous disgrace we've learned to live with in higher education.

Grade distribution by course and section at UW-Madison ---
http://www.metafilter.com/110462/Grade-distribution-by-course-and-section-at-UWMadison

What concerns me is that students entering college are seldom sure what they want to eventually major in, and those that eventually choose a major should not be forced out because of a quota system. For example, it seems totally unethical to force a student out of computer science or accounting into classical studies because there are plenty of openings in classical studies and no openings in popular career disciplines.

Unless accompanied by affirmative action giving priority of slots in popular career majors like nursing, accounting, and computer science the University of Wisconsin to minority students the policy may actually be blocking minority students from lifelong careers of their choosing.

After choosing a major in the first year, a student may be locked into that major forever or be forced to choose among the least popular majors in the university. What kind of Big Brother university is this?

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

Grade distribution by course and section at UW-Madison (since 2004)---
http://www.metafilter.com/110462/Grade-distribution-by-course-and-section-at-UWMadison

The grade distribution for all courses at UW-Madison is available going back to the spring 2004 semester. Unlike studies of aggregate grades that document grade inflation with time, this site provides grade distributions for each individual course and section. The data clearly shows that students in STEM courses at Madison receive markedly lower grades than students in education courses. Cornell recently stopped posting similar data because it believes access to this information causes grade inflation because students select courses with higher medium grade averages. This recent article addresses the question of grade inflation more generally and the efforts at UNC to fight it. Meanwhile, this student editorial in the Bowdoin newspaper argues that faculty at selective schools must continue to inflate grades so that students can maintain a competitive advantage. Also, see this previous post.
posted by Seymour Zamboni (91 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite

I am a professor at UW-Madison and I blogged about this data last year, when the Capital Times did a front-page story on it.

My take on grade inflation from Slate: grade inflation in itself probably doesn't matter, but differential grading between majors probably does.
posted by escabeche at 3:52 PM on December 13, 2011 [5 favorites]

 

As someone who double-majored in the humanities and STEM: This falls squarely into the category of "Things that are pretty obvious, but it's nice to have the numbers."
posted by Tomorrowful at 3:52 PM on December 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

 

In five years of teaching, I have yet to hear a convincing argument for the existence of grade inflation.

Instead, what I have seen is that fewer and fewer professors are allowed to continue teaching who believe that students should fail regardless of effort. I just turned in my own grades, and I can tell you that the distribution was a nearly perfect Bimodal shape.

That said, the only students who fail my class are those who apply no effort. You may get a noncredit C-, but you will not fail, so long as you put in some damned effort.
posted by strixus at 3:54 PM on December 13, 2011 [3 favorites]

 

I am in grad school after going to undergrad about 20 years ago. First of all, my undergrad did not have + or - and did not calculate GPAs, both to try and dissuade us from worrying about grades too much. But it sure feels like grades mean different things now. Classes over 25 students have to be curved so that the average grade is a B+. I am taking a bunch of quant courses along with International Security Policy classes where the grade is based on a paper and the effort that goes into the reading/writing courses has to be half of what goes into the quant courses.
posted by shothotbot at 3:59 PM on December 13, 2011

 

My niece just started at a major university in the South. Her older brother, another major university.

They're both great kids, both on full ride academic scholarships. That said, neither is in a STEM program.

I wonder if they'll really get anything out of their four years that'll be truly, truly useful, other than friendship and social skills.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:02 PM on December 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

 

This post on the NY Times blog has some nice figures:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-college-grade-inflation/?src=tptw
posted by gyp casino at 4:04 PM on December 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

 

When college degrees were rarer, did it make as much of a difference to get a C or a B?

Because in today's environment, when college degrees are very common, a lot of employers demand that you have a GPA above a 3.7. I used to review resumes and had various transcripts in front of me where a lot of students had high cumulative GPAs in classes that had titles similar to New York Times bestsellers.

It's a competitive world. I'm not surprised that students are probably working harder (or that college professors are easy graders). After all, you have expectations like those of Google's Marissa Mayer: "“One candidate got a C in macroeconomics…That’s troubling to me. Good students are good at all things.”
posted by anniecat at 4:06 PM on December 13, 2011 [7 favorites]

 

Well it's really just an arms race. If you're the school that bucks the trend and actually hands out C's to your average students and reserves even B's for above-average ones, you are also going to be the school that sends very few of your students to top graduate programs.

You are also going to be the school whose alums have resumes that appear lackluster in comparison to their peers' and who have a tough time getting jobs.

You are going to be the school with a less professionally successful alumni base, lower rates and amounts of alumni giving, a smaller endowment, less money to attract top professors and students to your school....

There may be a handful of ultra-prestigious institutions that can get away with being rigorous in their grading, but you can probably count them on both hands.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 4:10 PM on December 13, 2011 [9 favorites]

 

I went to Harvey Mudd College, a science and engineering school. It's a small school, so one of the mandatory freshman science lecture courses accommodated the entire matriculating class (who were pretty smart, with one third getting a perfect score on the math SAT).

Anyway, I recall a midterm freshman exam where we had an average score that was less than 60%. The letter grades we received were correspondingly non-inflated, which kind of sucked when trying to compete with graduates from other institutions.
posted by exogenous at 4:10 PM on December 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

 

dixiecup, "ultra-prestigious institutions" are well known for giving out As like candy, while public schools are legendary for flunking people left, right ,and centre. It seems that you don't advance to higher education or good jobs based on your marks from places like that, it's 100% based on the network you've built.
posted by Yowser at 4:18 PM on December 13, 2011 [3 favorites]

 

grades are 90% social engineering... the idea that they represent some form of "scientific" assessment derives from the social anxiety created by the GI Bill and the opening of higher education to the hoi polloi...
posted by ennui.bz at 4:23 PM on December 13, 2011

 

You touch on another interesting point with the state school comparison. With tuition being what it is these days, colleges no longer have students so much as they have customers. How can you ethically justify taking $50,000 a year from some 18 year old kid, and then telling him that you're going to fail him? The cost of higher education has established a quid pro quo situation. It would be practically unconscionable not to give someone passing marks after they've laid out the amount of money it costs to go to college.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 4:25 PM on December 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

 

Thank god for grade inflation in my gen-ed/humanities courses. Otherwise I never would have been able to put the time into my engineering courses that I did.
posted by sbutler at 4:27 PM on December 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

Comments continued at
http://www.metafilter.com/110462/Grade-distribution-by-course-and-section-at-UWMadison 

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor 

"Walmart Managers Average Salary Higher Than Starbucks," Time Magazine, July 23, 2014 ---
http://time.com/3026504/wal-mart-managers-average-salary-higher-than-starbucks/?xid=newsletter-brief
Many of their cashiers, however, make less than the USA national average of $11.22 per hour.

Jensen Comment
Walmart managers and senior executives are almost always promoted from within. Many of the Starbucks stores are not owned by Starbucks, and employees at all levels may be hired from the outside, including the hiring of relatives of the owners of the stores.

Both Walmart and Starbucks subsidize higher education in different ways for virtually all full-time employees. Starbucks will pay Arizona State University distance education tuition for the last two years of a four-year degree for employees of Starbucks-owned stores. In an older program, Walmart will subsidize all four years of distance education in what is almost tantamount to its own for-profit accredited university. Of course Walmart is much larger with over 2.2 million global employees ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart

Starbucks has fewer than 200,000 employees with a higher proportion of part-time workers ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks
Starbucks pays all workers more than $10 per hour. Walmart may pay less than $10 to new and part-time employees.

Starbucks has seven stores that are unionized which is a miniscule but possibly growing percentage of all stores. Also many Starbucks stores are franchised stores not owned by Starbucks. Walmart owns all of its stores and typically fights off unionization efforts in the USA. Washington DC fought and then caved in to new Walmart stores that are now swamped with job applications. No such luck for the unskilled and unemployed in Boston and Vermont.

Some places like Boston and Vermont will not allow Walmart to build non-unionized stores --- which is partly why so many people from Massachussets and Vermont travel to nearby Walmart stores in New Hampshire to shop. Of course not having a sales tax in New Hampshire is an added attraction.

However, to my knowledge Boston and Vermont will welcome non-unionized Starbucks stores with open arms. Go figure!
My guess is that unions salivate over the number of employees to organize in a single Walmart store whereas there are not enough employees in a Starbucks store to get excited over --- especially since many of the Starbucks stores are franchise mom and pop owned operations that operate more like the many mom and pop non-unionized small retail shops in Boston and Vermont.

In 2014: 41 more colleges charge in excess of $60,000 per year compared to 2013 when only nine colleges topped the $60,000 mark
As the average cost of higher education in America continues to rise, at least 50 American colleges and universities are now charging students more than $60,000 per year. ... Last year, only nine colleges charged more than $60,000 ---
For a listing of these 50 expensive colleges and universities go to http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/07/50-colleges-.html

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

"The Pay-for-Performance Myth,"  By Eric Chemi and Ariana Giorgi, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 22, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-22/for-ceos-correlation-between-pay-and-stock-performance-is-pretty-random?campaign_id=DN072214

Aside from outrageous compensation levels of top executives, my biggest gripe is how executives are paid outrageous salaries and golden parachutes even when they fail ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#OutrageousCompensation

Five Of The World's Lakes About To Dry Up:  Things Don't Look Good for Santa Barbara ---
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/world-lakes-drying-up/30646819#ixzz38CuZ79yj

Cars So Hot They Are Out of Stock 2014 ---
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/07/24/cars-so-hot-they-are-out-of-stock-2014/2/ 

Jensen Comment
There's a big difference in prices of these so-called "hot selling" cars. Just because a high priced vehicle like a BMW or Land Rover sells well does not mean it is worth the money to you.

All-wheel drive is recommended in these mountains even though the rear wheels may only kick in when needed (computer-controlled). Coming in at Rank 3 is my relatively inexpensive Subaru Forester SUV. It has twice as many miles as my Jeep Cherokee and never gives us any trouble. The Jeep is always having to go into the shop for one thing or another. AAA has grown tired of towing my Jeep. I will never by another Chrysler-made product as long as I live.

By the way, I think our Subaru was assembled in Indiana --- America-made in a way.

Batteries in electric and hybrid cars don't work well in cold weather, and we have a lot of cold weather in these mountains. The other day I was at an outdoor BBQ where cars were parked in a field. Electric and hybrid cars in my opinion are built two low to the ground. Unlike the other cars in that field my friend's Toyota Prius hybrid rubbed the grass. Like the Tesla models, my friend's  Prius is only five inches off the ground. He says his Prius is built so low that it bottoms out on the road to his Maine summer cottage. He has a Jeep for his trips to Maine.

"What Millennials Want That Their Boomer Parents Hate," by Taylor Tepper, Time Magazine, July 21, 2014 ---
http://time.com/money/3006715/millennials-higher-inflation-baby-boomers/

Jensen Comment
The argument is that millenials want more inflation such that their student loans, mortgages, and other long-term debt that they incurred getting dear dollars (higher purchasing power) can be paid off with cheap dollars (less purchasing power) obtained from inflated wages. Taken to extremes the burden the entitlement burdens of their boomer parents for Social Security and other pensions can be paid back in in cheap dollars.

And their parents do indeed hate inflation, especially since low interest rates are causing them to cut into the capital of their retirement savings rather than allowing them to live on interest income from those savings.

But Taylor Tepper overlooks some real dangers of inflation to millenials. Firstly, for those whom wage increases do not keep up with inflation they will face enormous hardships in for their living expenses, things like food, vehicles, fuel, medical care, costs of having children, costs of raising children, including education costs.

There are big dangers of inflation for things that increase faster than inflation in general such as medical costs for millenials and their parents on Medicare. Unlike Social Security, Medicare is not sustainable with no inflation and even less sustainable with inflation. Also Medicare does not pay for nursing care of their boomer parents whose retirement savings are disappearing fast due to low interest rates. Many of these millennials will have to dig deep to pay for the inflated nursing care of their boomer parents.

I think that an economist that advocates high inflation is not a very scholarly economist. Has there ever been a high inflation nation that is the envy of other nations?

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

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on July 22, 2014

Venezuela’s car culture fades as dollars are hard to come by.
Production is drying up in what was once South America’s third-largest auto industry as big auto makers can’t obtain dollars to pay parts suppliers and sky-high inflation turns older cars into investment vehicles, the WSJ’s Ezequiel Minaya reports. Balance sheets have been battered, with revenue vulnerable to devaluation and trapped in Venezuela because of currency controls.

Jensen Comment
The irony is that fuel is almost free in oil-rich Venezuela. But violent car stealing, funerals, and spare parts are so expensive that it's best to deeply hide the car from sight.

What Is Fracking? This Simple Animation Is The Best Explanation We've Ever Seen ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/marathon-oil-animation-on-hydraulic-fracking-2014-7?op=1#ixzz387Gv9tlq

REPORT OF JUDITH A. MALONE, BENTLEY UNIVERSITY ETHICS OFFICER, CONCERNING DR. JAMES E. HUNTON
July 21, 2014
https://www.bentley.edu/files/Hunton report July21.pdf
 

Thank you Rhoda Icerman for the heads for the link to a Bentley College 2014 explanation of the data fabrication of Professor James A. Hunton.

Links to the Boston Globe and Chronicle of Higher Education reports of the Professor Hunton data fabrication scandal ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/bentley-u-finds-former-professor-wrote-2-papers-with-false-data/82515?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
Since accountics research is rarely replicated and or even commented upon in accounting research journals, detection of data fabrication is a rare event. It was therefore a total shock to the academic accounting research world when the Hunton and Gold paper was retracted by The Accounting Review in 2012. To my knowledge this was only the second instance of a paper retraction by TAR since it started publishing in 1926.

At the time the only explanation is that the retracted Hunton and Gold paper had a "misstatement." Until now, there were no details given about the nature of this "misstatement."

"Following Retraction, Bentley Professor Resigns," Inside Higher Ed, December 21, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/12/21/following-retraction-bentley-professor-resigns

James E. Hunton, a prominent accounting professor at Bentley University, has resigned amid an investigation of the retraction of an article of which he was the co-author, The Boston Globe reported. A spokeswoman cited "family and health reasons" for the departure, but it follows the retraction of an article he co-wrote in the journal Accounting Review. The university is investigating the circumstances that led to the journal's decision to retract the piece.

An Accounting Review Article is Retracted

One of the article that Dan mentions has been retracted, according to
http://aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/accr-10326?af=R 

Retraction: A Field Experiment Comparing the Outcomes of Three Fraud Brainstorming Procedures: Nominal Group, Round Robin, and Open Discussion

James E. Hunton, Anna Gold Bentley University and Erasmus University Erasmus University This article was originally published in 2010 in The Accounting Review 85 (3) 911–935; DOI: 10/2308/accr.2010.85.3.911.

The authors confirmed a misstatement in the article and were unable to provide supporting information requested by the editor and publisher. Accordingly, the article has been retracted.

 REPORT OF JUDITH A. MALONE, BENTLEY UNIVERSITY ETHICS OFFICER, CONCERNING DR. JAMES E. HUNTON
July 21, 2014

Pursuant to the Bentley University Ethics Complaint Procedures (“Ethics Policy”), this report summarizes the results of an eighteen - month investigation into two separate allegations of research misconduct that were received by Bentley in November 2012 and January 2013 against James E. Hunton, a former Professor of Accountancy. The complainants – one a confidential reporter (as defined in the Ethics Policy) and the other a publisher – alleged that Dr. Hunton engaged in research misconduct in connection wit h two papers that he published while a faculty member at the University: “A Field Experiment Comparing the Outcomes of Three Fraud Brainstorming Procedures: Nominal Group, Round Robin, and Open Discussion,” The Accounting Review 85 (3): 911 - 935 (“Fraud Br barnstorming”) and “The Relationship between Perceived Tone at the Top and Earnings Quality,” Contemporary Accounting Research 28 (4): 1190 - 1224 (“Tone at the Top”).

Because of concerns regarding Fraud Brainstorming that the editors at The Accounting Review had been discussing with Dr. Hunton since May 2012, the editors withdrew that paper in November 2012. Bentley received the allegation of research misconduct from the confidential reporter later that month. The confidential reporter also raised questions about ten other articles that Dr. Hunton published or provided data for while he was at Bentley, which, the reporter alleged, raised similar questions of research integrity.

In my role as Ethics Officer, it was my duty to make the preliminary determination n about whether the allegations warranted a full investigation. To make that determination, I met with Dr. Hunton in person when Bentley received this allegation, after I first instructed Bentley IT to back up and preserve all of his electronic data store d on Bentley’s servers. During that meeting, we discussed the allegation, I explained the process that would be followed if I found an investigation was warranted, and I described the need for his cooperation, including the specific admonition that he pre serve, and make available to me, all relevant materials, including electronic and paper documents. This information and these instructions were confirmed in writing to Dr. Hunton. Dr. Hunton resigned shortly after that meeting, which coincided with my de termination that a full investigation was warranted.

In January 2013 as the investigation was just getting underway, Bentley received the second allegation of research misconduct from the editor of Contemporary Accounting Research. The editor had contacted ted Dr. Hunton directly in November 2012 with concerns about Tone at the Top after the Fraud Brainstorming paper was retracted. The journal brought the issue to Bentley’s attention after the response it received failed to resolve its concerns. When Bentley received this second allegation, I informed Dr. Hunton of it, as well.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The last paragraph of the article suggests that Professor Hunton did not cooperate in the investigation to the extent that it is unknown if his prior research papers were also based upon fabricated data. The last paragraph reads as follows:

Bentley cannot determine with confidence which other papers may be based on fabricated data. We will identify all of the co - authors on papers Dr. Hunton published while he was at Bentley that involve research data. We will inform them that, unless they have independent evidence of the validity of the data, we plan to ask the journals in which the papers they co - authored with Dr. Hunton were published to determine, with the assistance of the co - authors, whether the data analyzed in the papers were valid. The various journals will then have the discretion to decide whether any further action is warranted, including retracting or qualifying, with regard to an y of Dr. Hunton’s papers that they published

November 28, 2012 forward from Dan Stone

Anna Gold sent me the following statement and also indicated that she had no objections to my posting it on AECM:

Explanation of Retraction (Hunton & Gold 2010)

On November 9, 2012, The Accounting Review published an early-view version of the voluntary retraction of Hunton & Gold (2010). The retraction will be printed in the January 2013 issue with the following wording:

“The authors confirmed a misstatement in the article and were unable to provide supporting information requested by the editor and publisher. Accordingly, the article has been retracted.”

The following statement explains the reason for the authors’ voluntary retraction. In the retracted article, the authors reported that the 150 offices of the participating CPA firm on which the study was based were located in the United States. In May 2012, the lead author learned from the coordinating partner of the participating CPA firm that the 150 offices included both domestic and international offices of the firm. The authors apologize for the inadvertently inaccurate description of the sample frame.

The Editor and the Chairperson of the Publications Committee of the American Accounting Association subsequently requested more information about the study and the participating CPA firm. Unfortunately, the information they requested is subject to a confidentiality agreement between the lead author and the participating firm; thus, the lead author has a contractual obligation not to disclose the information requested by the Editor and the Chairperson. The second author was neither involved in administering the experiment nor in receiving the data from the CPA firm. The second author does not know the identity of the CPA firm or the coordinating partner at the CPA firm. The second author is not a party to the confidentiality agreement between the lead author and the CPA firm.

The authors offered to print a correction of the inaccurate description of the sample frame; however, the Editor and the Chairperson rejected that offer. Consequently, in spite of the authors' belief that the inaccurate description of the sample does not materially impact either the internal validity of the study or the conclusions set forth in the Article, the authors consider it appropriate to voluntarily withdraw the Article from The Accounting Review at this time. Should the participating CPA firm change its position on releasing the requested information in the future, the authors will request that the Editor and the Chairperson consider reinstating the paper.

Signed:

James Hunton Anna Gold

References: Hunton, J. E. and Gold, A. (2010), “A field experiment comprising the outcomes of three fraud brainstorming procedures: Nominal group, round robin, and open discussions,” The Accounting Review 85(3): 911-935.

 

December 1, 2012 reply from Harry Markopolos <notreallyharry@outlook.com> 

Harry Markopolos <notreallyharry@outlook.com>

The explanation provided by the Hunton and Gold regarding the recent TAR retraction seems to provide more questions than answers. Some of those questions raise serious concerns about the validity of the study.

1. In the paper, the audit clients are described as publically listed (p. 919), and since the paper describes SAS 99 as being applicable to these clients, they would presumably be listed in the U.S. However, according to Audit Analytics, for fiscal year 2007, the Big Four auditor with the greatest number of worldwide offices with at least one SEC registrant was PwC, with 134 offices (the remaining firms each had 130 offices). How can you take a random sample of 150 offices from a population of (at most) 134?

Further, the authors state that only clients from the retail, manufacturing, and service industries with at least $1 billion in gross revenues with a December 31, 2007 fiscal year-end were considered (p. 919). This restriction further limits the number of offices with eligible clients. For example, the Big Four auditor with the greatest number of offices with at least one SEC registrant with at least $1 billion in gross revenues with a December 31, 2007 fiscal year end was Ernst & Young, with 102 offices (followed by PwC, Deloitte and KPMG, with 94, 86, and 83 offices, respectively). Limiting by industry would further reduce the pool of offices with eligible clients (this would probably be the most limiting factor, since most industries tend to be concentrated primarily within a handful of offices).

2. Why the firm would use a random sample of their worldwide offices in the first place, especially a sample including foreign affiliates of the firm? Why not use every US office (or every worldwide office with SEC registrants)? The design further limited participation to one randomly selected client per office (p. 919). This design decision is especially odd. If the firm chose to sample from the applicable population of offices, why not use a smaller sample of offices and a greater number of clients per office? Also, why wouldn’t the firm just sample from the pool of eligible clients? Finally, would the firm really expect its foreign affiliates to be happy to participate just because the US firm is asking them to do so? Would it not be much simpler and more effective to focus on US offices and get large numbers of clients from the largest US Offices (e.g., New York, Chicago, LA) and fill in the remaining clients needed to reach 150 clients from smaller offices?

3. Given the current hesitancy of the Big Four to allow any meaningful access to data, why would the international offices be consistently willing to participate in the study, especially since each national affiliate of the Big Four is a distinct legal entity? The coordination of this study across the firm’s international offices seems like a herculean effort, at least. Further, even if the authors were not aware that the population of offices included international offices, the lead author was presumably aware of the identity of the partner coordinating the study for the firm. Footnote 4 of the paper and discussion on page 919 suggest that the US national office coordinated the study. It seems quite implausible that the US national office alone would be able to coordinate the study internationally.

4. In the statement that has been circulated among the accounting research community, the authors state:

“The second author was neither involved in administering the experiment nor in receiving the data from the CPA firm. The second author does not know the identity of the CPA firm or the coordinating partner at the CPA firm. The second author is not a party to the confidentiality agreement between the lead author and the CPA firm.”

However, this statement is inconsistent with language in the paper suggesting that both authors had access to the data and were involved in discussions with the firm regarding the design of the study (e.g. Footnote 17). Also, isn’t this kind of arrangement quite odd, at best? Not even the second author could verify the data. We are left with only the first author’s word that this study actually took place with no way for anyone (not even the second author or the journal editor) to obtain any kind of assurance on the matter. Why wouldn’t the firm be willing to allow Anna or Harry Evans to sign a confidentiality agreement in order to obtain some kind of independent verification? If the firm was willing to allow the study in the first place, it seems quite unreasonable for them to be unwilling to allow a reputable third party (e.g. Harry) to obtain verification of the legitimacy of the study. In addition, assuming the firm is this extremely vigilant in not allowing Harry or Anna to know about the firm, does it seem odd that the firm failed to read the paper before publication and, therefore, note the errors in the paper, including the claim that is made in multiple places in the paper that the data came from a random sample of the firm’s US offices?

5. Why do the authors state that the paper is being voluntarily withdrawn if the authors don’t believe that the validity of the paper is in any way questioned? The retraction doesn’t really seem voluntary. If the authors did actually offer to retract the study that implies that the errors in the paper are not simply innocent mistakes.

Given that most, if not all US offices would have had to be participants in the study (based on the discussion above), it wouldn’t be too hard to obtain some additional information from individuals at the firms to verify whether or not the study actually took place. In particular, if we were to locate a handful of partners from each of the Big Four who were office-managing partners in 2008, we could ask them if their office participated in the study. If none of those partners recall their office having participated in the study, the reported data would appear to be quite suspect.

Sincerely,

Harry Markopolos

Jensen Comment
Thanks to the Ethics Officer at Bentley College on July 14, 2014 we now know more of the story.

I have no idea what happened to Professor Hunton after he resigned from Bentley University in 2012.

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

"U.S. Senator’s Academic Thesis Contains Evidence of Plagiarism," by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/u-s-senators-college-thesis-contains-evidence-of-plagiarism?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Sen. John E. Walsh, a Montana Democrat, apparently plagiarized parts of his thesis on American Middle East policy, copying large sections from a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace document without attribution, The New York Times reports.

The thesis, written while Mr. Walsh was completing a master’s degree at the United States Army War College, a graduate-level institution, concludes with six policy recommendations, all of which were copied from the Carnegie document nearly verbatim.

Mr. Walsh said on Tuesday that he didn’t think he had plagiarized the paper, adding, “I didn’t do anything intentional here.”

Also see
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/07/25/army-war-college-starts-plagiarism-inquiry#sthash.FvtjCFVj.dpbs 

Bob Jensen's threads on celebrities who plagiarize ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities

Adjunct Accounting Professor Charged With Filming (Male) Students in Bathroom," Inside Higher Ed, July 25, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/07/25/professor-charged-filming-students-bathroom#sthash.roBBPYQD.dpbs

Jensen Comment
It's hard to explain this as an accounting research study.

"Prototype Display Lets You Say Goodbye to Reading Glasses:  Researchers are developing technology that can adjust an image on a display so you can see it clearly without corrective lenses," by Rachel Metz, MIT's Technology Review,July 23, 2014 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529191/prototype-display-lets-you-say-goodbye-to-reading-glasses/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140724

"What Else Could Smart Contact Lenses Do? Besides health tracking, contact lens technology under development could enable drug delivery, night vision, and augmented reality," by Suzanne Jacobs, MIT's Technology Review, July 23, 2014 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529196/what-else-could-smart-contact-lenses-do/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140724

"To Fight Grade Inflation in the Humanities, Add Context," by Andrew J. Perrin, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/To-Fight-Grade-Inflation-in/147793/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

. . .

I am an unlikely candidate to lead grading-reform efforts. The standard assumption is that the so-called STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are the "hard graders," the humanities and most of the social sciences the grade inflators. And my subfields—cultural sociology and social theory—are particularly susceptible to the steady upward creep of grades because their intellectual style is closer to the humanities than the sciences. I suspect this pattern is due in part to the inherently subjective nature of evaluation in humanistic fields, in part to the fact that students don’t complain when their grades are too high, and in part to the reluctance to exercise judgment that has characterized the humanities in recent decades.

Whatever the causes, my experience is that grade inflation contributes greatly to the devaluing of the humanities and some social sciences. In fact, humanists have, if anything, more reason than our STEM colleagues to push back against the expectation of excellent grades for only fair performance.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
In many colleges the Departments of Education have the biggest problems with grade inflation. Departments of Business across the USA are mixed in terms of grade inflation reputation. Business schools have the luxury in many colleges of not having to beg for majors to justify offering advanced courses. Its tough to have an advanced curriculum for less than ten graduates in a discipline. In many cases business schools have what the college considers a disproportionate number of majors. This gives them the ability to be tougher graders than some of the humanities departments that are starving for majors.

Also business courses may also attract some of the less talented and less motivated students that are more disserving of low grades. I have been in large universities where business schools attract a disproportionate number of students who washed out of engineering programs.

Within the business school some disciplines vary in terms of student talent and motivation. For example, it is common for accounting departments to put higher thresholds on overall gpa requirements to major in accounting because students learn that jobs are more plentiful in the field of accounting. Sometimes these requirements are quite high in the 3.0-3.5 gpa barrier threshold to major in accounting. In turn this contributes to grade inflation in accounting courses since there are fewer dummies to round out the grading distribution.

But in nearly all departments within USA colleges and universities the biggest disgrace in higher education is grade inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
The major reasons are teaching evaluations and the way gpa averages became keys to the kingdom for admission to graduate schools and getting jobs.

Grade distribution by course and section at UW-Madison (since 2004)---
http://www.metafilter.com/110462/Grade-distribution-by-course-and-section-at-UWMadison

The grade distribution for all courses at UW-Madison is available going back to the spring 2004 semester. Unlike studies of aggregate grades that document grade inflation with time, this site provides grade distributions for each individual course and section. The data clearly shows that students in STEM courses at Madison receive markedly lower grades than students in education courses. Cornell recently stopped posting similar data because it believes access to this information causes grade inflation because students select courses with higher medium grade averages. This recent article addresses the question of grade inflation more generally and the efforts at UNC to fight it. Meanwhile, this student editorial in the Bowdoin newspaper argues that faculty at selective schools must continue to inflate grades so that students can maintain a competitive advantage. Also, see this previous post.
posted by Seymour Zamboni (91 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite

I am a professor at UW-Madison and I blogged about this data last year, when the Capital Times did a front-page story on it.

My take on grade inflation from Slate: grade inflation in itself probably doesn't matter, but differential grading between majors probably does.
posted by escabeche at 3:52 PM on December 13, 2011 [5 favorites]

 

As someone who double-majored in the humanities and STEM: This falls squarely into the category of "Things that are pretty obvious, but it's nice to have the numbers."
posted by Tomorrowful at 3:52 PM on December 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

 

In five years of teaching, I have yet to hear a convincing argument for the existence of grade inflation.

Instead, what I have seen is that fewer and fewer professors are allowed to continue teaching who believe that students should fail regardless of effort. I just turned in my own grades, and I can tell you that the distribution was a nearly perfect Bimodal shape.

That said, the only students who fail my class are those who apply no effort. You may get a noncredit C-, but you will not fail, so long as you put in some damned effort.
posted by strixus at 3:54 PM on December 13, 2011 [3 favorites]

 

I am in grad school after going to undergrad about 20 years ago. First of all, my undergrad did not have + or - and did not calculate GPAs, both to try and dissuade us from worrying about grades too much. But it sure feels like grades mean different things now. Classes over 25 students have to be curved so that the average grade is a B+. I am taking a bunch of quant courses along with International Security Policy classes where the grade is based on a paper and the effort that goes into the reading/writing courses has to be half of what goes into the quant courses.
posted by shothotbot at 3:59 PM on December 13, 2011

 

My niece just started at a major university in the South. Her older brother, another major university.

They're both great kids, both on full ride academic scholarships. That said, neither is in a STEM program.

I wonder if they'll really get anything out of their four years that'll be truly, truly useful, other than friendship and social skills.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:02 PM on December 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

 

This post on the NY Times blog has some nice figures:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-college-grade-inflation/?src=tptw
posted by gyp casino at 4:04 PM on December 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

 

When college degrees were rarer, did it make as much of a difference to get a C or a B?

Because in today's environment, when college degrees are very common, a lot of employers demand that you have a GPA above a 3.7. I used to review resumes and had various transcripts in front of me where a lot of students had high cumulative GPAs in classes that had titles similar to New York Times bestsellers.

It's a competitive world. I'm not surprised that students are probably working harder (or that college professors are easy graders). After all, you have expectations like those of Google's Marissa Mayer: "“One candidate got a C in macroeconomics…That’s troubling to me. Good students are good at all things.”
posted by anniecat at 4:06 PM on December 13, 2011 [7 favorites]

 

Well it's really just an arms race. If you're the school that bucks the trend and actually hands out C's to your average students and reserves even B's for above-average ones, you are also going to be the school that sends very few of your students to top graduate programs.

You are also going to be the school whose alums have resumes that appear lackluster in comparison to their peers' and who have a tough time getting jobs.

You are going to be the school with a less professionally successful alumni base, lower rates and amounts of alumni giving, a smaller endowment, less money to attract top professors and students to your school....

There may be a handful of ultra-prestigious institutions that can get away with being rigorous in their grading, but you can probably count them on both hands.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 4:10 PM on December 13, 2011 [9 favorites]

 

I went to Harvey Mudd College, a science and engineering school. It's a small school, so one of the mandatory freshman science lecture courses accommodated the entire matriculating class (who were pretty smart, with one third getting a perfect score on the math SAT).

Anyway, I recall a midterm freshman exam where we had an average score that was less than 60%. The letter grades we received were correspondingly non-inflated, which kind of sucked when trying to compete with graduates from other institutions.
posted by exogenous at 4:10 PM on December 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

 

dixiecup, "ultra-prestigious institutions" are well known for giving out As like candy, while public schools are legendary for flunking people left, right ,and centre. It seems that you don't advance to higher education or good jobs based on your marks from places like that, it's 100% based on the network you've built.
posted by Yowser at 4:18 PM on December 13, 2011 [3 favorites]

 

grades are 90% social engineering... the idea that they represent some form of "scientific" assessment derives from the social anxiety created by the GI Bill and the opening of higher education to the hoi polloi...
posted by ennui.bz at 4:23 PM on December 13, 2011

 

You touch on another interesting point with the state school comparison. With tuition being what it is these days, colleges no longer have students so much as they have customers. How can you ethically justify taking $50,000 a year from some 18 year old kid, and then telling him that you're going to fail him? The cost of higher education has established a quid pro quo situation. It would be practically unconscionable not to give someone passing marks after they've laid out the amount of money it costs to go to college.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 4:25 PM on December 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

 

Thank god for grade inflation in my gen-ed/humanities courses. Otherwise I never would have been able to put the time into my engineering courses that I did.
posted by sbutler at 4:27 PM on December 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

Comments continued at
http://www.metafilter.com/110462/Grade-distribution-by-course-and-section-at-UWMadison 

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor 

"Chinese Researchers Stop Wheat Disease with Gene Editing:  Researchers have created wheat that is resistant to a common disease, using advanced gene editing methods," by David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, July 21, 2014 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529181/chinese-researchers-stop-wheat-disease-with-gene-editing/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140722

Jensen Comment
Break baked with this wheat will be a touch sell in Vermont following a new GMO labeling law. Is putting a label on items in each restaurant's plate of food practical? Actually it won't matter much since so many people in Vermont cross the border to shop in New Hampshire for lower prices and fewer sales taxes.

Details Begin to Emerge in Murder of Dan Markel (Florida State University law professor) ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/07/details-begin-to-emerge-.html

Paul Krugman has butchered numbers when writing about fiscal policy in nations such as France, Estonia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Daniel J. Mitchell --- Click Here
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/danieljmitchell/2014/07/26/krugmans-gotcha-moment-leaves-something-to-be-desired-n1867208?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

"Is Paul Krugman Leaving Princeton In Quiet Disgrace?" by Ralph Benki, Forbes, July 14, 2014 ---
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2014/07/14/is-paul-krugman-leaving-princeton-in-quiet-disgrace/

Professor Paul Krugman is leaving Princeton.  Is he leaving in disgrace?

Not long, as these things go, before his departure was announced Krugman thoroughly was indicted and publicly eviscerated for intellectual dishonesty by Harvard’s Niall Ferguson in a hard-hitting three-part series in the Huffington Post, beginning here, and with a coda in Project Syndicate, all summarized at Forbes.com.  Ferguson, on Krugman:

Where I come from … we do not fear bullies. We despise them. And we do so because we understand that what motivates their bullying is a deep sense of insecurity. Unfortunately for Krugtron the Invincible, his ultimate nightmare has just become a reality. By applying the methods of the historian – by quoting and contextualizing his own published words – I believe I have now made him what he richly deserves to be: a figure of fun, whose predictions (and proscriptions) no one should ever again take seriously.

Princeton, according to Bloomberg News, acknowledged Krugman’s departure with an extraordinarily tepid comment by a spokesperson. “He’s been a valued member of our faculty and we appreciate his 14 years at Princeton.”

Shortly after Krugman’s departure was announced no less than the revered Paul Volcker, himself a Princeton alum, made a comment — subject unnamed — sounding as if directed at Prof. Krugman.   It sounded like “Don’t let the saloon doors hit you on the way out.  Bub.”

To the Daily Princetonian (later reprised by the Wall Street Journal, Volcker stated with refreshing bluntness:

The responsibility of any central bank is price stability. … They ought to make sure that they are making policies that are convincing to the public and to the markets that they’re not going to tolerate inflation.

This was followed by a show-stopping statement:  “This kind of stuff that you’re being taught at Princeton disturbs me.”

Taught at Princeton by … whom?

Paul Krugman, perhaps?  Krugman, last year, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times entitled  Not Enough Inflation.  It betrayed an extremely louche, at best, attitude toward inflation’s insidious dangers. Smoking gun?

Volcker’s comment, in full context:

The responsibility of the government is to have a stable currency. This kind of stuff that you’re being taught at Princeton disturbs me. Your teachers must be telling you that if you’ve got expected inflation, then everybody adjusts and then it’s OK. Is that what they’re telling you? Where did the question come from?

Is Krugman leaving in disgrace? Krugman really is a disgrace … both to Princeton and to the principle of monetary integrity. Eighteenth century Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey) president John Witherspoon, wrote, in his Essay on Money:
 

Let us next consider the evil that is done by paper. This is what I would particularly request the reader to pay attention to, as it was what this essay was chiefly intended to show, and what the public seems but little aware of. The evil is this: All paper introduced into circulation, and obtaining credit as gold and silver, adds to the quantity of the medium, and thereby, as has been shown above, increases the price of industry and its fruits.

“Increases the price of industry and its fruits?”  That’s what today is called “inflation.”

Inflation is a bad thing.  Period.  Most of all it cheats working people and those on fixed incomes who Krugman pretends to champion.  Volcker comes down squarely, with Witherspoon, on the side of monetary integrity. Krugman, cloaked in undignified sanctimony, comes down, again and again, on the side of … monetary finagling.

Krugman consistently misrepresents his opponents’ positions, constructs fictive straw men, addresses marginal figures, and ignores inconvenient truths set forward by figures of probity such as the Bank of England and the Bundesbank, thoughtful work such as that by Member of Parliament (with a Cambridge Ph.D. in economic history) Kwasi Kwarteng, and, right here at home, respected thought leaders such as Steve Forbes and Lewis E. Lehrman (with whose Institute this writer has a professional affiliation).

Continued in article

Question
Are financial analysts overrated?

Answer
This appears to be the case for those advising mutual funds.

"Who Routinely Trounces the Stock Market? Try 2 Out of 2,862 Funds," The New York Times, July 19, 2014 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/your-money/who-routinely-trounces-the-stock-market-try-2-out-of-2862-funds.html?_r=0

"The Disruption Machine What the gospel of innovation gets wrong," by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, July 23, 2014 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine?currentPage=all&utm_source=howtogeek&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

. . .

Porter was interested in how companies succeed. The scholar who in some respects became his successor, Clayton M. Christensen, entered a doctoral program at the Harvard Business School in 1989 and joined the faculty in 1992. Christensen was interested in why companies fail. In his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” he argued that, very often, it isn’t because their executives made bad decisions but because they made good decisions, the same kind of good decisions that had made those companies successful for decades. (The “innovator’s dilemma” is that “doing the right thing is the wrong thing.”) As Christensen saw it, the problem was the velocity of history, and it wasn’t so much a problem as a missed opportunity, like a plane that takes off without you, except that you didn’t even know there was a plane, and had wandered onto the airfield, which you thought was a meadow, and the plane ran you over during takeoff. Manufacturers of mainframe computers made good decisions about making and selling mainframe computers and devising important refinements to them in their R. & D. departments—“sustaining innovations,” Christensen called them—but, busy pleasing their mainframe customers, one tinker at a time, they missed what an entirely untapped customer wanted, personal computers, the market for which was created by what Christensen called “disruptive innovation”: the selling of a cheaper, poorer-quality product that initially reaches less profitable customers but eventually takes over and devours an entire industry.

Ever since “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: “The degree is in disruption,” the university announced. “Disrupt or be disrupted,” the venture capitalist Josh Linkner warns in a new book, “The Road to Reinvention,” in which he argues that “fickle consumer trends, friction-free markets, and political unrest,” along with “dizzying speed, exponential complexity, and mind-numbing technology advances,” mean that the time has come to panic as you’ve never panicked before. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, who blog for Forbes, insist that we have entered a new and even scarier stage: “big bang disruption.” “This isn’t disruptive innovation,” they warn. “It’s devastating innovation.”

Things you own or use that are now considered to be the product of disruptive innovation include your smartphone and many of its apps, which have disrupted businesses from travel agencies and record stores to mapmaking and taxi dispatch. Much more disruption, we are told, lies ahead. Christensen has co-written books urging disruptive innovation in higher education (“The Innovative University”), public schools (“Disrupting Class”), and health care (“The Innovator’s Prescription”). His acolytes and imitators, including no small number of hucksters, have called for the disruption of more or less everything else. If the company you work for has a chief innovation officer, it’s because of the long arm of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” If your city’s public-school district has adopted an Innovation Agenda, which has disrupted the education of every kid in the city, you live in the shadow of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” If you saw the episode of the HBO sitcom “Silicon Valley” in which the characters attend a conference called TechCrunch Disrupt 2014 (which is a real thing), and a guy from the stage, a Paul Rudd look-alike, shouts, “Let me hear it, DISSS-RUPPTTT!,” you have heard the voice of Clay Christensen, echoing across the valley.

Last month, days after the Times’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., fired Jill Abramson, the paper’s executive editor, the Times’ 2014 Innovation Report was leaked. It includes graphs inspired by Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma,” along with a lengthy, glowing summary of the book’s key arguments. The report explains, “Disruption is a predictable pattern across many industries in which fledgling companies use new technology to offer cheaper and inferior alternatives to products sold by established players (think Toyota taking on Detroit decades ago). Today, a pack of news startups are hoping to ‘disrupt’ our industry by attacking the strongest incumbent—The New York Times.”

A pack of attacking startups sounds something like a pack of ravenous hyenas, but, generally, the rhetoric of disruption—a language of panic, fear, asymmetry, and disorder—calls on the rhetoric of another kind of conflict, in which an upstart refuses to play by the established rules of engagement, and blows things up. Don’t think of Toyota taking on Detroit. Startups are ruthless and leaderless and unrestrained, and they seem so tiny and powerless, until you realize, but only after it’s too late, that they’re devastatingly dangerous: Bang! Ka-boom! Think of it this way: the Times is a nation-state; BuzzFeed is stateless. Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption. Beginning in the eighteenth century, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross once pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they started something new—historicism, the idea “that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.” Things began looking up. First, there was that, then there was this, and this is better than that. The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.

Most big ideas have loud critics. Not disruption. Disruptive innovation as the explanation for how change happens has been subject to little serious criticism, partly because it’s headlong, while critical inquiry is unhurried; partly because disrupters ridicule doubters by charging them with fogyism, as if to criticize a theory of change were identical to decrying change; and partly because, in its modern usage, innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box.

The idea of progress—the notion that human history is the history of human betterment—dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War. It had critics from the start, and, in the last century, even people who cherish the idea of progress, and point to improvements like the eradication of contagious diseases and the education of girls, have been hard-pressed to hold on to it while reckoning with two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, genocide and global warming. Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.

The word “innovate”—to make new—used to have chiefly negative connotations: it signified excessive novelty, without purpose or end. Edmund Burke called the French Revolution a “revolt of innovation”; Federalists declared themselves to be “enemies to innovation.” George Washington, on his deathbed, was said to have uttered these words: “Beware of innovation in politics.” Noah Webster warned in his dictionary, in 1828, “It is often dangerous to innovate on the customs of a nation.”

The redemption of innovation began in 1939, when the economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his landmark study of business cycles, used the word to mean bringing new products to market, a usage that spread slowly, and only in the specialized literatures of economics and business. (In 1942, Schumpeter theorized about “creative destruction”; Christensen, retrofitting, believes that Schumpeter was really describing disruptive innovation.) “Innovation” began to seep beyond specialized literatures in the nineteen-nineties, and gained ubiquity only after 9/11. One measure: between 2011 and 2014, Time, the Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Forbes, and even Better Homes and Gardens published special “innovation” issues—the modern equivalents of what, a century ago, were known as “sketches of men of progress.”

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved.

Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle of the past (this has happened) and as a model for the future (it will keep happening). The strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions have been met.

. . .

Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

The upstarts who work at startups don’t often stay at any one place for very long. (Three out of four startups fail. More than nine out of ten never earn a return.) They work a year here, a few months there—zany hours everywhere. They wear jeans and sneakers and ride scooters and share offices and sprawl on couches like Great Danes. Their coffee machines look like dollhouse-size factories.

They are told that they should be reckless and ruthless. Their investors, if they’re like Josh Linkner, tell them that the world is a terrifying place, moving at a devastating pace. “Today I run a venture capital firm and back the next generation of innovators who are, as I was throughout my earlier career, dead-focused on eating your lunch,” Linkner writes. His job appears to be to convince a generation of people who want to do good and do well to learn, instead, remorselessness. Forget rules, obligations, your conscience, loyalty, a sense of the commonweal. If you start a business and it succeeds, Linkner advises, sell it and take the cash. Don’t look back. Never pause. Disrupt or be disrupted.

But they do pause and they do look back, and they wonder. Meanwhile, they tweet, they post, they tumble in and out of love, they ponder. They send one another sly messages, touching the screens of sleek, soundless machines with a worshipful tenderness. They swap novels: David Foster Wallace, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith. “Steppenwolf” is still available in print, five dollars cheaper as an e-book. He’s a wolf, he’s a man. The rest is unreadable. So, as ever, is the future.

 

"'Golden Goose' Award Goes to 3 Economists,"  Inside Higher Ed, July 18, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/07/18/golden-goose-award-goes-3-economists#sthash.xQ9c0hSK.dpbs

Jensen Comment
The Golden Goose Awards" are those awards that at one time probably would have received Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Awards for useless research funded by the Federal government ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award

However,, the Golden Goose Awards later on proved to have potential practical value.

Hiring Forecast Has Good News for Accountants ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/article/hiring-forecast-has-good-news-accountants/223606

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

"B-Schools Finally Acknowledge: Companies Want MBAs Who Can Code," by Cory Weinberg, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 11, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-11/b-schools-finally-acknowledge-companies-want-mbas-who-can-code

Jensen Comment
One question is whether this is mostly a filtering criterion or a genuine criterion for hiring. For example, some popular business schools require students to complete two courses in calculus before matriculating as undergraduate business majors. It's not so much that calculus is a prerequisite for business courses as it is that calculus weeds out the dummies.

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

"Three Radical Changes That Can Save Business Schools From Extinction," by Cory Weinberg, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 16, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-16/business-schools-will-go-out-of-business-unless-they-radically-reinvent-themselves

If online education is a tsunami threatening the future of business schools, consider a recent report from two professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School an emergency manual on where top business schools should seek high ground.

Karl Ulrich, Wharton’s vice dean of innovation, and Christian Terwiesch, a professor of operations and information management, write in a paper published on Wednesday that the video technology used in massive open online courses (MOOCs) would make MBA classes 40 percent cheaper to produce. A shift to this cheaper model would radically alter the traditional full-time MBA, which relies on lots of professors to offer in-class lectures.

Business schools have tiptoed around big shifts so far (for example, only a handful of top B-schools have put their MBA programs online), but full-time MBA programs have three options if they want to avoid irrelevance or extinction, the authors write:

Give students a bigger, better MBA program

The professors, who have both taught popular MOOCs, calculated that schools spend about 100 times less for each student to finish an online course than a traditional course. They write that schools should harness those potential cost savings by remaking full-time MBA programs into campus programs that give students less classroom time, but more time for experiential learning or study abroad.

This is pretty close to the status quo for B-schools, they admit, but schools could still enhance the student experience. “You can either leave the old customer satisfaction in place and you have cost savings, or you hold cost per students constant and you can provide a more worthwhile experience for students,” says Terwiesch.

“Dramatically” downsize tenure-track faculty

The professors pose a question in the title of the paper: “Will video kill the classroom star?” They don’t answer the question definitively, but do say B-schools have the clear option of “dramatically” slicing the number of tenure slots once online education becomes dominant. Professors that can become masters of video will likely get higher salaries as a result, they write.

This route isn’t as likely to happen at top B-schools that have strong enrollments and don’t face serious cost pressures, but would appeal to other colleges and universities under financial duress, they write. The point hits a nerve across higher education: Moody’s Investors Service reported on Monday that higher education faces a negative financial outlook in part because MOOCs have “accelerated the pace of change in online delivery models over the last two years.”

To avoid the ax, business faculty “should think about what can we do to deliver value to our customers so when the world changes, we’re not a Kodak married to an old technology,” Terwiesch says.

Switch to an iTunes model

The professors compare a full-time MBA program to a Swiss army knife that students can buy today to bone up on basic finance, management, and marketing to “use it one day in the future.” MOOC technology could make that model irrelevant because too much time elapses between when students learn a skill and then put it into action in the workplace.

Instead, “business education has the potential to move to mini-courses that are delivered to the learner as needed, on demand,” they write. B-schools could also certify specific skills instead of bundling courses together. That kind of shift would “dramatically change the way in which business education is delivered.”

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

Katie Couric Interviews Maker of the World’s First Family Robot ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/yahoo-news-global-anchor-katie-couric-talks-with-91959423099.html

"Jibo the Family Robot Might be Oddly Charming, or Just Plain Odd," by Will Knight, MIT's Technology Review, July 16, 2014 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/529076/jibo-the-family-robot-might-be-oddly-charming-or-just-plain-odd/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140717

The “world’s first family robot” is based on efforts to elicit emotional response in humans—a powerful idea, but one fraught with challenges.

The roboticist Cynthia Breazeal has announced a product designed to fundamentally alter the way we interact with technology: the “world’s first family robot,” called Jibo. 

Resembling a static but animated lampshade (with a slightly Hal-like, glowing-orb face), Jibo is meant to perform relatively simple tasks like capturing video, relaying messages, and turning light switches on and off. The plan is also let outside developers create apps that interface with Jibo. There’s nothing particularly special about the functionality promised, but if the interface works as advertised (see the promotional video) it would be extraordinary. There are no conventional buttons, swipes, or commands to learn with Jibo; you’d simply talk to it as if it were a tiny robotic person. 

Jibo promises to let us experience technology in an altogether more natural way, and there’s good reason to believe such an interface would be enjoyable and compelling to use (see “An AI Pal that’s Better than ‘Her’”). A more natural way of controlling consumer devices could certainly prove handy as smart appliances begin multiplying in our homes—potentially simplifying a mess of different competing interfaces.

But Jibo’s impact will depend entirely on how well it grapples with the complexities of human communication and the subtleties of social interaction.

Some technology companies have already begun exploring more “sociable” interfaces, with products such as Siri, Apple’s voice-activated assistant. However, slow progress highlights the difficulty of designing a machine to carry on a convincing conversation with person while respecting social nuance (see “Social Intelligence”). So if Jibo’s voice interface is too limited, or if it fails to respond to social cues correctly, it will quickly prove more weird and bothersome than brilliant. 

Nonetheless, were Jibo, or something similar, to work really well it could prove irresistible. Breazeal’s academic work advanced the power of harnessing social signals in robots several decades ago. Her Kismet robot had an expressive eyes, ears, and lips—designed to elicit and respond to emotion in human users, and Breazeal and colleagues found that such “sociable machines” could elicit surprisingly powerful effects on the humans interacting with them. 

Continued in article

"Over Half Of EU Jobs Could Be Replaced By Computers," by Jeremy Bowles, Business Insider, July 22, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/over-half-of-jobs-in-the-eu-at-risk-2014-7

Based on a European application of Frey & Osborne (2013)’s data on the probability of job automation across occupations, the proportion of the EU work force predicted to be impacted significantly by advances in technology over the coming decades ranges from the mid-40% range (similar to the US) up to well over 60%.

Those authors expect that key technological advances — particular in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and mobile robotics — will impact primarily upon low-wage, low-skill sectors traditionally immune from automation.

As such, based on our application it is unsurprising that wealthy, northern EU countries are projected to be less affected than their peripheral neighbours.

But irrespective of geography these impacts will be substantial, averaging 54% across EU-28. In spite of several caveats we note in another more detailed blog post, the presently second-order issue of labour allocation in the face of technological change is likely to become a key policy concern in the coming years.

What these estimates imply for policy is clear: if we believe that technology will be able to overcome traditional hurdles among non-routine cognitive tasks then we must equip the next generation of workers with skills that benefit from technology rather than being threatened by it. Such skills are likely to emphasize social and creative intelligence, which suggests that appropriate shifts in education policy are surely requisite in order to meet this automated challenge.

Roll over the graphic below to see risk of computerization by country:

Continued in article

Read more:
http://www.bruegel.org/nc/blog/detail/article/1399-chart-of-the-week-54-percent-of-eu-jobs-at-risk-of-computerisation/#ixzz38IUrgQLq

More from Bruegel:

• Juncker’s new start for Europe
• Chart of the Week: 54% of EU jobs at risk of computerisation
• Blogs review: The Taylor Rule legislation debate
• Towards a European unemployment insurance?
• Fact of the week: Norway is the safest place on Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued in article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are American workers losing their jobs to machines?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A World Without Work," by Dana Rousmaniere, Harvard Business Review Blog, January 27, 2013 --- Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/morning-advantage/2013/01/morning-advantage-a-world-with.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Jensen Comment
Historically, graduates who could not find jobs enlisted in the military. Wars of the future, however, will be fought largely by drones, robots, orbiting orbiting satellites. This begs the question of where graduates who cannot find work are going to turn to when the military enlistment offices shut down and Amazon's warehouse robotics replace Wal-Mart in-store workers.

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

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

"Let's Start Telling Young People the Whole Truth About College," by Karen Cates, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 16, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-16/stop-feeding-high-school-students-the-myth-that-college-is-right-for-everyone

Jensen Comment
At last the media is catching on to what I've been arguing all along. Except for professional majors (especially in accounting, engineering, nursing, etc.) a college undergraduate diploma is often a costly investment that more often than not does not pay for itself unless you are one of the top graduates who qualifies for graduate school and invests more in graduate studies. Even some of the professional majors like accounting and engineering are five-year programs that are not strictly comparable to four-year undergraduate programs. I have a granddaughter who this year will graduate from a six-year pharmacy education program to which she was admitted as a sophomore in college. We also have a son and his wife who, after having four children, received their college diplomas in business and criminology respectively. Neither can find jobs that require college diplomas.

The main problem is that many college graduates either cannot or will not proceed to graduate school.

Another problem is that high school students often do not understand the relation between majors and career opportunities. For example, many graduate from high school thinking that business majors are in high demand. Actually they are in demand to a point, but the problem is that there are so many business majors in the USA that the supply greatly exceeds demand for an undergraduate business major as opposed to one that has a more technical specialty such as accounting, finance, and management information systems.

Computer science graduates are more in demand but the routes to advancement may be limited. It may be better to combine a business major with a computer science minor or vice versa. Or instead of general business choose a technical specialty such as accounting or finance or management information systems.

"College Graduates Don't Always Out-Earn High School Grads," by Allison Schrager, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 185, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-15/is-college-worth-it-some-high-school-grads-earn-more?campaign_id=DN071514 

. . .

When we look at distribution of the college wage premium—how much more the lowest-, middle-, and highest-earning quartiles make relative to high-school grads, the picture of risk becomes clearer. At every level short of graduate school, there’s a not-insignificant chance that a successful high-school graduate will out-earn you. The chances are greatest for college dropouts—the people who spend some time and money but don’t walk away with a degree.

To consider risk, I used the 2013 Current Population Survey conducted by the U.S. Census, which asks detailed questions about employment and earnings. As Avery and Turner did, I took the present discounted value of lifetime earnings, but I included non-students from age 18 to age 65. (Avery and Turner assume that everyone works for 42 years.) I hoped to capture the additional income gained from forgoing college. I also included part-time workers to capture income risk.

The figure below gives the 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile of expected lifetime earnings for different education groups, starting at age 18 and proceeding to age 65.

I found a $225,000 premium, less than half what Avery and Turner found, partly because I included part-time workers, combined men and women, and granted high school graduates additional working years. The biggest risk of going to college is dropping out: An unfinished degree barely increases your earnings while costing money and time. Vocational two-year degrees have a stronger positive effect on earning power than academic ones do. (Insert English major joke here.)

On average, college pays off, though not always. The wage premium comes with risk. For every degree short of a graduate degree, there’s a decent chance that a good high school graduate will out-earn you. The risk-adjusted premium of college needs to be weighed against the cost of tuition (PDF): In 2010, public, full-time community college tuition cost more than $10,000 a year; undergrad full-time tuition cost $16,000 at public universities and $37,000 at private schools.

None of this suggests that motivated students shouldn’t go to college, especially if they’re committed to finishing. A degree is still a good bet and technology rewards education more than ever. (The data here are based on earnings for current workers of all ages; they don’t capture the increasing returns to education expected in the future.) The data also don’t capture a further benefit to education: It helps people stay employed, at whatever wage range. The unemployment rate for high-school graduates is 7.5 percent, almost double the 4 percent rate among people with a B.A.

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

"Crack Down on Scientific Fraudsters," by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, The New York Times, July 10, 2014 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/opinion/crack-down-on-scientific-fraudsters.html?_r=2 

. . .

Even though research misconduct is far from rare, Dr. Han’s case was unusual in that he had to resign. Criminal charges against scientists who commit fraud are even more uncommon. In fact, according to a study published last year, “most investigators who engage in wrongdoing, even serious wrongdoing, continue to conduct research at their institutions.” As part of our reporting, we’ve written about multiple academic researchers who have been found guilty of misconduct and then have gone on to work at pharmaceutical giants. Unusual, too, is the fact that Iowa State has agreed to reimburse the government about $500,000 to cover several years of Dr. Han’s salary and that the National Institutes of Health has decided to withhold another $1.4 million that it had promised the university as part of the grant.

But don’t applaud yet, taxpayers: The N.I.H. isn’t doing anything about the rest of the $10 million granted to Dr. Han’s boss, Michael Cho, after the two scientists announced the apparently exciting results now known to be fraudulent.

In the vast majority of cases, in fact, funding is not repaid. And just a few of the hundreds of American scientists found to have committed misconduct have served prison time. In 2006, Eric T. Poehlman was sentenced to a year in prison — the first scientist to be imprisoned for falsifying a grant application — and also had to pay about $200,000 in restitution for whistle-blower lawsuits and lawyers’ fees. But the millions awarded to the University of Vermont for his work were never repaid.

Scott S. Reuben, an anesthesiologist, spent six months in federal prison starting in 2010 for faking data in many of his studies. Dr. Reuben was also forced to pay back more than $360,000 to Pfizer as restitution for misusing the drugmaker’s grant money.

But these are the rare cases. And Dr. Han may have remained one of the hundreds of fraudster scientists who faced little punishment if it weren’t for the attention of a senator. The three-year ban, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told the Office of Research Integrity in a Feb. 10 letter, “seems like a very light penalty for a doctor who purposely tampered with a research trial and directly caused millions of taxpayer dollars to be wasted on fraudulent studies.” (In fact, just two of the 11 cases reported by the O.R.I. last year led to outright bans. Most only required supervision by a scientist in good standing with research overseers.)Senator Grassley is correct: The office needs teeth, and the people who helped pull them, not surprisingly, were scientists. The office never recovered from its case against Thereza Imanishi-Kari, a Tufts University researcher accused of fraud in her work with a Nobel laureate, the biologist David Baltimore. In 1991, investigators at the O.R.I. — then called the Office of Scientific Integrity — found Dr. Imanishi-Kari guilty of misconduct and lying to cover up her actions, but in 1996 they were overruled by panelists for its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, who concluded that the office had failed to prove its case.

Scientists used the Imanishi-Kari case as an example of government oversight run amok. But the O.R.I.’s presence as a deterrent, and oversight, does far more good than harm. Congress should give it even more needed authority. A good starting point would be to grant the office the right to issue administrative subpoenas like those its sister agency, the National Science Foundation, can use to gain access to university documents. Without subpoena power, the O.R.I. is able to see only what institutions want to share. Congress should also help by apportioning more funding to the office, whose budget is currently about $8.6 million, down from $9.1 million in 2010.

There are suggestions that other countries may be starting to take the lead on stronger penalties, based on recent cases in France, Italy and Britain. Recouping losses from fraud and deliberate misconduct — not shrugging them off — should be a high priority for federal agencies that fund scientific research.

The good news is that finding a cure for federal-funding amnesia isn’t difficult. If the O.R.I. feels that its mandate does not include getting misused public money back, then Congress should widen the office’s authority and expand its budget.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
To investigate scientific fraud, follow the money. These days the money trail is deepest in health science and environmental science, especially research on climate change.

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

"The Corruption of Peer Review Is Harming Scientific Credibility:  Dubious studies on the danger of hurricane names may be laughable. But bad science can cause bad policy," by Hank Campbell, The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/articles/hank-campbell-the-corruption-of-peer-review-is-harming-scientific-credibility-1405290747?tesla=y&mod=djemMER_h&mg=reno64-wsj

Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July 8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so that certain papers were sure to get a positive review for placement in the journal. In one case, a paper's author gave glowing reviews to his own work using phony names.

Acoustics is an important field. But in biomedicine faulty research and a dubious peer-review process can have life-or-death consequences. In June, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and responsible for $30 billion in annual government-funded research, held a meeting to discuss ways to ensure that more published scientific studies and results are accurate. According to a 2011 report in the monthly journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, the results of two-thirds of 67 key studies analyzed by Bayer researchers from 2008-2010 couldn't be reproduced.

That finding was a bombshell. Replication is a fundamental tenet of science, and the hallmark of peer review is that other researchers can look at data and methodology and determine the work's validity. Dr. Collins and co-author Dr. Lawrence Tabak highlighted the problem in a January 2014 article in Nature. "What hope is there that other scientists will be able to build on such work to further biomedical progress," if no one can check and replicate the research, they wrote.

The authors pointed to several reasons for flawed studies, including "poor training of researchers in experimental design," an "emphasis on making provocative statements," and publications that don't "report basic elements of experimental design." They also said that "some scientists reputedly use a 'secret sauce' to make their experiments work—and withhold details from publication or describe them only vaguely to retain a competitive edge."

Papers with such problems or omissions would never see the light of day if sound peer-review practices were in place—and their absence at many journals is the root of the problem. Peer review involves an anonymous panel of objective experts critiquing a paper on its merits. Obviously, a panel should not contain anyone who agrees in advance to give the paper favorable attention and help it get published. Yet a variety of journals have allowed or overlooked such practices.

Absent rigorous peer review, we get the paper published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Titled "Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes," it concluded that hurricanes with female names cause more deaths than male-named hurricanes—ostensibly because implicit sexism makes people take the storms with a woman's name less seriously. The work was debunked once its methods were examined, but not before it got attention nationwide.

Such a dubious paper made its way into national media outlets because of the imprimatur of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.

Yet a look at the organization's own submission guidelines makes clear that if you are a National Academy member today, you can edit a research paper that you wrote yourself and only have to answer a few questions before an editorial board; you can even arrange to be the official reviewer for people you know. The result of such laxity isn't just the publication of a dubious finding like the hurricane gender-bias claim. Some errors can have serious consequences if bad science leads to bad policy.

In 2002 and 2010, papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claimed that a pesticide called atrazine was causing sex changes in frogs. As a result the Environmental Protection Agency set up special panels to re-examine the product's safety. Both papers had the same editor, David Wake of the University of California, Berkeley, who is a colleague of the papers' lead author, Tyrone Hayes, also of Berkeley.

In keeping with National Academy of Sciences policy, Prof. Hayes preselected Prof. Wake as his editor. Both studies were published without a review of the data used to reach the finding. No one has been able to reproduce the results of either paper, including the EPA, which did expensive, time-consuming reviews of the pesticide brought about by the published claims. As the agency investigated, it couldn't even use those papers about atrazine's alleged effects because the research they were based on didn't meet the criteria for legitimate scientific work. The authors refused to hand over data that led them to their claimed results—which meant no one could run the same computer program and match their results.

Earlier this month, Nature retracted two studies it had published in January in which researchers from the Riken Center for Development Biology in Japan asserted that they had found a way to turn some cells into embryonic stem cells by a simple stress process. The studies had passed peer review, the magazine said, despite flaws that included misrepresented information.

Fixing peer review won't be easy, although exposing its weaknesses is a good place to start. Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley, is a co-founder of the Public Library of Science, one of the world's largest nonprofit science publishers. He told me in an email that, "We need to get away from the notion, proven wrong on a daily basis, that peer review of any kind at any journal means that a work of science is correct. What it means is that a few (1-4) people read it over and didn't see any major problems. That's a very low bar in even the best of circumstances."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Peer review fails us when the reviewers are content with method without questioning the value of content to the scholarly community.

"How Can Accounting Researchers Become More Innovative? by Sudipta Basu, Accounting Horizons, December 2012, Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 851-87 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/acch-10311 

We fervently hope that the research pendulum will soon swing back from the narrow lines of inquiry that dominate today's leading journals to a rediscovery of the richness of what accounting research can be. For that to occur, deans and the current generation of academic accountants must give it a push.�
Michael H. Granof and Stephen A. Zeff (2008)

 

Rather than clinging to the projects of the past, it is time to explore questions and engage with ideas that transgress the current accounting research boundaries. Allow your values to guide the formation of your research agenda. The passion will inevitably follow �
Joni J. Young (2009)

. . .

Is Academic Accounting a �Cargo Cult Science�?

In a commencement address at Caltech titled �Cargo Cult Science,� Richard Feynman (1974) discussed �science, pseudoscience, and learning how not to fool yourself.� He argued that despite great efforts at scientific research, little progress was apparent in school education. Reading and mathematics scores kept declining, despite schools adopting the recommendations of experts. Feynman (1974, 11) dubbed fields like these �Cargo Cult Sciences,� explaining the term as follows:

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same things to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas�he's the controller�and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Feynman (1974) argued that the key distinction between a science and a Cargo Cult Science is scientific integrity: �[T]he idea is to give all of the information to help others judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.� In other words, papers should not be written to provide evidence for one's hypothesis, but rather to �report everything that you think might make it invalid.� Furthermore, �you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist.�

Even though more and more detailed rules are constantly being written by the SEC, FASB, IASB, PCAOB, AICPA, and other accounting experts (e.g., Benston et al. 2006), the number and severity of accounting scandals are not declining, which is Feynman's (1969) hallmark of a pseudoscience. Because accounting standards often reflect standard-setters' ideology more than research into the effectiveness of different alternatives, it is hardly surprising that accounting quality has not improved. Even preliminary research findings can be transformed journalistically into irrefutable scientific results by the political process of accounting standard-setting. For example, the working paper results of Frankel et al. (2002) were used to justify the SEC's longstanding desire to ban non-audit services in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, even though the majority of contemporary and subsequent studies found different results (Romano 2005). Unfortunately, the ability to bestow status by invitation to select conferences and citation in official documents (e.g., White 2005) may let standard-setters set our research and teaching agendas (Zeff 1989). Academic Accounting and the �Cult of Statistical Significance�

Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) argue that, in trying to mimic physicists, many biologists and social scientists have become devotees of statistical significance, even though most articles in physics journals do not report statistical significance. They argue that statistical tests are typically used to infer whether a particular effect exists, rather than to measure the magnitude of the effect, which usually has more practical import. While early empirical accounting researchers such as Ball and Brown (1968) and Beaver (1968) went to great lengths to estimate how much extra information reached the stock market in the earnings announcement month or week, subsequent researchers limited themselves to answering whether other factors moderated these effects. Because accounting theories rarely provide quantitative predictions (e.g., Kinney 1986), accounting researchers perform nil hypothesis significance testing rituals, i.e., test unrealistic and atheoretical null hypotheses that a particular coefficient is exactly zero.15 While physicists devise experiments to measure the mass of an electron to the accuracy of tens of decimal places, accounting researchers are still testing the equivalent of whether electrons have mass. Indeed, McCloskey (2002) argues that the �secret sins of economics� are that economics researchers use quantitative methods to produce qualitative research outcomes such as (non-)existence theorems and statistically significant signs, rather than to predict and measure quantitative (how much) outcomes.

Practitioners are more interested in magnitudes than existence proofs, because the former are more relevant in decision making. Paradoxically, accounting research became less useful in the real world by trying to become more scientific (Granof and Zeff 2008). Although every empirical article in accounting journals touts the statistical significance of the results, practical significance is rarely considered or discussed (e.g., Lev 1989). Empirical articles do not often discuss the meaning of a regression coefficient with respect to real-world decision variables and their outcomes. Thus, accounting research results rarely have practical implications, and this tendency is likely worst in fields with the strongest reliance on statistical significance such as financial reporting research.

Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) highlight a deeper concern about over-reliance on statistical significance�that it does not even provide evidence about whether a hypothesis is true or false. Carver (1978) provides a memorable example of drawing the wrong inference from statistical significance:

What is the probability of obtaining a dead person (label this part D) given that the person was hanged (label this part H); this is, in symbol form, what is P(D|H)? Obviously, it will be very high, perhaps 0.97 or higher. Now, let us reverse the question. What is the probability that a person has been hanged (H), given that the person is dead (D); that is, what is P(H|D)? This time the probability will undoubtedly be very low, perhaps 0.01 or lower. No one would be likely to make the mistake of substituting the first estimate (0.97) for the second (0.01); that is, to accept 0.97 as the probability that a person has been hanged given that the person is dead. Even though this seems to be an unlikely mistake, it is exactly the kind of mistake that is made with interpretations of statistical significance testing�by analogy, calculated estimates of P(D|H) are interpreted as if they were estimates of P(H|D), when they clearly are not the same.

As Cohen (1994) succinctly explains, statistical tests assess the probability of observing a sample moment as extreme as observed conditional on the null hypothesis being true, or P(D|H0), where D represents data and H0 represents the null hypothesis. However, researchers want to know whether the null hypothesis is true, conditional on the sample, or P(H0|D). We can calculate P(H0|D) from P(D|H0) by applying Bayes' theorem, but that requires knowledge of P(H0), which is what researchers want to discover in the first place. Although Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) quote many eminent statisticians who have repeatedly pointed out this basic logic, the essential point has not entered the published accounting literature.

In my view, restoring relevance to mathematically guided accounting research requires changing our role model from applied science to engineering (Colander 2011).16 While science aims at finding truth through application of institutionalized best practices with little regard for time or cost, engineering seeks to solve a specific problem using available resources, and the engineering method is �the strategy for causing the best change in a poorly understood or uncertain situation within the available resources� (Koen 2003). We should move to an experimental approach that simulates real-world applications or field tests new accounting methods in particular countries or industries, as would likely happen by default if accounting were not monopolized by the IASB (Dye and Sunder 2001). The inductive approach to standard-setting advocated by Littleton (1953) is likely to provide workable solutions to existing problems and be more useful than an axiomatic approach that starts from overly simplistic first principles.

To reduce the gap between academe and practice and stimulate new inquiry, AAA should partner with the FEI or Business Roundtable to create summer, semester, or annual research internships for accounting professors and Ph.D. students at corporations and audit firms.17 Accounting professors who have served as visiting scholars at the SEC and FASB have reported positively about their experience (e.g., Jorgensen et al. 2007), and I believe that such practice internships would provide opportunities for valuable fieldwork that supplements our experimental and archival analyses. Practice internships could be an especially fruitful way for accounting researchers to spend their sabbaticals.

Another useful initiative would be to revive the tradition of The Accounting Review publishing papers that do not rely on statistical significance or mathematical notation, such as case studies, field studies, and historical studies, similar to the Journal of Financial Economics (Jensen et al. 1989).18 A separate editor, similar to the book reviews editor, could ensure that appropriate criteria are used to evaluate qualitative research submissions (Chapman 2012). A co-editor from practice could help ensure that the topics covered are current and relevant, and help reverse the steep decline in AAA professional membership. Encouraging diversity in research methods and topics is more likely to attract new scholars who are passionate and intrinsically care about their research, rather than attracting only those who imitate current research fads for purely instrumental career reasons.

The relevance of accounting journals can be enhanced by inviting accomplished guest authors from outside accounting. The excellent April 1983 issue of The Accounting Review contains a section entitled �Research Perspectives from Related Disciplines,� which includes essays by Robert Wilson (Decision Sciences), Michael Jensen and Stephen Ross (Finance and Economics), and Karl Weick (Organizational Behavior) that were based on invited presentations at the 1982 AAA Annual Meeting. The thought-provoking essays were discussed by prominent accounting academics (Robert Kaplan, Joel Demski, Robert Libby, and Nils Hakansson); I still use Jensen (1983) to start each of my Ph.D. courses. Academic outsiders bring new perspectives to familiar problems and can often reframe them in ways that enable solutions (Tullock 1966).

I still lament that no accounting journal editor invited the plenary speakers�Joe Henrich, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Michael Hechter, Eric Posner, Robert Lucas, and Vernon Smith�at the 2007 AAA Annual Meeting to write up their presentations for publication in accounting journals. It is rare that Nobel Laureates and U.S. Presidential Early Career Award winners address AAA annual meetings.20 I strongly urge that AAA annual meetings institute a named lecture given by a distinguished researcher from a different discipline, with the address published in The Accounting Review. This would enable cross-fertilization of ideas between accounting and other disciplines. Several highly cited papers published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics were written by economists (Watts 1998), so this initiative could increase citation flows from accounting journals to other disciplines.

HOW CAN WE MAKE U.S. ACCOUNTING JOURNALS MORE READABLE AND INTERESTING?

Even the greatest discovery will have little impact if other people cannot understand it or are unwilling to make the effort. Zeff (1978) says, �Scholarly writing need not be abstruse. It can and should be vital and relevant. Research can succeed in illuminating the dark areas of knowledge and facilitating the resolution of vexing problems�but only if the report of research findings is communicated to those who can carry the findings further and, in the end, initiate change.� If our journals put off readers, then our research will not stimulate our students or induce change in practice (Dyckman 1989).

Michael Jensen (1983, 333�334) addressed the 1982 AAA Annual Meeting saying:

Unfortunately, there exists in the profession an unwarranted bias toward the use of mathematics even in situations where it is unproductive or useless. One manifestation of this is the common use of the terms �rigorous� or �analytical� or even �theoretical� as identical with ��mathematical.� None of these links is, of course, correct. Mathematical is not the same as rigorous, nor is it the same as analytical or theoretical. Propositions can be logically rigorous without being mathematical, and analysis does not have to take the form of symbols and equations. The English sentence and paragraph will do quite well for many analytical purposes. In addition, the use of mathematics does not prevent the commission of errors�even egregious ones.

Unfortunately, the top accounting journals demonstrate an increased �tyranny of formalism� that �develops when mathematically inclined scholars take the attitude that if the analytical language is not mathematics, it is not rigorous, and if a problem cannot be solved with the use of mathematics, the effort should be abandoned� (Jensen 1983, 335). Sorter (1979) acidly described the transition from normative to quantitative research: �the golden age of empty blindness gave way in the sixties to bloated blindness calculated to cause indigestion. In the sixties, the wonders of methodology burst upon the minds of accounting researchers. We entered what Maslow described as a mean-oriented age. Accountants felt it was their absolute duty to regress, regress and regress.� Accounting research increasingly relies on mathematical and statistical models with highly stylized and unrealistic assumptions. As Young (2006) demonstrates, the financial statement �user� in accounting research and regulation bears little resemblance to flesh-and-blood individuals, and hence our research outputs often have little relevance to the real world.

Figure 1 compares how frequently accountants and members of ten other professions are cited in The New York Times in the late 1990s (Ellenberg 2000). These data are juxtaposed with the numbers employed in each profession during 1996 using U.S. census data. Accountants are cited less frequently relative to their numbers than any profession except computer programmers. One possibility is that journalists cannot detect anything interesting in accounting journals. Another possibility is that university public relations staffs are consistently unable to find an interesting angle in published accounting papers that they can pitch to reporters. I have little doubt that the obscurantist tendencies in accounting papers make it harder for most outsiders to understand what accounting researchers are saying or find interesting.

Accounting articles have also become much longer over time, and I am regularly asked to review articles with introductions that are six to eight pages long, with many of the paragraphs cut-and-pasted from later sections. In contrast, it took Watson and Crick (1953) just one journal page to report the double-helix structure of DNA. Einstein (1905) took only three journal pages to derive his iconic equation E = mc2. Since even the best accounting papers are far less important than these classics of 20th century science, readers waste time wading through academic bloat (Sorter 1979). Because the top general science journals like Science and Nature place strict word limits on articles that differ by the expected incremental contribution, longer scientific papers signal better quality.21 Unfortunately, accounting journals do not restrict length, which encourages bloated papers. Another driver of length is the aforementioned trend toward greater rigor in the review process (Ellison 2002).

My first suggestion for making published accounting articles less tedious and boring is to impose strict word limits and to revive the �Notes� sections for shorter contributions. Word limits force authors to think much harder about how to communicate their essential ideas succinctly and greatly improve writing. Similarly, I would encourage accounting journals to follow Nature and provide guidelines for informative abstracts.22 A related suggestion is to follow the science journals, and more recently, The American Economic Review, by introducing online-only appendices to report the lengthy robustness sections that are demanded by persnickety reviewers.23 In addition, I strongly encourage AAA journals to require authors to post online with each journal article the data sets and working computer code used to produce all tables as a condition for publication, so that other independent researchers can validate and replicate their studies (Bernanke 2004; McCullough and McKitrick 2009).24 This is important because recent surveys of science and management researchers reveal that data fabrication, data falsification, and other violations in published studies is far from rare (Martinson et al. 2005; Bedeian et al. 2010).

I also urge that authors report results graphically rather than in tables, as recommended by numerous statistical experts (e.g., Tukey 1977; Chambers et al. 1983; Wainer 2009). For example, Figure 2 shows how the data in Figure 1 can be displayed more effectively without taking up more page space (Gelman et al. 2002). Scientific papers routinely display results in figures with confidence intervals rather than tables with standard errors and p-values, and accounting journals should adopt these practices to improve understandability. Soyer and Hogarth (2012) show experimentally that even well-trained econometricians forecast more slowly and inaccurately when given tables of statistical results than when given equivalent scatter plots. Most accounting researchers cannot recognize the main tables of Ball and Brown (1968) or Beaver (1968) on sight, but their iconic figures are etched in our memories. The figures in Burgstahler and Dichev (1997) convey their results far more effectively than tables would. Indeed, the finance professoriate was convinced that financial markets are efficient by the graphs in Fama et al. (1969), a highly influential paper that does not contain a single statistical test! Easton (1999) argues that the 1990s non-linear earnings-return relation literature would likely have been developed much earlier if accounting researchers routinely plotted their data. Since it is not always straightforward to convert tables into graphs (Gelman et al. 2002), I recommend that AAA pay for new editors of AAA journals to take courses in graphical presentation.

I would also recommend that AAA award an annual prize for the best figure or graphic in an accounting journal each year. In addition to making research articles easier to follow, figures ease the introduction of new ideas into accounting textbooks. Economics is routinely taught with diagrams and figures to aid intuition�demand and supply curves, IS-LM analysis, Edgeworth boxes, etc. (Blaug and Lloyd 2010). Accounting teachers would benefit if accounting researchers produced similar education tools. Good figures could also be used to adorn the cover pages of our journals similar to the best science journals; in many disciplines, authors of lead articles are invited to provide an illustration for the cover page. JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) reproduces paintings depicting doctors on its cover (Southgate 1996); AAA could print paintings of accountants and accounting on the cover of The Accounting Review, perhaps starting with those collected in Yamey (1989). If color printing costs are prohibitive, we could imitate the Journal of Political Economy back cover and print passages from literature where accounting and accountants play an important role, or even start a new format by reproducing cartoons illustrating accounting issues. The key point is to induce accountants to pick up each issue of the journal, irrespective of the research content.

I think that we need an accounting journal to �fill a gap between the general-interest press and most other academic journals,� similar to the Journal of Economics Perspectives (JEP).25 Unlike other economics journals, JEP editors and associate editors solicit articles from experts with the goal of conveying state-of-the-art economic thinking to non-specialists, including students, the lay public, and economists from other specialties.26 The journal explicitly eschews mathematical notation or regression results and requires that results be presented either graphically or as a table of means. In response to the question �List the three economics journals (broadly defined) that you read most avidly when a new issue appears,� a recent survey of U.S. economics professors found that Journal of Economics Perspectives was their second favorite economics journal (Davis et al. 2011), which suggests that an unclaimed niche exists in accounting. Although Accounting Horizons could be restructured along these lines to better reach practitioners, it might make sense to start a new association-wide journal under the AAA aegis.

 

CONCLUSION

I believe that accounting is one of the most important human innovations. The invention of accounting records was likely indispensable to the emergence of agriculture, and ultimately, civilization (e.g., Basu and Waymire 2006). Many eminent historians view double-entry bookkeeping as indispensable for the Renaissance and the emergence of capitalism (e.g., Sombart 1919; Mises 1949; Weber 1927), possibly via stimulating the development of algebra (Heeffer 2011). Sadly, accounting textbooks and the top U.S. accounting journals seem uninterested in whether and how accounting innovations changed history, or indeed in understanding the history of our current practices (Zeff 1989).

In short, the accounting academy embodies a �tragedy of the commons� (Hardin 1968) where strong extrinsic incentives to publish in �top� journals have led to misdirected research efforts. As Zeff (1983) explains, �When modeling problems, researchers seem to be more affected by technical developments in the literature than by their potential to explain phenomena. So often it seems that manuscripts are the result of methods in search of questions rather than questions in search of methods.� Solving common problems requires strong collective action by the social network of accounting researchers using self-governing mechanisms (e.g., Ostrom 1990, 2005). Such initiatives should occur at multiple levels (e.g., school, association, section, region, and individual) to have any chance of success.

While accounting research has made advances in recent decades, our collective progress seems slow, relative to the hard work put in by so many talented researchers. Instead of letting financial economics and psychology researchers and accounting standard-setters choose our research methods and questions, we should return our focus to addressing fundamental issues in accounting. As important, junior researchers should be encouraged to take risks and question conventional academic wisdom, rather than blindly conform to the party line. For example, the current FASB�IASB conceptual framework �remains irreparably flawed� (Demski 2007), and accounting researchers should take the lead in developing alternative conceptual frameworks that better fit what accounting does (e.g., Ijiri 1983; Ball 1989; Dickhaut et al. 2010). This will entail deep historical and cross-cultural analyses rather than regression analyses on machine-readable data. Deliberately attacking the �fundamental and frequently asked questions� in accounting will require innovations in research outlooks and methods, as well as training in the history of accounting thought. It is shameful that we still cannot answer basic questions like �Why did anyone invent recordkeeping?� or �Why is double-entry bookkeeping beautiful?�

This opens the door to larger issues such as taxation of church property used to house the clergy. A high percentage of the real estate in Boston is owned by the Catholic church. I'm not certain how church-owned commercial property is taxed, but I don't think that it is tax free if used for commercial purposes such as when the church owns a shopping mall. But I suspect that parsonages for clergy are not taxed in Boston. Members of the clergy also get housing income tax relief in the federal and state statutes that is not available to anybody else ---
http://www.irs.gov/Help-&-Resources/Tools-&-FAQs/FAQs-for-Individuals/Frequently-Asked-Tax-Questions-&-Answers/Interest,-Dividends,-Other-Types-of-Income/Ministers%27-Compensation-&-Housing-Allowance/Ministers%27-Compensation-&-Housing-Allowance 

"Letting My Students Know What I Want From Them," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, July 13, 2014 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2014/07/letting-my-students-know-what-i-want.html

On Tuesday (July 15) at 11:00 a.m. I will be hosting a 35 minute webinar on “The Flipped Classroom.” I am doing this program in connection with my Financial Accounting textbook (coauthored with C. J. Skender of UNC). However, I hope to keep the textbook marketing down to a bare minimum because I really am interested in talking about the flipped classroom.

I would love for you to join me if you can. You can register in advance at:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/295135194 

**

Below is an email that I sent out this evening to all of my students for the upcoming fall semester. I am trying to plant a seed in their minds about what I want from them in the fall. I always believe that a semester goes better if the students know before they ever meet you what you want from them. They don’t have to waste important classroom time trying to figure out what you value. As you can see, I just tell them.

Continued in article

Tomorrow go to
At the time above, click this link to join the Webinar:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/join/295135194/106821457

"Desire2Learn Rebrands and Adds Partners," by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-desire2learn-rebrands-adds-partners/53959?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The education-technology company Desire2Learn said on Monday that it was renaming its learning-management system, which will now be called Brightspace, and adding assorted features, including game-based learning. The company also said it was teaming up with IBM to improve Desire2Learn’s predictive analytics and with Microsoft to add a Windows 8 mobile app for e-books to Desire2Learn’s offerings.

Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

"Miscalculating the Retirement Income You'll Need:  Proposals to raise Social Security benefits use a dubious formula. That could spell big trouble," by Andrew G. Biggs And Sylvester J. Schieber, The Wall Street Journal,  July 14, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/articles/miscalculating-the-retirement-income-youll-need-1405380517?tesla=y&mod=djemMER_h&mg=reno64-wsj

It is now conventional wisdom that Americans face a retirement "crisis," in part because Social Security benefits are seen as inadequate. For instance, the Social Security Administration's website explains that "most financial advisers say you'll need about 70% of your pre-retirement earnings to comfortably maintain your pre-retirement standard of living." It then notes that "under current law, if you have average earnings, your Social Security retirement benefits will replace only about 40%."

That line of thinking is misleading, often cited by progressives fighting benefit reforms that would address Social Security's $10 trillion shortfall. Here's why: Financial advisers do not calculate replacement rates the same way the Social Security Administration does. When the calculations are consistent, the replacement rate paid by Social Security comes closer to 60%, which substantially changes the retirement-income picture.

Financial advisers measure replacement rates relative to final earnings, generally meaning they divide the first year of retirement income by a worker's final year of working income, or average pay during the past five working years. The SSA, on the other hand, measures replacement rates relative to the wage-indexed average of lifetime earnings. "Wage indexing" increases past earnings to reflect the growth of average wages. These are very different numbers that produce very different outcomes.

By increasing the denominator, SSA's methods produce far lower replacement rates than the calculations of financial advisers. Our analysis of SSA data shows that the typical long-term employee who works until full retirement age receives a Social Security benefit equal to about 62% of his final earnings, defined here as the average of nonzero earnings in the five years before claiming Social Security benefits. For full-career workers with lower earnings, replacement rates average 70% of final earnings.

When including early retirees who receive reduced benefits, the typical replacement rate drops to 53% of final average earnings. But an individual who seeks to retire early must save a greater portion of his pre-retirement earnings, leaving less for consumption. Thus, an early retiree can match his pre-retirement consumption while receiving a lower replacement rate from Social Security and other sources of retirement income.

These distinctions may seem pedantic, but the underlying concepts are fundamental: Retirement plans are in theory designed to help retirees maintain their standard of living as they move out of the labor force. The SSA's wage indexing overstates an individual's pre-retirement earnings, which raises the bar for what counts as adequate retirement income.

Say you are retiring at age 65 this year and earned $20,000 in 1985. The purchasing power of that 1985 salary in 2014 dollars is $43,640. But in calculating replacement rates, SSA wage indexes that $20,000 for the growth of the economy, and so under that model you earned $53,281. Replacing 70% of $53,281 is a lot more difficult than replacing 70% of $43,640. SSA's wage indexing of past earnings in effect credits retirees with salaries that they never had, then deems retirement income inadequate if it fails to replace that nonexistent past salary.

There's a more consistent way to measure. If we calculate replacement rates relative to the inflation-adjusted average of total lifetime earnings, the typical retiree would receive a Social Security benefit equal to around 55% of his average lifetime income—and a low-income retiree would receive a replacement rate of around 70%.

These faulty replacement-rate calculations lead to profound errors. For example, analysts at the New America Foundation propose increasing Social Security benefits to raise replacement rates for an average worker from a supposedly inadequate 40% to 60%. This implies, however, that a typical worker could retire with a Social Security benefit that amounts to roughly 85% of his final salary, while a low-wage worker could retire at 140% of his final salary. If enacted, these changes would have disastrous effects on labor supply at older ages, not to mention the federal budget.

The issue here is not whether Social Security's benefit formula should be waged-indexed, which is an entirely separate issue that unfortunately uses similar terminology. Wage indexing of the benefit formula ensures that average replacement rates, however measured, remain roughly constant from one generation of retirees to the next.

Analysts are still debating whether to increase Social Security benefits, and figuring out how to return the program to solvency. But grappling with those problems requires fair, meaningful measurements of retirement income.

Mr. Biggs, a former principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Schieber, a former chairman of the Social Security Advisory Board, is co-author of "Fundamentals of Private Pensions" (9th ed., 2010).

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

"U. of Iowa Scholar Will Get New Trial in Promotion-Bias Case," by Nick DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 15, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-iowa-scholar-will-get-new-trial-in-hiring-bias-case/81983?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

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

Slavoj Žižek Charged With Plagiarizing A White Nationalist Magazine Article ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/slavoj-zizek-charged-with-plagiarizing-a-white-nationalist-magazine-article.html

Bob Jensen's threads on celebrity plagiarism ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities

"College, on Your Own Competency-based education can help motivated students. But critics say it’s no panacea," by Dan Barrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/College-on-Your-Own/147659/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
Several major universities like the University of Wisconsin and the University of Akron are now providing competency-based testing for college credit. Western Governors University for years is a bit different. It grades on the basis of competency-based testing but also requires that students enroll in courses. Years and years ago the University of Chicago allowed students to take final examinations for credit even though the students were not enrolled in courses. Like it or not we seem to be going full circle.

Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based testing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

From the Scout Report on July 17, 2014

Fetch Text --- http://fetchtext.herokuapp.com/ 

Looking for a new way to share articles in your emails? Fetch Text can lend a hand. By simply forwarding a link to the email address provided on the site, visitors will receive a response email of just the main text pulled from the link. It’s easy to use and is compatible with all operating systems.

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myMeetingTime --- http://www.mymeetingtime.com/ 

Trying to plan a meeting for folks in Bangalore and Birmingham? That can be a challenge, but worry no longer: myMeetingTime is here. This handy site can help groups and organizations coordinate synchronous meetings all over the world. Visitors just need to type in their location and they can use the time zone converter and other tools to share possible meeting times with participants. It's much easier than chains of emails and the like. This version is compatible with all operating systems.

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When (and where!) faults attack: New USGS map extends earthquake hazard
zones
Updated Earthquake Map Shakes Up Risk Zones
http://www.livescience.com/46855-earthquake-map-us-risk-zones.html?cmpid=514645_20140717_28029266

Earthquake Maps Reveal Higher Risks for Much of U.S.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140717-usgs-earthquake-maps-disaster-risk-science/

Risk of earthquake increased for one-third of US
http://www.usnews.com/news/science/news/articles/2014/07/17/earthquake-risk-increased-for-one-third-of-us

Did you feel that? USGS releases new earthquake hazard map
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-earthquake-map-20140717-story.html

Documentation for the 2014 Update of the United States National Seismic
Hazard Maps
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2014/1091/

Natural Hazards Image Database
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/hazardimages/

From the Scout Report on July 26, 2014

Privatize --- http://privatize.io/ 

The Privatize site is a great place to create tweets with private links that can only be viewed by the people you mention. It's a nice way to share information with only a set few and it's a good way to create discrete offerings. Users simply need to login with their Twitter account to get started. This version is compatible with all operating systems.

---

Screenmailer --- https://www.screenmailer.com/ 

Want to share video with friends and colleagues around the world? You may want to give Screenmailer a go. This version allows visitors to record up to 15 minutes at one time, send the links out privately via email, and even stream the video at their convenience. Additionally, the videos are made available using a private URL. This version is compatible with and Mac running Mavericks 10.9.

---

Chicago looks to revamp its lakefront in ways both modest and
monumental
Ideas abound at North Lake Shore Drive revamp meeting
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-07-08/news/chi-north-lake-shore-drive-revamp-20140708_1_north-lake-shore-drive-reconstruction-project-chicago-river

Streeterville Residents Redefine Their Own Bit of Lake Shore Drive
http://chi.streetsblog.org/2014/07/10/streeterville-residents-redefine-their-own-bit-of-lake-shore-drive/

Architect's Montrose Beach plan would sacrifice parking
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-montrose-beach-improvement-plan-20140723,0,1731503.story

Grant Park Skate Park Groundbreaking Kicks Off Faster Construction Timeline
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140714/south-loop/grant-park-skate-park-groundbreaking-kicks-off-faster-construction-timeline

North Lake Shore Drive: Redefine the Drive
http://www.northlakeshoredrive.org/

The Burnham Plan Centennial
http://burnhamplan100.uchicago.edu/

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

Education Tutorials

Internet Archive: Computers & Technology --- https://archive.org/details/computersandtechvideos

Bob Jensen's Technology History Glossary --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm

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

Community College Pathways: Summative Assessments and Student Learning ---  http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/sites/default/files/pathways/CCP_Assessment_Report_2014.pdf

Home Economics to Human Ecology: A Centennial History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison ---
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/SoHECent

Show-Me Magazine (University of Missouri History and a Little Humor) ---  http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=home;c=show

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

Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Internet Archive: Computers & Technology --- https://archive.org/details/computersandtechvideos

Bob Jensen's Technology History Glossary --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm

Computers, Computing, and Networking History --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#---ComputerNetworking-IncludingInternet

Deeplinks: Electronic Frontier Foundation (Copyrights, Computing Glossary) --- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks

The Oesper Collections (history of chemistry) --- http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/oesper/

The Power of Poison --- http://www.ology.amnh.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/the-power

TOXNET  (toxicology, ecology, enviornment) --- http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/

Mahjong Chemistry --- http://www2.stetson.edu/mahjongchem/

<em>Alvin's</em> Animals (Ocean Exploration of deep sea creatures) --- http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/alvins-animals

Paul Rudolph & His Architecture --- http://prudolph.lib.umassd.edu

Dawn of the Smart City? Perspectives From New York, Ahmedabad, Sao Paulo, and Beijing ---
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/dawn-the-smart-city-perspectives-new-york-ahmedabad-são-paulo-and-beijing

What Is Fracking? This Simple Animation Is The Best Explanation We've Ever Seen ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/marathon-oil-animation-on-hydraulic-fracking-2014-7?op=1#ixzz387Gv9tlq

3D Printing in Space  --- http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18871

Additive manufacturing has the potential to positively affect human spaceflight operations by enabling the in-orbit manufacture of replacement parts and tools, which could reduce existing logistics requirements for the International Space Station and future long-duration human space missions. The benefits of in-space additive manufacturing for robotic spacecraft are far less clear, although this rapidly advancing technology can also potentially enable space-based construction of large structures and, perhaps someday, substantially in the future, entire spacecraft. Additive manufacturing can also help to reimagine a new space architecture that is . . .

Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Social Science and Economics Tutorials

Technopanics: Moral Panics about Technology ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/comparative-media-studies/cms-s60-technopanics-moral-panics-about-technology-spring-2013/

Everett Massacre Collection (1916 labor unrest in Massachusetts) ---  http://content.lib.washington.edu/pnwlaborweb/index.html

Dawn of the Smart City? Perspectives From New York, Ahmedabad, Sao Paulo, and Beijing ---
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/dawn-the-smart-city-perspectives-new-york-ahmedabad-são-paulo-and-beijing

US Environmental Protection Agency: Students for the Environment --- http://www.epa.gov/students/

Home Economics to Human Ecology: A Centennial History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison ---
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/SoHECent

Communist Party, United States of America: Ninety Years of History ---
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tamiment/collections/72157600984900765/

Community College Pathways: Summative Assessments and Student Learning ---  http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/sites/default/files/pathways/CCP_Assessment_Report_2014.pdf

The Guardian Cities History and Future of Selected Cities Like Seoul and San Frnacisco) ---  http://www.theguardian.com/cities

History: The Colonial Williamsburg Official History Site http://www.history.org/history/index.cf

Tour the Town: The Colonial Williamsburg Official History & Citizenship Site ---
http://www.history.org/Almanack/TourTheTown/index.cfm

From the Scout Report on July 26, 2014

Chicago looks to revamp its lakefront in ways both modest and
monumental
Ideas abound at North Lake Shore Drive revamp meeting
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-07-08/news/chi-north-lake-shore-drive-revamp-20140708_1_north-lake-shore-drive-reconstruction-project-chicago-river

Streeterville Residents Redefine Their Own Bit of Lake Shore Drive
http://chi.streetsblog.org/2014/07/10/streeterville-residents-redefine-their-own-bit-of-lake-shore-drive/

Architect's Montrose Beach plan would sacrifice parking
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-montrose-beach-improvement-plan-20140723,0,1731503.story

Grant Park Skate Park Groundbreaking Kicks Off Faster Construction Timeline
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140714/south-loop/grant-park-skate-park-groundbreaking-kicks-off-faster-construction-timeline

North Lake Shore Drive: Redefine the Drive
http://www.northlakeshoredrive.org/

The Burnham Plan Centennial
http://burnhamplan100.uchicago.edu/

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Law and Legal Studies

Deeplinks: Electronic Frontier Foundation (Copyrights, Computing Glossary) --- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks

Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Math Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

History Tutorials

Internet Archive: Computers & Technology --- https://archive.org/details/computersandtechvideos

Communist Party, United States of America: Ninety Years of History ---
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tamiment/collections/72157600984900765/

Guide to the Old University of Chicago Records 1856-1890 ---
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.OLDUOFC

History: The Colonial Williamsburg Official History Site http://www.history.org/history/index.cf

Tour the Town: The Colonial Williamsburg Official History & Citizenship Site ---
http://www.history.org/Almanack/TourTheTown/index.cfm

Gay Bolling Shepperson Photographs (photographs of relief projects of the Great Depression in the USA) ---
http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com/store/Category/438-gay-bolling-shepperson-photographs.aspx

The Oesper Collections (history of chemistry) --- http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/oesper/

Dante’s Divine Comedy Illustrated in a Remarkable Illuminated Medieval Manuscript (c. 1450) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/dantes-divine-comedy-illustrated-in-a-illuminated-manuscript.html

Dante Worlds (Multimedia) --- http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/

The Guardian Cities History and Future of Selected Cities Like Seoul and San Frnacisco) ---  http://www.theguardian.com/cities

William Blake's Sublime Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy, Over Which He Labored Until His Dying Day ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/17/william-blake-dante-divine-comedy/

Bob Jensen's Technology History Glossary --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm

Computers, Computing, and Networking History --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#---ComputerNetworking-IncludingInternet

Deeplinks: Electronic Frontier Foundation (Copyrights, Computing Glossary) --- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks

The Power of Poison --- http://www.ology.amnh.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/the-power

Bob Jensen's Technology History Glossary --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm

Seven Settlement Houses: Database of Photos (American History in Illinois) ---
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_uic_7sh.php?CISOROOT=/uic_7sh

Animated: Winston Churchill’s Top 10 Sayings About Failure, Courage, Setbacks, Haters & Success ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/animated-winston-churchills-top-10-sayings.html

Everett Massacre Collection (1916 labor unrest in Massachusetts) ---  http://content.lib.washington.edu/pnwlaborweb/index.html

California Calls You: The Art of Promoting the Golden State, 1870-1940 --- http://www.library.ca.gov/calhist/travel/
In the 21st Century discovery of water would be more valuable than a new discovery of gold..

LA Liber Amicorum (art history) ---
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/digital_collections/notable/aiseborn_liber_amicorum.html

Versailles La grotte de Versailles (French Art History) ---  http://pudl.princeton.edu/collections/versailles2

The Touching Moment When Nicholas Winton Met the Children He Saved During the Holocaust ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/nicholas-winton-met-the-children-he-saved-during-the-holocaust.html

he Secret Annex Online (Anne Frank, Holocaust, Jewish History, World War II, World War 2, Nazi) --- http://www.annefrank.org/en/Subsites/Home/

The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures ---
http://www.loc.gov/collection/spanish-american-war-in-motion-pictures/about-this-collection/#overview

25 Of The Most Creative Sculptures And Statues From Around The World ---
http://www.boredpanda.com/worlds-most-creative-statues-sculptures/

‘Andrew D. Lytle's Baton Rouge’ Photograph Collection ---
 http://cdm16313.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15140coll12/

Mass MoCA: Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective --- http://www.massmoca.org/lewitt/

Mural Arts Program --- http://muralarts.org/

Show-Me Magazine (University of Missouri History and a Little Humor) ---  http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=home;c=show

Railroads and the Making of Modern America --- http://railroads.unl.edu/

Late 19th and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/collections/maps/transit/

Trains Magazine (railroads) --- http://trn.trains.com/

Railfan & Railroad Magazine --- http://railfan.com/

Canadian Pacific Railway Collection (Photographs) --- http://www.vpl.ca/cpr/index.html

Railroads and the Making of Modern America --- http://railroads.unl.edu/

Late 19th and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/collections/maps/transit/

Trains Magazine (railroads) --- http://trn.trains.com/

Railroads and the Making of Modern America --- http://railroads.unl.edu/ \

TrainWeb.com (railroads) --- http://www.trainweb.com/

Pullman Digital Collection (Railroad History) ---
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_nby_pullman.php?CISOROOT=/nby_pullman

Late 19th and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/collections/maps/transit/

Canadian Pacific Railway Collection (Photographs) --- http://www.vpl.ca/cpr/index.html

Trains Magazine (railroads) --- http://trn.trains.com/

Massachusetts Railroads
http://www.mass.gov/anf/research-and-tech/oversight-agencies/lib/railroads.html

Massachusetts Railroads
http://www.mass.gov/anf/research-and-tech/oversight-agencies/lib/railroads.html

Transcontinental Railroad Pictures and Exhibits --- http://cprr.org/Museum/Exhibits.html

Railroads and the Making of Modern America --- http://railroads.unl.edu/

Late 19th and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/collections/maps/transit/

Trains Magazine (railroads) --- http://trn.trains.com/

Massachusetts Railroads
http://www.mass.gov/anf/research-and-tech/oversight-agencies/lib/railroads.html

Steamtown National Historic Site (steam locomotives) ---  http://www.nps.gov/stea/index.htm

American Railroad Journal --- http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=home;c=arj

Railroad Picture Archives --- http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/

American Railroad Journal --- http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=home;c=arj

The Countryside Transformed: The Railroad and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, 1870-1935 ---
http://eshore.vcdh.virginia.edu/index.php

Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
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

Music Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

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

Writing Tutorials

“Weird Al” Yankovic Releases “Word Crimes,” a Grammar Nerd Parody of “Blurred Lines” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/weird-al-yankovic-releases-grammar-nerd-parody-of-blurred-lines.html

5 Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/5-very-long-literary-sentences.html
But never Hemingway.

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

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

July 15, 2014

• Study: 1 in 3 Alzheimer's Cases 'Preventable'
• iPads Can Trigger Nickel Allergies in Kids
• Teaspoons Behind Many Child Drug-Dosing Errors
• Don't Judge a Pill by Its Color
• Bed-Sharing Linked to SIDS
• Widowhood May Delay Dementia in Some Seniors
• Can Games, Puzzles Keep Aging Minds Sharp?
• U.S. News & World Report: Best Hospitals
• High Cost of Hepatitis C Drug Sovaldi Investigated
• Could a Simple Smell Test Help Spot Alzheimer's Early?

July 16, 2014

• Pregnant Workers Get More Protection
• Potential New Culprit Behind Alzheimer's
• Most Kids Eat Fruit, Veggies Daily: CDC
• Omega-3s May Help Ward Off Lou Gehrig's Disease
• Stroke Rates Declining Among Seniors, Study Shows
• Obamacare Help Was In High Demand, Survey Shows
• Alzheimer's Rate Falling in United States: Studies
• Gays, Lesbians Face Certain Health Challenges
• iPads Can Trigger Nickel Allergies in Kids
• Widowhood May Delay Dementia in Some Seniors

July 17, 2014

• AIDS Epidemic May Be Subsiding: Report
• Potential New Culprit Behind Alzheimer's
• Even Mild Concussion Can Cause Thinking, Memory Problems: Study
• Is Obesity an Advantage After Heart Procedures?
• Health Highlights: July 16, 2014
• Most Kids Eat Fruit, Veggies Daily: CDC
• Cancer: Removing Healthy Breast of Little Benefit
• Alzheimer's Rate Falling in United States: Studies
• Stroke Rates Declining Among Seniors, Study Shows
• Gays, Lesbians Face Certain Health Challenges

July 18, 2014

• Energy Drink Cocktails Boost Desire to Drink More?
• Do You Need to Fast Before a Cholesterol Test?
• Chikungunya: Questions and Answers
• Pregnant Workers Get More Protection Under New U.S. Guidelines
• Most Kids Eat Fruit, Veggies Daily: CDC
• Potential New Culprit Behind Alzheimer's
• Potassium May Help Some Heart Failure Patients
• AIDS Epidemic May Be Subsiding: Report
• Vitamin B No Help for Alzheimer's: Review
• Specialty Care Is A Challenge In Some ACA Plans

July 19, 2014

• Texas Abortion Clinics Close Due To State Law
• Full-Time Job May Disrupt Breast-Feeding Plans
• Superbug Increasing in Southeast Hospitals
• Energy Drink Cocktails Boost Desire to Drink More?
• Biggest Insurer Drops Caution, Embraces Obamacare
• Chikungunya: Questions and Answers
• Do You Need to Fast Before a Cholesterol Test?
• Is Obesity an Advantage After Heart Procedures?
• Cancer: Removing Healthy Breast of Little Benefit
• Niacin Doesn't Reduce Heart Problems

July 21, 2014

• Many Young Adults Misinformed About Hookahs' Harms
• HIV Diagnoses Down, Except for Young Gay Males: CDC
• HPV Test vs. Pap for Gauging Cervical Cancer Risk
• EPA Unveils New Bug Repellant Labeling
• Texas Abortion Clinics Close Due To State Law
• Full-Time Job May Disrupt Breast-Feeding Plans
• Superbug Increasing in Southeast Hospitals
• Energy Drink Cocktails Boost Desire to Drink More?
• Biggest Insurer Drops Caution, Embraces Obamacare
• Chikungunya: Questions and Answers

July 22, 2014

• Guns and Dementia
• Waistlines of U.S. Kids Seem to Be Holding Steady
• Smoking While Pregnant Linked to ADHD in Children
• Could Probiotics Help Tame High Blood Pressure?
• Asthma Drug May Help Those With Chronic Hives
• Irregular Heart Rhythm Ups Stroke Risk Soon After Heart Surgery
• Common Genes Implicated in Autism Study
• HIV Diagnoses Down, Except for Young Gay Males: CDC
• Many Young Adults Misinformed About Hookahs' Harms
• Medicare Modifies Controversial Hospice Drug Rule

July 23, 2014

• Obesity During Pregnancy and Asthma Risk in Kids
• Study Casts Doubt on Costly Treatment for Leg Clots
• Caffeine Powder: FAQ
• Appeals Courts Split On Legality Of ACA Subsidies
• Can Blood Test Predict Survival With Lou Gehrig's?
• Gene Discoveries Could Shed Light on Schizophrenia
• No Change in Heart Attack Rates for Younger Adults
• Waistlines of U.S. Kids Seem to Be Holding Steady
• Smoking While Pregnant Linked to ADHD in Children
• Fruit Recalled for Possible Listeria Contamination

July 24, 2014

• Study: Car Interiors Reach Dangerous Temps All Year
• Will 3-D Printing Revolutionize Medicine?
• Sleep Loss May Boost False Memories
• Acetaminophen May Not Help Against Back Pain, Study Contends
• HIV Meds May Also Help Control Hepatitis C
• Routine Pulse Check May Prevent Second Stroke
• Many Obese U.S. Kids Think They're Thinner Than They Are
• Cystic Fibrosis Drug Combo: How Effective Is It?
• Parent's Death Raises This Risk for Grown Children?
• Weight Loss Surgery Eases Urinary Incontinence?

July 26, 2014

• Blood-Thinner Pradaxa: What You Should Know
• Diet Changes Can Alter Gut Bacteria, Study Says
• Blood Thinner Doesn’t Prevent Miscarriages: Study
• Parents of Obese Kids Often View Them as Healthy
• Study: Car Interiors Reach Dangerous Temps All Year
• Study: 10 Million Americans Gained Health Coverage
• FDA Approves Hard-to-Abuse Narcotic Painkiller
• Study Links Shift Work to Risk for Type 2 Diabetes
• Is Coffee Aggravating Your Hot Flashes?
• Too Few Teens Receive HPV Shot, CDC Says

July 28, 2014

• Health Plans' Limitations Rankle Some Enrollees
• Blood-Thinner Pradaxa: What You Should Know
• Diet Changes Can Alter Gut Bacteria, Study Says
• Blood Thinner Doesn’t Prevent Miscarriages: Study
• Parents of Obese Kids Often View Them as Healthy
• Study: Car Interiors Reach Dangerous Temps All Year
• Study: 10 Million Americans Gained Health Coverage
• FDA Approves Hard-to-Abuse Narcotic Painkiller
• Study Links Shift Work to Risk for Type 2 Diabetes
• Is Coffee Aggravating Your Hot Flashes?

State Farm and Farm Bureau Insurance say a paralyzed man hit by an SUV can't collect because his motorized scooter wasn't insured ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/14764eccb5a5c125

Jensen Question
Does it have brake lights and turn signals?
Seems to me that a man on a motorized scooter is not a whole lot different from a pedestrian in a wheel chair.
However, pedestrians can be responsible for accidents if they are deemed responsible for their own accidents.

"More than a Hundred Genetic Variants Tied to Schizophrenia," by Dennis Rotman, MIT's Technology Review, July 22, 2014 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/529426/more-than-a-hundred-genetic-variants-tied-to-schizophrenia/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140723

"Data in Action:  Data is helping one of the country’s leading hospitals solve tough medical questions," by Jim Mullany, MIT's Technology Review, July 21, 2014 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/529041/data-in-action/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140722

What Goes Into Ramen Noodles (and What Happens When Ramen Noodles Go Into You) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/what-goes-into-instant-ramen-noodles.html

"Roche Reports Mixed Results in Trial of an Alzheimer’s Drug," by Andrew Pollack, The New York Times, July 16, 2014 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/business/roche-reports-mixed-results-in-trial-of-an-alzheimers-drug.html?_r=0

Roche, the pharmaceutical company, on Wednesday reported mixed results in its latest trial of an Alzheimer’s drug. It said that while the drug did not slow progression of the disease over all, at the highest doses it did seem to delay a decline in mental ability in patients with mild cases of Alzheimer’s.

The results of a clinical trial of the drug, crenezumab, were presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Copenhagen.

The study is the latest test of the so-called amyloid hypothesis — a theory that a buildup in the brain of a protein called beta amyloid is responsible for dementia in Alzheimer’s patients.

That hypothesis has taken a beating as one drug after another designed to reduce amyloid levels has failed in clinical trials.

Still, the Roche results will allow proponents to say that the approach could still work, if only a drug can be given at high enough doses and to patients early enough in the course of their disease.

“I do feel this is very encouraging for the field,” said Dr. Carole Ho, who runs an early clinical development group at Genentech, Roche’s California subsidiary. “We’re seeing movement on these cognitive endpoints with targeting of the amyloid pathway.”

But Dr. Ho said the company had not decided yet whether to proceed with the additional trials that would be necessary for the drug to win approval. She said the company would further analyze the data and talk with regulators before deciding.

Dr. Samuel E. Gandy, an Alzheimer’s expert who was not involved in the study, said the results were nowhere near good enough for approval.

“Long story short, we are still a long way from anything that could be approvable as therapy,” Dr. Gandy, who is director of the Center for Cognitive Health at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, said in an email.

The phase 2 study involved 431 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. They received either a low dose of the drug, a high dose or a placebo.

After 73 weeks, the patients getting the high dose had experienced a 16.8 percent slower decline in cognition, based on a measure called ADAS-Cog12. But the difference was not statistically significant.

However, among the patients with the mildest disease, there was a greater reduction, 35.4 percent, in the rate of cognitive decline.

Even the high dose, however, did not show a consistent effect on a different scale that measured patients’ ability to function, including carrying out activities of daily living.

Crenezumab, which Genentech licensed from AC Immune, a privately held Swiss company, is a type of protein called a monoclonal antibody that binds to beta amyloid so it can be cleared from the brain.

Both Eli Lilly and the team of Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson suffered high-profile failures of similar drugs in larger phase 3 studies.

Continued in article

A Bit of Humor

After Nigeria was eliminated from the world cup the Nigerian captain personally offered to refund all the expenses of fans that travelled to Brazil. He said he just needs their bank details and pin numbers to complete the transaction.

The 9 Best And Worst Moments From SNL's Controversial Latest Season ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/snl-best-worst-moments-season-39-2014-7

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

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

Update in 2014
20-Year Sugar Hill Master Plan --- http://www.nccouncil.org/images/NCC/file/wrkgdraftfeb142014.pdf

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

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

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

• With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
• With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
• With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of Accountancy Ignores TAR
• With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research into Undergraduate Accounting Courses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

CPA Examination --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle --- http://cpareviewforfree.com/

Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at http://iaed.wordpress.com/

Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

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

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.

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