Tidbits on November 25, 2014
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Set 6 Humor Cartoons ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Humor/Set05/HumorSet05.htm

 

Tidbits on November 25,, 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

Watch The Rosetta Mission's Historic Comet Landing --- http://www.newsweek.com/destination-comet-watch-live-283914
Photos from the Philae landing: What a comet's surface looks like up close ---
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/13/7211229/philae-photos-comet-rosetta
A Comet Up Close: News and Images From the Philae Probe ---
http://www.newsweek.com/comet-close-news-and-images-philae-284249

Check Out The First Animated Image Of The Philae Probe Landing On A Comet ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/animated-image-from-the-philae-lander-2014-11

Sainsbury’s Christmas Commercial Has Blown John Lewis' Penguin Out Of The Water
http://www.businessinsider.com/sainsburys-2014-christmas-ad-2014-11

Learn The History of Philosophy in 197 Podcasts (With More to Come) ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/hz6VziSrvTU/learn-the-history-of-philosophy-in-197-podcasts.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

This Incredible Time-Lapse Shows The Rotation Of The Earth From The Point Of View Of The Stars ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/time-lapse-shows-earth-rotation-stars-2014-11

The Great War: Video Series Will Document How WWI Unfolded, Week-by-Week, for the Next 4 Years ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/DHsCd4kJgMM/the-great-war-video-series-will-document-how-wwi-unfolded-week-by-week-for-the-next-4-years.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Watch This Baby Elephant Fight Off 14 Hungry Lions ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/baby-elephant-fights-off-hungry-lions-2014-11

15 Great Films Adapted From Equally Great Novels ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/YPTp3xNu5_U/15-great-films-adapted-from-equally-great-novels.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

A History of Ideas: Animated Videos Explain Theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Burke & Other Philosophers ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/qjtaYhJ7jWY/a-history-of-ideas-animated-videos-explain-theories-of-simone-de-beauvoir-edmund-burke.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

The US Military Just Released New Videos Of Its Airstrikes Against ISIS ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-military-just-released-new-videos-of-its-airstrikes-against-isis-2014-11

Gratitude
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDMoiEkyuQ&src_vid=FiZqn6fV-4Y&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_3179683611


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

Great Crowd Dancing in Wintertime Russia --- https://www.youtube.com/embed/KgoapkOo4vg?rel=0

Footloose Dancing --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVG_QA5stBc

Shadow Dancing --- http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=CvQBUccxBr4

As You Get Older Keep Dancing --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2LMxf3Df6I

Radio David Byrne: Stream Free Music Playlists Created Every Month by the Frontman of Talking Heads ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/mRxlH1S9Llo/radio-david-byrne.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

The Jimi Hendrix Experience Plays “Hey Joe” & “Wild Thing” on The Band’s Very First Tour: Paris, 1966 ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/sQ2Y1geuh0Y/the-jimi-hendrix-experience-first-tour.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

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

Read Free Digital Art Catalogues from 9 World-Class Museums, Thanks to the Pioneering Getty Foundation --- Click Here
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/4IyKU7hBbuI/read-free-digital-art-catalogues-from-9-world-class-museums.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Scientists Have Finally Taken A Look Inside One Of The Mysterious Siberian Holes ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-slide-down-hole-in-siberia-2014-11

ALBERTINA online (European art) --- http://sammlungenonline.albertina.at/default.aspx?lng=english2

Grand Canyon --- http://www.humfer.net/gcanyon/index.html

40 maps that explain World War II ---
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/13/7148855/40-maps-that-explain-world-war-ii

Pictures of Nursing - NLM Exhibition Program --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/picturesofnursing/index.html

Unpublished Vintage Pictures Show Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, And More Silicon Valley Stars In The 1980s ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-was-like-to-photograph-silicon-valleys-most-important-people-2014-11

The Art of Leo Tolstoy: See His Drawings in the War & Peace Manuscript & Other Literary Texts ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/C35Ii8N17jw/the-art-of-leo-tolstoy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Striking Photos Of The Homeless Community That Lived Beneath Manhattan ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-homeless-living-underground-2014-11

14 Never-Before-Seen Pictures From The World's Best Photographers ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/unseen-magnum-photos-2014-11

These Photos Show The Magical Life Of A Pair Of Icelandic Twins ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-magical-life-of-icelandic-twins-2014-11

The Red Menace: A Striking Gallery of Anti-Communist Posters, Ads, Comic Books, Magazines & Films ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/lEyP_9tQJaY/the-red-menace-a-striking-gallery-of-anti-communist-propaganda.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

26 Unbelievable Photos From The Battered Heart Of Ukraine ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-protest-pictures-2014-2

24 More Incredible Images From Google Street View ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-street-view-photography-2014-9

Staggering Photos Of Buffalo's Historic Snowstorm ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/buffalo-blizzard-2014-2014-11

The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/CkGJ77UBkT8/the-unexpected-math-behind-van-goghs-starry-night.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Never-before-seen photos from 100 years ago tell vivid story of gritty New York City ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134408/Never-seen-photos-100-years-ago-tell-vivid-story-gritty-New-York-City.html

20 Extremely Dumb Celebrities ---
http://www.rantlifestyle.com/2014/07/29/20-extremely-dumb-celebrities/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=Taboola&utm_term=Title1&&utm_content=dailymail-us 

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


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

The Immanent Frame (excellent essays about scholars in philosophy, religion, and the public sphere) --- http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/

Mark Twain Predicts the Internet in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Story, “From The ‘London Times’ in 1904” ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/5nHsgdWRsf8/mark-twain-predicts-the-internet-in-1898-read-his-sci-fi-crime-story-from-the-london-times-in-1904.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

A Lost Steinbeck Story Resurfaces 40 Years After Author's Death ---
http://lisnews.org/a_lost_steinbeck_story_resurfaces_40_years_after_authors_death

Materials for Teachers: Academy of American Poets --- http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/materials-teachers

A Cabinet of Curiosities: Discover The Public Domain Review’s New Book of Essays ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/e5WnYG6WR_4/a-cabinet-of-curiosities-discover-the-public-domain-reviews-new-book-of-essays.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Download 110 Free Philosophy eBooks: From Aristotle to Nietzsche & Wittgenstein ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/7KCZcr9eKM4/download-110-free-philosophy-ebooks-from-aristotle-to-nietzsche-wittgenstein.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

A History of Ideas: Animated Videos Explain Theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Burke & Other Philosophers ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/qjtaYhJ7jWY/a-history-of-ideas-animated-videos-explain-theories-of-simone-de-beauvoir-edmund-burke.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

David Foster Wallace's The Pale King --- http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15878coll20#nav_to

Naropa Archive Presents 5,000 Hours of Audio Recordings of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs & Other Beat Writers ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/1co2T2PWRVw/naropa-archive-features-5000-hours-of-beat-writers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

The Best Children's Books of 2014 (not free) ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/149dcbdfb1de6fec

Bob Jensen's threads on free children's books ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Children

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




Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on November 25, 2014
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2014/TidbitsQuotations112514.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/

Government Budget Balance --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_budget_balance

"Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2014 to 2023," Congressional Budget Office, November 2014 ---
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44715-OptionsForReducingDeficit-3.pdf

Contents
1 Introduction

2 Mandatory Spending Options

3 Discretionary Spending Options

4 Revenue Options

5 Options Related to Health

6 The Budgetary Implications of Eliminating a Cabinet Department

OPTIONS FOR REDUCING THE DEFICIT: 2014 TO 2023 NOVEMBER 2013

List of Tables and Figures

About This Document

GAO: Fiscal Outlook & The Debt --- http://www.gao.gov/fiscal_outlook/overview 

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

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





Tuition and Fees, 1998-99 Through 2014-15
Chronicle of Higher Education
November 13, 2014
http://chronicle.com/article/TuitionFees-1998-99/142511/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en


Posting from David Giles in his Econometrics Beat Blog, November 11, 2014

Normality Testing & Non-Stationary Data

 
Bob Jensen emailed me about my recent post about the way in which the Jarque-Bera test can be impacted when temporally aggregated data are used. Apparently he publicized my post on the listserv for Accounting Educators in the U.S.. He also drew my attention to a paper from Two former presidents of the AAA: "Some Methodological Deficiencies in Empirical Research Articles in Accounting", by Thomas R. Dyckman and Stephen A. Zeff, Accounting Horizons, September 2014, 28 (3), 695-712. (Here.) 

 
Bob commented that an even more important issue might be that our data may be non-stationary. Indeed, this is always something that should concern us, and regular readers of this blog will know that non-stationary data, cointegration, and the like have been the subject of a lot of my posts.

 
In fact, the impact of unit roots on the Jarque-Bera test was mentioned in this old post about "spurious regressions". There, I mentioned a paper of mine (Giles, 2007) in which I proved that:

Continued in article

"The Rise of Bayesian Econometrics," by David Giles, Econometrics Beat, November 19, 2014 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-rise-of-bayesian-econometrics.html

. . .

The authors round out their paper as follows:
 
"...with a list of subjects that are important challenges for twenty-first century Bayesian conometrics: Sampling methods suitable for use with big data and fast, parallelized and GPU, calculations, complex models which account for nonlinearities, analysis of implied model features such as risk and instability, incorporating model incompleteness, and a natural combination of economic modeling, forecasting and policy interventions."
So, there's lots more to be done!

Bob Jensen's threads on mathematics and statistics tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

Common Accountics Science and Econometric Science Statistical Mistakes ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsScienceStatisticalMistakes.htm


How to Mislead With Charts
"How to Lie with Charts," Harvard Business Review, December 2014 ---
https://hbr.org/2014/12/vision-statement-how-to-lie-with-charts
The above link is only a teaser. You have to pay to see the rest of the article.

"BP Misleads You With Charts," by Andrew Price, Good Blog, May 27, 2010 --- Click Here
http://www.good.is/post/bp-misleads-you-with-charts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+good%2Flbvp+%28GOOD+Main+RSS+Feed%29

"Correlation or Causation? Need to prove something you already believe? Statistics are easy: All you need are two graphs and a leading question," by Vali Chandrasekaran, Business Week, December 1, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/correlation-or-causation-12012011-gfx.html

How to Mislead With Statistics
"Reminder: The FBI’s ‘Police Homicide’ Count Is Wrong," by Reuben Fischer-Baum, Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog, November 12, 2014 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/reminder-the-fbis-police-homicide-count-is-wrong/ 

How to Mislead With Statistics
"Some Stats Are Just Nonsense
," by Cullen Roche, Pragmatic Capitalism via Business Insider, November 15, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/historical-statistical-and-nonsensical-2014-11

How to Mislead With Statistics
Common Accountics Science and Econometric Science Statistical Mistakes ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsScienceStatisticalMistakes.htm


Posting from David Giles on November 19, 2014

Orthogonal Regression ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2014/11/orthogonal-regression-first-steps.html


Video:  A Scenario of Higher Education in 2020

November 14, 2014 message from Denny Beresford

Bob,

The link below is to a very interesting video on the future of higher education – if you haven’t seen it already. I think it’s very consistent with much of what you’ve been saying.

Denny

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ

November 15, 2014 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Denny,

Thank you for this link. I agree with many parts of this possible scenario, and viewers should patiently watch it through the Google Epic in 2020.

But this is only one of many possible scenarios, and I definitely do not agree with the predicted timings. None of the predictions for the future will happen in such a short time frame.

It takes a long time for this video to mention the role of colleges as a buffer between living as a protected kid at home and working full time on the mean streets of life. And I don't think campus living and learning in the future will just be for the "wealthy." We're moving toward a time when campus living will be available more and more to gifted non-wealthy students. But we're also moving toward a time when campus living and learning may be available to a smaller percentage of students --- more like Germany where campus education is free, but only the top 25% of the high school graduates are allowed to go to college. The other 75% will rely more and more on distance education and apprenticeship training alternatives.

Last night (November 14) there was a fascinating module on CBS News about a former top NFL lineman (center) for the Rams who in the prime of his career just quit and bought a 1,000 acre farm in North Carolina using the millions of dollars he'd saved until then by playing football.

What was remarkable is that he knew zero about farming until he started learning about it on YouTube. Now he's a successful farmer who gives over 20% of his harvest to food banks for the poor.

This morning I did a brief search and discovered that there are tons of free videos on the technical aspect of farming just as there are tons of videos that I already knew about on how to be a financial analyst trading in derivative financial instruments.

My point is that there will be more and more people who are being educated and trained along the lines of the video in your email message to me.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ 
The education and training will be a lifelong process because there is so much that will be available totally free of charge. We will become more and more like Boy-Girl Scouts earning our badges.

College degrees will be less and less important as the certification badges (competency achievements) mentioned in the video take over as chevrons of expertise and accomplishment. Some badges will be for hobbies, and some badges will be for career advancement.

These are exciting times for education and training. We will become more and more like the Phantom of the Library at Texas A&M without having to live inside a library. This "Phantom" Aggie was a former student who started secretly living and learning in the campus library. Now the world's free "library" is only a few clicks away --- starting with Wikipedia and YouTube and moving on to the thousands of MOOCs now available from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 

Also see the new-world library alternatives at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Thanks Denny

Bob


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

"6 Big Takeaways From the EdX Global Forum," by Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, November 23, 2014 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/6-big-takeaways-edx-global-forum

Bob Jensen's threads on free MOOCs, free videos, and other free course materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The MOOCs, by definition, are free but students may have to pay for competency testing and transcript credits.


Here's How Likely Each Poker Hand Is ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/poker-hand-probabilities#how-to-find-probabilities-1
This is a slide show. Use the arrows in the upper right corner.
Keep in mind that the betting odds change dramatically if players can make decisions at interim points based upon partial views of the hands of opponents such as in five-card stud poker and its variants.

For example, the probability that you will get four aces changes if you can see that two of your opponents each have an ace showing before the next cards are dealt. Odds also change with the rules of the game (such as caps on the number and size of raises) and the risk aversions of players. In big-time poker, with virtually unlimited raises allowed, bluffing becomes a very unpredictable (well maybe somewhat predictable) part of the game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-card_stud

The other night I re-watched one of my favorite movies with great acting --- A Big Hand for a Little Lady (1966) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Big_Hand_for_the_Little_Lady
It's a tongue-in-cheek comedy that illustrates the importance of how poker changes with unlimited raises allowed. The ending is very, very clever even if it does leave you hanging in one important respect!


Advances in the Khan Academy

Invention of the Linear Perspective --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Brunelleschi#Invention_of_linear_perspective

What was the obsession of Filippo Brunelleschi back in the days of Pacioli and Leonardo Devinci?
http://emails.khanacademy.org/523a1d5a191b2a646d943fa620eim.1eyad/VG-CV0mOC-z1j_0qD60d9


New Helpers for Sight Impaired and Even Totally Blind Readers

"Software Captions Complex Images," by Tom Simonite, MIT's Technology Review, November 18, 2014 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532666/googles-brain-inspired-software-captions-complex-images/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141119

. . .

The new software is the latest product of Google’s research into using large collections of simulated neurons to process data (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”). No one at Google programmed the new software with rules for how to interpret scenes. Instead, its networks “learned” by consuming data. Though it’s just a research project for now, Vinyals says, he and others at Google have already begun to think about how it could be used to enhance image search or help the visually impaired navigate online or in the real world.

Google’s researchers created the software through a kind of digital brain surgery, plugging together two neural networks developed separately for different tasks. One network had been trained to process images into a mathematical representation of their contents, in preparation for identifying objects. The other had been trained to generate full English sentences as part of automated translation software.

When the networks are combined, the first can “look” at an image and then feed the mathematical description of what it “sees” into the second, which uses that information to generate a human-readable sentence. The combined network was trained to generate more accurate descriptions by showing it tens of thousands of images with descriptions written by humans. “We’re seeing through language what it thought the image was,” says Vinyals.

After that training process, the software was set loose on several large data sets of images from Flickr and other sources and asked to describe them. The accuracy of its descriptions was then judged with an automated test used to benchmark computer-vision software. Google’s software posted scores in the 60s on a 100-point scale. Humans doing the test typically score in 70s, says Vinyals.

That result suggests Google is far ahead of other researchers working to create scene-describing software. Stanford researchers recently published details of their own system and reported that it scored between 40 and 50 on the same standard test.

However, Vinyals notes that researchers at Google and elsewhere are still in the early stages of understanding how to create and test this kind of software. When Google asked humans to rate its software’s descriptions of images on a scale of 1 to 4, it averaged only 2.5, suggesting that it still has a long way to go.

Vinyals predicts that research on understanding and describing scenes will now intensify. One problem that could slow things down: though large databases of hand-labeled images have been created to train software to recognize individual objects, there are fewer labeled photos of more natural scenes.

Microsoft this year launched a database called COCO to try to fix that. Google used COCO in its new research, but it is still relatively small. “I hope other parties will chip in and make it better,” says Vinyals. 

 

Jensen Comment
It's a bit like captions for the hearing impaired in television shows only this time the captions are for the blind regarding images in computer screens.

Of course authors could probably do a better job by merely describing aloud the images they insert in there text. Some publishers now have audio versions of their textbooks. But do they also describe each image in the page?

Intel developed software for reading hard copy text aloud, but the software cannot describe images.

Intel Reader --- http://www.intel.com/healthcare/reader/index.htm

The Intel Reader, powered by an Atom processor, is a handheld device with a five-­megapixel camera that can read aloud any printed text it is pointed at, including product labels, receipts, and pages from books and newspapers. Previously, visually impaired or dyslexic people required a desktop scanner connected to a computer to convert print into speech.
"Scan and Listen," MIT's Technology Review, December 17, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24198/?a=f

Bob Jensen's threads on helpers for handicapped and disabled learners ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped


"This Anonymous Account Of A UVA Rape Case Is Utterly Heartbreaking:  This Anonymous Account Of A UVA Rape Case Is Utterly Heartbreaking," by Peter Jacobs, Business Insider, November 21, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/uva-students-anonymous-post-about-her-rape-2014-11

Reported rape incidents a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity houses (probably only the tip of the iceberg) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_Kappa_Psi#Rape_incidents


"Harvard Researchers Build $10 Robot That Can Teach Kids to Code," by Davey Alba, Wired News, November 21, 2014 ---
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/10-dollar-education-robot/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


Magnus Carlsen --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen

. . .

Carlsen had an aggressive style of play as a youth,[147][148] and, according to Agdestein, his play was characterised by "a fearless readiness to offer material for activity".[149] Carlsen found as he matured that this risky playing style was not as well suited against the world elite. When he started playing in top tournaments he was struggling against top players, and had trouble getting much out of the opening. To progress, Carlsen's style became more universal, capable of handling all sorts of positions well. Carlsen opens with both 1.d4 and 1.e4, as well as 1.c4, and, on occasion, 1.Nf3, thus making it harder for opponents to prepare against him.[150][151] Evgeny Sveshnikov has criticised Carlsen's opening play, claiming in a 2013 interview that without a more "scientific" approach to preparation, his "future doesn't look so promising".[152]

[Carlsen] has been known to say that he isn't all that interested in opening preparation; his main forte is the middlegame, in which he manages to outplay many of his opponents with positional means. ... Carlsen's repertoire is aimed at avoiding an early crisis in the game. He invariably aims for middlegames that lend themselves to a strategic approach. Jan Timman, 2012[153]

Garry Kasparov, who coached Carlsen from 2009 to 2010, said that Carlsen has a positional style similar to that of past world champions such as Anatoly Karpov, José Raúl Capablanca, and Vasily Smyslov, rather than the tactical style of Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Tal, and himself.[154] According to Carlsen, however, he does not have any preferences in playing style.[85] Kasparov said in 2013 that "Carlsen is a combination of Karpov [and] Fischer. He gets his positions [and] then never lets go of that bulldog bite. Exhausting for opponents."[155] Carlsen has also stated that he follows in the traditions of Karpov and Fischer, but also mentions Reuben Fine as a player who "was doing in chess similar to what I am doing."[156] Anand has said of Carlsen: "The majority of ideas occur to him absolutely naturally. He's also very flexible, he knows all the structures and he can play almost any position. ... Magnus can literally do almost everything."[157] Kasparov expressed similar sentiments: "[Carlsen] has the ability to correctly evaluate any position, which only Karpov could boast of before him."[158] In a 2012 interview, Vladimir Kramnik attributed much of Carlsen's success against other top players to his "excellent physical shape" and his ability to avoid "psychological lapses", which enables him to maintain a high standard of play over long games and at the end of tournaments, when the energy levels of others have dropped.[159]

Continued in article

Chess Quotes By or About Magnus Carlsen
http://www.chessquotes.com/player-carlsen

Comprehensive Magnus Carlsen chess games collection, opening repertoire, tournament ...
Wins: 637 (42.33 %). Draws: 606 (40.27 %). Losses: 262 (17.41 %).
These statistics have little meaning unless you also look at the dates and trends.
He became a grand master at Age 13 but lost quite a few games in those early years.
He was not a world champion until 2013-2014

"An Almost Unbeatable Magnus Carlsen Defends His Title As World Chess Champion," by Matthew DeBord, Business Insider, November 23, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/an-almost-unbeatable-magnus-carlsen-defends-his-title-as-world-chess-champion-2014-11

November 24, 2014 reply from Richard Sansing

Although the Carlsen-Anand match is decidedly off-topic, this post speaks to the reporting of historical events, and accounting is lens through which the financial history of a firm is recorded.

There is an annoying tendency to view a particular outcome as inevitable, and tell the story of that outcome in a way that makes the outcome sound inevitable. The article that Bob posted regarding Carlsen’s win over Anand reflects that tendency.

Indeed, Carlsen could have easily lost this match; I think he is the stronger player, but in a 12-game match against a former world champion any outcome is possible. Carlsen was crushed in game 3. In game 6, he blundered in a stronger position with 26. Kd2? With 26…N:e5!, Anand would have had excellent winning chances, but blundered back with 26…a4? See


http://en.chessbase.com/post/sochi-g6-carlsen-won-anand-missed-big-chance

That game gave Carlsen a one-point lead that he had going into game 11.

The characterization of Anand’s play in game 11 bears little resemblance to how it was discussed by grandmasters in real time. Anand had to play aggressively at the end of the match, as two more draws would have lost him the match.  At the time, the commentators had been discussing a possible exchange sacrifice, but thought it was premature. At the chessboard, it takes a lot more courage to maintain the tension he had created by 23…b5! with 27…Rb3 than to resolve it with 27…Rb4. And his followup with 28…c:b4 was just bad; 28…a:b4 looked much better. See


http://en.chessbase.com/post/sochi-g11-in-dramatic-finale-carlsen-retains-title

Carlsen is a worthy world champion. But “almost unbeatable”? Not a chance. They said the same thing about Capablanca before he lost his title to Alekhine in 1927.

http://moscow2012.fide.com/en/history/94

Richard Sansing

 


"These Are The Highest Paying Programming Languages You Should Learn, Ranked By Salary," by Lisa Eadicicco, Business Insider, November 20, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-tech-skills-resume-ranked-salary-2014-11

. . .

Based on that data, here are programming languages listed next to their average annual salary from lowest to highest:

12. PERL - $82,513

11. SQL - $85,511

10. Visual Basic - $85,962

9. C# - $89,074

8. R- $90,055

7. C - 90,134

6. JavaScript - $91,461

5. C++ - $93,502

4. JAVA - $94,908

3. Python - $100,717

2. Objective C - $108,225

1. Ruby on Rails - $109,460

While some of these coding languages can help you earn around $100,000, train to become a Salesforce Architect if you want one of the highest paying jobs in tech. According to data from IT recruiting firm Mondo that was published back in March, Salesforce Architects can earn anywhere between $180,000 and $200,000. 


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/best-tech-skills-resume-ranked-salary-2014-11#ixzz3JdigS3Iy
 

Jensen Comment
After spending all that part of my life learning and teaching Fortran and COBOL I'm no longer needed. Sigh!

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


"Click Here to See If You’re Under Surveillance," by Vernon Silver, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 21, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-21/detekt-is-free-software-that-spots-computer-spyware?campaign_id=DN112114

Jensen Comment
I've not tried this yet, but would like to hear from users who've tried it. As most of you probably know by now, there's noting on my computer that I'm trying to hide. I'm the most open sharing guy I know.


How to Mislead With Statistics
"The 10 Best Jobs For 2015," by Jacquelyn Smith, Business Insider, November 20, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-jobs-for-2015-2014-11?op=1

. . .

Marketing Executive

Software Developer, Applications

Registered Nurse

Industrial Engineer

Network and Computer System Administrator

Web Developer

Medical and Health Services Manager

Physical Therapist

Speech-Language Pathologist

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The above article is terrible in many respects.

  1. The biggest failing is that it does not define "best jobs." There are many criteria for "best jobs." Best can be defined in terms of starting compensation packages, demand versus supply, mobility (e.g., are the jobs only available in larger urban centers or are they available in rural areas across the USA), amount of overnight travel required, promotion opportunities and career paths, nature of the compensation (fixed salary versus bonuses versus sales commissions) etc.
     
  2. The article does list "growth potential" as an annual percentage growth in compensation, but this is highly misleading. In some careers the inflation-adjusted compensation is asymptotic. The growth in compensation for a Registered Nurse or a Physical Therapist may be 5% per year for the first few years, but the after adjusting for inflation the growth potential is likely to be asymptotic as it approaches the high end in that career. A CPA or computer program may work for a firm for five years and then go to work for a client at double or triple compensation rates.
     
  3. The article mixes executive jobs like Marketing Executive, Network and Computer System Administrator, and Medical and Health Services Manager with non-executive jobs like Registered Nurse, Physical Therapist, and Speech-Language Pathologist. There are usually entry jobs available for Registered Nurse, Physical Therapist, and Speech-Language Pathologist, but nobody graduates after four years expecting to get job offers as a Marketing Executive or a "Manager" of anything.
     
  4. Some job categories are too vague in terms of a high degree of variance in opportunity and compensation. For example, Web Developers are a dime a dozen with extremely high variance in opportunity and compensation.
     
  5. In my opinion, the "best jobs" at the time of graduation are those with high demand, on-the-job-training, and client/customer exposures that will lead to huge opportunities down the road. The starting salary is very low in importance if a job offers tremendous opportunity for training and career advancement. For example, a new CPA in a large accounting firm usually receives very extensive training and exposure to clients that will offer tremendous job offers down the road. A Registered Nurse, Physical Therapist, and Speech-Language Pathologist may end up doing pretty much the same thing for 40+ years.
     
  6. For men or women with family responsibilities some jobs can be performed heavily without leaving the home or children. For example, many CPA firms now let workers work from home computers a very large share of the work week. This is usually not the case for a all of the above supposed "best jobs" other than possibly a "Web Developer."
     
  7. I'm confused why "Industrial Engineer" beats out other types of engineers in the above ranking. Most rankings that I have seen before list the Chemical Engineers and Electrical Engineers well above Industrial Engineers. Civil Engineers don't fare as well.
     

I could go on and on lambasting the above article. but perhaps you get the idea by now.


How to Mislead With Statistics:  Ignore the Variance and Ignore the Outliers (in this case graduates without law jobs)
"Why Huge Salaries Don't Necessarily Make Law Grads Rich," bv Akane Otani, Bloomberg Businessweek, October 22, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-22/law-school-grads-make-good-salaries-but-have-high-debt-and-few-jobs

Graduates of Harvard Law School, among all the graduate schools in the U.S., make the most money, earning a median salary of $201,000 once they are 10 years out of school, according to a new report. Law schools rank higher than other graduate programs when it comes to salaries, yet skyrocketing debt and a thinning job market for law graduates may dampen the appeal of a J.D.

Harvard Law School, Emory University School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law topped salary rankings for graduate and professional programs in a study released Wednesday by compensation-tracking company PayScale. Of the top 20 schools, 12 were law schools. The rest were business schools.

Despite a few law schools dominating the rankings, law school graduates did not hold claim to the most lucrative degree on the market. The median midcareer salary for a law school graduate was $139,300—a far smaller sum than the figures boasted by the schools that topped PayScale’s rankings. Considering that the median debt load for law school graduates rose to $140,616 in 2012, even a six-figure salary doesn’t sound as glamorous.

What’s more, Payscale’s data didn’t factor in law school grads who don’t have jobs—and jobs are scarcer for lawyers now than they have been in years. The employment rate for law school graduates has dropped six years in a row. “Since 1985, there have only been two classes with an overall employment rate below [84.5 percent], and both of those occurred in the aftermath of the 1990-91 recession,” the National Association for Law Placement said in a report this summer. Over the past decade, at least 12 firms, accounting for more than 1,000 lawyers, have shut their doors. Others are eyeing cuts among partners.

One reason why a J.D. isn’t a get-rich-quick guarantee is the wide range of salaries within the field of law. A new graduate working as a public interest lawyer or for local government will make an average of $60,000 or less a year, according to the NALP.

“If you want to be a public defender vs. a corporate attorney, there is going to be a big difference in terms of ability to pay off your loans,” says Lydia Frank, editorial and marketing director for PayScale. “Because there’s such a wide variety in earnings potential, you can’t assume that any job you’re going to pursue with a J.D. is going to be equal.”

While the salary rankings may provide a good benchmark for what’s possible with an elite law degree, great job connections, and a lucrative specialty, the average would-be lawyer should think carefully about the return on an investment in legal education.

“If you’re going to take out ‘X’ amount in student loans, you really want to have a good understanding of the likelihood of being able to repay that loan in a timely fashion,” Frank says. “I think it still behooves everybody to really examine things other than salary potential, such as employment potential for JDs.”

Jensen Comment
Traditionally, accounting graduates who go to work for large CPA firms get great training and great client exposure. The bad news is that probabilities of attaining partnerships after 6-10 years are very low. The good news is that prospects of going to work for clients are high, and new graduates never wanted the pressures, travel, and time commitments of partnerships in CPA firms in the first place.

Among the least-wanted pressures are the pressures to obtain new clients via lots of night and weekend community volunteer work, golf outings that aren't all that much fun, and selling the firms' services over and over and over year after year Some of the things that discourage faculty from striving to be college presidents also discourage staff accountants and lawyers from seeking partnerships.

My point is that winnings of the  highest salaries as partners in both law and accounting firms are not all they're cracked up to be in terms of job stress, long hours, frequent travel, glad-handing, broken marriages, neglected children, etc. Most of the very good lawyers and accountants want no part of this partnership lifestyle even at much higher compensation. Men and women partners who are also parents are advised to have spouses who will take on the chores of child rearing and keeping the home fires burning.

A bummer for finance and marketing graduates is performance-based compensation. For example, landing that job on Wall Street sounds great until you realize that your pay is really based upon sales commissions. It's not a great life unless you really like to spend your days wooing customers to buy what you're selling (like bonds and derivatives) year after year after year.


"Where the Jobs Are," Inside Higher Ed, April 23, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/04/23/where-jobs-are#sthash.NKe4NhNO.dpbs

A new analysis of available jobs finds that the highest demand (among openings for college graduates) is for white-collar professional occupations (33 percent) and science and technology occupations (28 percent). The analysis -- by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce -- is consistent with that center's past research, in finding many more opportunities for those with a bachelor's degree than for those without a college degree.

The new study is based on online job advertisements. The most in-demand professional jobs are accountants/auditors and medical/health service managers. In STEM, the most in-demand jobs are for applications software developers and computer systems analysts.

Jensen Comment
There's a bit of mixing of apples and oranges here. The study says it looks at bachelor's degrees. But in in order to take the CPA exam accountants and auditors mush have 150 credits which for most graduates translates to a masters degree. Also many medical/health service programs are graduates of masters of health care administration programs such as the graduate health care administration program at Trinity University.

In some cases like chemistry and biology the job prospects with a bachelor's degree are mostly lousy McJobs. But those majors have an edge for being admitted to graduate programs, especially medical schools, where opportunities abound upon graduation.

For those rejected for graduate schools or who cannot afford graduate schools, career opportunities are probably better in the skilled trades such as those $150,000 - $200,000 welding jobs.

Bob Jensen's career helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

 


Questions
Could this be a precursor for making libraries, including eBook libraries, responsible for any plagiarism and any book contained in the library?

Will it ruin YouTube if Google has to investigate the legal rights of every submitted video clip before posting it on YouTube?

Could this be the doom of crowd-sourced sites in general?

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on November 19, 2014

Music mogul tells YouTube to remove clients’ songs ---
http://online.wsj.com/articles/manager-irving-azoff-tells-youtube-to-remove-songs-by-lennon-eagles-others-1416346805?mod=djemCFO_h

Music mogul Irving Azoff told YouTube to remove his clients’ songs, challenging the Google-owned site over royalties for Pharrell Williams, John Lennon and others. Mr. Azoff is taking on YouTube on behalf of the 46 songwriters represented by his new company, Global Music Rights, which collects performance royalties from radio stations, digital music services, bars and nightclubs. Meanwhile, a top Sony Corp. executive said the company is re-evaluating its support for free, advertiser-supported online music after U.S. pop star Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify.

Jensen Comment
There's a huge difference between removing clips upon request of copyright owners and being responsible for not allowing such postings in the first place. YouTube already removes clips upon request such as all the YouTube music links that no longer work at my music-link site at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

How to Work Around Broken YouTube Links
There are thousands of YouTube links in my Music.htm site. YouTube links are like prairie dogs. They keep disappearing from sight only to re-emerge from other holes. Rather than give up on a broken YouTube link, enter the particular singer or orchestra or song title in the YouTube search box and bring that prairie dog back to the surface.

To force YouTube to prevent postings in advance could be a YouTube-killing court order. People posting to YouTube will become more devious about posting songs of popular artists so that it's almost impossible to prevent without killing YouTube. For example, people can bury a popular artist's recording within some of their own clips that have junky front ends with their own selfie-recorded voices.

It's a little like making a librarian responsible to read every new book and detect all plagiarisms before making only plagiarism-free books available to the public. That type of request is clearly impossible if you are going to have a library.

Bob Jensen's threads on the DMCA ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright


Question
Why is the biggest economic problem in Japan virtually unsolvable?

Hint
The USA has basically the same problem, but the USA can willingly or unwillingly solve this problem to a point.

"Japan's Biggest Problem Is Basically Unfixable," by Shane Ferro, Business Insider, November 19, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-unfavorable-demographics-2014-11

. . .

One-fourth of Japan's population is older than 65, and that number isn't going down anytime soon. That means a shrinking percentage of the population is working. Meanwhile, a growing percentage of the population is receiving benefits, living on a fixed income, and being supported by that shrinking population of workers.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-unfavorable-demographics-2014-11#ixzz3JXN4ae2a
 

Jensen Comment
The USA has a similar problem as more and more older people (the "Boomers") are being supported by fewer and fewer workers. But the USA willingly or unwillingly is making strides with legal and illegal immigration providing tens of millions of workers.  Cultural and language barriers against immigration are much greater in Japan.

The unknowns in all of this are robotics and other forms of technology. In nations having low population growth, like Japan, technology can increasingly become an economic break.

In the USA, with rapidly rising population, technology is a mixed blessing. If the rising population cannot find work due to technology displacements people  have to be supported on unemployment benfits, thereby exacerbating an aging population problem living on entitlements.

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

"Amazon’s Warehouse Robots, at Work and Play," by Rob Walker, Yahoo Tech, November 20, 2014 ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/amazons-warehouse-robots-at-work-and-play-103129789109.html


"Still trapped:  Governments and lobbies still need to fight to end modern-day slavery, The Economist, November 18, 2014 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21633585-governments-and-lobbies-still-need-fight-end-modern-day-slavery-still-trapped

2014 Global Slavery Index --- http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/

This is the second edition of the Global Slavery Index, the flagship report of the Walk Free Foundation. The Global Slavery Index estimates the number of people in modern slavery in 167 countries. It is a tool for citizens, non government organisations, businesses and public officials to understand the size of the problem, existing responses and contributing factors, so they can build sound policies that will end modern slavery.

01    Mauritania
02    Uzbekistan
03    Haiti
04    Qatar
05    India
06    Pakistan
07    Congo
08    Sudan
09    Syria
10    Central African Republic

Continued in article


"The Human-Rights Charade," by Eric A. Posner, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, November 19, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Peace-LoveGrandstanding/149961/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

In August, Yale University announced a new undergraduate program in human rights. It joins numerous other human-rights programs, institutes, and clinics that have spread like kudzu across campuses in the United States and around the world. By one count, the number has increased from one in 1968 to almost 150 in 2000, with most of the growth in the 1990s. The U.N. provides links to more than 300 academic institutions that offer human-rights instruction. These programs raise numerous questions about the role of political advocacy in the university.

What explains the rise of human rights on campuses? It is in part the result of international human-rights law and the worldwide human-rights movement. Most of the major human-rights treaties were ratified in the 1970s and 80s. These treaties helped create an international system of committees, commissions, and courts that churn out reports and opinions. As a result, "human rights" has become an idiom in the diplomatic vernacular of states. Scholars in turn have put it on their research agendas. The use of "human rights" in English-language books has increased 200-fold since 1940, and is used today 100 times as often as terms like "constitutional rights" and "natural rights."

But the increasing prominence of human rights cannot by itself explain the growth of interest at universities. Something else is going on. One factor is the interest among donors, students, and professors in forging an international image, as shown by the feverish opening of campus colonies in foreign lands. In the era of globalization, a university that pursues traditional academic research in a purely national setting risks looking provincial.

Another factor is the vast ideological appeal of human rights. It’s become the lingua franca for political action, and the always-present temptation for professors and students to use the university as a vehicle for political advocacy has found its motor in human-rights law. Under the guise of teaching and studying human rights, academics can use university resources to engage in political activism.

Some programs are clear about this. The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, at Harvard, says its mission is "to partner with human rights organizations to help them respond to current and future challenges. … Thus, we seek to expand the reach and relevance of human rights considerations to all who influence their outcomes." The Institute for the Study of Human Rights, at Columbia, fashions itself a "leader in bridging the academic study of human rights and the worlds of advocacy and public policy." The director of Yale’s program denies that it is a training program for human-rights advocates.

But these and other university programs frequently form partnerships with law-school human-rights clinics, and these clinics, animated by law schools’ mission to train advocates, are not shy about their agendas. According to its mission statement, Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights "promotes activism through summer and postgraduate fellowships … and fosters human rights activities throughout Yale University." The University of California at Berkeley’s clinic says it "is engaged in cutting-edge research, policy work, and advocacy." The international human-rights clinic at my institution, the University of Chicago Law School, "works for the promotion of social and economic justice globally, including in the United States."

What does it mean for law-school clinics, and other university programs, to "promote" human rights? Should the university be involved in such advocacy? Law-school clinics, like clinics in medical school, are designed to give students practical skills that cannot be taught in normal classroom settings. Most legal clinics allow students to participate in the representation of criminal defendants and in other forms of legal advocacy, as well as to draft contracts, fill out legal forms, and conduct interviews of clients. In fulfilling those roles, students both learn skills and help people who cannot afford a lawyer. While many students are motivated by political and ideological goals—many clinics, for example, assist defendants in capital cases because professors and students oppose the death penalty—the projects are rooted in the legal system, which ensures that students learn skills consistent with the pedagogic mission of the law school.

But human-rights clinics are different. They engage in a bewildering array of programs and strategies that have little in common but a left-wing orientation. These include helping undocumented migrants obtain asylum; developing a best-legal-practices guide for responding to domestic violence in Mexico and Guatemala; advocating for public housing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; drafting a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights after a local government denied dialysis funding to certain immigrants; and writing reports to help Haitian residents in the Dominican Republic who suffer from political repression and discrimination. (These examples are taken from an academic article.)

Other examples include a successful effort to persuade the City Council of Chicago to recognize in a resolution that domestic violence is a human-rights concern; traveling to Congo to help ensure that mining profits are shared with citizens; teaching residents of California’s Central Valley that their rights to housing, water, and political participation have been violated, and that international institutions could be helpful in vindicating them; and issuing a report that argues that laws intended to ban sex-selective abortions in various U.S. states are actually intended to reduce the number of abortions.

In short, a human-rights clinic can do anything it wants, as long as it can argue that its project will (or is intended to) benefit (some) people. In some cases, participants do not even pretend that their projects advance human-rights law—there is no international human right to abortion, and the report (issued by the clinic at the University of Chicago Law School) does not suggest otherwise. But in most cases, a clinic can link its political advocacy to human-rights law because, thanks to the extraordinary proliferation of human rights in treaties and other legal instruments, virtually every facet of human existence is governed by one or another international human right.

How did this come about?
A bit of background may be helpful. The core idea in modern human-rights law is that governments are responsible for the well-being of the people living in their territories. While this idea is actually very old, and received a significant boost during the Enlightenment, its embodiment in international law dates back only a few decades. And its development was accompanied by intense controversies—controversies that were never resolved but instead papered over for the sake of diplomatic progress.

The story begins with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After World War II, the victorious Allies sought to repudiate Nazism and establish the principle that governments owe obligations to their citizens. But a cleavage immediately opened up. The United States sought to enshrine the liberal democratic values that its Constitution (imperfectly) embodied, but which were utterly inconsistent with the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. By contrast, the U.S.S.R. advocated economic and social rights—jobs, income, health care, education, and the like. Europe and developing countries sought something of a middle path. As a compromise, the Universal Declaration contained all these rights but in vague and aspirational terms. It was not regarded as a treaty; instead, it was issued in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly, which does not possess the authority to make law. The U.S.S.R. and a handful of other countries abstained from the vote.

Negotiations toward a treaty regime then followed two tracks. Political and civil rights were set forth in a treaty that was eventually known as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, while economic and social rights were embodied in what became the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Those treaties went into force in 1976.

Over the following decades, countries negotiated and ratified numerous other treaties that, among other things, banned torture and discrimination against women, and recognized rights for children and disabled people. Not all countries ratified all these treaties. Notably, the United States never ratified the covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights. But nearly all countries ratified nearly all the treaties, leading many scholars to claim that the body of human-rights law was effectively an international bill of rights, binding on all countries, even those that have not ratified some of the treaties.

The treaty regime has given rise to a fantastically complex set of international institutions that monitor countries’ compliance with their human-rights obligations, interpret the law, and propose reform. However, these institutions possess no enforcement power. And as a large body of empirical research has shown, many countries completely disregard their treaty obligations. Indeed, there is little evidence that human-rights treaties have improved the well-being of people or even resulted in respect for the rights in those treaties.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This article caught me by surprise since 99+% of the articles in the Chronicle Review are usually to the left of liberal progressive.

"Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education," by Josh Jones, Open Culture, November 2012 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/noam_chomsky_spells_out_the_purpose_of_education.html

E + ducere: “To lead or draw out.” The etymological Latin roots of “education.” According to a former Jesuit professor of mine, the fundamental sense of the word is to draw others out of “darkness,” into a “more magnanimous view” (he’d say, his arms spread wide). As inspirational as this speech was to a seminar group of budding higher educators, it failed to specify the means by which this might be done, or the reason. Lacking a Jesuit sense of mission, I had to figure out for myself what the “darkness” was, what to lead people towards, and why. It turned out to be simpler than I thought, in some respects, since I concluded that it wasn’t my job to decide these things, but rather to present points of view, a collection of methods—an intellectual toolkit, so to speak—and an enthusiastic model. Then get out of the way. That’s all an educator can, and should do, in my humble opinion. Anything more is not education, it’s indoctrination. Seemed simple enough to me at first. If only it were so. Few things, in fact, are more contentious (Google the term “assault on education,” for example).

What is the difference between education and indoctrination? This debate rages back hundreds, thousands, of years, and will rage thousands more into the future. Every major philosopher has had one answer or another, from Plato to Locke, Hegel and Rousseau to Dewey. Continuing in that venerable tradition, linguist, political activist, and academic generalist extraordinaire Noam Chomsky, one of our most consistently compelling public intellectuals, has a lot to say in the video above and elsewhere about education.

First, Chomsky defines his view of education in an Enlightenment sense, in which the “highest goal in life is to inquire and create. The purpose of education from that point of view is just to help people to learn on their own. It’s you the learner who is going to achieve in the course of education and it’s really up to you to determine how you’re going to master and use it.” An essential part of this kind of education is fostering the impulse to challenge authority, think critically, and create alternatives to well-worn models. This is the pedagogy I ended up adopting, and as a college instructor in the humanities, it’s one I rarely have to justify.

Chomsky defines the opposing concept of education as indoctrination, under which he subsumes vocational training, perhaps the most benign form. Under this model, “People have the idea that, from childhood, young people have to be placed into a framework where they’re going to follow orders. This is often quite explicit.” (One of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary defines education as “the training of an animal,” a sense perhaps not too distinct from what Chomsky means). For Chomsky, this model of education imposes “a debt which traps students, young people, into a life of conformity. That’s the exact opposite of what traditionally comes out of the Enlightenment.” In the contest between these two definitions—Athens vs. Sparta, one might say—is the question that plagues educational reformers at the primary and secondary levels: “Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?”

Chomsky goes on to discuss the technological changes in education occurring now, the focus of innumerable discussions and debates about not only the purpose of education, but also the proper methods (a subject this site is deeply invested in), including the current unease over the shift to online over traditional classroom ed or the value of a traditional degree versus a certificate. Chomsky’s view is that technology is “basically neutral,” like a hammer that can build a house or “crush someone’s skull.” The difference is the frame of reference under which one uses the tool. Again, massively contentious subject, and too much to cover here, but I’ll let Chomsky explain. Whatever you think of his politics, his erudition and experience as a researcher and educator make his views on the subject well worth considering.

Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.

 

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.
William F. Buckley

"Moving Further to the Left," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, October 24, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/24/survey-finds-professors-already-liberal-have-moved-further-left

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


"Colleges’ Prestige Doesn’t Guarantee a Top-Flight Learning Experience," by Dan Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 20, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Prestige-Doesn-t/150155/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

"Educators Point to a ‘Crisis of Mediocre Teaching’," by Vimal Patel, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Educators-Point-to-a-Crisis/145901/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Dr. Collier is a psychology professor at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C.
"We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn:  At colleges today, all parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards.," by Jeffrey L. Collier, The Wall Street Journal, December 26, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303531204579204201833906182?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

The parlous state of American higher education has been widely noted, but the view from the trenches is far more troubling than can be characterized by measured prose. With most students on winter break and colleges largely shut down, the lull presents an opportunity for damage assessment.

The flood of books detailing the problems includes the representative titles "Bad Students, Not Bad Schools" and "The Five Year Party." To list only the principal faults: Students arrive woefully academically unprepared; students study little, party much and lack any semblance of internalized discipline; pride in work is supplanted by expediency; and the whole enterprise is treated as a system to be gamed in which plagiarism and cheating abound.

The problems stem from two attitudes. Social preoccupations trump the academic part of residential education, which occupies precious little of students' time or emotions. Second, students' view of education is strictly instrumental and credentialist. They regard the entire enterprise as a series of hoops they must jump through to obtain their 120 credits, which they blindly view as an automatic licensure for adulthood and a good job, an increasingly problematic belief.

Education thus has degenerated into a game of "trap the rat," whereby the student and instructor view each other as adversaries. Winning or losing is determined by how much the students can be forced to study. This will never be a formula for excellence, which requires intense focus, discipline and diligence that are utterly lacking among our distracted, indifferent students. Such diligence requires emotional engagement. Engagement could be with the material, the professors, or even a competitive goal, but the idea that students can obtain a serious education even with their disengaged, credentialist attitudes is a delusion.

The professoriate plays along because teachers know they have a good racket going. They would rather be refining their research or their backhand than attending to tedious undergraduates. The result is an implicit mutually assured nondestruction pact in which the students and faculty ignore each other to the best of their abilities. This disengagement guarantees poor outcomes, as well as the eventual replacement of the professoriate by technology. When professors don't even know your name, they become remote figures of ridicule and tedium and are viewed as part of a system to be played rather than a useful resource.

To be fair, cadres of indefatigable souls labor tirelessly in thankless ignominy in the bowels of sundry ivory dungeons. Jokers in a deck stacked against them, they are ensnared in a classic reward system from hell.

All parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards. It is well known that friendly, entertaining professors make for a pleasant classroom, good reviews and minimal complaints. Contrarily, faculty have no incentives to punish plagiarism and cheating, to flunk students or to write negative letters of reference, to assiduously mark up illiterate prose in lieu of merely adding a grade and a few comments, or to enforce standards generally. Indeed, these acts are rarely rewarded but frequently punished, even litigated. Mass failure, always a temptation, is not an option. Under this regimen, it is a testament to the faculty that any standards remain at all.

As tuition has skyrocketed, education has shifted from being a public good to a private, consumer product. Students are induced into debt because they are repeatedly bludgeoned with news about the average-income increments that accrue to additional education. This is exacerbated by the ready availability of student loans, obligations that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

In parallel, successive generations of students have become increasingly consumerist in their attitudes, and all but the most well-heeled institutions readily give the consumers what they want in order to generate tuition revenue. Competition for students forces universities to invest in and promote their recreational value. Perhaps the largest scam is that these institutions have an incentive to retain paying students who have little chance of graduating. This is presented as a kindness under the guise of "student retention." The student, or the taxpayer in the case of default, ends up holding the bag, whereas the institution gets off scot free. Withholding government funding from institutions with low graduation rates would only encourage the further abandonment of standards.

So students get what they want: a "five year party" eventuating in painlessly achieved "Wizard of Oz" diplomas. This creates a classic tragedy of the commons in which individuals overuse a shared resource—in this case the market value of the sheepskin. Students, implicitly following the screening theory that credentials are little more than signals of intelligence and personal qualities, follow a mini-max strategy: minimize the effort, maximize the probability of obtaining a degree. The decrement in the value of the sheepskin inflicted by each student is small, but the cumulative effect is that the resource will become valueless.

The body politic lately has become aware of the cracks in this game. With about half of college graduates under 25 currently unemployed or underemployed, the income advantage of a four-year degree may be on the decline. Employers are justifiably fed up with college graduates lacking basic knowledge, to say nothing of good work habits and intellectual discipline. Yet the perennial impulse toward bureaucratic command-and-control solutions, such as universal standardized testing or standardized grade-point averages, only leads in the direction of more credentialism.

If the body politic desires this, so be it. However, these are essentially supply-side solutions, in that they attempt to staunch the supply of poorly prepared students or increase the supply of well-prepared students. Such approaches are notoriously problematic, as in the classic case of black markets.

Better to address the demand side. To be sure, there is plenty of student demand for credentials, but there is little demand for the rigor that the credentials putatively represent. Rather than more attempts at controlling output quality through standardization, what are needed are input changes provided by creative alternative routes to adulthood that young people find attractive; a "pull" rather than a "push." It would be helpful, too, if faculty started viewing undergraduates less as whining boors and more as lost souls who have been scandalously misguided by a feel-good "everyone's a star" culture.

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

Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation (the biggest disgrace in higher education) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor

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

"Our Compassless Colleges," by Peter Berkowitz, The Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2007; Page A17 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118895528818217660.html

At universities and colleges throughout the land, undergraduates and their parents pay large sums of money for -- and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support -- "liberal" education. This despite administrators and faculty lacking, or failing to honor, a coherent concept of what constitutes an educated human being.

To be sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person, and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside. In these circumstances, why should we not conclude that universities are betraying their mission?

Many American colleges do adopt general distribution requirements. Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, decorated perhaps with a dollop of fine arts, rudimentary foreign-language exposure, and the acquisition of basic writing and quantitative skills. And all students must choose a major. But this veneer of structure provides students only superficial guidance. Or, rather, it reinforces the lesson that our universities have little of substance to say about the essential knowledge possessed by an educated person.

Certainly this was true of the core curriculum at Harvard, where I taught in the faculty of arts and sciences during the 1990s. And it remains true even after Harvard's recent reforms.

Harvard's aims and aspirations are in many ways admirable. According to this year's Report of the Task Force on General Education, Harvard understands liberal education as "an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry undertaken without concern for topical relevance or vocational utility." It prepares for the rest of life by improving students' ability "to assess empirical claims, interpret cultural expression, and confront ethical dilemmas in their personal and professional lives." But instead of concentrating on teaching substantive knowledge, the general education at Harvard will focus on why what students learn is important. To accomplish this, Harvard would require students to take single-semester courses in eight categories: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding, Culture and Belief, Empirical Reasoning, Ethical Reasoning, Science of Living Systems, Science of the Physical Universe, Societies of the World, and The United States in the World.

Unfortunately, the new requirements add up to little more than an attractively packaged evasion of the university's responsibility to provide a coherent core for undergraduate education. For starters, though apparently not part of the general education curriculum, Harvard requires only a year of foreign language study or the equivalent. Yet since it usually takes more than a year of college study to achieve competence in a foreign language -- the ability to hold a conversation and read a newspaper -- doesn't Harvard, by requiring only a single year, denigrate foreign-language study, and with it the serious study of other cultures and societies?

Furthermore, in the search for the immediate relevance it disavows, Harvard's curriculum repeatedly puts the cart before the horse. For example, instead of first requiring students to concentrate on the study of novels, poetry, and plays, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on "literary or religious texts, paintings, sculpture, architecture, music, film, dance, decorative arts" that involve "exploring theoretical and philosophical issues concerning the production and reception of meanings and the formation of aesthetic judgment."

Instead of first requiring students to gain acquaintance with the history of opinions about law, justice, government, duty and virtue, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on how to bring ethical theories to bear on contemporary moral and political dilemmas. Instead of first requiring students to survey U.S. history or European history or classical history, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses that examine the U.S and its relation to the rest of the world. Instead of first teaching students about the essential features of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on almost any aspect of foreign societies.

Harvard's general education reform will allow students to graduate without ever having read the same book or studied the same material. Students may take away much of interest, but it is the little in common they learn that will be of lasting significance. For they will absorb the implicit teaching of the new college curriculum -- same as the old one -- that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know.

Of course, if parents, students, alumni donors, trustees, professors and administrators are happy, why worry? A college degree remains a hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable social networks, a signal to employers that graduates have achieved a certain proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and getting along with peers.

The reason to worry is that university education can cause lasting harm. The mental habits that students form and the ideas they absorb in college consolidate the framework through which as adults they interpret experience, and judge matters to be true or false, fair or inequitable, honorable or dishonorable. A university that fails to teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for public and private life.

Moreover, properly conceived, a liberal education provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students, it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples and cultures. A proper liberal education liberalizes in the old-fashioned and still most relevant sense: It forms individuals fit for freedom.

The nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the claims of justice and the opportunities for -- and limits to -- realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy whose citizens practice different religions and no religion at all, in which individuals have family heritages that can be traced to every continent, and in which the nation's foreign affairs are increasingly bound up with local politics in countries around the world is particularly dependent on citizens acquiring a liberal education.

Crafting a core consistent with the imperatives of a liberal education will involve both a substantial break with today's university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require all students to take semester courses surveying Greek and Roman history, European history, and American history. It would require all students to take a semester course in classic works of European literature, and one in classic works of American literature. It would require all students to take a semester course in biology and one in physics. It would require all students to take a semester course in the principles of American government; one in economics; and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require all students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It would require all students to take a semester course of their choice in the history, literature or religion of a non-Western civilization. And it would require all students to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language of their choice by carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper in the language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two years of college study, or four semester courses.

Such a core is at best an introduction to liberal education. Still, students who meet its requirements will acquire a common intellectual foundation that enables them to debate morals and politics responsibly, enhances their understanding of whatever specialization they choose, and enriches their appreciation of the multiple dimensions of the delightful and dangerous world in which we live.

It is a mark of the politicization and clutter of our current curriculum that these elementary requirements will strike many faculty and administrators as benighted and onerous. Yet the core I've outlined reflects what all successful individuals outside of academia know: Progress depends on mastering the basics.

Assuming four courses a semester and 32 to graduate, such a core could be completed in the first two years of undergraduate study. Students who met the foreign-language requirement through high school study would have the opportunity as freshman and sophomores to choose four elective courses. During their junior and senior year, students could devote 10 courses to their major while taking six additional elective courses. And students majoring in the natural sciences, where it is necessary to take a substantial sequence of courses, would enroll in introductory and lower-level courses in their major during freshman and sophomore years and complete the core during junior and senior years.

Admittedly, reform confronts formidable obstacles. The major one is professors. Many will fight such a common core, because it requires them to teach general interest classes outside their area of expertise; it reduces opportunities to teach small boutique classes on highly specialized topics; and it presupposes that knowledge is cumulative and that some books and ideas are more essential than others.

Meanwhile, students and parents are poorly positioned to affect change. Students come and go, and, in any event, the understanding they need to formulate the arguments for reform is acquired through the very liberal education of which universities are currently depriving them. Meanwhile, parents are too distant and dispersed, and often they have too much money on the line to rock the boat.

But there are opportunities. Change could be led by an intrepid president, provost or dean of a major university who knows the value of a liberal education, possesses the eloquence and courage to defend it to his or her faculty, and has the skill to refashion institutional incentives and hold faculty and administrators accountable.

Reform could also be led by trustees at private universities -- the election in recent years of T.J. Rodgers, Todd Zywicki, Peter Robinson and Stephen Smith to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees on platforms supporting freedom of speech and high academic standards is a start -- or by alumni determined to connect their donations, on which universities depend, to reliable promises that their gifts will be used in furtherance of liberal education, well understood.

And some enterprising smaller colleges or public universities, taking advantage of the nation's love of diversity and openness to innovation, might discover a market niche for parents and students eager for an education that serves students' best interests by introducing them in a systematic manner to their own civilization, to the moral and political principles on which their nation is based, and to languages and civilizations that differ from their own.

Citizens today are called on to analyze a formidable array of hard questions concerning war and peace, liberty and security, markets and morals, marriage and family, science and technology, poverty and public responsibility, and much more. No citizen can be expected to master all the issues. But liberal democracies count on more than a small minority acquiring the ability to reason responsibly about the many sides of these many-sided questions. For this reason, we must teach our universities to appreciate the aims of a liberal education. And we must impress upon our universities their obligation to pursue them responsibly.

Mr. Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, teaches at George Mason University School of Law. This commentary draws from an essay that previously appeared in Policy Review.

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


"Fidelity’s Oculus App Lets You Fly Through Your Investments:  Brokerage giant Fidelity gives a glimpse of how virtual reality might be used beyond gaming," by David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, November 19, 2014 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532676/fidelitys-oculus-app-lets-you-fly-through-your-investments/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141120

"Whatever Happened to ... Virtual Reality? Remember the movie Lawnmower Man? Here's why we're not even close," MIT's Technology Review, October 21, 2010 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25917/?nlid=3673

The early 90's were awesome. Bill Waters was still drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the tattered remnants of the Cold War were falling down around our ears, and most of Wall Street was convinced that the Macintosh was a computer for effete graphic designers and that Apple was more or less on its way out.

Into this time of innocence came a radical vision of the future, epitomized by the movie Lawnmower Man. It was a future in which Hollywood starlets had virtual intercourse with developmentally challenged computer geeks in Tron-style bodysuits and everything looked like it was rendered by a Commodore Amiga.

Anyway, at that time Virtual Reality was a Big Deal. Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist most closely associated with the idea, was bouncing from one important position to another, developing virtual worlds with head mounted displays and, later, heading up the National Tele-immersion initiative, "a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2," whatever the heck that was.

Google Trend shows the steady decline in searches for "Virtual Reality" Soon some sensed that the technology wasn't bringing about the revolution that had been promised. In a 1993 column for Wired that earns a 9 out of 10 for hilarity and a 2 out of 10 for accuracy, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab (who I'm praying will have a sense of humor about this) asked the question that was on everyone's mind: Virtual Reality: Oxymoron or Pleonasm?

It didn't matter if anyone knew what he was talking about, because time has proved most of it to be nonsense:

"The argument will be made that head-mounted displays are not acceptable because people feel silly wearing them. The same was once said about stereo headphones. If Sony's Akio Morita had not insisted on marketing the damn things, we might not have the Walkman today. I expect that within the next five years more than one in ten people will wear head-mounted computer displays while traveling in buses, trains, and planes."..."One company, whose name I am obliged to omit, will soon introduce a VR display system with a parts cost of less than US$25."

Affordable VR headsets were just around the corner, really? And the only real barrier to adoption, according to Negroponte? Lag. Computers in 1993 just weren't fast enough to react in real time when a user turned his or her head, breaking the illusion of the virtual.

According to Moore's Law, we've gone through something like 10 doublings of computer power since 1993, so computers should be about a thousand times as powerful as they were when this piece was written - not to mention the advances in massively parallel graphics processing brought about by the widespread adoption of GPUs, and we're still not there.

So what was it, really, that kept us from getting to Virtual Reality?

For one thing, we moved the goal posts - now it's all about augmented reality, in which the virtual is laid over the real. Now you have a whole new set of problems - how do you make the virtual line up perfectly with the real when your head has six degrees of freedom and you're outside where there aren't many spatial referents for your computer to latch onto?

And most important of all, how do you develop screens tiny enough to present the same resolution as a large computer monitor, but in something like 1/400th the space? This is exactly the problem that has plagued the industry leader in display headsets, Vuzix. Their products are fine for watching movies, but don't try using them as a monitor replacement.

Consumer-level Virtual Reality, it turns out, is really, really hard - not quite Artificial Intelligence hard, but so much harder than anyone expected that people just aren't excited anymore. The Trough of Disillusionment on this technology is deep and long.

That doesn't mean Virtual Reality is gone forever - remember how many false starts touch computing had before technologists succeeded with, of all things, a phone?

And, just a coda, even though the public long ago gave up on searching for Virtual Reality, the news media never got tired of it. Which just shows you how totally out of touch we can be:

Jensen Comments 

Artificial intelligence
To my opinion there is a big need to artificial intelligence, therefore the virtual reality research has future. I wish the mankind had artificial "people", who work instead him. Virtual reality must be created from the simple reality, and storaged in big memories of artificial creatures. Afterwards these robots can learn anything... Rate this comment: (Reply) vkrmful 10/22/2010 Posts:1

VR, AR, etc.
The problem with all of these technologies is not just interface (getting the tools to work well), it is also one of content and content creation. I would argue that iPhone only made touch interfaces sexy again because they created a platform that had just enough tools to make it easy for the 3rd party comunity to generate lots of exciting content for it that leveraged the interface. If someone could create an inexpensive VR/AR system and tool kit that not just worked but also made it easy to for instance point the system's cameras at a nearby object and get a workable shaded 3D model which the user could easily manipulate and use to create new conent I think these products will continue to stay out of the consumer space. Sure bits and pieces of AR and VR will continue to creep into our lives but don't expect any explosions anytime soon there is a lot of work on this stuff left to be done. 

Re: VR, AR, etc.
VR has to be vectored, In order to deal with the specter, Of people losing their way, While navigating their stay, In a world where reality is sectored. Rate this comment: (Reply) luddite 10/22/2010 Posts:151 Avg Rating:

Jensen Comment
High end virtual reality learning was and is too expensive for main stream higher education. Second Life is vastly inferior to virtual reality but was more affordable until the 50% academic discount was taken away. Any type of virtual world learning beyond video is probably to technical facilitate and deliver for mainstream higher education Now in the military training for most any nation, it is quite another matter where virtual reality is too valuable to ignore..

Bob Jensen's threads on virtual learning worlds ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#VirtualWorldResearch

 


"Toyota Is Bringing In The Future With A New Fuel Cell Car," by Stefano Pozzebon, Business Insider,  November 18, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/toyota-launches-mirai-hydrogen-car-2014-11

Toyota is launching a new hydrogen-powered car that will first be available in Japan in mid-December this year. 

The Mirai — a Japanese words that means future — uses a hydrogen fuel cell generate electricity instead of batteries, as in Toyota's Prius. 

The car is powered by an electric engine of 113 KW (152 bhp) and has a maximum speed of 110 mph (almost 180 km/h), the company said in a statement. It has a recharging time of three minutes. The benefit of this car is that it emits no carbon dioxide pollutants as its being driven. 

The Mirai will be available in the UK, Germany, and Denmark in September 2015.

The Guardian reports that that the new energy-efficient car will retail in Japan for about 6.7 million yen (£37,000 or $57,000).


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/toyota-launches-mirai-hydrogen-car-2014-11#ixzz3JQdbklLj
 

Electrolysis for Splitting Water into Oxygen and Hydrogen --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis#Electrolysis_of_water

"Stanford scientists develop water splitter that runs on ordinary AAA battery," Stanford News, August 22, 2014 ---
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/august/splitter-clean-fuel-082014.html

Jensen Comment
Unlike Tesla, Japanese and South Korean automobile manufacturers are betting on electric cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. This makes me wonder about the sensibility of Tesla's forthcoming investment in a $1.3 billion dollar battery plant in Nevada ---
http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2014/09/10/nevada-governor-orders-extra-session-for-13b-deal-to-land-tesla-electric-car/?intcmp=us_topics


Students who go to college because they have nothing better to do are on average wasting their time and money (aside from possible benefits in their love life)
"Colleges Saw a Flood of Students at Recession’s Peak—and Discouraging Results," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 18, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Saw-a-Flood-of/150111/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Six years after a flood of students entered college, many seeking shelter from a sinking economy and a leg up in an uncertain job market, their progress report is in, and it isn’t encouraging.

Only 55 percent of the students who entered college in the fall of 2008, at the peak of the Great Recession, had earned college degrees or certificates by May 2014, according to a report released on Tuesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That’s down from 56.1 percent for the cohort that started in 2007.

That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it comes at a time when colleges, foundations, and policy makers have been pulling out the stops to prod more students along to the finish line.

And it follows a year when completion rates failed to budge.

The biggest drops were among older and part-time students struggling with rising costs and the competing demands of their jobs, colleges, and families. The sector with the sharpest declines was four-year for-profit colleges. Those are the very students and sectors that accounted for the largest increases in enrollment during the recession, so it is perhaps not surprising that overall graduation rates slipped.

Continued in article

Also see
http://insidehighered.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=ed1d2ff123b6b83dd97022f88&id=2dfc57f2b4&e=1e78f7c952

Jensen Comment
One of the main discouragements is the time it takes to earn 120 or more semester credits required for graduation, especially for part-time students. There will be great benefits to learners when "badges of competency" eventually replace the traditional college degrees.

The University of Northern Arizona Offers a Dual Transcript Option, One of Which is Competency-Based
"Competency-Based Transcripts," by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed, August 9, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/09/northern-arizona-universitys-new-competency-based-degrees-and-transcripts

Video About Badges of Competency ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ


Jensen Comment
Bowdoin College in Maine is perhaps the last liberal arts college that I predicted with promote outsourcing to distance education.
Bowdoin College --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowdoin_College

Bowdoin is the latest liberal-arts institution to offer an online course developed elsewhere—an experiment that has seen mixed results at other residential colleges.
"At Liberal-Arts Colleges, Debate About Online Courses Is Really About Outsourcing," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 13, 2014 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/at-liberal-arts-colleges-debate-about-online-courses-is-really-about-outsourcing/55151?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en 

Lifetime residents of Maine tend to look askance at people who are “from away,” an epithet reserved for transplants, summer vacationers, and college students. Such people might mean well, the thinking goes, but ultimately they do not belong.

Bowdoin College, a 220-year-old institution in Brunswick, Me., takes a similarly protective view of its curriculum. At a time when online education has blurred campus borders—and institutions face growing pressure to train students for specific jobs—Bowdoin and many other liberal-arts colleges have held the line. When I matriculated there, a decade ago, Bowdoin didn’t even have online course registration. (The college finally added it last year.)

So it was a significant move last week when Bowdoin decided to offer, in the spring, a partly online course in financial accounting led by a professor at Dartmouth College’s business school.

For more stories about technology and education, follow Wired Campus on Twitter.

As many as 50 Bowdoin students will take the course, for credit, from the Maine campus. The Dartmouth professor, Phillip C. Stocken, will teach largely from his post in New Hampshire, holding weekly class sessions and office hours online. Meanwhile, an economics professor at Bowdoin will lead weekly face-to-face sessions on its campus. Bowdoin will pay $60,000 for the course—significantly less than it would cost to develop a course “of this quality” from scratch, according to Scott Hood, a spokesman.

Not surprisingly, the Dartmouth course has met with resistance from some faculty members at Bowdoin; 21 professors voted against the decision to offer it as a one-semester pilot.

“I am skeptical of how a course like this reinforces the student-faculty dynamic, and remain to be convinced that it can,” wrote Dale A. Syphers, a physics professor, in an email interview.

In the grand scheme of online education, Bowdoin’s collaboration with Dartmouth is relatively conservative. Many traditional institutions now offer fully online courses, and have done so for a long time. But liberal-arts colleges, which stake their prestige on the offer of an intimate, residential experience, have been wary of fielding courses with significant online components, even on a trial basis—especially if those courses are “from away.”

2U, a company that helps colleges put their programs online, tried last year to build a coalition of elite colleges that would develop online versions of their undergraduate courses that students at member institutions could take for credit. But Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Rochester all dropped out after faculty members objected, and the remaining colleges voted to dissolve the consortium.

Other experiments in sharing online courses among liberal-arts colleges have produced more-encouraging results. Last year a theater professor at Rollins College, in Florida, taught an online course on voice and diction to students at Hendrix College, in Arkansas. Eric Zivot, the Rollins professor, used high-definition videoconferencing technology to hold class sessions, where he appeared on a projection screen at the front of the Hendrix classroom.

Only once did the professor visit his Hendrix students in person, said Amanda Hagood, director of blended learning at the Associated Colleges of the South, a consortium that has continued to facilitate the exchange. When Mr. Zivot does visit, “it’s always an underwhelming moment because the Hendrix students always feel like they already know him,” said Ms. Hagood. “It’s not a big deal that he’s there in person.”

Another consortium, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, has supported an online calculus course, led by an associate professor at Macalester College, that is open to students at the association’s 14 member colleges.

The eight-week course had its first run in the summer of 2013. Sixteen students enrolled, hailing from eight colleges in the consortium. “We were never in the same place, ever,” said Chad Topaz, the professor. One student took the course while traveling in India, Mr. Topaz said.

He taught the same course again this past summer. Mr. Topaz said the course went well both times, but it is still in a pilot phase. He said he had yet to be told whether he would be teaching it again next summer.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, SMOCS, Future Learn, iversity, and OKI Free Learning Alternatives Around the World ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance education and training courses and degrees ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm

Video on One Possible Future of Higher Education ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ


The Immanent Frame (excellent essays about scholars in philosophy, religion, and the public sphere) --- http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/

The Immanent Frame (TIF) publishes interdisciplinary perspectives on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. Featuring invited contributions and original essays, TIF serves as a forum for ongoing exchanges among leading thinkers from the social sciences and humanities. Contributors have included Gil Anidjar, Abdullahi An-Na`im, Arjun Appadurai, Talal Asad, Akeel Bilgrami, Robert Bellah, Wendy Brown, Craig Calhoun, José Casanova, Dipesh Chakrabarty, William E. Connolly, Veena Das, Hent de Vries, John Esposito, Tracy Fessenden, Nilüfer Göle, Charles HirschkindDavid Hollinger, Hans Joas, Mark Juergensmeyer, Saba Mahmood, Tomoko Masuzawa, Leigh Eric Schmidt, Joan Wallach Scott, Jonathan Z. SmithWinnifred Fallers Sullivan, Charles Taylor, Mark C. Taylor, Michael Warner, and many others.

Founded in October 2007 in conjunction with the Social Science Research Council’s program on Religion and the Public Sphere, The Immanent Frame was named an official honoree of the 12th annual Webby Awards and a “favorite new religion site, egghead division” by The Revealer. CNN has called The Immanent Frame “exceptionally eye opening.” In September of 2011, The Immanent Frame partnered with Killing the Buddha to launch Frequencies, later named an official honoree of the 16th annual Webby Awards. In March of 2013, members of TIF’s editorial team launched Reverberations, recently selected as a nominee for the 18th annual Webby Awards.

Except where otherwise noted, content published by The Immanent Frame on or after January 1, 2014, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. This license permits you to copy, distribute, and display such content as long as you mention and link back to the The Immanent Frame, attribute the work appropriately (including both author and title), and do not adapt the content or use it commercially. For all undated content and all content published by The Immanent Frame prior to January 1, 2014, please contact the editors to ensure that there are no legal restrictions on the use of the material in question. If you wish to cite The Immanent Frame in a book or article, please consult the “academic citations” tool at the bottom of each post.

Contributions to The Immanent Frame are generally by invitation. We are open to inquiries and suggestions, especially regarding our ongoing discussions and exchanges, but due to limited editorial capacity we cannot respond to all inquiries. We encourage readers to join discussions by commenting on individual posts (all comments are reviewed prior to posting). Questions regarding editorial policy and terms of use should be directed to the editors.

Jensen Comment
Note the "Off the Cuff" link where "editors pose a question to a handful of leading thinkers and scholars, and invite a quick and succinct response." This is great for finding what current scholars are reading.

Also see the Book Blog.

The site would be greatly improved with a search engine.


"CheatSheet for Mac Shows You Every Keyboard Shortcut You Need to Know, When You Need to Know," by Daniel Howley, Yahoo Tech, November 13, 2014 ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/cheatsheet-for-mac-shows-you-every-keyboard-shortcut-102558076849.html


Beware of Wireless Charges on Airplanes and Hotels
Man Billed $1,200 For Reading Email On A Plane ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/1200-for-reading-email-on-a-plane-2014-11 


"Florida State Player Fled Crash but Got Only Traffic Tickets," by Mike McIntire and Walt Bogdanich,  The New York Times, November 14, 2015 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/sports/ncaafootball/for-an-fsu-football-player-a-hit-and-run-becomes-two-traffic-tickets.html?hpw&rref=sports&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

Jensen Comment
Since he left his totaled car at the scene and fled by foot he was bound to get caught, but maybe by then he could pass a blood test for alcohol.


For Dyslexics, A Font And A Dictionary That Are Meant To Help ---
http://lisnews.org/for_dyslexics_a_font_and_a_dictionary_that_are_meant_to_help

The Intel Reader, powered by an Atom processor, is a handheld device with a five-­megapixel camera that can read aloud any printed text it is pointed at, including product labels, receipts, and pages from books and newspapers. Previously, visually impaired or dyslexic people required a desktop scanner connected to a computer to convert print into speech.
"Scan and Listen," MIT's Technology Review, December 17, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24198/?a=f

Technology Aids for the Handicapped, Disabled, and Learning Challenged ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped


"Lazy graduate students?" The Economist, November 12, 2014 ---
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/11/productivity-phds

IF THE objective of graduate training in top-ranked [economics] departments is to produce successful research economists, then these graduate programmes are largely failing.” That’s the startling message from a recent paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

How did the authors of this paper reach such a pessimistic conclusion? They look at a 14,300 people who received an economics PhD from 154 American and Canadian institutions. They then find a massive database of academic papers published over a two-decade period. From that, they are able to tell how many papers each PhD graduate has produced in the six years after leaving graduate school. (Six years, by the way, is about the average time it takes for a newly-minted PhD to get tenure). 

Of course, quantity is not the only measure of success. One great paper is worth more than three bad ones. So the authors create an index that adjusts the number of publications by the quality of the journal it appears in. The authors end up with what they call the "American Economic Review­-equivalent". To get published in the AER is a dream for any economist and so other journals are indexed in relation to it. An article in the Journal of Political Economy, for instance, is worth 0.67 papers in AER. A paper in Economic Theory is worth a quarter.

Some of the results are not terribly surprising. Graduates from the big-hitting universities can be extremely productive. The graduate in the 99th percentile from Harvard or MIT—that is, right at the very top of the graduating class—produces over 4 AER-equivalent papers over six years. 

But the vast majority of PhD students, even at top universities, produce nowhere near that much (see chart). The number of AER-equivalent papers of the median PhD student, six years after graduation, is below 0.2 for all universities. Yes, all—even Harvard, MIT and Chicago. The 50th percentile at almost all universities has a score of 0.1. That’s equivalent to publishing one paper in a second-tier field journal over six years. 

What are the implications of these results? Even if you have been accepted into a top economics department, there is no guarantee that you will be a successful researcher. In fact top researchers come from a range of institutions, not just the best ones. The researcher in the 99th percentile of the typical “non-top-30” institution—that is, the 124 other universities in the authors’ sample—is better than her equivalent from a range of big-hitting institutions like Penn State and the University of Texas at Austin. 

The paper probably says something about how economics PhD programmes are taught. Professors may give a disproportionate amount of time to the students that they think are most naturally gifted, while leaving the majority behind. As a result that lucky student is much more likely to have a successful publication record.

Now: the crucial question is whether economics PhD students want to be successful researchers. The authors see this as self-evident: 

Our experience suggests that most students, especially at the better programs, enter graduate school planning to seek academic jobs, or at any rate, jobs that require research.

I'm not so sure: many econ PhDs that I know have no intention of becoming an academic but instead want to work for government or an NGO. And lots of people working in the upper echelons of business and government may produce research, but may not publish it in a peer-reviewed journal. Take economists at the IMF, for example, who produce working papers that may never become "proper" academic articles. The same goes for government employees who produce policy analysis.

For the vast majority of economics PhDs there is little point in being more productive. As we have shown before, there are far more PhDs produced each year than there are job openings. America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009; in the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. What's the point in killing yourself to be a productive researcher when finding an academic job is so hard?

Continued in article

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


"2 in 5 Young Americans Don’t Have Jobs and Aren’t Looking," Time Magazine, November 14, 2014 ---
http://time.com/3585786/young-americans-work/?xid=newsletter-brief

93% of Americans who aren't looking for work say they don't want a job

Nearly 40% of people in the United States ages 16 to 24 don’t have a job, and are fine with it. They say they’re happy not to be employed and don’t plan to find a job anytime soon, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The figures do not include young people who aren’t working, but are actively seeking employment. About 10% of Americans aged 20 to 24 and 19% of those aged 16 to 19 are considered unemployed, which means they are actively seeking work.

However, most Americans who are of working age and don’t have jobs are not actively seeking employment. Overall, 93% of the 86 million Americans 16 and older who aren’t looking for work say they don’t want a job. The total figure is up from a decade ago, and the change is most stark for young people. Around 30% of young Americans of working age in 2000 said they weren’t looking for work, compared to nearly 40% today. People over 55 are much more likely not to look for work, the data shows.

Individuals who aren’t looking for work do not count as unemployed for statistical purposes. The U.S. unemployment hit 5.8% last month, the lowest number since 2008

Jensen Comment
I guess they either live on welfare or somebody who loves them to a point where they don't have to contribute to their own room and board. Most of the time it's probably parents for the young people who are not yet parents themselves and qualify for welfare.

To be honest, I don't really trust these statistics due to the $2+ trillion underground economy. The nerd who fixes computers for cash probably does not report the income to the IRS and is not truly "unemployed." The same goes for many of the people who clean houses, work on construction, farms, and ranches for cash, load and unload furniture trucks for cash, tutor in math and music for cash, etc. Sadly, tens of thousands are also drug pushers, prostitutes, stealing cars, or otherwise starting life as career criminals.

Case Studies in Gaming the Income Tax Laws
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm


Anat R. Admati --- https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/anat-r-admati

"When She Talks, Banks Shudder," by Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times,  August 9, 2014 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/business/when-she-talks-banks-shudder.html?_r=0

Bankers are nearly unanimous on the subject of Anat R. Admati, the Stanford finance professor and persistent industry gadfly: Her ideas are wildly impractical, bad for the American economy and not to be taken seriously.

But after years of quixotic advocacy, Ms. Admati is reaching some very prominent ears. Last month, President Obama invited her and five other economists to a private lunch to discuss their ideas. She left him with a copy of The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It,” a 2013 book she co-authored. A few weeks later, she testified for the first time before the Senate Banking Committee. And, in a recent speech, Stanley Fischer, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, praised her “vigorous campaign.”

Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, a nonprofit that advocates stronger financial regulation, said Ms. Admati has emerged as one of the most effective advocates of the view that regulatory changes since the 2008 crisis remain insufficient. “She has been, as one must be,” Mr. Kelleher said, “dogged from the West Coast to the East Coast to Europe and back again and over again.”

Ms. Admati’s simple message is that the government is overlooking the best way to strengthen the financial system. Regulators, she says, need to worry less about what banks do with their money, and more about where the money comes from.

Companies other than banks get money mostly by selling shares to investors or by reinvesting profits. Banks, by contrast, can rely almost entirely on borrowed funds, including the money they get from depositors. Ms. Admati argues that banks are taking larger risks than other kinds of companies because they use other people’s money, and the results are that they keep crashing the economy.

Her solution is to make banks behave more like other companies by forcing them to reduce sharply their reliance on borrowed money. That would likely make the banking industry more stodgy and less profitable — reducing the economic risks, the executive bonuses and, for shareholders, both the risks and the profits.

“My comparison is to speed limits,” Ms. Admati said in an interview near the Stanford campus. “Basically what we have here is the market has decided nobody else should be driving faster than 70 miles an hour and these are the biggest trucks with the most explosive cargo and they are driving at almost 100 miles an hour.”

For all her success in stimulating debate, however, Ms. Admati and like-minded critics face long odds. Since the financial crisis, the government has already required banks to reduce their reliance on borrowed money by increasing capital standards, which dictate the share of funding that must come from equity. Mr. Obama recently described that increase as massive, and officials are considering further increases for the largest banks. But the net effect is tiny in comparison to the change sought by Ms. Admati. Officials worry that larger changes would hamstring American banks, driving business both to other kinds of domestic financial firms and to foreign rivals. Continue reading the main story

In his speech, Mr. Fischer said Ms. Admati’s arguments made sense in principle. “At one level, the story on capital and liquidity ratios is very simple: From the viewpoint of the stability of the financial system, more of each is better,” he said. But the United States, he said, was constrained by practicality. If other countries aren’t willing to impose stricter capital requirements on their own banks — and they don’t appear to be — then unilateral increases would hurt the American banking industry and the broader economy.

Andrew Metrick, a Yale finance professor, said that such rules could also push activity into the less regulated corners of the domestic financial system.

He compared the situation to a pair of parallel highways, echoing Ms. Admati’s metaphor. “If you lower the speed limit on one highway, you’ll have fewer accidents on that highway,” he said. “But the other road will just get more crowded.”

Ms. Admati compares this logic to letting American manufacturers pollute so that they can compete more effectively with companies in China. And she says she is looking for new ways to press her fight. In January, she debated bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In May, she delivered a 15-minute TED talk to an audience at Stanford. Next year, she is planning a conference in Washington. She says it’s hard to imagine a return to the kind of theoretical work that absorbed her before the crisis.

“This is not fun,” she said of her campaign. “But I know that this is a bad system. There is no justification for this — zero. The only reason we are staying where we are is that the status quo has staying power. And if we are stuck with the status quo, then we are going to have to suffer the consequences.”

‘Something Is Very Wrong’

Before the financial crisis in 2008, Ms. Admati spent most of her time working with complicated financial models. She had never paid much attention to banking or to public policy. But as the crisis unfolded, she began reading and talking with colleagues — “like a doctor from another field of medicine visiting the emergency room,” she said — and grew increasingly disconcerted by what she learned.

Even after the crisis, banks continue to rely on debt financing far more than other kinds of corporations. Last year, the eight largest American banks together derived less than 5 percent of their funding from shareholders, according to Thomas M. Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The average equity financing for nonfinancial corporations was about 60 percent.

Ms. Admati said she started asking one question repeatedly: Why were banks behaving so differently? Companies with more debt are more vulnerable to financial setbacks. Banks were in the danger zone, so why not raise more equity?

Four years later, she says she’s still waiting to hear a good answer. She recalled the explanation in one prominent banking textbook, which she read in 2010, as a particular spur to action. “It was shocking,” she remembered. She said she went to the office of a Stanford colleague, her frequent collaborator Paul Pfleiderer, and told him: “Something is very wrong. I’ve never heard so much nonsense in all of my life.” She still becomes visibly angry as she recalls the conversation. “They are denying what we know about financial markets. It’s like they are saying gravity is not a force in nature.”Ms. Admati decided to enter the public square because she felt that academics and policy makers weren’t listening. “The Bankers’ New Clothes,” which she wrote with Martin Hellwig, an economics professor at the University of Bonn, proved a turning point in her campaign. But the first step was much smaller. She was not sure how to reach a popular audience, so in 2010 she enrolled in a program that teaches prominent women to write opinion articles. Her first, published in The Financial Times in the fall of 2010, was a letter co-signed by 19 other academics that criticized an international agreement on minimum bank capital standards as “far from sufficient to protect the system from recurring crises.”

Banking is the only industry subject to systematic capital regulation. Borrowing by most companies is effectively regulated by the caution of lenders. But the largest lenders to banks are depositors, who generally have no reason to be cautious because federal deposit insurance guarantees repayment of up to $250,000 even if the bank fails. This means the government, which takes the risk, must also impose the discipline.

In the decades before the financial crisis, banks gradually convinced regulators to reduce capital requirements to very low levels. In the aftermath, banks acknowledged that some increases were necessary — they had just needed enormous bailouts, after all — but they fought to minimize those increases. The day after Ms. Admati’s article ran, the same paper ran one by Vikram S. Pandit, then the chief executive of Citigroup, arguing that the proposed standards were excessive. “The last thing the global economy needs is another economic dampener,” Mr. Pandit wrote.

‘Add a Digit’

The industry has benefited from, and sometimes encouraged, public confusion. Banks are often described as “holding” capital, and capital is often described as a cushion or a rainy-day fund. “Every dollar of capital is one less dollar working in the economy,” the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade association representing big banks and financial firms, said in 2011. But capital, like debt, is just a kind of funding. It does the same work as borrowed money. The special value of capital is that companies are under no obligation to repay their shareholders, whereas a company that cannot repay its creditors is out of business.

The industry’s more serious argument is that equity is more expensive than debt. If governments require banks to raise more equity, the industry warns, the results would be higher interest rates, less lending and slower economic growth.

A 2010 analysis funded by the Clearing House Association, a trade group, concluded that an increase of 10 percentage points in capital requirements would raise interest rates by 0.25 to 0.45 percentage points.

Jensen Comment
I think this is a great subject for debate in economics and finance courses. It's important to note how banks differ from other types of business. Probably the main difference is that commercial banks create the money in the money supply. Naive people think the government prints the money supply. The government prints money for the money supply created by the banks. Printed cash money is only one type of "money." For example, if you borrow $10,000 from a bank and put it into your checking account, $10,000 has been created for the USA money supply. If you write a check you can spend this money without ever converting it into cash money.

A central government can also create money by spending without taxing or borrowing (or equivalently borrowing from itself). States in the USA cannot create money, but the criminals in Washington DC and Zimbabwe get away with it. However, in the USA most of the money supply is created by the banks.

The gray zone is bartering. For example, if panned gold nuggets are bartered for a log cabin in Alaska the transaction bypasses the money supply.

Bitcoins and other forms of digital currency are extended forms of bartering that bypass the money supply ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Money Supply --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply


"The Future of Money Four surprising ways we might pay for stuff in the next 15 years," by Heather Schlegel, Reason Magazine, December 2014 ---
http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/18/the-future-of-money


"Maryland’s Distance-Education Giant Will Stay Public and Part of University System," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 18, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Maryland-s/150109/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


Jensen Comment
In Germany only the top 25% of high school graduates are allowed to go to college. In the USA the bottom 10% are given full athletic scholarships if they're good in sports. Then we keep them so busy in training, practice, and travel to games that they have even less of a chance to learn how to read.

"A Competitive Disadvantage," by Jake New, Inside Higher Ed, November 19, 2014 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/11/19/are-selective-colleges-big-time-sports-greater-risk-compromising-academics

Speaking to the University of Michigan faculty senate last week, Mark Schlissel, the university’s president, was candid in his assessment of the admissions process for athletes. "We admit students who aren't as qualified," he said. “And it's probably the kids that we admit that can't honestly, even with lots of help, do the amount of work and the quality of work it takes to make progression from year to year.”

His comments -- made as the University of North Carolina is still reeling from a high-profile academic scandal where athlete preparedness was a central issue -- were perhaps too candid for some.

Schlissel became president of Michigan in July after serving as provost for three years at Brown University, an institution with a very different take on athletics. In his short time at Michigan, Schlissel has been pressured by angry students, alumni, fans, and the board of regents to replace the university's since-resigned athletic director. Schlissel said he wants to take his time and find a new athletic director who has "academic integrity," while many fans want him to hire an athletic director who will quickly fire the current football coach, Brady Hoke. “I’ve really learned that this whole athletic sphere and the usual way you approach things just doesn’t work," he said. "It’s just a crazed or irrational approach that the world and the media takes to athletics decisions."

The president later publicly apologized for his remarks and the stir they caused, though not before Hoke swiftly offered a rebuttal, explaining that Michigan is a university that boasts both a proud athletic tradition and strong academics. “Being truly an academic institution that it is, that degree will last forever,” he said. “So we take it very seriously.”

But academically competitive universities with big-time sports programs like Michigan and UNC may be precisely where the risk for this sort of compromise is greatest. And, like Schlissel said, it starts with admissions.

“The original sin of college sports is willfully admitting deficient or unprepared students into an institution,” Gerald Gurney, president of the Drake Group and the former president of the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics, said. “Admissions, specifically special admissions, is the single most problematic issue in college sports. It’s particularly troublesome with highly selective institutions.”

The National Collegiate Athletic Association sets minimum standards athletes must meet to be eligible to play sports, but leaves admissions practices up to individual institutions, allowing athletes who do not meet "standard or normal entrance requirements” to be admitted to colleges through “special admissions” programs. An athlete who passes the NCAA's eligibility bar and receives special admission to an open-admission institution might be much closer to the average student's credentials there than an athlete at a highly selective college.

The NCAA allows institutions to use special admissions programs as long as they also offer the opportunity to other types of students, such as those in music programs. A 2009 review by the Associated Press found that athletes were far likelier to benefit from special admissions than other types of students, identifying about 30 universities where athletes were at least 10 times more likely to be admitted through special admissions than non-athletes were.

At the University of California at Berkeley, one of the most highly selective public universities in the country, athletes were 43 times more likely to gain special admissions than non-athletes were.

A Gulf

When a report released in October revealed just how extensive academic fraud had been at UNC, Carol Folt, the university’s chancellor, said that one of the reasons that it went undetected for nearly two decades was that many at the university simply assumed that UNC employees were above such conduct.

Richard Southall, director of the College Sports Research Institute at the University of South Carolina, said the fraud was simply a “logical extension of the special admissions that is in place at many universities where players" are admitted based on how they can contribute to a revenue-generating sports team rather than how they can contribute to the university's academic profile.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies in higher education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Athletics


Well er ...  Just Sort of Anyway
"Spread the Word: Ninite is the Only Safe Place to Get Windows Freeware," by Chris Hoffman, How-To-Geek, November 11, 2014 ---
http://www.howtogeek.com/201354/ninite-is-the-only-safe-place-to-get-windows-freeware/

Ninite is a free tool that automatically downloads, installs, and updates various Windows programs for you, skipping past the evil toolbar offers. For Windows users, Ninite is arguably the only really safe place to get freeware.

This application is far more than a tool for tech support people to easily set up PCs. It’s a place you can get safe Windows freeware without trawling the usual download sites full of harmful garbage.

The Only Safe Place, Really?

Of course, safe freeware is available elsewhere online. But there’s no real trustworthy, centralized source of the stuff. Download sites are uniformly terrible these days — even good old SourceForge is now bundling junkware.

f you want a safe place to get freeware without worrying about toolbars and other junkware, Ninite is the program to use. If you have parents or relatives that use a computer, you can tell them just to use Ninite to get and update the free programs they need — the software on Ninite is guaranteed to be safe. Even programs that come with toolbars (like Java) won’t have a toolbar when you install them via Ninite. We can’t think of a single rule of thumb that will help a typical user get useful free Windows applications while avoiding all the junkware and malware beyond “just use Ninite.”

This doesn’t mean you should avoid other websites entirely — sure, if you use Microsoft Office, download it from Microsoft. But, if you need a free application to do something, head to Ninite’s website and find one there instead of attempting to hunt down an application on the freeware sites.

Continued in article


"Kindle Voyage is the Best E-Book Reader Ever. But it's Ridiculously Expensive," by David Pogue, Yahoo Tech, November 14, 2014 ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/either-amazon-knows-exactly-what-its-doing-or-102593981399.html

Either Amazon knows exactly what it’s doing, or it’s completely out of its mind.

What was once an online bookstore is now blanketing the earth with hardware products. Amazon is currently selling a smartphone (the Fire Phone), a TV box (Fire TV), five different color tablets (Fire HD and HDX), and three e-book readers (Kindle). It’s also testing a weird Siri-in-a-box speaker system (the Echo), and a grocery-ordering microphone thing (the Dash),  

Some products are experiments. Some, like the phone, are flops. But one is the shining star of the holiday season.

It’s the Kindle Voyage, the latest Amazon e-reader. The price: $200.

Now, until you actually try reading a book on this thing, your first reaction might be a snarky chuckle. Two hundred dollars? For a six-ounce slab with a black-and-white screen?

Is Amazon not aware of the Law of Diminishing Gadget Prices? Is it not aware of its own pricing history? The first Kindle in 2007 cost $400; today, the basic Kindle goes for 80 bucks.

And now Amazon’s resetting the price graph up to $200. You think, “What are they smoking?”

And then you try it.

Bob Jensen's threads on E-Book readers (hard copy versus electronic books) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm


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

"Using Evernote in the Classroom," by Amy Cavender, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 20, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/using-evernote-in-the-classroom/58347?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"A Brief Word from an Evernote Convert," by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 6, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/A-Brief-Word-from-an-Evernote/25291/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

"Evernote and Markdown: Two Tools that Work Great Together," by Amy Cavender, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 10, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/evernote-and-markdown-two-tools-that-work-great-together/58457?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Sometimes, I come across ideas for posts quite by accident.

Early this afternoon (November 6), for instance, I was looking at the wiki that we use for scheduling our posts, trying to figure out my posting schedule for the next few weeks. I was also wondering whether I’d be able to post something for the week of November 10. We try to have our posts in by midnight on Thursday of the week before the post runs, and I was, quite frankly, drawing a blank on post ideas.

I’d pretty much concluded I’d have to put posting anything off for a week, and I turned to other concerns. I’ve been frustrated with my writing (or lack thereof) lately, and I’ve been thinking I need to restart a daily writing practice — something along the lines of using 750words.com, but without relying on that service

Readers may recall that I recently wrote about using Evernote in the classroom. In that post, I noted that I use Evernote for storing all kinds of information, not just for keeping track of my class notes. Since everything in my Evernote account is searchable, it seemed a good place to start keeping that daily writing.

The catch is that I’ve started doing most of my writing in Markdown, for a number of reasons. (I won’t go into them here, but if you’d like some good reasons and a quick introduction to Markdown, check out Lincoln’s post from a few years back.)
So far as I’m aware, Evernote doesn’t handle Markdown natively. Still, I was sure there had to be a way to get them working together, and that more than likely some clever person had already figured something out. So off to Google I went, and I found this:
Evernote for Sublime Text. I’ve been using Sublime Text for most of my writing for some months now. A Sublime Text package that integrates with my Evernote account is ideal. I can do my writing in the application and markup language I’ve become most accustomed to using, and can send daily work to my Evernote account with just a few keystrokes, and without having to leave Sublime Text. The note shows up in Evernote formatted in rich text, but I can easily open it (or any other note in my account) again in Sublime Text to continue editing in Markdown. This may turn out to be just the tool I was looking for.

It turned out to be a fine post idea, too.

Bob Jensen's threads on Evernote and other tricks and tools of the trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


NPR series on reading in the Common Core era
http://lisnews.org/npr_series_on_reading_in_the_common_core_era

November 16, 2014 - 6:31pm — Bibliofuture
Part 1 of 4 - Common Core Reading: 'The New Colossus'
Part 2 of 4 - Common Core Reading: The High Achievers
Part 3 of 4 - Common Core Reading: The Struggle Over Struggle
Part 4 of 4 - Common Core Reading: Difficult, Dahl, Repeat

"New At Forbes Online: The Precarious Financial Position Of The New York Times," by Francine McKenna, re:TheAuditors, November 11, 2014 ---
http://retheauditors.com/2014/11/11/new-at-forbes-online-the-precarious-financial-position-of-the-new-york-times/

Update: The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan published a column, Shaky Times, Strong Journalism”, shortly after the 3rd Quarter earnings announcement with several critiques of the results and commentary.  My column in Forbes was cited. She said I provided a provided “a tough, and rather dire, analysis of the issues.”

This post was originally published on October 29,2014.

I published some New York Times numbers over at Forbes.com, Time Is Running Short For The New York Times”, in anticipation of the company’s 3Q earnings announcement on October 30. I plan to write a followup when we know if the company’s own predictions about its third quarter have come true.

The Times telegraphed its expected 3Q results to the market on October 1 when it filed a notice with the SEC regarding upcoming staff voluntary buyouts that may convert to involuntary layoffs later. Anything can happen. More important than the third quarter is how the company will end the year and move forward. Even its own predictions are less than encouraging, regardless of how much Paid Post-type storytelling they can put on the books.

I did put a nice link to PwC thought leadership in the piece.

To say the trend for print advertising is very negative would be an understatement. In a just published essay for the Brookings Institution, “The Bad News about the News,” veteran Washington Post reporter and editor Robert Kaiser says nearly 20 percent of advertising dollars still go to print media but “Americans only spend about 5 percent of the time they devote to media of all kinds to magazines and newspapers.” Revenue from print ads will nearly disappear when advertisers catch on.

Circulation revenues rose globally in 2013 after years of decline, but advertising revenue continued to crater, says PricewaterhouseCoopers in its latest Global and Media Entertainment Outlook. By 2018, circulation or subscription revenue will likely match advertising revenue. Consumers will have to become news media’s biggest source of revenue.

Read the rest at Forbes.com, “Time Is Running Short For The New York Times”.


The Pacific Bluefin Tuna Is At Risk Of Extinction ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-sashimi-trend-helps-edge-pacific-bluefin-tuna-towards-extinction-2014-11


"Sheriff's department files held for ransom by malware: The "Cryptowall" malware demanded more than $500 from the Dickson County Sheriff's Office to unlock its case files.," by Ben Hooper, UPI, November 13, 2014 ---
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2014/11/13/Sheriffs-department-files-held-for-ransom-by-malware/4061415904893/?spt=sec&or=on

A Tennessee sheriff's department said it paid more than $500 ransom to release files locked away by malicious software accidentally downloaded into the system.

Detective Jeff McCliss, IT director for the Dickson County Sheriff's Office, said the "Cryptowall" program was installed into the department's computer system in late October when someone streaming local radio station WDKN accidentally clicked on a rotating ad that had been infected with the malware.

McCliss and Sheriff Jeff Bledsoe said Cryptowall put a lock on the department's case folder and demanded $572 worth of anonymous online currency Bitcoins to unlock the files.

"Every sort of document that you could develop in an investigation was in that folder. There was a total of 72,000 files," McCliss told WTVF-TV.

McCliss said he consulted with experts including those affiliated with the FBI and the military, but the consensus was the only way to unlock the files was to pay.

The payment was made to a person identified only as "Nimrod Gruber."

"Although a substantial portion of the data encrypted on the report management server was able to be restored from backups, there were still approximately 72,000 files affected on the host computer, which introduced the malware to the network and the report management system and the attached drives," Bledsoe told the Dickson Herald.

Luke Vincent, information technology director for the town of Durham, N.H., said police in his town were targeted by a similar "ransomware" scheme, but officials decided not to pay. He said the affected files were "administrative" rather than "critical."

"We knew we were never going to pay that ransom," Vincent said. "We were able to restore all the files...so there was never a thought of paying the ransom in that case."

However, he said the town did end up spending about $3,000 to a contractor to help with "cleanup" following the breach.

Read more:
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2014/11/13/Sheriffs-department-files-held-for-ransom-by-malware/4061415904893/#ixzz3J3hwPkp0

Jensen Comment
Beware if advertisements to detect and/or remove malware free. These are often ploys to infect your computer. It's best to get expert advice before trying to remove malware yourself --- other than the following the instructions in pup-ups from the trusted security software that you already have installed on your system. I now get a pop-up about every ten minutes from my trusted F-Secure system. Malware detected by F-Secure can be easily deleted with one click. This does not mean the F-Secure is the best protection available. I just happens to be the protection that I installed.

The Sheriff paid the ransom ---
http://www.johnsoncitypress.com/article/122014/middle-tenn-sheriff-pays-ransom-for-files-held-hostage-by-malware


Good Deals in Becoming a K-12 Teacher: 
Easy A's and Never Get Fired Even If You Don't Show Up for Work or Molest the Children

"‘Easy A’s’ Gets an F," by Donald E. Heller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Easy-A-s-Gets-an-F/150025/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en 

"Do Education Programs Dole Out Too Many Easy A’s?" by Rebecca Koenig, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Do-Education-Programs-Dole-Out/149947/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Are teacher-training programs rigorous enough? A new study, completed by a group that has long been critical of the quality of teacher preparation, makes the case that they’re not.

Education students face easier coursework than their peers in other departments, according to the study, and they’re more likely to graduate with honors.

The report"Easy A’s and What’s Behind Them," which is to be released Wednesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality—argues that a more-objective curriculum for teaching candidates would better prepare them for careers in the classroom.

"We’re out to improve training," said Julie Greenberg, the report’s co-author, who is a senior policy analyst for teacher-preparation studies for the advocacy group. "We want teacher candidates to be more confident and competent when they get in the classroom so their students can benefit from that."

Continued in article

 

Monsters in the Classroom: NYC Teachers Union Reinstates Alleged Molesters ---
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/14/monsters-in-the-classroom 

Or when pedophiles are too dangerous for children they are sent to a "Rubber Room" where they receive full pay every year for doing nothing ---
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/31554

Rubber Room Reassignment Center Controversies (not all are pedophiles) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassignment_centers
Rubber rooms are spread across the USA and are not just in NYC

Keeping Molesters in the Classroom is Not Always the Fault of Teachers Unions ---
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2012/07/incompetent-administrators-not-unions.html
The fault often lies in fears of being sued and fears of bad publicity (especially in expensive private schools)

Jensen Comment
I know of a case in Maine where a tenured high school teacher started missing half her classes. After countless warnings she was eventually put on leave, but she got two more years on leave at full pay before she reached retirement age. This is one way for an older teacher to get two added years of retirement pay and medical insurance before reaching retirement age. This would be a good strategy for college professors except that it probably won't work without being admitted to an early retirement program. Most colleges don't have such generous early retirement programs.

As far as easy grades go, with colleges across the USA having median grades of A- for most disciplines it's hard to say that Education Departments are any more grade inflated that other departments. However, Education Departments may be attracting weaker students to become majors in the first place. For example, it is usually much easier to major in math education than mathematics in most colleges ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor


The conflict between "never up never in" versus "just trying too hard."

Kobe Bryant is currently ranked Number 4 in terms of NBA points scored. However, he's now Number 1 in terms of missed shots in a single game ---
http://time.com/3580708/kobe-bryant-breaks-nba-record-for-missed-shots/?xid=newsletter-brief

Jensen Comment
Years ago a well-known accounting professor named Williard Stone made the following comment about an assistant professor seeking tenure at the University of Florida. Professor Stone observed that if this candidate would have slowed down in publishing he might have had a better chance of getting tenure. Read that as meaning that Stone thought most of the candidate's publications were crap surrounding some more quality hits ---
http://clio.lib.olemiss.edu/cdm/ref/collection/aah/id/27297


Hi Tom,

A complicating factor in this survey is overtime. One of the reasons I left Ernst and Ernst to become an accounting professor was too much overtime at E&E Denver. Actually I mean too much overtime in ski season.

When I started out with E&E tax accountants were tax experts who did not have computer software making all the complicated legal decisions. After New Years Day we started spending upwards of 60 hours per week in the back room trying to figure out how clients should report their taxes.

On Saturday and Sunday mornings I would ride the elevator up the the 17th floor of Denver's First National Bank Building recalling that when I was still a student at Denver University. I would instead be riding three successive chair lifts to the top of the mountain at Aspen.

My DU accounting professors seemingly only worked 12-16 hours per week. That was when I decided that being an accounting professor was the way to go for a ski bum.

Eventually, after I graduated from Stanford, and I moved to my first faculty job at Michigan State University I never skied again. Instead I worked 60+ hours a week trying to get tenure. And there was no overtime pay for research and writing.

My point is that Notre Dame in this survey will probably have a difficult time factoring overtime for me back in the E&E office. Overtime was a highly variable thing with almost none in the summers and tons of it in the winters.

Now I suspect overtime is not such a big deal in the EY office in Denver in 2015. Staff accountants will pretty much feed the accounting data into highly sophisticated tax computers and watch the return copies get printed. The hard copy is not even mailed to the IRS. The IRS wants eFiling in 2015.

I wonder what percentage of EY staff accountants in Denver these days will be wearing casts on their legs and arms during the 2015 ski season? Sigh!

Respectfully,
Bob Jensen


With Special Focus on Suspected Cheating at Dartmouth and Duke
"Think Students in Your Class Might Be Cheating? Here’s What to Do," by Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Think-Students-in-Your-Class/150091/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en 

Cheating has made headlines again in recent weeks with investigations at Dartmouth College and Duke University. The details of the two cases are different, but both involve alleged violations by many students in a single course, suddenly thrusting the instructors into the high-profile role of guarding their institution’s academic rigor.

At Dartmouth, a religion professor noticed a discrepancy between the number of students answering questions with clickers and the number who appeared to be in the room in his "Sports, Ethics, and Religion" course. After a bit of sleuthing, the professor, Randall Balmer, determined that some students were using the clickers for other students to make it appear that the absent students were showing up and completing in-class work—a violation of the college’s Academic Honor Principle. (See timeline.)

So while he did not relish the duty, Mr. Balmer felt obliged to report the incident. "If students are obligated to abide by the terms of the honor code," he figured, "professors are as well."

At Duke, meanwhile, the investigation involves assignments submitted by "a number of students" that were suspiciously similar to the solutions available online or to the work of other students. Each of the hundreds of students who took the course, in computer science, last spring or who are enrolled in it now received an email saying they might receive a lighter academic penalty if they came forward now and confessed to cheating rather than be investigated. (The email was first reported by the student newspaper, The Chronicle.)

The university and the visiting professor who informed officials of the incident both declined to comment because the investigation is still in progress.

Cheating is widespread, experts say, and it could happen in any professor’s class. So what should you do if it happens in yours? Here’s what the experts say:

How common is cheating?

Surveys suggest that some students will try to cheat even when professors do everything right, says Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center for Academic Integrity. Researchers estimate that about 20 percent of students won’t cheat, regardless of the environment they’re in. Another 20 percent will try to cheat even if professors take extra precautions. But, Ms. Fishman says, "the great big middle you can influence."

Can cheating be stopped before it starts?

To a point. Students tend to regard cheating as a "victimless crime," Ms. Fishman says. Teaching them that cheating does matter and has real-world consequences can make a difference, she argues. It helps, for instance, to explain that if a college gets a reputation for graduating students without the skills they’re supposed to have, it will cheapen everyone’s degree.

Professors can also reduce the chance students will cheat by conveying that they care about their students, and by having them sign a statement saying their work is their own before they take a test, Ms. Fishman says.

It also helps, she says, if professors monitor an examination from the back of the room instead of from the front: "It’s completely simple and low-tech." Low-tech solutions are good, Ms. Fishman says, because "professors cannot out-tech their students."

Good course design that accounts for the technology students use also helps, says Tricia Bertram Gallant, the center’s outreach coordinator. Still, she says, the goal is not to make cheating impossible. Ideally, it’s something students will choose not to do.

I think students might be cheating in my class. What should I do?

Professors who suspect students of cheating might investigate on their own, as Mr. Balmer did at Dartmouth, as long as they can do so without violating students’ privacy, says James M. Lang, a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. (He is also a regular contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Advice section.)

Jensen Comment
The best-known cheating incident took place in a political science course at Harvard where 60% of the students were expelled from Harvard because of cheating in a course where every student who did minimal work was assured of getting an A. I suspect the students cheated because added effort in the course would not improve their grades.

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

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

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

Prevention of Onsite and Online Cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline


"Japanese Artists Solve The Problem of How To Sell Multiple Copies of Interactive Artworks," MIT's Technology Review, November 16, 2014 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/532586/japanese-artists-solve-the-problem-of-how-to-sell-multiple-copies-of-interactive/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141117

If you’re a modern art fan, you may have bought a copy of a Picasso or a Pollock. But chances are, you’ve never been able to buy a copy of an interactive art installation…until now.

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in Japan displayed a giant canvas showing four snowmen in a wintry scene. People approaching the canvas found their faces superimposed onto the heads of the four snowmen, so that their facial expressions determined the mood of the scene.

The installation, called Yukinko, proved popular and ran until the end of August with an estimated 100,000 visitors.

This installation was unusual because, unlike other interactive artworks, anybody could by a copy to run at home. That’s a potentially significant money spinner for the museum and the artists Mayuko Kanazawa and a couple of pals from Osaka University.

While it is common for museums to sell prints and posters of conventional works of art, this has never been possible with interactive art because of the unique technology it often relies on.

Kanazawa and co get around this with a simple approach. The technology that powers their installation is an iPhone 5c mounted behind the canvas with its camera peering through a pinhole. It uses conventional face recognition software to pick out the faces of anybody nearby and then sends the pictures to a projector. This beams the faces onto the canvas.

Kanazawa and co have made all this available as an iPhone app costing 99c. So anybody can run a similar installation in their living room. The paper referenced below provides some technical pointers about how best to set it up.

Continued in article


"Are Business Majors Harder to Love?" by Akane Otani, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 7, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-07/college-business-majors-dont-get-emotional-support-from-teachers

Jensen Comment
I always thought I was pretty easy to love, but my students most likely did not think the same way.

This begs the question about loving accounting majors apart from the general population of business majors. Accounting majors are probably even harder to love since they go to work as auditors, IRS agents, and FBI probers --- only one poet in a million.


"Amanda Palmer on the Art of Asking and What Thoreau Teaches Us about Accepting Love," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, November 11, 2014 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/11/amanda-palmer-the-art-of-asking-book/

 


"Women's Career Choices Don't Explain the Gender Pay Gap," by Natalie Kitroeff and Jonathan Rodkin, Bloomberg Businessweek, November 14, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-14/women-make-less-than-men-even-when-they-are-equally-qualified-mbas 

High-achieving women are paid less than men even when they have similar levels of experience and are in the same fields, according to new Bloomberg Businessweek data. Women graduating business school this year reported an average of $14,548 less in expected annual pay than men, graduating MBAs said in a survey of 9,965 students at 112 schools, conducted as part of our recently published biennial ranking of MBA programs.

Part of the reason women overall earned less is that they were more likely to go into fields with below-average salaries, like consumer products and advertising. But even within the same fields, women were paid less than men. Indeed, 17 of 22 industries that hired MBAs last year offered women less money. Women entering finance earned, on average, close to $22,000 less than men, the largest pay differential among companies that drive MBA hiring. Women were offered $12,300 less by tech companies, and $11,500 less by consulting firms than their male peers.

The analysis continues a debate that pits those who cite discrimination as the reason American women earn 77 cents to a man’s dollar against others who argue women make less because they opt for lower-paying jobs than men, work fewer hours, and interrupt their careers to have children. When you account for those factors, they say, the pay gap all but disappears.

It may be true that over the course of their lives, women make choices that cost them at work. So it’s useful to analyze the pay difference at a career moment when they’re both highly qualified and available to work. Women graduating from top MBA programs are usually in their late twenties or early thirties and have just sunk over $100,000 into a degree, presumably to raise their value to employers—just like their male counterparts. We limited this analysis to people who had full-time jobs lined up; so there was no gender difference in their commitment to working a full day. Even with those things being equal, the pattern held.

Without looking at the individual circumstances of the women in the survey, it’s hard to know whether there’s something about them besides their gender that could knock their pay after graduation, like how many years of work experience they had before their MBA. One data point in our survey, however, helps get at the question of experience: whether they graduated into the same industry as the one they were in when they started their MBA.

Career-switchers should, in theory, be on a level playing field. A man entering a new industry straight out of an MBA program has the same amount of experience in that industry (none) and the same level of education as a woman in the same situation. Yet women who were switching into tech, finance, or consulting—the three industries that hire the most MBAs—made an average of $12,800 less than men who were also newbies. Men who were in one of these jobs before business school, and stayed the course after graduating, made $13,300 more than women on the same path.

The postgraduation gap also wasn’t explained by the fact that women, on average, were making less than the men to start with. When we controlled for people’s compensation before getting to campus, the gap narrowed, but didn’t disappear. Women made about $8,500 less than men upon graduating regardless of what they were pulling in beforehand.

Our data suggest that employers pay certain people less not because of their reproductive choices or penchant for low-paying gigs, but because they are women.

Continued in article

 

"Women with MBAs from Elite Schools Are More Likely to Drop Out of the Workforce," Harvard Business Review Blog, November 19, 2014 ---

Married mothers who are graduates of elite business schools are 30 percentage points less likely to be employed full-time than mothers who are graduates of less-selective B-schools, according to a study by Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School. The reasons are unclear, but women who hold MBAs from selective schools may have high family incomes, which allow them to take time off from work to raise children. Their lower levels of labor-market participation may have the effect of limiting the number of women reaching high-level corporate positions, because elite workplaces prefer to hire MBAs from elite schools, Hersch says.

SOURCE: Opting Out Among Women with Elite Education ---
http://links.mkt3142.com/ctt?kn=12&ms=OTk1NDAyMAS2&r=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&b=0&j=NDIxNTY1NzA4S0&mt=1&rt=0

The Third Wave of Feminism (Gender Studies)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Feminism

Bob Jensen's threads on the history of professional women ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#Women
 

 




From the Scout Report on November 14, 2014

Earth-Now --- http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20120319.html 

This app from NASA gives readers a peek into the constantly fluctuating elements of the earth’s atmosphere. Using 3D models constructed from satellite images, the app visually displays the causes and effects of climate change via surface air temperature, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide levels, and sea level height anomalies among others. Fascinating for students, teachers, and anyone interested in climate change, Earth-Now is compatible with Apple devices running iOS 5.1+ and Android devices running 4.0+


Women in Congress
Meet Elise Stefanik, the Youngest Woman Ever Elected to Congress
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/elise-stefanik-youngest-woman-elected-congress/story?id=26694806

Elise Stefanik: Future of the GOP
http://www.businessinsider.com/elise-stefanik-future-of-the-gop-ny-21-district-positions-2014-11

Utah’s Mia Love to Become First-Ever Black Female Republican in Congress
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/11/05/mia_love_utah_black_female_republican_headed_to_house.html

Women make up more than hall the U.S. population, less than one fourth of
U.S. House witnesses
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/09/09/women-make-up-half-the-u-s-population-one-fourth-of-u-s-house-witnesses/

100 women in Congress is not enough
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/05/opinion/ghitis-women-in-congress/index.html

100 Women in Congress? So What.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/100-women-in-congress-so-what-112663.html#.VFzntEu4n8s


From the Scout Report on November 21, 2014

Circa news --- http://cir.ca 

Voted Best App by the App Store way back in 2013, Circa has been improving its services ever since. In essence, Circa condenses news stories to the size of your screen, and then allows you to follow the ones that are important to you as they develop. Available for iOS 7.0+ and Android 2.3+.


Venmo --- https://venmo.com 

If you think of a world without checkbooks, or maybe even a world without cash, you might be imagining Venmo. Venmo uses bank-grade security to let you pay friends or family for dinner, drinks, or really anything. Forbes has called the app "the crown jewel of all finance apps." This version is available for apple devices running iOS 7.0+ and Android devices running 4.0+.


The Polar Vortex Rides Again?
What is a Polar Vortex?
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/what-is-a-polar-vortex/21793077

Yes, The Weather Is Polar. No, It's Not The Vortex
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/16/364243343/yes-the-weather-is-polar-no-its-not-the-vortex

Snowvember: What's Causing the Unseasonably Cold Weather?
http://www.livescience.com/48742-heavy-snowfall-polar-vortex.html

The Squishiness of the Phrase "Polar Vortex"
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/11/17/polar_vortex_definition_here_s_what_s_really_happening_with_stratospheric.html

Arctic Blast Brings Freezing Temperatures and More Snow to U.S.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/arctic-blast-brings-freezing-temperatures-more-snow-u-s-n249861

Polar vortex visits to U.S. linked to climate change
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/09/02/polar-vortex-climate-change/14973047/

 




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


Education Tutorials

ACT Raising Safe Kids Program --- http://actagainstviolence.apa.org

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

The Immanent Frame (excellent essays about scholars in philosophy, religion, and the public sphere) --- http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/

Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room --- http://www.foia.cia.gov

Coffee Break: NCBI Bookshelf (biotechnology readings) --- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2345/

National Priorities Project (especially note the Educator Toolkit) --- https://www.nationalpriorities.org

The Legislative Process --- https://www.congress.gov/legislative-process 
Also see http://www.congresslink.org/print_basics_leadershippositions.htm

Committees of the USA Congress --- https://www.congress.gov/committees

University of Hawaii at Manoa Marine Option Program (oceanic studies) ---  http://www.hawaii.edu/mop/

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Encyclopedia of Earth: People (in science) --- http://www.eoearth.org/topics/view/51cbfc78f702fc2ba8129e86/

Institute for Science + Math Education (University of Washington) --- http://sciencemathpartnerships.org

Scientists Have Finally Taken A Look Inside One Of The Mysterious Siberian Holes ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-slide-down-hole-in-siberia-2014-11

Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton --- http://mthamilton.ucolick.org

European Physical Society --- http://www.eps.org

Subzero Science and Engineering Research Facility --- http://www.coe.montana.edu/ce/subzero/

Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room --- http://www.foia.cia.gov

The Manhattan Project: An Interactive History (nuclear physics) --- https://www.osti.gov/manhattan-project-history/index.htm

Interactives: Oceanus Magazine--- http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/interactive

Coffee Break: NCBI Bookshelf (biotechnology readings) --- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2345/

Search NMNH Collections (natural history) --- http://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/

Anatomical Atlas of Flies --- http://www.ento.csiro.au/biology/fly/fly.php#

National Library of Medicine Specialized Information Services --- http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/

Indiana Resource Center for Autism --- http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/index.php?pageId=32

Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries (especially pollution control and clean up) --- http://www.bire.org

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

Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet --- http://climate.nasa.gov

National Priorities Project (especially note the Educator Toolkit) --- https://www.nationalpriorities.org

From the Scout Report on November 14, 2014

Earth-Now --- http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20120319.html 

This app from NASA gives readers a peek into the constantly fluctuating elements of the earth’s atmosphere. Using 3D models constructed from satellite images, the app visually displays the causes and effects of climate change via surface air temperature, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide levels, and sea level height anomalies among others. Fascinating for students, teachers, and anyone interested in climate change, Earth-Now is compatible with Apple devices running iOS 5.1+ and Android devices running 4.0+

From the Scout Report on November 21, 2014

The Polar Vortex Rides Again?
What is a Polar Vortex?
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/what-is-a-polar-vortex/21793077

Yes, The Weather Is Polar. No, It's Not The Vortex
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/16/364243343/yes-the-weather-is-polar-no-its-not-the-vortex

Snowvember: What's Causing the Unseasonably Cold Weather?
http://www.livescience.com/48742-heavy-snowfall-polar-vortex.html

The Squishiness of the Phrase "Polar Vortex"
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/11/17/polar_vortex_definition_here_s_what_s_really_happening_with_stratospheric.html

Arctic Blast Brings Freezing Temperatures and More Snow to U.S.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/arctic-blast-brings-freezing-temperatures-more-snow-u-s-n249861

Polar vortex visits to U.S. linked to climate change
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/09/02/polar-vortex-climate-change/14973047/

 

 

Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries http://www.bire.org


Social Science and Economics Tutorials

The Legislative Process --- https://www.congress.gov/legislative-process 
Also see http://www.congresslink.org/print_basics_leadershippositions.htm

Committees of the USA Congress --- https://www.congress.gov/committees

APA Center for Organizational Excellence (psychological health in the workplace) --- http://www.apaexcellence.org

The Immanent Frame (excellent essays about scholars in philosophy, religion, and the public sphere) --- http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/

The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society ---
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview/

Inside Islam: Dialogues and Debates [iTunes] http://insideislam.wisc.edu/

Free Literature About Islam --- http://islam.about.com/od/basicbeliefs/a/freelit.htm

Open Collections Program: Islamic Heritage Project --- http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ihp/

Denied Dignity: Systematic Discrimination and Hostility toward Saudi Shia Citizens ---  http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/09/03/denied-dignity-0

Encyclopedia of Earth: People (in science) --- http://www.eoearth.org/topics/view/51cbfc78f702fc2ba8129e86/

Institute for Science + Math Education (University of Washington) --- http://sciencemathpartnerships.org

Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room --- http://www.foia.cia.gov

Urbanology: BMW Guggenheim Lab (study of people living in cities) --- http://www.bmwguggenheimlab.org/urbanology-online

American Migration [Interactive Map] --- http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/migration.html

A State-by-State Look at Where Each Generation Lives
http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-generational-population-data-maps-by-state.html

ACT Raising Safe Kids Program --- http://actagainstviolence.apa.org

Center for Transatlantic Relations --- http://transatlantic.sais-jhu.edu

The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society ---
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview/

Open World Bank India --- http://openindia.worldbankgroup.org

Ling long Women's Magazine (China) --- http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/linglong/

Indiana Resource Center for Autism --- http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/index.php?pageId=32

Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries (especially pollution control and clean up) --- http://www.bire.org

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

Backwards in High Heels: Getting Women Elected, 1842-1990 --
http://library.austintexas.gov/ahc/backwards-high-heels-getting-women-elected-1842-1990-53352

National Priorities Project (especially note the Educator Toolkit) --- https://www.nationalpriorities.org

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon --- http://www.un.org/sg/

From the Scout Report on November 14, 2014

Women in Congress
Meet Elise Stefanik, the Youngest Woman Ever Elected to Congress
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/elise-stefanik-youngest-woman-elected-congress/story?id=26694806

Elise Stefanik: Future of the GOP
http://www.businessinsider.com/elise-stefanik-future-of-the-gop-ny-21-district-positions-2014-11

Utah’s Mia Love to Become First-Ever Black Female Republican in Congress
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/11/05/mia_love_utah_black_female_republican_headed_to_house.html

Women make up more than hall the U.S. population, less than one fourth of
U.S. House witnesses
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/09/09/women-make-up-half-the-u-s-population-one-fourth-of-u-s-house-witnesses/

100 women in Congress is not enough
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/05/opinion/ghitis-women-in-congress/index.html

100 Women in Congress? So What.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/100-women-in-congress-so-what-112663.html#.VFzntEu4n8s

 

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

ACT Raising Safe Kids Program --- http://actagainstviolence.apa.org

Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room --- http://www.foia.cia.gov

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


Math Tutorials

Institute for Science + Math Education (University of Washington) --- http://sciencemathpartnerships.org

The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/CkGJ77UBkT8/the-unexpected-math-behind-van-goghs-starry-night.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

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


History Tutorials

Learn The History of Philosophy in 197 Podcasts (With More to Come) ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/hz6VziSrvTU/learn-the-history-of-philosophy-in-197-podcasts.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Download 110 Free Philosophy eBooks: From Aristotle to Nietzsche & Wittgenstein ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/7KCZcr9eKM4/download-110-free-philosophy-ebooks-from-aristotle-to-nietzsche-wittgenstein.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Wittgenstein Day-by-Day: Facebook Page Tracks the Philosopher’s Wartime Experience 100 Years Ago ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/1yCnakyzN6M/wittgenstein-day-by-day.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

A History of Ideas: Animated Videos Explain Theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Burke & Other Philosophers ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/qjtaYhJ7jWY/a-history-of-ideas-animated-videos-explain-theories-of-simone-de-beauvoir-edmund-burke.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room --- http://www.foia.cia.gov

The Immanent Frame (excellent essays about scholars in philosophy, religion, and the public sphere) --- http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/

The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society ---
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview/

Inside Islam: Dialogues and Debates [iTunes] http://insideislam.wisc.edu/

Free Literature About Islam --- http://islam.about.com/od/basicbeliefs/a/freelit.htm

Open Collections Program: Islamic Heritage Project --- http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ihp/

Denied Dignity: Systematic Discrimination and Hostility toward Saudi Shia Citizens ---  http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/09/03/denied-dignity-0

15 Great Films Adapted From Equally Great Novels ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/YPTp3xNu5_U/15-great-films-adapted-from-equally-great-novels.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Read Free Digital Art Catalogues from 9 World-Class Museums, Thanks to the Pioneering Getty Foundation --- Click Here
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/4IyKU7hBbuI/read-free-digital-art-catalogues-from-9-world-class-museums.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

ALBERTINA online (European art) --- http://sammlungenonline.albertina.at/default.aspx?lng=english2

The Red Menace: A Striking Gallery of Anti-Communist Posters, Ads, Comic Books, Magazines & Films ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/lEyP_9tQJaY/the-red-menace-a-striking-gallery-of-anti-communist-propaganda.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

The Great War: Video Series Will Document How WWI Unfolded, Week-by-Week, for the Next 4 Years ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/DHsCd4kJgMM/the-great-war-video-series-will-document-how-wwi-unfolded-week-by-week-for-the-next-4-years.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

40 maps that explain World War II ---
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/13/7148855/40-maps-that-explain-world-war-ii

The Manhattan Project: An Interactive History (nuclear physics) --- https://www.osti.gov/manhattan-project-history/index.htm

The Union general’s March to the Sea was brutal, but his troops were careful to destroy only the South’s war machine, a strategy historians now deem effective and legal.
"Wrestling With a Revised View of Sherman’s March," by Alan Blinder, The New York Times, November 14, 2014 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/us/150-years-later-wrestling-with-a-revised-view-of-shermans-march.html?_r=0 

David Foster Wallace's The Pale King --- http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15878coll20#nav_top

Backwards in High Heels: Getting Women Elected, 1842-1990 --
http://library.austintexas.gov/ahc/backwards-high-heels-getting-women-elected-1842-1990-53352

A History of Ideas: Animated Videos Explain Theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Burke & Other Philosophers ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/qjtaYhJ7jWY/a-history-of-ideas-animated-videos-explain-theories-of-simone-de-beauvoir-edmund-burke.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

From the Scout Report on November 14, 2014

Women in Congress
Meet Elise Stefanik, the Youngest Woman Ever Elected to Congress
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/elise-stefanik-youngest-woman-elected-congress/story?id=26694806

Elise Stefanik: Future of the GOP
http://www.businessinsider.com/elise-stefanik-future-of-the-gop-ny-21-district-positions-2014-11

Utah’s Mia Love to Become First-Ever Black Female Republican in Congress
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/11/05/mia_love_utah_black_female_republican_headed_to_house.html

Women make up more than hall the U.S. population, less than one fourth of
U.S. House witnesses
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/09/09/women-make-up-half-the-u-s-population-one-fourth-of-u-s-house-witnesses/

100 women in Congress is not enough
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/05/opinion/ghitis-women-in-congress/index.html

100 Women in Congress? So What.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/100-women-in-congress-so-what-112663.html#.VFzntEu4n8s

"Japanese Artists Solve The Problem of How To Sell Multiple Copies of Interactive Artworks," MIT's Technology Review, November 16, 2014 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/532586/japanese-artists-solve-the-problem-of-how-to-sell-multiple-copies-of-interactive/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141117

If you’re a modern art fan, you may have bought a copy of a Picasso or a Pollock. But chances are, you’ve never been able to buy a copy of an interactive art installation…until now.

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in Japan displayed a giant canvas showing four snowmen in a wintry scene. People approaching the canvas found their faces superimposed onto the heads of the four snowmen, so that their facial expressions determined the mood of the scene.

The installation, called Yukinko, proved popular and ran until the end of August with an estimated 100,000 visitors.

This installation was unusual because, unlike other interactive artworks, anybody could by a copy to run at home. That’s a potentially significant money spinner for the museum and the artists Mayuko Kanazawa and a couple of pals from Osaka University.

While it is common for museums to sell prints and posters of conventional works of art, this has never been possible with interactive art because of the unique technology it often relies on.

Kanazawa and co get around this with a simple approach. The technology that powers their installation is an iPhone 5c mounted behind the canvas with its camera peering through a pinhole. It uses conventional face recognition software to pick out the faces of anybody nearby and then sends the pictures to a projector. This beams the faces onto the canvas.

Kanazawa and co have made all this available as an iPhone app costing 99c. So anybody can run a similar installation in their living room. The paper referenced below provides some technical pointers about how best to set it up.

Continued in article

 

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

Handmade Animation Shows You “How To Make a 1930 Paramount Record” ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/XYjj3C7WxcA/how-to-make-a-1930-paramount-record.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

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

Materials for Teachers: Academy of American Poets --- http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/materials-teachers

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



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

November 12, 2014

November 13, 2014

November 14, 2014

November 15, 2014

November 17, 2014

November 18, 2014

November 19, 2014

November 20, 2014

November 21, 2014

November 22, 2014

November 24, 2014

 


"We Are Witnessing A Great American Relapse," The Economist, November 21, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/we-are-witnessing-a-great-american-relapse-2014-11

I'm not really elated or upset that millions of "undocumented residents" no longer have to fear deportation. Actually the overwhelming majority really don't have to fear deportation whether or not they sign up for temporary legal status. Those that sign up up have a higher probability of eventually becoming citizens. Also it will be easier to get refunds on the tax withholdings from their paychecks. Those that are deported are usually back in the USA in less than a month. The best way to end the flood of undocumented immigration, in my viewpoint, is to legalize narcotics in the USA, Latin America, and South America. That is probably the only way to end the violent drug gangs that are making life unbearable in this hemisphere and especially in Latin America.
Bob Jensen
Also see http://www.newsweek.com/five-questions-after-obamas-immigration-speech-286031

94% of Illegals Skip Their Deportation Hearings
Breitbart --- http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/10/31/2-1-2-Month-Snapshot-Thousands-of-Family-Units-Failed-to-Appear-in-Immigration-Court


APA Center for Organizational Excellence (psychological health in the workplace) --- http://www.apaexcellence.org


How Trans Fat Eats Away at Your Memory ---
http://time.chtah.net/a/hBUbIidBASRffB84oq1BRZ6xBsu/time14


New Test May Predict Alzheimer's 10 Years Before Diagnosis ---
http://time.chtah.net/a/hBUaztDBASRffB84oq1BRZ6xBHN/time13


Indiana Resource Center for Autism --- http://www.iidc.indiana.edu/index.php?pageId=32


"Wisconsin Wind Turbines Declared Health Hazard:  First of its kind ruling; similar to Michigan situation," by Jack Spencer, Michigan Capitol Confidential, November 8, 2014 ---
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/20690

. . .

“I can tell you that we are absolutely not an anti-wind energy board,” Tibbetts said. “We worked on this for four and a half years before making this decision. Three families have moved out. I knew all of them. We also know that this isn’t only happening here. In Ontario 40 families have abandoned their homes to get away from the effects of wind turbines.”

According to Tibbetts, micro barometers were placed in homes located in the area surrounding the industrial wind plant. The purpose of this was to detect acoustic emissions, including infrasound and low frequency noise emanating from the turbines.

“They found that there were tones of infrasound and low frequency noise as far away as 6.2 miles from the nearest wind turbine,” Tibbetts said. “There were no complaints associated with the home that was 6.2 miles away, but there were complaints associated with one 4.2 miles away.

“We have 80 people on record who have made health complaints, including a nurse who is going deaf,” Tibbetts continued. “We can’t just ignore this.”

Brown County’s health code defines a human health hazard as “a substance, activity or condition that is known to have the potential to cause acute or chronic illness or death if exposure to the substance, activity or condition is not abated.”

The Board of Health’s Oct. 14 decision could potentially put Duke Energy — which operates and owns the wind plant — in a position where it has to prove the turbines are not the cause of the health complaints. Duke Energy, a sustainable electric and gas company with approximately 7.2 million U.S. customers in the Southeast and Midwest, did not build the plant, it purchased it.

Those who defend the safety of wind turbines argue that infrasound and low-frequency noise can also be detected miles away from other sources, such as traffic and large bodies of water. They claim the ill-effects residents complain about could be psychological (based on an anticipation of being adversely impacted) and there is no scientific proof that turbines make people sick.

Tammie McGee, spokesperson for Duke Energy, said the wind plant is the only one owned by the company that has received health complaints. She also said that Duke Energy has a good track record for responding to complaints and has, so far, received no notification or other form of communication from the Brown County Board of Health.

“Duke Energy has more than 1,000 wind turbines,” McGee said. “The wind development in Brown County, which is in complete compliance with (local) ordinances, has only eight turbines and it is the only one we have where there are complaints from neighbors.

“We have heard nothing from the Brown County Board of Health,” McGee added. “Over the three weeks since Oct. 14, we have not been able to get anything from them — including being able to find the minutes of the meeting on their (the County’s) website.”

Tibbetts said the Oct. 14 meeting was public and it wasn’t the board’s responsibility to see to it that a representative of Duke Energy was present. However, there are indications that (possibly for legal reasons) board members, other than Tibbetts, have not been making themselves available to the press for comment.

Rick James, of Lansing-based E-Coustic Solutions, is an acoustic engineer. He conducted the Brown County survey.

“The County has a responsibility to protect the health of the public from entities that are emitting things that are toxic; and that includes substances or noise,” James said. “The wind plant has been studied and studied. The micro barometers confirmed that the wind turbine tones propagated out about four miles and that there were complaints that could be linked to that data.

“As I understand it, the board could have declared the wind plant to be a hazard of a higher level,” James said. “They didn’t do that. However, I believe what they did puts the burden of proof on Duke Energy.”

Tibbetts said the board’s decision has received much news media coverage.

“It’s worldwide,” Tibbetts said. “It’s been covered as far away as Australia.”

What about the regular news media in the United States?

“Not much,” Tibbetts said. “I don’t think the average person in the United States hears anything about this issue. For some reason the news media doesn’t seem to want to cover it. But I did get a call from someone at NBC. I think that was in the context of what’s been going on in Massachusetts. It was picked by some affiliates. But for the most part, I don’t think a lot of the people in this county have heard very much about any of this. It took our local Green Bay Gazette almost two weeks to do the story.”

Brown County is across Lake Michigan from Mason County, where health complaints allegedly caused by the Lake Winds industrial wind plant, near Ludington, resulted in both a civil lawsuit and Mason County declaring that the wind plant was not in compliance with the County noise ordinance.

“What’s happening in Wisconsin is consistent with results we are seeing on the ground in the Garden Peninsula and Huron, Tuscola, Missaukee, Mason and even Gratiot counties,” said Kevon Martis, director of the Interstate Informed Citizens Coalition, a nonprofit organization that is concerned about the construction of wind turbines in the region.

“What is pathetic is that wind developers could offer to relocate people outside the footprint of most developments for $3 million to $5 million,” Martis continued. “When the total capital costs of a wind development are $200 to $300 million, such a cost to protect our rural citizens is barely a blip on the balance sheet. And in most cases the wind developer is playing with public funds in the first place.”

James was asked if there were many other situations involving health issues allegedly resulting from wind turbine-produced infrasound and low frequency noise.

“I mostly limit my travel to the Midwest,” James said. “However, I have gone to West Virginia, North Carolina, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Washington state, Vancouver, Australia and New Zeeland. This stuff is happening all over.”

Tibbetts publicly opposed the wind plant before it was constructed and the Brown County Board of Health had previously asked the state of Wisconsin to intervene in the situation. In January of 2013, the Wisconsin Towns Association called for a moratorium on construction of new wind turbines.

 

 




A Bit of Humor

Blind Date --- http://www.youtube.com/embed/_CwHrJt8Oz8

Video:  Instead of Milk and Cookies Give Santa Air Freshener for XMAS ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW0VYKtJisw

Great Crowd Dancing in Wintertime Russia ---
https://www.youtube.com/embed/KgoapkOo4vg?rel=0

Former major League baseball star will not give you the finger, but you can buy his actual finger on eBay ---
Jose Canseco plans to sell his middle finger on eBay --- Click Here
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCgQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Fsports%2F2014%2F11%2F17%2Fjose-canseco-plans-to-sell-his-middle-finger-on-ebay%2F&ei=zmFrVMjzOIq6yQS0rIKgAw&usg=AFQjCNHxemWqcxvQOxpyozdKM7-sTne6KA&bvm=bv.79908130,d.aWw
Jensen Comment
If successful in this sale he may shoot himself a second time to pay off his gambling debts with a shot to a more profitable appendage --- I meant to say his throwing arm.

Think of how Vincent van Gogh could've gotten out of poverty if eBay had been around in the late 1800s. "Eh ... what's that you say?"

Forwarded by Paula

With all the new technology regarding fertility recently, a 65-year-old friend of mine was able to give birth.

When she was discharged from the hospital and went home, I went to visit.

'May I see the new baby?' I asked.

'Not yet,' She said. 'I'll make coffee and we can visit for a while first.'

Thirty minutes had passed, and I asked, 'May I see the new baby now?'

'No, not yet,' she said.

After another few minutes had elapsed, I asked again, 'May I see the baby now?'

'No, not yet,' insisted my friend.

Growing very impatient, I asked, 'Well, when CAN I see the baby?'

'WHEN HE CRIES!' she told me.

'WHEN HE CRIES?' I demanded. 'Why do I have to wait until he CRIES?'

'BECAUSE I FORGOT WHERE I PUT HIM, O.K.?'

 

Forwarded by Paula

My wife found out that our dog (a Schnauzer) could hardly hear, so she took it to the veterinarian. The vet found that the problem was hair in the dog's ears. He cleaned both ears, and the dog could then hear fine. The vet then proceeded to tell Andrea that, if she wanted to keep this from recurring, she should go to the store and get some "Nair" hair remover and rub it in the dog's ears once a month.

Andrea went to the store and bought some "Nair" hair remover. At the register, the pharmacist told her, "If you're going to use this under your arms, don't use deodorant for a few days."

Andrea said, "I'm not using it under my arms."

The pharmacist said, "If you're using it on your legs, don't use body lotion for a couple of days."

Andrea replied, "I'm not using it on my legs either. If you must know, I'm using it on my Schnauzer."

The pharmacist says, "Well, stay off your bicycle for about a week."

Forwarded by Paula

The rain was pouring down and there was a big puddle in front of the pub just outside an Air Force base. An old man wearing a baseball cap with the Navy insignia on it was standing near the edge with a fishing rod, his line in the puddle.

A curious young Air Force pilot stopped and asked what he was doing. 'Fishing,' the old guy simply said.

'Poor old fool,' the Air Force officer thought, but out of respect he invited the ragged old sailor into the pub for a drink. He felt he should open up a conversation, so he asked 'How many have you caught? 'You're the eighth' the old sailor replied.


Forwarded by Paula

Capeeshe Italiano........ I'm sending this out to every person I know who is Italian, could be Italian, married an Italian, lived with Italians or wants to be Italian......!!!!!

Let's start at the beginning.

Come stai? Molto bene. Bongiorno. Ciao. Arrivederci.

Every Italian from Italy knows these words and every Italian-American should.

But ……… what about the goomba speech pattern? Those words and phrases that are a little Italian, a little American, and a lot of slang. Words every Paesano and Bacciagaloop we have heard, - words we hear throughout our Little Italy neighborhood of New York.

This form of language, the 'Goomba-Italiano ' has been used for generations. It's not gangster slang terms like 'whack' or 'vig', if that's what you are thinking---nope, this is real Guido talk!

The goomba says ciao when he arrives or leaves. He says Mama Mia anytime emotion is needed in any given situation.

Mannaggia, meengya, oofah, and of course, va fongool can also be used…. Capeesh?

He uses a moppeen to wipe his hands in the cuchina, gets agita from the gravy and will shkeevats meatballs unless they are homemade from the famiglia.

Always foonah your bread in the pot of gravy (sauce) or you will be considered a real googootz or Mezzo-finookio.

There are usually plenty of mamalukes and the girl from the neighborhood with the reputation is a facia-bruta, puttana or a schifosa.

If called cattivo, cabbadost, sfatcheem, stupido, or strunz, you are usually a pain in the ass. A crazy diavlo can give you the malokya (evil eye), but that red horn (contra malokya) will protect you if you use it right.

Don 't forget to always say per favore and grazia and prego.

If you are feeling mooshadda or stounad or mezzo-morto, always head to Nonna's and she will fix you up with a little homemade manicott', cavadell', or calamar ', or some ricotta cheesecake.

Mangia some zeppoles, canolis, torrone, struffoli, shfoolyadell', pignoli cookies, or a little nutella on pannetone. Delizioso!

I think I will fix myself a sangweech of cabacol' with some proshoot and mozarell' or maybe just a hot slice of peetza.

So salud' if you have any Italian blood in you and you understood anything written here! Then, you are numero uno and a professore of the goombas.

If you don't get any of this, then fa Nabola with the whole thing and you are a disgraziato. Scuzi, Mia dispiachay, I didn't mean that....... Just....... Fu-ghedda-boudit…

Bada Bing….. This is also so true. Enjoy!

Italians have a $40,000 kitchen, but use the $100, 35 year old stove from Sears in the basement to cook things on.

There is some sort of religious statue in the hallway, living room, bedroom, front porch and backyard. (A Mary on the half shell).

The outdoor table is linoleum covered with small, chrome metal trim along the edges.

The living room is filled with old wedding favors with bows and stale almonds (they are too pretty to open and eat).

All lampshades, stuffed chairs and stuffed couches are covered with stiff, clear plastic.

A portrait of the Pope and Frank Sinatra hang in the dining room.

God forbid if anyone EVER attempted to eat 'Chef Boy-ar-Dee', 'Franco American', 'Ragu', 'Prego', or anything else labeled as Italian in a jar or can.

Meatballs are made with pork, veal and beef, mixed together.

Turkey is served on Thanksgiving AFTER the manicotti, gnocchi, lasagna, and minestrone or shcarole soup.

If anyone EVER says ESCAROLE, slap 'em in the face -- it's SHCAROLE.

Sunday dinner was at 1:00 PM sharp. The meal went like this... The table was set with everyday dishes. It doesn't matter if they don't match. They're clean; what more do you want?

Wine, homemade, is served up in small water or old cheese glasses.

At the table all the utensils go on the right side of the plate and the napkin goes on the left.

A clean kitchen towel was put at Nonno's & Papa's plates because they won't use napkins.

Homemade wine, a pitcher of water and bottles of 7-UP are on the table.

First course, Antipasto... Change plates.

Second course, macaroni or ravioli.

All pasta was called macaroni...or `paste`. Change plates.

Third course was usually roast beef, some chicken with potatoes and vegetables... Change plates.

THEN, and only then - NEVER AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MEAL - would you eat the salad drenched in homemade oil & strong, red-vinegar dressing.. Change plates.

Next course, fruit & nuts - in the shell - on paper plates because you ran out of the real ones.

You pinched yourself on that damn nutcracker...how many times..?

Last was coffee with anisette, some espresso for Nonno, 'American' coffee for the rest - with hard cookies (biscottis) to dunk in the coffee with more fruit and some cheese.

The kids would go out to play.

The men would go lay down. They slept so soundly that you could do brain surgery on them without anesthesia.

The women cleaned the kitchen.

We got screamed at by Mama or Nonna, and half of the sentences were English, the other half in Italian.

Italian mothers never threw a baseball in their life, but could nail you in the head or back with their shoe thrown from the kitchen while you were in the living room.

Other things particular to Italians...

The prom dress that Zia Ceserina made for her kid, Carmella, cost only $20.00, which was for the material.

The prom hairdo was done free by Cousin Angelina.

Turning around at your prom to see your entire family, including your Godparents, standing in the back of the gym...was simply PRICELESS!

True Italians will love this.

Those of you who are married to Italians will understand this. And those who wish they were Italian, and those who are friends with Italians, will remember with a smile.

Then they'll forward this to their Italian friends with love or a reasonable facsimile.


Forwarded by Paula

Father Norton woke up one Sunday morning. It was an exceptionally beautiful and sunny early spring day, and he decided he just had to play golf. He called up his associate pastor and told him that he was feeling sick and asked him to hold Mass for him that day.

As soon as he hung up, Father Norton headed for a golf course about 40 miles away. He wanted to make sure that he didn't run into anyone he knew. After all, everyone else would be in church.

At the course, Father Norton asked to play alone, and as he strolled onto the first tee, St. Peter leaned over to the Lord while they were looking down from Heaven and exclaimed, “You're not going to let him get away with this, are you?" The Lord sighed and responded, “No, I guess not."

Father Norton teed his ball up and took a mighty swing. The ball came

off the face of his driver like a cannon shot, straight and true. His ball landed just short of the green, bounced on and rolled straight into the hole, a 420-yard hole-in-one! St. Peter was astonished. He looked at the Lord and asked, “How could you let that happen?

The Lord just smiled and replied, “Who's he going to tell?"

 




 




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting educators.
Any college may post a news item.

Accounting  and Taxation News Sites ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

 

For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators) http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.

Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing, doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics) research, publication, replication, and validity testing.

 

CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/  (Closed Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.
Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.
AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1 
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.
Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com 
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog

Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board on this financial reporting blog from Financial Executives International. The site, updated daily, compiles regulatory news, rulings and statements, comment letters on standards, and hot topics from the Web’s largest business and accounting publications and organizations. Look for continuing coverage of SOX requirements, fair value reporting and the Alternative Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such as the subprime mortgage crisis, international convergence, and rules for tax return preparers.
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv

September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as well as a practicing CPA)

I found another listserve that is exceptional -

CalCPA maintains http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/  and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.

There are several highly capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and the answers are often in depth.

Scott

Scott forwarded the following message from Jim Counts

Yes you may mention info on your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not have access to the files and other items posted.

Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I will get the request to join.

Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.

We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in California.... ]

Please encourage your members to join our listserve.

If any questions let me know.

Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk

 

 

 

 

Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) --- http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm

 

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

Some Accounting History Sites

Bob Jensen's Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
 

Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

Sage Accounting History --- http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269

A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm 

A nice timeline of accounting history --- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING

From Texas A&M University
Accounting History Outline --- http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html

Bob Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds

History of Fraud in America --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

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

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

All my online pictures --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone:  603-823-8482 
Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu