Tidbits on December 15, 2014
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Photographs of the History of The White Mountains --- Set 06 (Kinsman Notch)
 http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Mountains/HistoryWhiteMountains/06/WhiteMountains06-Kinsman.htm

 

Tidbits on December 15,, 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 

For earlier editions of Fraud Updates go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
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 
Bookmarks for the World's Library --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.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

10 TED talks that defined 2014
Plus the 20 most popular TED talks of all time ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/top-10-ted-talks-2014-12

Eastern Philosophy Explained with Three Animated Videos by Alain de Botton’s School of Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/eastern-philosophy-explained-with-three-animated-videos.html

"Honest advertising is remarkably winning" (but is it really honest from a health standpoint?) ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-12-05/arbys-best-commercial-yet-is-actually-for-pepsi?campaign_id=DN120514

A UK Biscuit Company Has Made Such A Cute Ad With Baby Animals You Won't Even Care About The Biscuits ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/mcvities-christmas-animal-ad-2014-12

How Bourbon is Made: The ABC’s in 9 Minutes ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/how-bourbon-is-made-the-abcs-in-9-minutes.html

Now, Anyone On Earth Can See A View Of Our Planet From Space In Real Time ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/earth-live-stream-from-iss-2014-11

A Year in the Life of Earth’s CO2: A Striking Visualization ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/a-year-in-the-life-of-earths-co2-a-striking-visualization.html 
These 6 Countries Are Responsible For 60% Of CO2 Emissions (China, India, USA, Russia, Japan, Germany) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-countries-are-responsible-for-60-of-co2-emissions-2014-12

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-countries-are-responsible-for-60-of-co2-emissions-2014-12#ixzz3LDHgbNeJ

Wanderers: A Short Sci-Fi Film About Humanity’s Future in Space, Narrated by Carl Sagan ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/wanderers.html

A Haunting Drone’s-Eye View of Chernobyl ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/a-haunting-drones-eye-view-of-chernobyl.html

Sainsbury's Christmas Ad (tribute to WW I on XMAS Day 1914) --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWF2JBb1bvM

Shelf Life: American Museum of Natural History Creates New Video Series on Its 33 Million Artifacts ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/shelf-life.html

Albert Camus: The Madness of Sincerity — 1997 Documentary Revisits the Philosopher’s Life & Work ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/RbW3Sz6RD-g/albert-camus-the-madness-of-sincerity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

"Watch the Robots Shipping Your Amazon Order This Holiday," by Sam Frizell, Time Magazine, December 1, 2014 ---
http://time.com/3605924/amazon-robots/?xid=newsletter-brief

From MIT:  Philosophy of Love in the Western World ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-261-philosophy-of-love-in-the-western-world-fall-2004/index.htm


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

Jazz on the Tube: An Archive of 2,000 Classic Jazz Videos (and Much More) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/jazz-on-the-tube-an-archive-of-2000-classic-jazz-videos-and-much-more.html

'Dancing With The Stars' Did A Routine Set To Old Nintendo Music, And It's Amazing ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/dancing-with-the-stars-mario-bros-choreography-2014-11

Orchestra Flash Mob ---
 http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-cKE8pyfcZc 

Watch Bob Dylan Play a Private Concert for One Lucky Fan ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/watch-bob-dylan-play-a-private-concert-for-one-lucky-fan.html

The Classical Music in Stanley Kubrick’s Films: Listen to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/the-classical-music-in-stanley-kubricks-films-listen-to-a-free-4-hour-playlist.html

Latin Music USA | PBS --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/latinmusicusa/

Handel: Messiah - Chorus: 'For unto us a child is born'
Artist: Handel & Haydn Society Album: Messiah Song: For unto us a child is born
Scroll Down at
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2014/12/11/370156185/a-bicentennial-for-bostons-handel-and-haydn-society

 

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

The Best Tourist Attraction In Every State ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-tourist-site-in-each-state-2014-12

Best Photos of 2014 as Chosen by Reuters ---
http://www.reuters.com/news/picture/2014/12/03/best-photos-of-the-year?articleId=USRTR4GLBU&slideId=

Hubble Space Telescope:  The first image is spectacular –
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2014/12/2014-hubble-space-telescope-advent-calendar/100863/

48 Unexpected Views Of Famous Historic Moments ---
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.distractify.com%2Fculture%2Fviews-of-famous-events%2F&ei=EQB1VJXvA4WcgwTPuoKoCg&usg=AFQjCNGAqwN6P9RT3NCxFDKGrTInVMBaow&bvm=bv.80185997,d.eXY
Also see
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCQQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fimgur.com%2Fgallery%2FFd184&ei=EQB1VJXvA4WcgwTPuoKoCg&usg=AFQjCNG72S_y_fmUFgVY-p0Y4IU5SogbFQ&bvm=bv.80185997,d.eXY

45 Color Photos Of Manhattan In The 1940s ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/color-photos-of-manhattan-in-the-1940s-2014-12

Haunting Images From One Of America's Dying Shopping Malls ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/haunting-images-of-a-dying-shopping-mall-2014-12

Amazing American Civil War Photos Turned Into Glorious Color ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazing-american-civil-war-photos-turned-into-glorious-color-2014-12

Barnard & Gardner Civil War Photographs --- http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/rubenstein_barnardgardner/

Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion (Chinese American Art & Photography) ---
http://chineseamerican.nyhistory.org/explore/

Art Works Blog (National Endowment for the Arts) --- http://arts.gov/art-works

AP Mobile --- http://www.ap.org/apmobile/ 

Phenomenal Pictures ---
https://www.google.ca/search?q=%22Phenomenal+Pictures%22&lr=&as_qdr=all&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=h4Z0VICHEdP4yQTQ-IHgBw&ved=0CDoQsAQ&biw=1024&bih=506

Historic Pictures
http://earthlymission.com/rarely-seen-enchanted-moments-of-us-history-megapost/

This Hypnotically Beautiful Chart Shows All Life On Earth ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-hypnotically-beautiful-chart-shows-all-life-on-earth-2014-12

See The Size Of The World's Largest Armies From Antiquity To Present ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-ambitious-graphic-shows-the-size-of-standing-armies-from-antiquity-to-the-present-2014-11

Barnard & Gardner Civil War Photographs --- http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/rubenstein_barnardgardner/

The 15 Best Ski Resorts In America --- http://www.businessinsider.com/best-ski-resorts-in-america-2014-11

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 Digital Nietzsche: Download Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/2_QWsCeBHZA/download-nietzsches-major-works-as-free-ebooks.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

The Digital Dostoevsky: Download Free eBooks & Audio Books of the Russian Novelist’s Major Works ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/download-free-ebooks-audio-books-of-dostoevsky.html

Dostoyevsky Got a Reprieve from the Czar’s Firing Squad and Then Saved Charles Bukowski’s Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/dostoyevsky-saved-bukowskis-life.html

Zinsser's essay about how Norman Rockwell might portray the holiday today ---
http://theamericanscholar.org/scholar-sendy/l/L8d9J7WO89D763Ym8GrU4vbA/4owb7mqWw0JkznOUH892AeBw/9hM58IG0KwwpxwR1zTIOtg

16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writing on Evolution Now Digitized and Available Online ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/6px2DY_zYXs/16000-pages-of-charles-darwins-writing-on-evolution-now-available-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Dickens in Massachusetts Virtual Tour --- http://library.uml.edu/dickens/exhibit/VirtualTour.html

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow Finally Gets Released as an Audio Book ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/AXYh_0SQmQo/thomas-pynchons-gravitys-rainbow-finally-gets-released-as-an-audio-book.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Thug Notes Demystifies 60 Literary Classics (from Shakespeare to Gatsby) with a Fresh Urban Twist ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/thug-notes-demystifies-60-literary-classics.html

Ezra Pound --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound
"The Tragic Hero of Literary Modernism Ezra Pound’s generous spirit looms over 20th-century literature, and in the early years his megalomania seemed harmless," by David Mason, The Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-ezra-pound-poet-the-epic-years-1921-1939-by-a-david-moody-1417818046?tesla=y&mod=djemMER_h&mg=reno64-wsj

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 December 15, 2014
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2014/TidbitsQuotations121514.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/

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




10 TED talks that defined 2014
Plus the 20 most popular TED talks of all time
---
http://www.businessinsider.com/top-10-ted-talks-2014-12

Library Scientists Pick the Best Ten Stories That Shaped 2014 ---
http://lisnews.org/ten_stories_that_shaped_2014

Time Magazine:  The Top 10 Gadgets of 2014 ---
http://time.com/3582115/top-10-gadgets-2014/?xid=newsletter-brief

Time Magazine:  The Best Inventions of 2014 ---
http://time.com/3594971/the-25-best-inventions-of-2014/?xid=newsletter-brief

Time Magazine's Choices for the 2014 Top 10 Apps ---
http://time.com/3582114/top-10-apps/?xid=newsletter-brief

Yahoo Tech's Choices for the 2014 Top 10 Gadgets ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/the-10-most-wanted-tech-c1417549586539/photo-iphone-6-photo-1417549459482.html

Jensen Comment
Some of these inventions are cool and very expensive. I find the MS Surface tablet computer not so expensive and not very cool. I'll take a laptop over a tablet any day of the week.

One of the many things I don't like are the mini ports that are just too fragile along with the mini plugs that plug into them Thin is nice in people. It's not nice in computers. I recommend using a USB port replicator (under $10) on your tablet computer such that you only have one mini plug to contend with for USB devices. But I don't like the other mini connectors such as the mini-power connector.

I like mini skirts but not mini ports on thin tablet computers.

These Are 17 Of Our Favorite Gadgets From The 1990s ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/tech-gadgets-from-the-1990s-2014-12

The Best Art, Design, and Photography Books of the Year ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/08/best-art-design-photography-books-2014/

"The Year's Best Books on Psychology, Philosophy, and How to Live Meaningfully," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, December 1, 2014 ---
ttp://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/01/best-psychology-philosophy-books-2014/

The 15 Best Business Books Of 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-business-books-of-2014-2014-12


15 Amazing Features In Office 365 That You Probably Don't Know About ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-office-365-15-amazingly-useful-hidden-features-2014-12?op=1


Hypocrisy at UC Berkeley:  Celebrate Free Speech by Whisking Away a Conservative Speaker for His Own Safety
"Berkeley Protests Shut Down Peter Thiel Speech," by Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart, December 11, 2014 ---
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-California/2014/12/11/Berkeley-Protests-Shut-Down-Peter-Thiel-Speech

On Wednesday evening, in the very hall where the University of California at Berkeley had just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, demonstrators shut down a speech by billionaire tech guru--and noted libertarian--Peter Thiel.

. . .

On Monday evening, Breitbart News had reported on the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement from within the same hall. One veteran of that event, philosopher John Searle, lamented that Berkeley had not achieved complete free speech, because of hostility towards unpopular views, particularly conservative ones.

 


Wikipedia is a fantastic crowd-sourced encyclopedia that is free and does not receive advertising revenues. It relies on donations to fund its massive complex of servers. This is the time of year it conducts its annual fund drive. I donated easy by simply clicking on the Amazon button where my credit card is on file ---
https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:FundraiserLandingPage&country=US&uselang=en&utm_medium=sidebar&utm_source=donate&utm_campaign=C13_en.wikipedia.org

"Educating Minds Online:  An outstanding new book provides a road map for truly effective teaching with technology," by James M. Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 8, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Educating-Minds-Online/150743/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"The Future of Higher Education:  Shaking Up the Status Quo:  Chronicle of Higher Education, October 4, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/section/NEXT-The-Future-of-Higher/751/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"When Computers Beat Humans on Jeopardy Artificial intelligence is developing much more rapidly than most of us realize," by Ray Kurzweil, The Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146542688952206.html

Over the past three days,the TV show "Jeopardy!" featured a showdown between a clever IBM computer system called Watson and the two greatest "Jeopardy!" champions. Watson won handily. It won the preliminary practice round, tied Monday's opening round, and won by large margins on Tuesday and Wednesday. The point has been made: Watson can compete at the championship level—and is making it more difficult for anyone to argue that there are human tasks that computers will never achieve.

"Jeopardy!" involves understanding complexities of humor, puns, metaphors, analogies, ironies and other subtleties. Elsewhere, computers are advancing on many other fronts, from driverless cars (Google's cars have driven 140,000 miles through California cities and towns without human intervention) to the diagnosis of disease.

Watson runs on 90 computer servers, although it does not go out to the Internet. When will this capability be available on your PC? The ratio of computer price to performance is now doubling in less than a year, so 90 servers would become the equivalent of one server in about seven years, and the equivalent of one personal computer within a decade. However, with the growth in cloud computing—in which supercomputer capability is increasingly available to anyone via the Internet—Watson-like capability will actually be available to you much sooner.

Given this, I expect Watson-like "natural language processing" (the ability to "understand" ordinary English) to show up in Google, Bing and other search engines over the next five years.

With computers demonstrating a basic ability to understand human language, it's only a matter of time before they pass the famous "Turing test," in which "chatbot" programs compete to fool human judges into believing that they are human.

If Watson's underlying technology were applied to the Turing test, it would likely do pretty well. Consider the annual Loebner Prize competition, one version of the Turing test. Last year, the best chatbot contestant fooled the human judges 25% of the time.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Watson would have to dumb itself down in order to pass a Turing test. After all, if you were talking to someone over instant messaging and they seemed to know every detail of everything, you'd realize it was an artificial intelligence (AI).

A computer passing a properly designed Turing test would be operating at human levels. I, for one, would then regard it as human.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
But it truly is not a question of computer versus human. The beauty is that it is a question of human with the computer as a tool --- Hal 9000 is not here yet and probably will never be here until humans are extinct on earth and Hal is in outer space.

However, what we are probably not anticipating is how well we will one day be able to program creativity into the computer where eventually the computer will create original works of art, music, opera, ballet, literature, elegant (rather than brute-force) mathematical proofs, science experiments, aircraft designs, chess playing strategies, and even computers not yet conceived by humans.


I suspect that credit must be given to humans who can program creativity into a machine to a degree that it can invent things. The debate of "creativity" will one day boil down to a chicken versus the egg question.

.
Or put another way, when God says to the Devil "make your own dirt," can the "computer" truly create unless a human provides the "dirt?"

Bob Jensen's updated threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


"Google Pulls Out Of Russia," by Joshua Barrie, Business Insider, December 12, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-pulls-out-of-russia-2014-12


Library directors at liberal arts institutions are losing their jobs as they clash with faculty and administrators over the future of the academic library

"Clash in the Stacks," by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, December 10, 2014 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/12/10/rethinking-library-proves-divisive-topic-many-liberal-arts-institutions

Several library directors at liberal arts institutions have lost their jobs as they clash with faculty and administrators over how much -- and how fast -- the academic library should change.

None of the dismissals, resignations or retirements are identical. Some have resulted from arguments over funding; others from debates about decision-making processes or ongoing personal strife. One common trend, however, is that several of the library directors who have left their jobs in recent years have done so after long-term disputes with other groups on campus about how the academic library should change to better serve students and faculty.

The disputes highlight the growing pains of institutions and their members suddenly challenged to redefine themselves after centuries of serving as gateways and gatekeepers to knowledge.

“For the entire history of libraries as we know them -- 2,000 or 3,000 years -- we have lived in a world of information scarcity," said Terrence J. Metz, university librarian at Hamline University. "What’s happened in the last two decades is that’s been turned completely on its head. Now we’re living in a world of superabundance."

As their reasons for departing are different, so too are the factors current and former library directors said triggered the disagreements. In interviews with Inside Higher Ed, the library directors pointed to the shift from print to digital library materials, which they said is raising questions about who on campus is best-prepared to manage access to the wealth of information available through the internet. The financial fallout of the recent economic crisis has only inflamed that conversation.

“To my mind, all of this hubbub is probably exacerbated by the fact that libraries are trying to figure out what they are and what their future is and what their role is,” said Bryn I. Geffert, college librarian at Amherst College. “Every time you have a body of people going through this kind of existential crisis, conflict is inherent. As you’re trying to redefine an institution, you know there are going to be different opinions on how that redefinition should happen.”

The most recent case, Barnard College, presents a symbolic example of the shift from print to digital. There, the Lehman Hall library is about to be demolished to make way for an estimated $150 million Teaching and Learning Center. The new building means the library’s physical collection will shrink by tens of thousands of books.

Last month, the debate about the new space intensified when Lisa R. Norberg, dean of the Barnard Library and academic information services, resigned. In an article in the Columbia Daily Spectator, faculty members were quick to jump to Norberg’s defense, saying the administration “hobbled” and “disrespected” her.

Norberg did not respond to a request for comment, but her case resembles others in the liberal arts library community. As recently as this September, Patricia A. Tully, the Caleb T. Winchester university librarian at Wesleyan University, was fired after less than five years on the job. Tully and Ruth S. Weissman, Wesleyan’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, had for more than a year argued about how the library could work with administrators, faculty members and IT staffers.

“We just seemed to have different ideas about the role of the libraries,” Tully said then.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
There's an analogy here between the rise of air power vis-a-vis infantry, but perhaps this should not be pursued too far. Libraries are literally moving to the clouds while old and musty books gather mold untouched in stacks on the ground, increasingly unused by students and faculty. It's not that college libraries failed to keep pace with technology just like infantry soldiers are equipped with the latest in communications and ground weapons technology.

Libraries increasingly have expensive subscriptions to knowledge databases. But as such they are becoming bases for launching students and faculty into the clouds. Libraries increasingly give up space for student coffee shops, multimedia conference rooms, and computer labs. Reference librarians increasingly help students navigate in the clouds rather than in the stacks.

And thus libraries are somewhat caught in the middle of the budget disputes over spending for more air power or more ground power. Air power will probably keep getting increasing shares of resources relative to "books on the ground." We must now redefine what we mean by the terms "library" and "librarian." More importantly we need to define these terms on the basis of what sets them apart from the rest of the resources on campus.

Of course we also need to redefine what we mean by courses in the clouds versus courses on the ground.

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


Theory X --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y

36 Presidents of Private Colleges Earn More Than $1 Million ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/12/36-presidents-of-private-colleges-.html

The highest paid private university president every year could be a case study on Theory X management coupled with a quick temper. In my opinion, a quick temper is an asset for a Theory X university president. This forestalls any rabble rousing among the faculty. I would be more impressed if this particular president raised more money commensurate with her salary (much of which is deferred perhaps in hope that their will be more gifts down the road).


"Tales From The Grumpy Programmer: What Old Farts Can Teach You For instance, how not to fall into a hole," ReadWriteWeb, December 12, 2014 ---
http://readwrite.com/2014/12/12/grumpy-programmer-what-old-farts-can-teach-you


A Rolling Stone Gathers Fiction Without Fact

In light of these developments, Rolling Stone magazine is no longer standing by its story about a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia ---
http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/05/uva-rape-story-retracted

"Like A Rolling Stone A charge of rape at UVA unravels, and so does a political narrate." The Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/articles/like-a-rolling-stone-1417823962?tesla=y&mod=djemMER_h&mg=reno64-wsj

Rolling Stone magazine has now acknowledged “discrepancies” in an article it published last month about an alleged premeditated gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely made sensational allegations based solely on the testimony of the alleged victim. Ms. Erdely also made no attempt to get a comment from the alleged assailants, a failing that bloggers and columnists first pointed out.

All publications make mistakes, including us, but this one is worth some meditation for what it says about our larger media and political culture. All the more so given the amount of laudatory national attention the story received, and the trauma it caused at UVA.

Part of the reason may be a natural human reluctance to investigate the credibility of an alleged rape victim. But that should not have stopped Ms. Erdely from doing some basic due diligence. The rape allegedly took place at a loud “date function” at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on September 28, 2012. On Thursday the fraternity released a statement that it “did not have a date function or a social event during the weekend of September 28th, 2012.”

The larger problem, however, is that Ms. Erderly was, by her own admission, looking for a story to fit a pre-existing narrative—in this case, the supposed epidemic of sexual assault at elite universities, along with the presumed indifference of those schools to the problem. As the Washington Post noted in an admiring profile of Ms. Erdely, she interviewed students at several elite universities before alighting on UVA, “a public school, Southern and genteel.”

In other words, Ms. Erdely did not construct a story based on facts, but went looking for facts to fit her theory. She appears to have been looking for a story to fit the current popular liberal belief that sexual assault is pervasive and pervasively covered-up.

Now that the story has begun to fall apart, it’s worth considering the damage. Though it may never get as far as the bogus 2006 rape charges against the students of the Duke lacrosse team, members of the UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi will have to live with undeservedly tainted personal reputations, especially since the charges may never be decisively refuted. UVA has also taken an unfair blow to its reputation. Nor can the story do any good for the broader interest of preventing future campus sexual assaults.

We live in an era of politically driven narratives—particularly about race, class and gender—which the media often use to assert “truths” before bothering to ascertain facts. Last month in Ferguson, Missouri, and now at UVA, we’ve seen the harm those narratives can do.


Another False Rape Story
"INVESTIGATION: Lena Dunham ‘Raped by a Republican’ Story in Bestseller Collapses Under Scrutiny,"  Brietbart, December 2014 ---
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/12/03/investigation-lena-dunhams-republican-rapist-story-falls-apart-under-scrutiny

In her just-released memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham describes her alma mater, Oberlin College, as "a liberal arts haven in the cornfields of Ohio." After a month-long investigation that included more than a dozen interviews, a trip to the Oberlin campus, and hours spent poring through the Oberlin College archives, her description of the campus remains the only detail Breitbart News was able to verify in Dunham's story of being raped by a campus Republican named Barry.

On top of the name Barry, which Dunham does not identify as a pseudonym (more on the importance of this below), Dunham drops close to a dozen specific clues about the identity of the man she alleges raped her as a 19-year-old student. Some of the details are personality traits like his being a “poor loser” at poker. Other details are quite specific. For instance, Dunham informs us her rapist sported a flamboyant mustache, worked at the campus library, and even names the radio talk show he hosted.

To be sure we get the point, on three occasions Dunham tells her readers that her attacker is a Republican or a conservative, and a prominent one at that -- no less than the "campus's resident conservative."

For weeks, and to no avail, using phone and email and online searches, Breitbart News was able to verify just one of these details. Like everyone else interested, we immediately found that there indeed was a prominent Republican named Barry who attended Oberlin at the time in question.

Whatever her motives, Dunham is pointing her powerful finger at this man. But as you will read in the details below, the facts do not point back at him. Not even close. This man is by all accounts (including his own) innocent.

Nonetheless, even though she is aware of the suspicion under which she placed this man, to our knowledge, Dunham has yet to clear his name.

To be sure we weren't overlooking anything, Breitbart News then took the added step of visiting the Oberlin campus in Ohio during the very cold week just before Thanksgiving. Here we interviewed a number of Oberlin staffers and students. Most were pleasant and helpful. Some less so. One adamantly refused access to documents and told us outright that it didn't matter if Dunham was telling the truth.

In the end, Breitbart News could not find a Republican named Barry who attended Oberlin during Dunham's time there who came anywhere close to matching her description of him. In fact, we could not find anyone who remembered any Oberlin Republican who matched Dunham's colorful description.

Under scrutiny, Dunham's rape story didn’t just fall apart; it evaporated into pixie dust and blew away.

One of the Most Powerful Women in America Cries 'Rape'

After receiving a reported $3.7 million advance, Dunham's memoir hit bookshelves in September with a publicity blitz usually reserved for conquering generals returning to ancient Rome. On top of the usual network television appearances and glossy magazine profiles, Dunham's book tour not only sold out in places, but scalped tickets reportedly sold for as high as $900.

Just four years ago, Dunham was casting family-members in micro-budgeted independent movies she hoped would help her break through. Today, she is the toast of elite salons along both coasts. Every word uttered, every Tweet tweeted, every promotional or political appearance made, and every episode of Girls (the HBO show Dunham created, writes, and directs) is obsessed and gushed over -- not only in the entertainment media, but also the mainstream media.

A name search at the New York Times yields more than 5000 results for the 28-year-old, almost exactly the same number recorded for Oscar-winner Kate Winslet, who's been a star since Dunham was 10.

Although she doesn't appear to have a very big or mainstream audience, Dunham is still adored by All The Right People and, as a result, she currently stands as one of the most powerful and influential women in America.

When no less than the President of the United States needed young people to turn out for his 2012 re-election effort, BarackObama.com turned to Lena Dunham.

What Dunham says reverberates through our culture. This obviously includes her rape allegation. The story of being a rape survivor led the charge and captured most of the headlines surrounding Dunham's book launch.

The Rape

The facts of the rape as Dunham lays them out are found in two chapters. In the chapter titled "Girls and Jerks" Dunham describes an "ill-fated evening of lovemaking with our campus's resident conservative." No name is given, no allegation of rape is made. The man in question is merely described as a jerk who tries to get away with not using a condom during sex and who "didn't say hi to me on campus the next day."

Continued in article


General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee --- http://archive.org/details/generaleducation032440mbp

Jensen Comment
Probably no single controversy has be studied by more committees in virtually all universities than the subject of the Gen Ed curriculum. There is constant conflict between having some consistency in general education versus turf wars between most academic disciplines wanting their subject matter somewhere in the core Gen Ed curriculum for both budgetary and pedagogic reasons. Harvard University over the years has been watched more closely than virtually any other university in the area of the Gen Ed curriculum.

Over the years the Gen Ed core at Harvard evolved from a rather structured definition of the core topics to a smorgasbord where a combination of most any choices constitutes the Gen Ed core. With the smorgasbord has come heated controversy. Most every scholar agrees on certain skills that must be had by all graduates such as minimal skills in mathematics and writing. The controversy comes more in education topics like the history of Western Civilization versus the African American Studies versus Government versus laboratory sciences. What topics and methodology competencies should be shared by all graduates? For example, should all students understand the electoral process by having competency hurdles (AP tests or courses in government)? I personally am an advocate of having financial literacy (e.g., time value of money, borrowing, and financial risk concepts) in the Gen Ed core, but almost no university has such a common core requirement.

Common Curriculum:  Some Nonsense Distinctions Between Training and Theory ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CommonCurriculum

"The Trouble With Harvard:  The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it," by Steven Pinker, The New Republic, September 4, 2014 ---
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests


Jensen Comment
I think Harvard's Ben Edelman overreacted in a fit of temper at being overcharged one time at a Chinese restaurant. I also do not fully support Peter Jacob's defense of Professor Edelman
"Stop Hating On The Harvard Professor Who Complained About Overpaying For Chinese Food — He Had A Good Point," by Peter Jacobs, Business Insider, December 10, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/in-defense-of-harvard-professor-ben-edelman-2014-12

Jensen Comment
The academic approach to this situation, and the possible police undercover investigation approach, should have been to say nothing and not even reveal that the overcharge was detected. Then investigators (or Edelman's friends) should have dined out in the future to investigate whether there was a systematic pattern to such overcharges.

This is what happened in an incident at the golf course that I live beside up here in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire.
The golf course is owned by the Sunset Hill House Hotel (SSH) subject to deed restrictions that the mountain golf course can only be a golf course or a forest. The owners of the SSH at the time contacted me and other nearby friends to pay green fees so that the SSH owners could investigate account bookings of the fees.

They suspected pilfering of green fees by the golf course manager and pro who also gave golfing lessons. Let's call him Pro X.

Even though I don't play golf, I was one of the local residents who the SSH owners asked to pay green fees to play a round of golf. Subsequent inspections of the accounting records uncovered a pattern of unbooked green fees. Eventually the police conducted their own undercover investigation. When confronted under oath in court, Pro X eventually plea bargained to stay out of prison by confessing to stealing over $100,000 from the golf course over the years. He was unable to pay back most of the stolen funds, although the SSH eventually got the deeds to a home and car owned by Pro X. His wife also bid him farewell.

The point is that if the Chinese restaurant overcharged Professor Edelman also systematically overcharged a relatively large number of customers it becomes a matter for undercover investigation. Sadly, law enforcement often does nothing in such instances. For example, studies have shown that some hospitals systematically overcharge patients, especially billings when third parties (e.g., Medicaid, Medicare, and medical insurance companies) pay the billings such that patients are not directly harmed by the billing errors. Studies show that in over 90% of the time in some hospitals the billing errors are in favor of the hospitals. Patients seldom scrutinize bills that they do not have to pay themselves.

Back to the Chinese restaurant
Peter Jacobs does provide us with some background information on Peter Edelman that perhaps explains Edelman's overreaction. It does not explain his stupidity of making a big issue out of this one instance. Instead he should have quietly had his friends examine future billings by this restaurant in an effort to detect a systematic pattern of fraud.

Then it becomes a matter for law enforcement just like the suspected fraud by Pro X eventually became a matter for law enforcement.

Here are some pictures of the mountain golf course in question ---
Set 1 --- www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/GolfCourse/GolfCourseSet01.htm


Question
On occasion does a new book publisher rip off Amazon customers with enormous differential pricing?

One Illustration
Yesterday I found a short paperback book on Amazon with used copy prices starting at $130. Amazon reported that it also had four new copies in stock at a price of $64 each. When I went to the Website of the publisher in Canada no mention was made about limited supplies of new copies of this book. The price was $10 USD plus $3 for shipping and handling. I immediately cancelled my $64 Amazon order and purchased the $10 version from the publisher.

My Assumptions

My True Story

Although I sometimes buy eBooks from Amazon for my Kindle, I prefer hard copy books. When possible I almost always purchase used copies through Amazon.  I'm almost never suspicious about new book or used book prices on Amazon.

This week Erika returned home with a paperback book loaned to her by one of her doctors. Yesterday I found this book on Amazon with used copy prices starting at $130. Amazon reported that it also had four new copies in stock at a price of $64 each. Barnes & Noble did not have any available copies of this specialty book published in 2008.

When I went to the site of the publisher in Canada no mention was made about limited supplies of new copies of this book. The price was $10 USD plus $3 for shipping and handling. I immediately cancelled my $64 Amazon order and purchased the $10 version from the publisher.

My Question
On occasion do publishers rip-off Amazon customers with negotiated prices for new copies of their books that are substantially higher from Amazon than from their own Websites?

Answer
That would seem to be the case in this one anecdotal instance.

It would seem that whenever you're suspicious about the pricing of a new book copy from Amazon you should check around for prices from vendors other than Amazon, including the Website of the publisher. I do not believe that in this instance Amazon is intentionally ripping off customers at an inflated price of $64 for a book that sells for $10 from the publisher. I'm more inclined to blame the publisher that negotiated the Amazon price.

Amazon should install some internal controls that prevent rip-offs such as the one described above at new book prices of $64 each.

One such internal control would be a contractual clause that requires publishers to notify Amazon of all current prices of new books at its own Website.

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


"Accountant accused of stealing millions from N.J. megachurch," by Katie Lannin, NJ.com, December 4, 2014 ---
http://www.nj.com/union/index.ssf/2014/12/accountant_stole_millions_from_rahway_church_over_7_years_funneled_some_to_golf_association_attorney.html

The former accountant for the Agape Family Worship Center has been indicted for embezzling more than $4 million from the church over a period of seven years, church officials said today.

Donald Gridiron, Jr., a certified public accountant licensed in California, was arrested in Los Angeles Tuesday, according to a statement from the church.

The thefts were hidden in 900 separate transactions in which Gridiron would write checks to himself or arrange wire transfers, said Matthew Davis, a Texas-based attorney representing the church.

"Professionally, our former CPA violated the trust of the ministry," said Lawrence Powell, Agape's senior pastor. "And personally, I feel betrayed because this man used to be my friend. It hurts, but we serve a God who will get us through this."

The church began in Powell's parents' garage 14 years ago and has since grown to a 6.5-acre campus that serves a congregation of nearly 5,000.

Gridiron had sole control over the church's finances, Powell said.

The accountant, a California resident selected for the job in part because of his "connections with individuals in the religious community as well as his standing within that community," earned a monthly salary of $5,500, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday in federal court.

On top of his salary, he took more than $4.25 million in unauthorized payments, sending more than $2.75 million to his personal accounts in California, FBI Special Agent Abigail Weidner wrote in the complaint.

Gridiron, 50, spent those funds at casinos and a luxury car dealership and on mortgage payments, the complaint reads.

Continued in article

 


A Master List of 1,100 Free Courses From Top Universities: 33,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures (Spring 2015)---
http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses
Note that some Business Management  programs from for-profit universities are listed that do not have free courses.
In general MOOCs are free only on a non-credit basis. Fees are charged for credits or certificates.

Jensen Comment
I don't trust the links for Top Online Colleges since they tend to promote for-profit colleges of dubious quality relative to the US News top-ranked non-profit college online programs.

From US News in 2014
Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
Central Michigan is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
Indiana University is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
Northern Illinois is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
Columbia University is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
The University of Southern California is the big winner

Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
St. Xavier University is the big winner

US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data. I suspect this in large measure is due to their low admission standards where if you can pay you're admitted.

It is sad to see Open Culture promoting for-profit colleges.


Note this article has links to the doctoral degree graduation data in either Excel or PDF formats

"Doctoral Degrees Increased Last Year, but Career Opportunities Remained Bleak," by Audrey Williams June, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 5, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Doctoral-Degrees-Increased/150421/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The number of earned doctorates awarded by American universities increased 3.5 percent in 2013, to 52,760, according to data from the National Science Foundation.

However, the snapshot of new Ph.D.’s, which comes from an annual report on doctoral-degree attainment known as the "Survey of Earned Doctorates," highlights a bleak part of post-Ph.D. life. For new doctoral recipients, starting a postgraduate career is still an uphill struggle and appears to be getting tougher.

Continued in article

Data Tables --- http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2013/

Jensen Comment
Business administration doctorates (including accounting doctoral degrees) still comprise less that three percent of all doctoral degrees granted in the USA. But number of graduates increased from 750 graduates in 1983 to 1,545 in 2013. In comparison there were 2,781 engineering new doctorates in 1983 versus 8,963 graduates in 2013.

The tables above do not drill down to accounting doctorates, but those have actually declined from 212 accountancy doctoral graduates 1989 to 136 graduates in 2013. At the same time, demand for accounting doctorates in 2014 is well in excess of 10 openings for every new accountancy Ph.D. awarded in 2014.
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf

Question
Where are the shortages of PhDs in academe more severe than the shortage of accounting PhDs?

"Believe It or Not, in Some Fields Colleges Can’t Find Anybody to Hire," by Sara Jerde, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Believe-It-or-Not-in-Some/147207/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

. . .

Since there are so few Ph.D.’s in criminal justice, the degree nearly guarantees an offer for a tenure-track position, probably several offers, said Craig T. Hemmens, professor and chair of the department of criminal justice and criminology at Washington State University.

"There’s job after job posted throughout the year," he said. "There are more jobs out there than there are people graduating with Ph.D.’s." A 3-Year Search

Competition for faculty members is also tough in professionally oriented fields, such as physical therapy. It took three years for the University of Central Arkansas to hire an instructor in that field. The small number of qualified applicants, coupled with the college’s rural location, made for a tough search, said Nancy Reese, professor and chair of the department of physical therapy at Central Arkansas and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Academic Physical Therapy. In Arkansas, Ms. Reese said, the number of applicants in the health-science field can average in the single digits.

During the search, Ms. Reese said, only about two or three people applied per year—and not all of them met even the basic job requirements. Eventually her department decided it had to be more proactive. Faculty members brainstormed to come up with a list of people they knew in the industry who might make a good fit and contacted them, ultimately offering the job to someone who was suggested to Ms. Reese by a colleague at another institution.

Job advertisements don’t often work for filling these kind of jobs, she said. "You know someone who knows someone," she said. "It’s that network that actually gets someone there."

One reason colleges struggle to hire professors in some fields might be the careers implied by the discipline. Most students going into social work, for example, don’t envision themselves leading a classroom, said Tory Cox, assistant director of field education at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work.

Among the hundreds of master’s-degree students at USC who interact with Mr. Cox, about 15 or 20 will pursue a Ph.D. in social work, and only four or five of those will even consider teaching.

Teaching isn’t necessarily compatible with the goals students often have of working directly with people who are poor and disenfranchised, Mr. Cox said.

In nursing, meanwhile, higher paychecks in the professional sector often draw qualified candidates away from faculty positions. Someone with a Ph.D. in nursing, or a doctor-of-nursing-practice degree (a doctoral degree that emphasizes practice rather than research), can earn, as a conservative estimate, 15 to 20 percent more in a "practice setting" than in higher education, said Robert Rosseter, chief communications officer for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

The median salary of an associate professor with a doctoral degree is $92,736, according to the association’s data. But the median salary for a nursing director, who typically holds a doctoral degree, is $125,073. Likewise, the median salary for a chief nurse anesthetist is $179,552.

There is little comprehensive data to show where Ph.D.’s across many fields end up working. But the American Association of Colleges of Nursing tries to track where Ph.D.’s in the field are employed and began to notice a faculty shortage a decade ago.

The association also keeps track of how many students are entering nursing Ph.D. programs. So many nursing students want the credential that there aren’t always enough qualified instructors to teach them. Over the past decide, the number of students enrolled in nursing Ph.D. programs increased by 49 percent. And lack of staffing was cited as a reason almost 280 applicants were turned away from those programs last year. Nearly 1,500 applicants were turned away from doctor-of-nursing-practice programs, according to the nursing association’s data.

On top of that, a wave of nursing professors are either retiring or nearing retirement age, Mr. Rosseter said.

"It’s a perfect storm, really," said Linda K. Young, dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. Incentives to Teach

Ms. Young helped get a state grant, worth $3.2-million, to ease faculty shortages in Wisconsin. The money was awarded to four nursing programs in the University of Wisconsin system, which turned away between 50 and 80 percent of qualified applicants last year.

Continued in article

"Lessons Not Learned:  Why is There Still a Crisis-Level Shortage of Accounting Ph.D.s?" by R. David Plumlee and Philip M. J. Reckers, Accounting Horizons, June 2014, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 313-330.
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/acch-50703 (not free)

SYNOPSIS:

In 2005, an ad hoc committee appointed by the American Accounting Association (AAA) documented a crisis-level shortage of accounting Ph.D.s and recommended significant structural changes to doctoral programs (Kachelmeier, Madeo, Plumlee, Pratt, and Krull 2005). However, subsequent studies show that the shortage continues and the cumulative costs grow (e.g., Fogarty and Holder 2012; Brink, Glasscock, and Wier 2012). The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) recently called for renewed attention to the problem (AACSB 2013b). We contribute to the literature by providing updated information regarding responses by doctoral programs and, from the eyes of potential candidates, of continuing impediments to solving the doctoral shortage. In this paper, we present information gathered through surveys of program administrators and master's and Accounting Doctoral Scholars Program (ADS) students. We explore (1) the cumulative impact of the Ph.D. shortage as of 2013, including its impact on accounting faculty composition, across different types of institutions, (2) negative student perceptions of Ph.D. programs and academic accounting careers, which discourage applicants from pursuing Ph.D. programs, and (3) impediments facing institutions in expanding doctoral programs.

Keywords:  faculty shortage, recruiting, accounting Ph.D

Received: December 2013; Accepted: December 2013 ;Published Online: January 2014

R. David Plumlee is a Professor at The University of Utah, and Philip M. J. Reckers is a Professor at Arizona State University. Corresponding author: R. David Plumlee. Email: david.plumlee@business.utah.edu

 

INTRODUCTION

Despite recognition of a critical shortage in accounting Ph.D.s and recommendations for structural changes to doctoral programs (Kachelmeier et al. 2005), there is evidence that the shortage continues (e.g., Fogarty and Holder 2012; Brink et al. 2012). The objective of this commentary is to provide contemporaneous information from administrators of doctoral programs, and the perceptions of potential candidates on the major impediments to addressing the doctoral shortage.

We were mindful in the design of our study that, potentially, two factors contribute to the current dilemma:

Insufficient numbers of qualified individuals are applying for admission to doctoral programs, and The capacity of doctoral programs has declined; thus, even if sufficient numbers of qualified individuals are applying, schools are failing to admit enough candidates to address the shortage.

In this paper, we present information gathered through surveys of program administrators and master's and Accounting Doctoral Scholars Program (ADS) students. We explore (1) the cumulative impact of the Ph.D. shortage as of 2013, including its impact on accounting faculty composition, across different types of institutions, (2) negative student perceptions of Ph.D. programs and academic accounting careers, which discourage applicants from pursuing Ph.D. programs, and (3) impediments to growth in doctoral programs faced by institutions. While many authors (e.g., Gary, Dennison, and Bouillon 2011; Fogarty and Holder 2012) have examined various causal elements for the shortage over the years, our purpose is to provide a more comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the environment.

Prior research and commentary have addressed many of the unintended negative consequences associated with the accounting doctoral shortage. Exacerbating the problem is the growing demand for collegiate accounting education. Leslie (2008) and Baysden (2013) report a surge in undergraduate and graduate accounting enrollments in recent years In 2011–2012, undergraduate accounting enrollments exceeded 240,000 students (up another 6 percent from the 2009–2010 figures), with 61,334 B.S. accounting degrees conferred and 20,843 master's accounting degrees conferred—both record highs.

Some prior initiatives regarding the shortage of Ph.D.-qualified accounting faculty have failed to sustain. The 2005 ad hoc AAA committee recommended greater financial support for doctoral students. The profession responded. The ADS program was kicked off in 2008 with funding by CPA firms and state societies; it provided four years of financial support each year for 30 doctoral students specializing in auditing or tax. Unfortunately, the ADS program has expired, and its success is hard to evaluate. Despite the initiative, Fogarty and Holder (2012, 374) conclude that “(e)xtrapolating from the current population of doctoral programs fails to support the prospects for a recovery over the near future.”

Alternative means of supplying accounting faculty have also been suggested. For example, Trapnell, Mero, Williams, and Krull (2009) propose structural changes to reduce the time frame for the degree to four years. Additionally, they suggest an executive-type program where students do not leave their employment to pursue a Ph.D. In this model, students would draw on their experience, supplemented by coursework in research methods, to develop a research project. Few schools have responded and adopted this model, and acceptance of their graduates has yet to be tested. Another proposed alternative is to take advantage of international accounting doctoral scholars willing to relocate to the United States, who would participate in a ten-week postdoctoral program and thereby become eligible to serve as accounting faculty in the United States (HassabElnaby, Dobrzykowski, and Tran 2012). Our survey addresses whether schools have actually substantially changed their doctoral programs along these lines or the composition of their student bodies.

In the remainder of this paper, we report on surveys conducted to address these and other relevant issues. First, we focus on costs of the shortage and, specifically, the changes in hiring that have been made, in part because of the Ph.D. shortage. Then we spotlight structural changes in accounting Ph.D. programs. Finally, we consider what might be discouraging more student applications; to address these issues, we surveyed 388 M.Acc. students from various programs across the country, requesting their perceptions of accounting Ph.D. programs and the academic accounting profession. We also surveyed 84 current Ph.D. students in the ADS program to compare the perceptions of a group who have chosen to get a Ph.D. with those of potential applicants. In the final section, we discuss our findings and offer recommendations for recruiting qualified students to accounting Ph.D. programs.

 

SURVEY OF ADMINISTRATORS OF ACCOUNTING PROGRAMS
Changes in Faculty Composition

Since the AAA ad hoc committee's report on the accounting Ph.D. shortage in 2005, studies have documented various aspects of the shortage, using data sources such as Hasselback's Accounting Directory (Brink et al. 2012; Fogarty and Holder 2012), surveys of accounting faculty (Hunt, Eaton, and Reinstein 2009), and surveys of accounting Ph.D. students (Deloitte 2007), but none have asked accounting program administrators directly about the impact of the shortage on their programs. To examine how accounting departments have responded to the Ph.D. shortage, we surveyed 754 accounting program administrators listed in the Hasselback directory and received 204 completed responses (a 27 percent response rate). The schools in the sample included 73 percent that had separate AACSB accounting accreditation. Of responding schools, 69 percent graduated fewer than 100 undergraduate accounting majors each year, and 69 percent of schools with Master's of Accounting programs graduated 50 or fewer each year. When asked about their teaching mission, 20 percent responded that they had only an undergraduate accounting program, 61 percent had both accounting undergraduate and master's programs, and the remaining 19 percent had a Ph.D. program in accounting, in addition to bachelor's and master's programs.

. . .

 

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Over 70 percent of responding accounting program administrators believe that their programs have been harmed by the accounting Ph.D. shortage. While the impact of broader economic factors is undeniable, the shortage is certainly contributing to larger class sizes, reduced elective offerings, and a significant change in the composition of accounting faculties. Nearly every category of school reports an increasing number of classes taught by clinical faculty, lecturers, and part-time instructors. It is also clear from our data that accounting Ph.D. programs have not been responsive to the calls of the AAA (Kachelmeier et al. 2005), AACSB (2013b), and others for significant structural change.

Whether the change in faculty composition is seen as a serious problem depends on one's perspective regarding the learning goals and objectives of collegiate accounting education. Some opine (e.g., AACSB 2003, 2013b) that less exposure of accounting students to doctorally qualified faculty will result in reduced attention to the economic and social roles of accounting in society, and less exposure to the rigorous forms of inquiry and analysis associated with the scientific method (and its attendant skepticism). On the other hand, the shortage is less troubling if the role of accounting faculty is perceived to be primarily to instruct and train students in technical accounting, auditing, and tax topics, and thereby instill those skills demanded to enter the accounting profession. There is a continuing controversy about when and where students are best “educated,” in the classroom or on the job, with clearly different traditions in different parts of the world.

There is also the issue of the value of accounting research, as well as the quantity of research needed. A root issue is the value one places on the role of accounting faculty in contributing to questions fundamental to accounting as a discipline. Advocates for a greater research role might ask questions such as, “Would the propriety of fair value as a measure of asset values or the option value of stock as a measure of compensation be as thoroughly embedded in the accounting discipline today without the contribution of rigorously trained accounting scholars?” The relative contribution of scholars both in the classroom, as well as through their contribution to fundamental knowledge and timely analyses of societal issues of importance, is a value of doctoral education that must be recognized and appreciated. Certainly, the AACSB (2013b) Report of the International Doctoral Education Task Force: The Promise of Business Doctoral Education foresees a much-expanded role for doctorally qualified faculty.

That AACSB (2013b) report also argues the time is now for business schools to embrace innovation, experimentation, and opportunity, and come to grips with economic realities by exploring innovations in doctoral education to enhance values and constrain costs to the individual and the institution. While M.Acc. students represent a large potential population of Ph.D. students, converting that opportunity into reality has been and will continue to be a challenge. Dogmatic intransience to change has not served our community well, any more than it has served politicians in Washington well. Honest, serious discourse is crucial if a way forward is to emerge. Financial constraints, including the length of programs, must not only be acknowledged, they must be solved. Our data are clear. Current accounting Ph.D. program models are not attractive to domestic doctoral program candidates.

The authors' personal beliefs represent two voices out of many. We do not purport to have the solutions. Certainly, we believe that a critical mass of accounting scholars is necessary for accounting to continue to serve its crucial role in society. Nonetheless, we are concerned that little appears to be happening to address our current dilemma. We are certainly mindful of the recommendations made nine years ago by the AAA's ad hoc committee (Kachelmeier et al. 2005), but that is nearly a decade past. Sustainable solutions have yet to manifest, and few signs of active commitment to find solutions appear on the horizon. Can we continue to wait on individual schools to change, or must a major collective initiative be forthcoming? Foremost, our results suggest that active recruiting of potential accounting Ph.D. students is critical, but unlikely to be successful without significant institutional changes.

Our survey of M.Acc. students also finds that there is a significant knowledge gap. Overcoming this knowledge gap requires a collective effort. This may be within the purview of the AAA or the AACSB or both. And this initiative, in our judgment, needs to rise above the level of a one-year plan.

The group of M.Acc. students who expressed the highest likelihood of applying to Ph.D. programs is those who see value in and express an affinity for teaching and research. In professions such as engineering and medicine, the leap from the academic content found in master's programs and those found in doctoral programs is not huge. However, in accounting, the disparity between the content of master's programs and Ph.D. programs is enormous. As a result, Master's of Accounting students are not acquainted with accounting research. Can this condition be remediated? How do we go about this? While cost constraints are important to everyone, it is well known that accounting academics are not motivated solely by money matters. Arguably, one way is to incorporate academic research that addresses issues of professional and/or societal importance into master's, if not undergraduate, courses. This is something individual accounting academics can do. This end might also be achieved through focused undergraduate honors theses, or by embedding distinct research courses into master's programs. While incentives for schools to adopt these strategies and Ph.D. programs to accept the academic credit do not appear to exist at present, such an approach might serve to reduce the length of Ph.D. programs.

The ad hoc committee of 2005 also urged leaders of accounting programs to consider “Ph.D. tracks” in their master's programs. These tracks should not be thought of narrowly. Courses in the track could be fashioned to allow students to get a head start on a Ph.D. program by including foundational topics such as economics, mathematics, or statistical methods.2 Accounting programs without a Ph.D. program might develop some sort of articulation agreement, where certain courses in their “Ph.D. track” would count toward the Ph.D. at the doctoral granting school. Our M.Acc. survey finds that even those inclined to apply to an accounting Ph.D. program see five years or more in a Ph.D. program as too much to sacrifice for an academic career. Any method of shortening the process without diluting the quality would be a welcome innovation.

A prior positive teaching experience also appears to be related to pursuit of an academic career. We cannot definitively resolve, based on our findings, whether those interested in Ph.D. programs seek teaching opportunities or whether teaching sparks interest in Ph.D. programs. Nonetheless, opportunities exist for more accounting students to teach in some manner, or tutor. Whatever the venue, teaching opportunities for students could be the catalyst for pursuit of an academic accounting career.

In summary, the shortage of accounting Ph.D. graduates continues, with several clearly identifiable negative consequences. Many recommendations have been forthcoming in the past with the goal of remediating the problem, but few recommendations have been adopted. Champions of sustained new initiatives have not stepped forward, with the exception of the ADS program, and the output of Ph.D. programs continues to be inadequate.

M.Acc. students offer a large potential recruiting pool, and a significant number of master's students show early interest in academic careers. Unfortunately, a host of impediments thwart our progress toward a robust Ph.D. pool. We identify and discuss the major impediments. We observe that significant M.Acc. student recruitment efforts are needed, where there are virtually none today. We suggest that waiting for this problem to solve itself is folly; that well-considered, significant, and sustained initiatives are required; and that there exists an opportunity for the AAA, and its sections, to take the lead. Individual accounting departments and schools can also make a difference. Waiting for others to solve the problem has not led to a solution to date. Continuing on our same path and expecting different outcomes is likely unrealistic.

 

Jensen Comment
This is an important update to an ever-increasing problem in our Academy. It surveys students, doctoral program coordinators, and accounting department heads with outcomes that provide some detailed insights into large and small issues.

One enormous issue is the decline in capacity for admission of applicants into accounitng doctoral programs in North America. That is best reflected in the well-known table generated by Jim Hasselback each year for many years showing the number of graduating doctoral students in each doctoral program over time ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf
At the moment the table shown in the above link only goes back to 1995. However, I've saved copies of this table from earlier years Consider the University of Illinois for example. Between 1939 and 1995 the University of Illinois graduated an average of six accounting PhDs per year. The data are skewed. There were only a few graduates in the early years of the program whereas during the1960-1980 period Illinois was graduating 10-20 accounting PhDs per year.

Between 1996 and 2013 Illinois only graduated an average of two accounitng PhDs per year. Similar outcomes happened in the other accounting doctoral mills of Texas and Arkansas where there were similarly severe declines in the number of annual graduates since 1995. There have been some new doctoral programs such as the newer program at the University of Texas in San Antonio, but the numbers graduated each year from those programs are small.

My poi9nt is that the decline in output in the larger mills since 1995 has not been offset by increased output in other programs. Hence in North America  we see a decline in the annual output from nearly 300 accounting PhD graduates per year to 140.4 per yer between 1996 and2013.

Plumly and Reckers avoided some of the most controversial questions in their surveys. Before 1985 accounting doctoral programs admitted accountants without mathematical and statistical backgrounds and permitted accounting dissertations without equations such as accounting history disserations without equations. Now having equations in dissertations is required even in accounting history dissertations.

In virtually all accounting doctoral programs in North America, new doctoral students cannot matriculate without meeting advanced mathematics and statistics prerequisites. Most of the accounting courses have been taken out of the curricula and are replaced by econometrics and psychometrics courses. The programs are essentially sophisticated programs on how to mine data.
 

Most accounting faculty in an accounting program do not have the quantitative skill sets to teach in the accounting doctoral programs or if they have some quantitative skills they do not want to teach ecnonometrics and psychometrics and data mining course or supervise accountics science dissertations.. This is a major reason why the the number of doctoral students that can be handled in most accounting doctoral programs have declined so dramatically.

Also accountants who have been practicing accounting for 5-10 years wound prefer accounting doctoral programs rather than accountics science doctoral programs. One reason the number of foreign students has been increasing in North American Accounting Doctoral Programs is that students are admitted on the basis of their mathematics and statistics skills rather than accounting knowledge (and even interest in accounting).

This is why so many of the graduates from our accounting doctoral programs in the 21st Century are not prepared to teach accounting courses in the undergraduate and masters programs. All they can teach are the doctoral program courses. The teaching of accounting is being shifted to adjunct professors who are better prepared to teach accounting, auditing, and taxation.

Plumlee and Reckers indirectly recognize this problem and suggest that there be more curriculum tracks in accounting doctoral programs. The Pathways Commission is even more blunt. It recommends that doctoral programs allow doctoral dissertations without equations --- like in the good old days when we had more accounting doctoral program graduates.

A huge limitation of the Plumlee and Reckers paper above is that it ignores the Pathways Commission recommendations.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/31/updating-accounting-curriculums-expanding-and-diversifying-field

The (Pathways Commission) report includes seven recommendations. Three are shown below:

  • Integrate accounting research, education and practice for students, practitioners and educators by bringing professionally oriented faculty more fully into education programs.

     
  • Promote accessibility of doctoral education by allowing for flexible content and structure in doctoral programs and developing multiple pathways for degrees. The current path to an accounting Ph.D. includes lengthy, full-time residential programs and research training that is for the most part confined to quantitative rather than qualitative methods. More flexible programs -- that might be part-time, focus on applied research and emphasize training in teaching methods and curriculum development -- would appeal to graduate students with professional experience and candidates with families, according to the report.

     
  • Increase recognition and support for high-quality teaching and connect faculty review, promotion and tenure processes with teaching quality so that teaching is respected as a critical component in achieving each institution's mission. According to the report, accounting programs must balance recognition for work and accomplishments -- fed by increasing competition among institutions and programs -- along with recognition for teaching excellence.

 

The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral Programs in North America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms


"NY Times: Life Insurers Use State Laws to Avoid $100 Billion in U.S. Taxes," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, December 13, 2014 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/12/ny-times-life-insurers-use-state-laws-.html 

New York Times DealBook, Life Insurers Use State Laws to Avoid as Much as $100 Billion in U.S. Taxes:

Some companies have been called economic traitors for seeking to lower their tax bills by moving overseas. But life insurers are accomplishing the same goal without leaving the country, saving as much as $100 billion in federal taxes, much of it in the last several years.

The insurers are taking advantage of fierce competition for their business among states, which have passed special laws that allow the companies to pull cash away from reserves they are required to keep to pay claims. The insurers use the money to pay for bonuses, shareholder dividends, acquisitions and other projects, and because of complicated accounting maneuvers, the money escapes federal taxation.

"WSJ: Bonus Depreciation Fails to Boost Jobs, Capital Investment,"  by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, December 12, 2014 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/12/wsj-bonus-depreciation.html

With Congress poised to extend a raft of tax breaks, consider this: One such break has helped AT&T and Verizon slash their recent tax bills by billions of dollars without leading to the intended increase in investment or jobs.

The measure, known as “bonus depreciation,” lets companies offset their income with investments they have made more quickly. It was enacted in 2008 as part of the economic stimulus package with the goal of giving companies an incentive to build more factories or upgrade more equipment, creating jobs and giving a boost to sluggish economic growth in the process.

But that isn’t how it has worked, at least at AT&T and Verizon, whose vast networks of towers and cables make them two of the country’s biggest investors in infrastructure.

AT&T estimated its federal tax bill last year at $3 billion, down from about $5.9 billion in 2007, before the tax relief was enacted. Verizon estimated that it would get $197 million back last year, compared with a 2007 bill of $2.6 billion.

Meanwhile, the companies have kept their capital spending relatively flat since the stimulus was adopted, and their employee count has dropped by more than 100,000 people, a fifth of their combined work forces.

"'Tax Avoidance On An Industrial Scale' Says British MP About PwC’s Luxembourg Work For AIG And Others," by Francine McKenna, re:TheAuditors, December 10, 2014 ---
http://retheauditors.com/2014/12/10/tax-avoidance-on-an-industrial-scale-says-british-mp-about-pwcs-luxembourg-work-for-aig-and-others/

On Monday of this week, British MP Margaret Hodge grilled Kevin Nicholson, lead partner of PwC’s UK tax practice, in a Parliament Public Accounts Committee hearing about the firm’s Luxembourg tax arrangements. This follows the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) LuxLeaks investigation announced November 5.

Hodge accused Nicholson of lying to the committee.

You know that you’re on your “back foot” when the first words out of your mouth are a denial that you lied to a legislative committee under oath. (PwC better hurry up and get on the good foot.)

From The Guardian:

In a series of fractious exchanges on Monday, the committee’s chair, the Labour MP Margaret Hodge, said: “We’ve asked you to come back to see us because we’ve reflected on the evidence that you gave us on 31 January 2013, and tried to relate that to the revelations around the Luxembourg leaks that have been in the press. I think I have a very simple question for you: did you lie when you gave evidence to us?”

Nicholson responded: “I didn’t lie and stand by what I said.”

A key issue was whether PwC had sold the tax schemes or clients bought them. When it comes to allegations of tax abuse, there’s a world of difference.

Continued in article


Melee between self-published authors talking about how great self-published works are and librarians talking about how awful they are.

"Self-Published Winners @ the Library," by Annoyed Librarian, Library Journal, November 26, 2014 ---
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/

Whenever I write about self-published authors, the comment section seems to erupt into a melee between self-published authors talking about how great self-published works are and librarians talking about how awful they are. One solution to the problem would be for the ALA to create an award for self-published books to go along with popular awards like the Newbery Award and all the other awards I can’t remember right now. Then the librarians in the trenches would know what books to buy and wouldn't have to read any of them. The only problem is that the committee might be overwhelmed by thousands of self-published titles to choose from, but that can be solved by increasing the size of the committee to a few hundred people if necessary. That might even be possible. I met some Newbery people once, or members of some committee like that, and the people on awards committees seem to love the work. How hard could it be to get librarians to read through thousands of self-published works to ...

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I don't think there are cheap and easy solutions to this since it is increasingly and overwhelmingly popular to self-publish books and media recordings in general. The powerful roles that publishing company editors perform in choosing both what to publish and how to improve what is accepted for publication is slipping away. A profession might even emerge that, for a fee, gives "independent ratings" to books and other media recordings. This will succeed, however, only if highly reputable reviewers put their reputations on the line.

Authors, in turn, desperately want systems where their works be compared with the competition and publicized independently as outstanding. Paid advertising of a self-published work is almost never trusted even if the work is outstanding. It becomes too much like those dreaded infomercials.

Probably the largest vendor of self-published books is Amazon. However, I tend not to trust the positive reviews of self-published books at the Amazon site. The authors often have a lot of friends.

People will soon grow weary of so many things trying to "go viral" on YouTube. That may become self-defeating as millions of things compete to "go viral."

I think something similar happens with faculty blogs. As more and more faculty start blogging it becomes increasingly difficult for actives like me to cover the waterfront even in the somewhat narrow field of accounting faculty blogging. How many accounting faculty blogs have become inactive or no longer existent? And how many of those that remain have almost no following?
http://profalbrecht.wordpress.com/links/

I am now contacted daily by individuals (not just accounting professors) and companies wanting me to publicize their Websites. Only rarely do I do this, because my own academic reputation is at stake. The other day I had site that cataloged Christian college distance education programs. However, I found so many errors that I would not give it any publicity. Countless times I receive sites that mix in selected for-profit universities with the top-ranking nonprofit universities in the USA or the world in general. Any for-profit university that ends up in the Top 25 universities of the USA is probably paying for the ranking outcome.

November 30, 2014 reply from Scott Bonacker

Coincidentally, there was an article in the local paper today about the experiences of a self-published author –

I did not know you could spend $10,000 in editing a book,” Jefferson said. “It depends on how good you want the book to be. Before you know it, you’ve spent enough to buy a brand new car. … For what I have spent on this book, I could buy two very nice cars.”

For context, a check of the website of Xlibris, one of the major self-publishing companies, shows a range of packages for a black-and-white book with a full-color cover, from $499 to $15,249. Packages provide increasing levels of services, with additional fees for printed books beyond those that might come with the package. In contrast, Jefferson hand-picked his editors and consultants and made his own production and post-publication contacts.

http://www.news-leader.com/story/life/2014/11/26/writers-road-self-publication-paved-many-costs/19541209/

 

Hope your Thanksgiving went well Bob, and it’s not surprising you get lots of request for promotions from your website. There is a fair amount of information there that draws interest and views.  Good job of putting it together.

Scott

Jensen Comment

Scott's reply points out that there is a gray zone between traditional publishers that require editing and vanity press publishers that offer editing and promotion services for fees paid by authors.


The Most Corrupt and the least Corrupt Nations of the World ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-corrupt-countries-in-the-world-2014-12

One of the reasons the USA is not in the Top 10 nations in terms of ethics is that vendors who do business with municipalities and schools (from Chicago to Detroit to Podunk Township) must often pay bribes and kickbacks to public officials like mayors and other city leaders.

"L.A. School District iPad Program Ends Amid FBI Suspicions," by Lauren Orsini, ReadWriteWeb, December 3, 2014 ---
http://readwrite.com/2014/12/03/school-district-ipad-fbi-subpoena

L.A. school district officials have turned over twenty boxes of documents pertaining to its troubled iPad project in response to a federal grand jury’s subpoena, the LA Times reports.

What was intended to be a $1.3 billion project to equip every student in the district with an iPad running Pearson education software has been plagued with issues since the beginning. The Feds are investigating ties between then-superintendent John Deasy and Pearson and Apple executives at the time of the deal.

On top of that, the project suffered from technical difficulties, including students who deleted the security filter so they could play games and browse the Internet freely, and teachers who said they were ill-prepared regarding the devices. Already, some teachers in the district have willingly opted out of the program.

Continued in article


"The Error Term in the History of Time Series Econometrics," , by David Giles, Econometrics Beat, December 12, 2014 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-error-term-in-history-of-time.html

 
While we're on the subject of the history of econometrics ......... blog-reader Mark Leeds kindly drew my attention to this interesting paper published by Duo Qin and Christopher Gilbert in Econometric Theory in 2001.

 
I don't recall reading this paper before - my loss.

 
Mark supplied me with a pre-publication version of the paper, which you can download here if you don't have access to Econometric Theory.

 
Here's the abstract:
"We argue that many methodological confusions in time-series econometrics may be seen as arising out of ambivalence or confusion about the error terms. Relationships between macroeconomic time series are inexact and, inevitably, the early econometricians found that any estimated relationship would only fit with errors. Slutsky interpreted these errors as shocks that constitute the motive force behind business cycles. Frisch tried to dissect further the errors into two parts: stimuli, which are analogous to shocks, and nuisance aberrations. However, he failed to provide a statistical framework to make this distinction operational. Haavelmo, and subsequent researchers at the Cowles Commission, saw errors in equations as providing the statistical foundations for econometric models, and required that they conform to a priori distributional assumptions specified in structural models of the general equilibrium type, later known as simultaneous-equations models (SEM). Since theoretical models were at that time mostly static, the structural modelling strategy relegated the dynamics in time-series data frequently to nuisance, atheoretical complications. Revival of the shock interpretation in theoretical models came about through the rational expectations movement and development of the VAR (Vector AutoRegression) modelling approach. The so-called LSE (London School of Economics) dynamic specification approach decomposes the dynamics of modelled variable into three parts: short-run shocks, disequilibrium shocks and innovative residuals, with only the first two of these sustaining an economic interpretation."

Jensen Comment
Note that this problem can arise in what we often do not think of as "time series" econometrics.

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, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 695-712 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/acch-50818   (not free)

This paper uses a sample of the regression and behavioral papers published in The Accounting Review and the Journal of Accounting Research from September 2012 through May 2013. We argue first that the current research results reported in empirical regression papers fail adequately to justify the time period adopted for the study. Second, we maintain that the statistical analyses used in these papers as well as in the behavioral papers have produced flawed results. We further maintain that their tests of statistical significance are not appropriate and, more importantly, that these studies do not�and cannot�properly address the economic significance of the work. In other words, significance tests are not tests of the economic meaningfulness of the results. We suggest ways to avoid some but not all of these problems. We also argue that replication studies, which have been essentially abandoned by accounting researchers, can contribute to our search for truth, but few will be forthcoming unless the academic reward system is modified.

The free SSRN version of this paper is at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2324266

This Dyckman and Zeff paper is indirectly related to the following technical econometrics research:
"The Econometrics of Temporal Aggregation - IV - Cointegration," by David Giles, Econometrics Blog, September 13, 2014 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-econometrics-of-temporal.html 

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


"Statistical Controls Are Great - Except When They're Not!" by David Giles, Econometrics Beat, December 1, 2014 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2014/12/statistical-controls-are-great-except_1.html

A blog post today, titled, How Race Discrimination in Law Enforcement Actually Works", caught my eye. Seemed like an important topic. The post, by Ezra Klein, appeared on Vox.
 
I'm not going to discuss it in any detail, but I think that some readers of this blog will enjoy reading it. Here are a few selected passages, to whet your collective appetite:
 
"You see it all the time in studies. "We controlled for..." And then the list starts. The longer the better." (Oh boy, can I associate with that. Think of all of those seminars you've sat through.......)
"The problem with controls is that it's often hard to tell the difference between a variable that's obscuring the thing you're studying and a variable that is the thing you're studying."
"The papers brag about their controls. They dismiss past research because it had too few controls." (How many seminars was that?)
"Statistical Controls Are Great - Except When They're Not!"

Bob Jensen's threads on misleading statistical mistakes are at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsScienceStatisticalMistakes.htm

 


"Google’s Intelligence Designer: The man behind a startup acquired by Google for $628 million plans to build a revolutionary new artificial intelligence," MIT's Technology Review, December 2, 2014 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532876/googles-intelligence-designer/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141203 

Demis Hassabis started playing chess at age four and soon blossomed into a child prodigy. At age eight, success on the chessboard led him to ponder two questions that have obsessed him ever since: first, how does the brain learn to master complex tasks; and second, could computers ever do the same?

Now 38, Hassabis puzzles over those questions for Google, having sold his little-known London-based startup, DeepMind, to the search company earlier this year for a reported 400 million pounds ($650 million at the time).

Google snapped up DeepMind shortly after it demonstrated software capable of teaching itself to play classic video games to a super-human level (see “Is Google Cornering the Market on Deep Learning?”). At the TED conference in Vancouver this year, Google CEO Larry Page gushed about Hassabis and called his company’s technology “one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a long time.”

Researchers are already looking for ways that DeepMind technology could improve some of Google’s existing products, such as search. But if the technology progresses as Hassabis hopes, it could change the role that computers play in many fields.

DeepMind seeks to build artificial intelligence software that can learn when faced with almost any problem. This could help address some of the world’s most intractable problems, says Hassabis. “AI has huge potential to be amazing for humanity,” he says. “It will really accelerate progress in solving disease and all these things we’re making relatively slow progress on at the moment.”

Renaissance Man

Hassabis’s quest to understand and create intelligence has led him through three careers: game developer, neuroscientist, and now, artificial-intelligence entrepreneur. After completing high school two years early, he got a job with the famed British games designer Peter Molyneux. At 17, Hassabis led development of the classic simulation game Theme Park, released in 1994. He went on to complete a degree in computer science at the University of Cambridge and founded his own successful games company in 1998.

But the demands of building successful computer games limited how much Hassabis could work on his true calling. “I thought it was time to do something that focused on intelligence as a primary thing,” he says.

So in 2005, Hassabis began a PhD in neuroscience at University College London, with the idea that studying real brains might turn up clues that could help with artificial intelligence. He chose to study the hippocampus, a part of the brain that underpins memory and spatial navigation, and which is still relatively poorly understood. “I picked areas and functions of the brain that we didn’t have very good algorithms for,” he says.

As a computer scientist and games entrepreneur who hadn’t taken high school biology, Hassabis stood out from the medical doctors and psychologists in his department. “I used to joke that the only thing I knew about the brain was that it was in the skull,” he says.

But Hassabis soon made a mark. In a 2007 study recognized by the journal Science as a Breakthrough of the Year,” he showed that five patients suffering amnesia due to damage to the hippocampus struggled to imagine future events. It suggested that a part of the brain thought to be concerned only with the past is also crucial to planning for the future.

That memory and forward planning are intertwined was one idea Hassabis took with him into his next venture. In 2011, he quit life as a postdoctoral researcher to found DeepMind Technologies, a company whose stated goal was to “solve intelligence.”

High Score

Hassabis founded DeepMind with fellow AI specialist Shane Legg and serial entrepreneur Mustafa Suleyman. The company hired leading researchers in machine learning and attracted noteworthy investors, including Peter Thiel’s firm Founders Fund and Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. But DeepMind kept a low profile until December 2013, when it staged a kind of debutante moment at a leading research conference on machine learning.

Continued in article

 


"So Much For The Tablet Market — The iPad Has Hit The Wall," by Matt Rosoff, Business Insider, November 25, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/so-much-for-the-tablet-market--the-ipad-has-hit-the-wall-2014-11


Let's Hope That This Catches On and On and On
"Report: Alabama-Birmingham to End Football Program," Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2014 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/12/01/report-alabama-birmingham-end-football-program

How to Mislead With Statistics
Tell The New York Times that Black Friday sales were not down 11% ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/12/no-black-friday-sales-were-not-down-11/


If you teach in a Florida college (or at the University of North Carolina) don't expect all your students to functionally be able read and write

"One State’s Shakeup in Remedial Education Brings a Slew of Headaches," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, December
, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/One-State-s-Shakeup-in/150323/?cid=at

Enrollments in remedial courses dropped by half at many of Florida’s community and state colleges this fall, but not everyone is cheering. Just as many poorly prepared students are showing up, but thanks to a new state law, many are jumping straight into college-credit classes.

The optional-remediation law is forcing professors in college-level composition classes to spend time on basic sentence structure, while math teachers who were ready to plunge into algebra are going over fractions. It’s also raising questions about how the dwindling number of students who do sign up for remedial classes here will perform when those catch-up lessons in math, reading, and writing are compressed, embedded into credit courses, or offered alongside them.

The shakeup in remedial education, also known as developmental education, is badly needed, most educators in Florida concur. But that’s about all they agree on as they begin to assess the impact in its first year.

Alarmed by the high dropout and failure rates for college students who start out in remedial classes, Florida lawmakers voted last year to make such courses, and even the related placement tests, optional for anyone who had entered a Florida public school as a ninth-grader in 2003 or later and earned a diploma. Students who are actively serving in the military can also opt out.

The legislation affects the 28 open-access colleges known as the Florida College System.

"The law is based on the assumption that students know better about what they need," said Shouping Hu, a professor of higher education and director of the Center for Postsecondary Success at Florida State University. Some faculty members and administrators aren’t so sure, said Mr. Hu, who leads a research team that received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the Florida law’s impact.

Continued in article

"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death threats after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading age of a THIRD GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014 ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html

Mary Willingham exposed college athletes' lack of academic abilities

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
These days you can expect all your graduate students to be able to read write because of grade inflation at the undergraduate level ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor


"UNLV Fires Professor for Repeated Plagiarism," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/UNLV-Fires-Professor-for/150309/?cid=at

The University of Nevada at Las Vegas has fired Mustapha Marrouchi, a professor of postcolonial literature, based on its finding that he plagiarized the work of numerous other scholars, according to documents it released to The Chronicle on Monday in response to an open-records request.

Donald D. Snyder, the university’s president, told the professor in a letter dated November 7 that he was firing Mr. Marrouchi for cause, effective immediately, based on the conclusions of a special hearing officer and the recommendations of a special hearing committee.

The five-member hearing committee had unanimously found Mr. Marrouchi guilty of academic dishonesty and of misconduct deemed serious enough to render him unfit to remain in his job in the university’s English department.

The committee voted, 4 to 1, in favor of his dismissal, with the dissenter arguing that instead he should be suspended for a year and required to forfeit six years’ worth of pay increases, apologize to his victims, undergo ethics training, and submit to plagiarism-software analysis any scholarly work he intends to submit to publishers over the next three years.

Continued in article

Maybe Arizona State University will hire Professor Marrouchi
"New Book, New Allegations," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, May 13, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/05/13/arizona-state-professor-accused-plagiarism-second-time#sthash.OmcGllGb.dpbs 

An investigation into plagiarism allegations against an Arizona State University professor of history in 2011 found him not guilty of deliberate academic misconduct, but the case remained controversial. The chair of his department’s tenure committee resigned in protest and other faculty members spoke out against the findings, saying their colleague – who recently had been promoted to full professor – was cleared even though what he did likely would have gotten an undergraduate in trouble.

Now, Matthew C. Whitaker has written a new book, and allegations of plagiarism are being levied against him once again. Several blogs – one anonymously, and in great detail – have documented alleged examples of plagiarism in the work. Several of his colleagues have seen them, and say they raise serious questions about Whitaker’s academic integrity.

Meanwhile, Whitaker says he won’t comment on allegations brought forth anonymously, and his publisher, the University of Nebraska Press, says it’s standing by him.

Three years ago, several senior faculty members in Whitaker’s department accused him of uncited borrowing of texts and ideas from books, Wikipedia and a newspaper article in his written work and a speech. In response, the university appointed a three-member committee to investigate. The group found that Whitaker’s work contained no “substantial or systematic plagiarism,” but that he had been careless in some instances, as reported by Inside Higher Ed at the time. As a result, the university did not impose serious sanctions on the scholar, who is the founding director of Arizona State’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.

In response, Monica Green, professor of history, resigned as department tenure committee chair. Several other professors called the investigation flawed and incomplete in a formal complaint to the university and in public statements.

Whitaker at the time told the university that his colleagues were pursuing a personal vendetta, possibly due to his race and the fact that they disagreed with his promotion, The Arizona Republic reported.

The university backed Whitaker, saying that the investigation had been thorough and carried out by distinguished scholars.

In January, the University of Nebraska Press published Whitaker’s newest book, Peace Be Still: Modern Black America from World War II to Barack Obama. Several prominent professors of history have written blurbs for the book, which won the Bayard Rustin Book Award from the Tufts University Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.

But not everyone is impressed.

Since the book’s publication, a blog called the Cabinet of Plagiarism has detailed numerous alleged instances of plagiarism in the book, including text and ideas taken from information websites and published scholarship. The blog is moderated by someone using the name Ann Ribidoux, who did not return a posted request for comment. There is no one on the Arizona State faculty by that name.


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/05/13/arizona-state-professor-accused-plagiarism-second-time#ixzz31ajydqT2
Inside Higher Ed

Matthew C. Whitaker Homepage at ASU --- http://csrd.asu.edu/people/matthew-c-whitaker-phd

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


Patterson, New Jersey has a population of around 150,000 with 19 high school graduates who are ready for college in terms of SAT scores ---
http://www.my9nj.com/story/27515692/only-19-paterson-students-ready-for-college

Paterson, New Jersey (My9NJ) -

In Paterson, New Jersey only 19 kids who took the SAT's are considered college ready. This means that they scored at least a 1500 out of 2400 on the standardized test, and this number is truly shocking considering how large the school district is.

Paterson resident Jason Williams is one of the lucky ones. He just graduated high school last year and has been enrolled in college since September, after taking the SAT's three times determined to score over 1500. He says that the key to his success was not falling victim to the streets.

“Just last summer, my friend and teammate, he was shot and killed that summer and that really affected me,” he said.

Derrick Fritts was shot during National Night Out on the streets of Paterson and wasn't found until the next day. Williams said most of the football players stopped paying attention to school after that, but that's when he buckled down.

Rosie Grant, the Executive Director of the Paterson Education Fund, said that the cards are stacked against the students in Paterson.

“These kids who are now seniors have gone through seven superintendents in their tenor at Paterson public schools and with every administration change, there's a reworking of what the schools are supposed to be doing,” she said.

However, the Paterson school district said that they no longer use SAT scores to gauge students' success.


Question
What is the main difference between errors in hospital bills (in over 90% of the billings) and retail store scanned billings (in over 4% of the billings)?

Answer
Errors in hospital bills almost always favor the hospitals.
Retail store billing errors only favor the stores about half the time.

 

"The Accuracy of Scanned Prices, David Hardesty, Journal of Retailing, 2014 ---
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022435914000244

4.08% of the prices picked up by retail-store scanners are wrong, about twice the error rate considered acceptable by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, says a team led by David M. Hardesty of the University of Kentucky that studied more than 231,000 products scanned over 15 years in the state of Washington. Slightly less than half the errors were overcharges. An intriguing finding: Error rates are higher in affluent neighborhoods, suggesting that stores may be more careful about mistakes in areas where shoppers are more price-conscious, the researchers say.

Continued in article

The Health Care Market is Not a Market

"Video:  Inside ‘Bitter Pill’: Steven Brill Discusses His TIME Cover Story," Time Magazine, February 22, 2013 ---
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-inside-times-cover-story-on-medical-bills/

Simple lab work done during a few days in the hospital can cost more than a car. A trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion brings a bill that can exceed the price of a semester at college. When we debate health care policy in America, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?

Steven Brill spent seven months analyzing hundreds of bill from hospitals, doctors, and drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers to find out who is setting such high prices and pocketing the biggest profits. What he discovered, outlined in detail in the cover story of the new issue of TIME, will radically change the way you think about our medical institutions:

· Hospitals arbitrarily set prices based on a mysterious internal list known as the “chargemaster.” These prices vary from hospital to hospital and are often ten times the actual cost of an item. Insurance companies and Medicare pay discounted prices, but don’t have enough leverage to bring fees down anywhere close to actual costs. While other countries restrain drug prices, in the United States federal law actually restricts the single biggest buyer—Medicare—from even trying to negotiate the price of drugs.

· Tax-exempt “nonprofit” hospitals are the most profitable businesses and largest employers in their regions, often presided over by the most richly compensated executives.

· Cancer treatment—at some of the most renowned centers such as Sloan-Kettering and M.D. Anderson—has some of the industry’s highest profit margins. Cancer drugs in particular are hugely profitable. For example, Sloan-Kettering charges $4615 for a immune-deficiency drug named Flebogamma. Medicare cuts Sloan-Kettering’s charge to $2123, still way above what the hospital paid for it, an estimated $1400.

· Patients can hire medical billing advocates who help people read their bills and try to reduce them. “The hospitals all know the bills are fiction, or at least only a place to start the discussion, so you bargain with them,” says Katalin Goencz, a former appeals coordinator in a hospital billing department who now works as an advocate in Stamford, CT.

Brill concludes:

The health care market is not a market at all.
It’s a crapshoot. Everyone fares differently based on circumstances they can neither control nor predict. They may have no insurance. They may have insurance, but their employer chooses their insurance plan and it may have a payout limit or not cover a drug or treatment they need. They may or may not be old enough to be on Medicare or, given the different standards of the 50 states, be poor enough to be on Medicaid. If they’re not protected by Medicare or protected only partially by private insurance with high co-pays, they have little visibility into pricing, let alone control of it. They have little choice of hospitals or the services they are billed for, even if they somehow knew the prices before they got billed for the services. They have no idea what their bills mean, and those who maintain the chargemasters couldn’t explain them if they wanted to. How much of the bills they end up paying may depend on the generosity of the hospital or on whether they happen to get the help of a billing advocate. They have no choice of the drugs that they have to buy or the lab tests or CT scans that they have to get, and they would not know what to do if they did have a choice. They are powerless buyers in a sellers’ market where the only consistent fact is the profit of the sellers.

 

"Bitter Pill:  Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us," Time Magazine Cover Story, March 4, 2013, pp. 16-65 (a very long article)  ---
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/

"Yes, Hospital Pricing Is Insane, But Why? Time magazine issues a 24,000-word memo on what we already knew," by Holman Jenkins Jr., The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323978104578334082993009730.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

Without diminishing the epic scope of Steven Brill's Time magazine piece about the U.S. health care system, he reiterates in lengthy detail perversities that are already well known, without offering a single useful insight on how it go that way, and even less on how to fix it.

Yet Mr. Brill, founder of CourtTV and American Lawyer magazine, author of books on terrorism and education, has written the longest piece in Time's history—24,000 words—so attention must be paid.

That health-care costs are inflated compared to what they would be in a reasonably transparent, competitive market (a point Mr. Brill never clearly makes) won't be a revelation. That hospitals allocate their costs to various items on their bills and price lists in ways that are opaque and arbitrary is not a new discovery either.

He finds it shocking that a hospital charging $1,791 a night won't throw in the generic Tylenol for free (instead charging $1.50 each). But this is to commit the reification fallacy of thinking there is some organic relationship between what a hospital charges for a particular item and what that item costs in the first place.

He dwells on the irrationality of hospitals charging their highest prices to their poorest customers, those without insurance. But he's also aware that these customers often pay little or nothing of what they are charged and hospitals reallocate the cost to the bills of other patients. He even notes that a hospital might collect as little as 18% of what it bills.

He vaguely gets that hospital price lists are memos for the file, to be drawn out and waved as a reference in negotiations with their real customers, the big health-care insurers, Medicaid, Medicare and other large payers.

The deals hammered out with these customers tend naturally to gravitate toward round numbers, leaving a hospital free to allocate its costs and profits to specific items however it wants. Mr. Brill may be offended that certain "non-profit" hospitals appear to be highly profitable. He probably wouldn't be happier, though, if they diverted their surplus revenues into even higher salaries and more gleamingly superfluous facilities.

"What is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?" Mr. Brill asks. But his question is rhetorical since he doesn't exhibit much urge to understand why the system behaves as it does, treating its nature as a given.

In fact, what he describes—big institutions dictating care and assigning prices in ways that make no sense to an outsider—is exactly what you get in a system that insulates consumers from the cost of their health care.

Your time might be better spent reading Duke University's Clark Havighurst in a brilliant 2002 article that describes the regulatory, legal and tax subsidies that deprive consumers of both the incentive and opportunity to demand value from medical providers. Americans end up with a "Hobson's choice: either coverage for 'Cadillac' care or no health coverage at all."

"The market failure most responsible for economic inefficiency in the health-care sector is not consumers' ignorance about the quality of care," Mr. Havighurst writes, "but rather their ignorance of the cost of care, which ensures that neither the choices they make in the marketplace nor the opinions they express in the political process reveal their true preferences."

You might turn next to an equally fabulous 2001 article by Berkeley economist James C. Robinson, who shows how the "pernicious" doctrine that health care is different—that consumers must shut up, do as they're told and be prepared to write a blank check—is used to "justify every inefficiency, idiosyncrasy, and interest-serving institution in the health care industry."

Hospitals, insurers and other institutions involved in health care may battle over available dollars, but they also share an interest in increasing the nation's resources being diverted into health care—which is exactly what happens when costs are hidden from those who pay them.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Over a year ago Erika's Medicare-Anthem summary of charges for the month included an $11,376 charge for out patient surgery that was mistakenly billed to her account. We called our doctor who did the procedure in the hospital. Our doctor responded not to bother her or the hospital --- since Medicare-Anthem paid the entire bill it would not matter.

This bothered us since the woman (I assume it was a woman) may not have been eligible for Medicare-Anthem. So I phoned Medicare. Medicare said not to bother them and advised us to contact the hospital where the procedure took place. Any corrections should be made by the hospital and the doctor.

So I called the hospital's accounting office. They asked that I send in a copy of the Medicare-Anthem report. I hand-delivered the report to the the hospital accounting office --- which is miles from the hospital.

Over the ensuing year we waited for a corrected Medicare-Anthem report. Nothing! So I did a follow up visit to the hospital's accounting office. The feedback was that since Medicare-Anthem paid the bill there was no need to waste time correcting this item.

I keep thinking that some woman not eligible for Medicare got a windfall gain here. Who cares if it was Medicare-Anthem that got screwed?

Erika and I changed to a doctor that we like better. But we cannot change hospitals.

Moral of the Story
If the third party insurer gets billed mistakenly or pays too much nobody cares, least of all the doctors and hospitals who got reimbursed.

Question
Who is telling a lie?

Steven Brill wrote a long cover story for Time Magazine, In that story he describes having his team examine eight very complicated hospital bills from different hospitals. In every case they found that the bills were laced with errors and overcharges in favor of the hospital and possible frauds.
Bitter Pill:  Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us," Time Magazine Cover Story, March 4, 2013, pp. 16-65 (a very long article)  ---
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/

The following week Stamford Hospital CEO Brian G. Grissler replied as shown, in part, below. Steven Brill's reply to Grissler, Time Magazine, March 18, 2013, Page 2.

Brian G. Grissler
". . . Brill refused to share the patient's name or the complete bill, so we are unable to answer those questions . . . "

Steven Brill Responds
"Stamford Hospital was shown the bill and never disputed its authenticity. I made clear in the article the hospital settled for cutting its bill entirely in half."

Jensen Comment
There are four possibilities behind this dispute:

  1. Brian Grissler could be lying through his teeth.

     
  2. Brian Grissler may not have thoroughly investigated the ultimate resolution of this bill by his staff.

     
  3. Steven Brill could be lying through his teeth.

     
  4. Steven Brill and Brian Grissler may not be discussing the same bill (although Brill claims he only picked one bill to examine from Stamford Hospital).

My vote is that Answer 1 above is probably the correct answer, but we most likely will never know.

 


Suggestions for Accounting Majors (including doctoral students)
Ask your advisor accounting professor to give you a listing of the Top 10 accounting historians since Pacioli.

"The Fall and Rise of Economic History," by Jeremy Adelman and Jonathan Levy, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-FallRise-of-Economic/150247/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Irritated, one shoos it out the door, and almost immediately it climbs in through the window." Without the concept of capitalism, the late French historian Fernand Braudel once wrote, it was impossible to study economic history. But the reverse is equally true: We can’t understand capitalism without economic history.

Once a mainstay of history departments, economic history was, with historians’ complicity, seized in the mid-20th century by economists who sucked the culture and chronology out of it and turned it into an obscure province of mathematical formulas. There it languished. The field became increasingly uncool. By the 1990s, to be a materialist in the age of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu was to be "deterministic"in other words, a dinosaur. So economic history further retreated to economics departments, where many self-described economic historians had already been gathering under the banner of the "new economic history."

The past decade has exposed some fundamental problems with that division of disciplinary labor. The now-old "new" economic history either fizzled or has become so technical, so unrecognizable to anyone who cannot wield its finely tuned analytics, that few historians can engage with it. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer economics departments now consider history—including the history of economics itself—a relevant domain of disciplinary inquiry, with many of the top departments having eliminated economic history from their programs altogether.

Lately historians have started to take it back, spurred by a demand to better understand the roller coaster of capitalist life, particularly how inequality and globalization factored into the recession. The economic crisis pushed courses on the "history of capitalism" to the top of the charts in history departments around the country, even making front-page news in The New York Times. With conferences, courses, and book series, the history of capitalism, one of the few areas of inquiry where job postings are growing, is on the verge of becoming an established subfield. The runaway success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press) raised even higher the political and intellectual profile of capitalism and its history.

In this way, a prodigal-son subfield has returned. Historians do not leave political history to political scientists, or social history to sociologists. Why should economic history be left to economists, especially when they ignore it? Besides, the humanities might well benefit from the revival of a field that once served as a bridge to the social sciences.

The history of capitalism performs heroic service, but bereft of a broader grasp of the history of economic life, it can’t provide deep insights into the makings of systems of production, circulation, and distribution. Capitalism is a latecomer in that story, and, like all latecomers, more reliant on its precursors and alternatives than its apostles and critics like to admit. There can be no history of capitalism without an economic history near its explanatory core.

Like democracy or modernity, capitalism is a historical problem, specific to time and place. If only because it eludes easy definition, it must be studied from different perspectives, with different historical methodologies. There are social histories of democracy, intellectual histories of democracy, and, of course, political histories of democracy. The economy could be the subject of similar multiple approaches. But it is not. It has been treated as a realm apart.

This is a surprising state of affairs. Looking back to 1960 or even 1980, one would not have predicted the eclipse of economic history. From the Progressive Age (1900 to 1930) onward, it was almost de rigueur to proclaim the material roots of everything and to tie one’s research to the broad spirit of reform. Capitalism’s postwar "golden age" was good for economic history, as it was for the world economy. The pairing of "social and economic history" was the fallback working methodology of many professional historians. The works of Eric Hobsbawm, Thomas C. Cochran, and Braudel himself were touchstones. Even books by the first generation of new economic historians, such as Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery (Little, Brown and Company, 1974), were read and reckoned with by noneconomic historians. Surely globalization, the ascendance of China, and the rise of Apple should have continued to fuel the field.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
In accountancy programs accounting history never "rose again" because it never ever rose from the bottom in the first place. I suspect that the history of a discipline is sadly neglected in most any academic programs dominated by licensure examination passage concerns of students. History would rise from the bottom of accountancy program curricula if it was a topic on the CPA examination, but this has never been the case.

Most accountancy students are aware that Pacioli wrote a book that illustrates double entry accounting using algebra, but most are not aware that this book was primarily an algebra book that only used accounting as an illustration of algebra. Between Pacioli in 1494 and the FASB's formation in the 1970s, accounting students learn virtually nothing about the intervening history of accounting for nearly 500 years.

In accountancy doctoral programs accounting history is a track in only a few programs such as at Case Western and Ole Miss. Over 99% of the new Ph.D.s in accounting graduate with little or no more knowledge than historically-unchallenged accounting undergraduates.

Assorted accounting professors have carried forth with contributions to accounting history, and most of them in recent years are or have been members of the Academy of Accounting Historians ---
http://www.aahhq.org/
Most are involved in accounting history out of genuine interest, although some may mostly be looking for opportunities to publish in journals that do not require equations and/or statistical analysis.

Suggestions for Accounting Majors (including doctoral students)
Ask your adviser accounting professor to give you a listing of the Top 10 accounting historians since Pacioli.

Hint
Don't let them fail to mention Littleton, Flesher, Previts, and Zeff.

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


"Don't Rely On Salary Data To Pick A Programming Language (career):  To Learn Current demand says nothing about earnings potential," by Matt Asay, ReadWriteWeb, November 28, 2014 ---
http://readwrite.com/2014/11/28/programming-language-salary-data-dont-mix

Jensen Comment
This is good advice in general, not just good advice for programmers. I always advised my graduating accounting students not to be mislead by higher starting salaries. I told them to instead look at prospects for training, experience, and exposure to great clients, clients that will often hire them into terrific jobs after they have on-the-job skills.

As a matter of fact higher salaries can be very misleading if you ignore living costs.
For example, CPA firms will often pay more to graduates who will locate in San Francisco, Manhattan, Honolulu, etc. But the cost of living in those cities overwhelms the higher compensation. A lower salary in Des Moines or San Antonio end up being more in terms of compensation net of living costs. But even even then compensation should not be the deciding factor. Look at other things vital to career and happiness in life.

Also don't look at happiness in life to make short term decisions. I very nearly took my first teaching job in Gunnison, Colorado because I wanted to ski and raise horses. At the time this would have been a dead end choice that entailed heaving teaching loads and no research support. Plus as a hot dog skier I would probably be long dead by now.

PS
I still have a friend in Houston who makes a good living programming in COBOL.

"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
 

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


How to Mislead With Statistics
As Two-Parent families Decline, Income and Wealth Inequality
For example, married parents in a $200,000 home and income now have to live as single parents in two much lower quality homes on lower incomes

"For richer, for poorer: How family structures economic success in America," by W. Bradford Wilcox and Robert I. Lerman, American Enterprise Institute, October 28, 2014 ---
http://www.aei.org/publication/for-richer-for-poorer-how-family-structures-economic-success-in-america/

Executive Summary

The standard portrayals of economic life for ordinary Americans and their families paint a picture of stagnancy, even decline, amidst rising income inequality or joblessness. But rarely does the public conversation about the changing economic fortunes of Americans and their families look at questions of family structure. This is an important oversight because, as this report shows, changes in family formation and stability are central to the changing economic landscape of American families, to the declining economic status of men, and to worries about the health of the American dream.

Continued in article


Remember Dem Bums from Brooklyn?
"Brooklyn Is Now the Least Affordable Housing Market in the Country," by Jacob Davidson, Time Magazine, December 4, 2014 ---
http://time.com/money/3618823/brooklyn-least-affordable-housing-market/?xid=newsletter-brief

Jensen Comment
I still think it's worse in San Francisco, Manhattan, and Honolulu.


Increasing the Minimum Wage for Many Low Income Workers Will Only Exacerbate the Hidden Problem

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on December 5, 2014

Income volatility is low-wage families’ hidden problem
The financial volatility of paychecks that bounce up and down from week to week have become a feature of life for millions of workers
, writes Patricia Cohen for the New York Times. It isn’t easy to measure income variability, but studies suggests that a growing number of workers began to live off incomes that fluctuate with the season, an hourly schedule or the size of a weekly commission in the 1970s. That trend leveled off in the early 2000s, but jumped again when the financial crisis struck. “Low pay is also unsteady as well,” said Jonathan Morduch, who oversees a project for U.S. Financial Diaries. “This is a hidden inequality that often gets lost.” That strain explains why more than three-quarters of those surveyed in Mr. Morduch’s study said financial stability was more important than moving up the income ladder.


President Obama will propose Ashton Carter to be the next Secretary of Defense.

What is interesting in this regard is the Wikipedia module on Ashton Carter ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton_Carter

Jensen Comment
I assume that the above criticisms of the module were written by Wikipedia editors/reviewers themselves. This type of lament is common on a lot of Wikipedia modules. I suspect that there will soon be some major revisions (mostly improvements) to the module as Ashton's nomination runs its course.

No such laments appear on the module for outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Hagel
It's possible that there were such laments before Hagel was nominated for Secretary of Defense.

My point is not to provide an opinion on either Carter or Hagel. My point is that biographic entries in Wikipedia often seem promotional, especially if the person in question is an author selling books or a political figure seeking office by election or appointment. I suspect corporations write much of the promotional material that appears in employee Wikipedia modules.

Top selling authors have very extensive modules that were probably written/revised by their publishers. Professors who are not being promoted by publishing houses tend to have puny ot nonexistent modules in comparison.

Note that Wikipedia does not allow people to write their own modules. Wikipedia also prefers that biographic or product modules not be promotional, but this is often (usually?) possible in numersous instances.

What's important, however, is that Wikipedia does make it easy to delete non-libelous criticisms. For example, note Daniel Okrent's criticisms of Paul Krugman at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
I suspect Krugman would prefer that Oakrent's criticisms harmful to Krugman's academic integrity be deleted from Wikipedia. But these criticisms have remained for quite a long time in Wikipedia.

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

"The University of Google," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2008 --- Click Here

Tara Brabazon, professor of media studies at Britain’s University of Brighton, was expected Wednesday to criticize Google and what she sees as students’ over-reliance on the search engine and Wikipedia in an inaugural lecture at the university. She calls the trend “The University of Google,” according to an article Monday in The Times, and labels the search engine “white bread for the mind.” The professor bans her own students from using Wikipedia and Google in their first year of study.

A columnist for the paper responded in a piece that accuses Ms. Brabazon of snobbery. “Curiosity, it seems, can only be stimulated by trawling library shelves or by shelling out substantial amounts of money,” he writes, sarcastically.

January 17, 2008 reply from Derek

Very interesting. I understand Brabazon’s point about students’ over-reliance on Google and Wikipedia, but I don’t know if banning those web sites helps to improve students’ information literacy. I think students need to know how to use these kinds of web sites wisely.

If I can make a plug here, our teaching center just started a new podcast series featuring interviews with faculty about issues of teaching and learning. The first episode, available here, features an interview with a (Vanderbilt) history professor who uses Wikipedia to teach the undergraduate history majors in his class how to think like historians. He’s a great teacher and interviewee, and I think he offers an effective way to use Wikipedia to help him accomplish his course goals.

Episode 1 --- http://blogs.vanderbilt.edu/cftpodcast/?p=4

 

Jensen Question
How will Professor Brabazon deal with the new and authoritative Google Knol?

Jensen Comment
So how might a student find refereed journal or scholarly book references using Wikipedia?

  1. Most scholarly Wikipedia modules have footnotes and references that can be traced back such that there is no evidence of having ever gone to Wikipedia.
    For example, note the many scholarly references and links at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung
     

  2. Don't overlook the Discussion tab in Wikipedia. Here's where some information is turned into knowledge by scholars.
     

  3. If there is not a footnote or a reference, look for a unique phrase in Wikipedia and then insert that phrase in Google Scholar or one of the other sites below:

Scholarpedia --- http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page

PLoS One --- http://www.plosone.org/home.action

Google Scholar --- http://scholar.google.com/
Not to be confused with Google Advanced Search which does not cover many scholarly articles --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Google Knol --- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Google Research --- http://research.google.com/

One Million University of Illinois (Free) Books to be Digitized by Google --- http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/programs/CenterForLibraryInitiatives/Archive/PressRelease/LibraryDigitization/index.shtml
Google Digitized Books --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search?q=Accounting
For example, key in the word "accounting"
Then try "Advanced Managerial Accounting"
Then try "Joel Demski"
Then try "Accounting for Derivative Financial Instruments"
Then try "Robert E. Jensen" AND "Accounting"

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University Library's own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at: http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/

Microsoft's Windows "Live Search" or  "Academic Search" ---
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?scope=academic&q=

Amazon's A9 --- http://a9.com/-/search/advSearch 

Beginning October 23, 2003, Amazon.com offers a text search of entire contents of millions of pages of books, including new books ---
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/ref%3Dsib%5Fmerch%5Fgw/104-3984945-7813514 

How It Works --- http://snurl.com/BookSearch 
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as running an Amazon.com search. 

Soon to be the largest scholarly library in the world:
Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

Answers.com --- http://www.answers.com/

Carnegie Mellon Libraries: Digital Library Colloquium (video lectures) --- http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/DLColloquia.html

 

For example,
Wikipedia describes how Jung proposed spiritual guidance as treatment for chronic alcoholism --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung#Spirituality_as_a_cure_for_alcoholism
Professor Brabazon might give a student an F grade for citing the above link. Instead the student is advised to enter the phrase [ \"Jung\" AND \"Alcoholism\" AND \"Spiritual Guidance\" ] into the exact phrase search box at http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search?hl=en&lr=
Hundreds of scholarly references will emerge that Professor Brabazon will accept as authoritative. But never mention to Professor Brabazon that you got the idea for spiritual guidance as a treatment of alcoholism from Wikipedia.

Also there's a question of how Professor Brabazon will deal with the new Google Knol

"Google's Answer to Wikipedia:  Google's Knol project aims to make online information easier to find and more authoritative," MIT's Technology Review, January 15, 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20065/?nlid=806 

Google recently announced Knol, a new experimental website that puts information online in a way that encourages authorial attribution. Unlike articles for the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which anyone is free to revise, Knol articles will have individual authors, whose pictures and credentials will be prominently displayed alongside their work. Currently, participation in the project is by invitation only, but Google will eventually open up Knol to the public. At that point, a given topic may end up with multiple articles by different authors. Readers will be able to rate the articles, and the better an article's rating, the higher it will rank in Google's search results.

Google coined the term "knol" to denote a unit of knowledge but also uses it to refer to an authoritative Web-based article on a particular subject. At present, Google will not describe the project in detail, but Udi Manber, one of the company's vice presidents of engineering, provided a cursory sketch on the company's blog site. "A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read," Manber writes. And in a departure from Wikipedia's model of community authorship, he adds that "the key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors."

Noah Kagan, founder of the premier conference about online communities, Community Next, sees an increase in authorial attribution as a change for the better. He notes the success of the review site Yelp, which has risen to popularity in the relatively short span of three years. "Yelp's success is based on people getting attribution for the reviews that they are posting," Kagan says. "Because users have their reputation on the line, they are more likely to leave legitimate answers." Knol also has features intended to establish an article's credibility, such as references to its sources and a listing of the title, job history, and institutional affiliation of the author. Knol may thus attract experts who are turned off by group editing and prefer the style of attribution common in journalistic and academic publications.

Manber writes that "for many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing." But Mark Pellegrini, administrator and featured-article director at Wikipedia and a member of its press committee, sees two problems with this plan. "I think what will happen is that you'll end up with five or ten articles," he says, "none of which is as comprehensive as if the people who wrote them had worked together on a single article." These articles may be redundant or even contradictory, he says. Knol authors may also have less incentive to link keywords to competitors' articles, creating "walled gardens." Pellegrini describes the effect thus: "Knol authors will tend to link from their articles to other articles they've written, but not to articles written by others."

Continued in article

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


"Watch the Robots Shipping Your Amazon Order This Holiday," by Sam Frizell, Time Magazine, December 1, 2014 ---
http://time.com/3605924/amazon-robots/?xid=newsletter-brief


The 20 Best Places To Work In 2015 ---
 http://www.businessinsider.com/best-places-to-work-in-2015-2014-12?op=1

Jensen Comment
What this tells me is that there's no heaven on earth. There are only subsets of criteria that can paint some employers white or black or any other color depending upon the colors (criteria) used.

For example, Google comes out Number 1 but in the Silicon Valley region, where most Google employees work, housing costs are among the highest in the world. Also California's taxation frustrations are among the worst in the world. The way Google comes out Number 1 is to leave out the criteria that make Google look bad.

The same is true for every other one of the "Top 20 Places to Work."

Brigham and Women's Hospital in the Harvard Medical School complex comes out at Rank 12. However, having stayed in a hotel in this complex for weeks on end several times while my wife was recovering from 6 of her 15 spine surgeries (including her long stays in rehab facilities in this complex) I can suggest that this complex perhaps has the worst traffic design with narrow streets the USA. There is almost no reasonably-priced parking anywhere (my hotel charged $30 per day for parking). Traffic congestion is frequently outrageous.  I certainly would not want to commute to any of the facilities in this complex. House and apartment costs are out of sight such that living within walking distance requires being a millionaire or having ten roommates. It is not a good area for raising children. But these are not criteria used in ranking the "Top 20 Places to Work."

Very little consideration is given in this ranking to freedom and independence on the job. If that were the case, all of the Top 20 places to work in my opinion would be college campuses where tenured professors have no time clocks, outrageous job security, freedom from teaching for upwards of five months every year, options for sabbatical and other leaves of absence, options for consulting upwards of one or two days per week on average while teaching, frequent reimbursed trips to research conferences around the world, etc.

My conclusion is that what is the "best place to work" is totally in the eyes of the beholder. The experience of work is very similar to the experience of love, beauty, and self-actualization. Some workers find great satisfaction in what others would call bad jobs with bad employers. Some workers find great misery while employed in one of the Top 20 Places to Work.


"How Sociologists Made Themselves Irrelevant," by Orlando Patterson, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, December 1, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Sociologists-Made/150249/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Early in 2014, President Obama announced a new initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, aimed at alleviating the problems of black youth. Not only did a task force appointed to draw up the policy agenda not include a single professional sociologist, but I could find no evidence that any sociologist was even consulted in the critical first three months of the group’s work, summarized in a report to the president, despite the enormous amount of work sociologists have done on poverty and the problems of black youth.

Sadly, this situation is typical because sociologists have become distant spectators rather than shapers of policy. In the effort to keep ourselves academically pure, we’ve also become largely irrelevant in molding the most important social enterprises of our era.

Continued in article

How Accountics Scientists Made Themselves Irrelevant:  In the effort to keep ourselves academically pure ---
The Cargo Cult of Accounting Research
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


Holiday travelers faced a literal nightmare on Sunday morning when the line for security checks at Midway Airport in Chicago was reportedly over a mile long. KOMO reporter Denise Whitaker said that the line was 1.2 miles long. An airport spokesperson said that she wasn't surprised by the crowds.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/30/midway-airport-line-security-1-mile_n_6244282.html


New Inefficiencies in the Capital Markets:  Unwanted (and possibly unreachable) Insiders Now Conducting Insider Trades
"Security Firm Says It Uncovered A Cyber Espionage Ring Focused On Gaming The Stock Market," by Jim Finkle, Reuters via Business Insider, December 1, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-cyber-ring-stole-secrets-for-gaming-us-stock-market-fireeye-2014-12

BOSTON (Reuters) - Security researchers say they have uncovered a cyber espionage ring focused on stealing corporate secrets for the purpose of gaming the stock market, in an operation that has compromised sensitive data about dozens of publicly held companies.

Cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc, which disclosed the operation on Monday, said that since the middle of last year, the group has attacked email accounts at more than 100 firms, most of them pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.

Victims also include firms in other sectors, as well as corporate advisors including investment bankers, attorneys and investor relations firms, according to FireEye.

The cybersecurity firm declined to identify the victims. It said it did not know whether any trades were actually made based on the stolen data.

Still, FireEye Threat Intelligence Manager Jen Weedon said the hackers only targeted people with access to highly insider data that could be used to profit on trades before that data was made public.

They sought data that included drafts of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, documents on merger activity, discussions of legal cases, board planning documents and medical research results, she said.

"They are pursuing sensitive information that would give them privileged insight into stock market dynamics," Weedon said.

The victims ranged from small to large cap corporations. Most are in the United States and trade on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, she said.

An FBI spokesman declined comment on the group, which FireEye said it reported to the bureau.

The security firm designated it as FIN4 because it is number 4 among the large, advanced financially motivated groups tracked by FireEye.

The hackers don't infect the PCs of their victims. Instead they steal passwords to email accounts, then use them to access those accounts via the Internet, according to FireEye.

They expand their networks by posing as users of compromised accounts, sending phishing emails to associates, Weedon said.

FireEye has not identified the hackers or located them because they hide their tracks using Tor, a service for making the location of Internet users anonymous.

FireEye said it believes they are most likely based in the United States, or maybe Western Europe, based on the language they use in their phishing emails, Weedon said.

She said the firm is confident that FIN4 is not from China, based on the content of their phishing emails and their other techniques.

Researchers often look to China when assessing blame for economically motivated cyber espionage. The United States has accused the Chinese government of encouraging hackers to steal corporate secrets, allegations that Beijing has denied, causing tension between the two countries.

Weedon suspects the hackers were trained at Western investment banks, giving them the know-how to identify their targets and draft convincing phishing emails.

"They are applying their knowledge of how the investment banking community works," Weedon said.

"We Have Better Things to Do Than Prosecute Insider Trading," by Justin Fox, Harvard Business Review Blog, October 11, 2014 ---
 https://hbr.org/2014/12/we-have-better-things-to-do-than-prosecute-insider-trading?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Jensen Comment
I disagree with Justin on this one. Insider trading is an infectious market disease that can spread like an epidemic if no prosecuted vigorously.

 

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

Bob Jensen's threads on the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#EMH


Here Are The 10 Worst States To Retire (possibly) --- http://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-10-worst-states-to-retire-2014-11

Jensen Comment
The above article mostly ignores taxation. For example, California is not listed as one of the worst retirement states even though it is one of the worst states in terms of taxation, especially if you're moving into the state and cannot enjoy the property tax relief of Proposition 13 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29
Nevada is one of the best states for tax relief, but is listed as being one of the worst states in terms of crime. I think California is worse for crime, although a lot depends upon where your retire in California. Don't count of crime relief in rural areas in some states, especially California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. For example, in and around Stockton is now one of the most dangerous places to live in the USA.

There is a great deal of variation in terms of personal factors that often affect retirement preferences, possibly the most important being where your family is concentrated --- or at least the family that you most want to live near or family that needs you the most for such things as moral support, child care, etc. Some retirees really enjoy being near other retirees in the same age group. Others don't like living in the midst of a whole lot of other old folks.

As the saying goes, home is where the heart is --- although sometimes it takes a strong heart to do the shoveling. In some northern states there are high traditional migration rates for retirement. For example, New York has a very high migration rate --- especially to Florida.

In the Midwest it's common to retire in two places --- up north for the summer months and down south for the winter months such as in Texas, Arizona, and California. Typically the most time is spent in the north such that those Midwestern states still get most of your state income tax. In the Southeast some people spend more than six months in places like New Hampshire and move back south for the winter. New Hampshire is popular for the summer months because of having no state taxes on sales (think of costly new automobiles, boats, and motor homes) and retirement fund income taxes. Spend less retirement time in other New England states like Vermont and Maine to avoid their high taxes on retirees deemed to be residents.

Two of our friends sold their mountain-top home in New Hampshire and retired to Amelia Island in Florida thinking that the summer months would be tolerable if they lived beside the Atlantic Ocean (which they could well afford) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Island
They were so miserable the first summer on Amelia Island that they now spend the summer months back in New Hampshire and only the winter months on Amelia Island. The very sultry months of July, August, and September in the deep south are unpopularly known as the Dog Days ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_days

I once spent two weeks in Hawaii that were equally sultry relative to my four summers in northern Florida (Tallahassee) and 24 summers in San Antonio. "Paradise" is a relative term. I really don't like humidity in hot weather. I like our mountain home in all seasons in spite of the shoveling. A diesel tractor helps, but there is still quite a lot of shoveling.


The 10 Worst Countries for Women ---
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/28/the-10-worst-countries-for-women/4/

Jensen Comment
Many of these are the 10 worst countries for men as well. Is there a model Islamic nation that is more happy than hateful?


Time Magazine's Choices for the 2014 Top 10 Apps ---
http://time.com/3582114/top-10-apps/?xid=newsletter-brief

Yahoo Tech's Choices for the 2014 Top 10 Gadgets ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/the-10-most-wanted-tech-c1417549586539/photo-iphone-6-photo-1417549459482.html


From the Khan Academy
Tutorials on Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/macroeconomics/gdp-topic/piketty-capital


"The Year's Best Books on Psychology, Philosophy, and How to Live Meaningfully," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, December 1, 2014 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/01/best-psychology-philosophy-books-2014/


"The Research Productivity of New PhDs in Economics: The Surprisingly High Non-success of the Successful," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, November 30, 2014 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/11/the-research-productivity-of-new-phds-in-economics-.html

John P. Conley (Vanderbilt) & Ali Sina Önder (Bayreuth), The Research Productivity of New PhDs in Economics: The Surprisingly High Non-success of the Successful:

We study the research productivity of new graduates from North American PhD programs in economics from 1986 to 2000. We find that research productivity drops off very quickly with class rank at all departments, and that the rank of the graduate departments themselves provides a surprisingly poor prediction of future research success. For example, at the top ten departments as a group, the median graduate has fewer than 0.03 American Economic Review (AER)-equivalent publications at year six after graduation, an untenurable record almost anywhere. We also find that PhD graduates of equal percentile rank from certain lower-ranked departments have stronger publication records than their counterparts at higher-ranked departments. In our data, for example, Carnegie Mellon's graduates at the 85th percentile of year-six research productivity outperform 85th percentile graduates of the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Berkeley. These results suggest that even the top departments are not doing a very good job of training the great majority of their students to be successful research economists. Hiring committees may find these results helpful when trying to balance class rank and place of graduate in evaluating job candidates, and current graduate students may wish to re-evaluate their academic strategies in light of these findings.

Continued in article

 


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

A couple posts from David Giles on his Econometrics Beat Blog

Marc Bellemare on Social Media

 
Marc Bellemare has been catching my attention recently. On Saturday I had a post that mentioned his talk on "How to Publish Academic Papers". I know that a lot of you have followed this up already.

 
Today, I just have to mention another of his talks, given last Friday, titled "Social Media for (Academic) Economists". Check out his blog post about the talk, and then look at this slides that are linked there.

 
Yep, I agree with pretty much everything he has to say. And nope, we're not related!


 
2014, David E. Giles
 

Sunday, December 7, 2014

"Mastering 'Metrics"

 
Mastering 'Metrics: The Path From Cause to Effect, by Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, is to be published by Princeton University Press later this month. This new book from the authors of Mostly Harmless Econometrics is bound to be well received by students and researchers involved in applied empirical economics. My guess is that the biggest accolades will come from those whose interest is in empirical microeconomics.

You can download and preview the Introduction and Chapter 1.
 

 
Apparently the book focuses on:
"The five most valuable econometric methods, or what the authors call the Furious Five - random assignment, regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and differences in differences."
If this sounds interesting to you, then make sure that you take a look at Peter Dizikes' recent post, "How to Conduct Social Science Research", on the World Economic Forum website.

 




From the Scout Report on November 28, 2014

Waze --- https://www.waze.com 

Phone based navigation systems are one of the great innovations of the early 21st century. But they have their drawbacks - like when they take you down a road dead-ended by construction. Waze seeks to improve on the greatness by tapping into real drivers driving real roads. Put simply, it's a community-based navigation and traffic app. So when a waze user sees traffic or other obstacles, they tell the app, and the app tells all the other drivers. It's a fluid, continually self-updating account of the roads as they actually are. Available for Apple devices (iOS 5.0 and up) and Android (2.2 and up).


AP Mobile --- http://www.ap.org/apmobile/ 

The Associated Press, the multinational nonprofit news agency that publishes and republishes in about 1,700 newspapers worldwide, has its own award-winning news app. AP Mobile sports a clean, intuitive layout, beautiful photos, and rich content. It is available for iOS 7.0+ and Android 2.3.3+.


The National Book Awards
2014 National Book Awards
http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2014.html#.VHOik764l9s

Redeployment by Phil Klay review
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/26/redeployment-phil-klay-review-incendiary-stories-of-war

Review: 'Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New
China' by Evan Osnos
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/review-age-of-ambition-chasing-fortune-truth-and-faith-in-the-new-china-by-evan-osnos/2014/05/16/9b122786-cef0-11e3-937f-d3026234b51c_story.html

Acquainted With the Dark: Louise Gluck's 'Faithful and Virtuous Night'
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/books/review/louise-glcks-faithful-and-virtuous-night.html?_r=0

Review of the Day: brown girl dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2014/06/02/review-of-the-day-brown-girl-dreaming-by-jacqueline-woodson/#_

Book News: Ursula K. Le Guin Steals The Show At the National Book Awards
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/11/20/365434149/book-news-ursula-k-le-guin-steals-the-show-at-the-national-book-awards


From the Scout Report on December 5, 2014

Fences  --- http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/ 

Having trouble keeping your desktop clean? Try Fences. CBS Money Watch called the desktop organization software "utterly transformational," and it's been featured everywhere from Oprah Magazine to lifehacker. The tool allows users to organize clutter by creating shaded areas, showing and hiding icons, and moving between pages. This software is available for Windows 7 or newer. 


WorkFlowy --- https://workflowy.com 

Put simply, WorkFlowy is a zoomable document; but it's a lot more than that. In fact, it's a simple and adaptable way to take notes and keep track of just about everything, from grocery lists to big projects. With this organizational tool, users can work with infinitely nested lists, zoom, tag, filter, and work offline. After creating an account, the fun can begin and helpful instructional Videos are available to walk you through any stumbling blocks. Workflowy is available for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac OSX 10.6+, Microsoft Windows 7+, iOS 6.0+ and Android 4.4+.


The Skeleton Discovered Under a British Parking Lot Once Belonged to a
Mighty King
DNA Evidence proves that King Richard III’s remains really did end up in
a parking lot
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/12/02/dna-evidence-proves-that-king-richard-iiis-remains-really-did-end-up-in-a-parking-lot/

DNA Confirms: Here Lieth Richard III, Under Yon Parking Lot
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141202-richard-iii-genes-shakespeare-science/

Yes, the Skeleton Beneath a Leicester Parking Lot Was King Richard III
http://www.newsweek.com/king-richard-iiis-skeleton-was-indeed-found-beneath-leicester-parking-lot-288662

It’s Official: Skeleton Found Under Parking Lot is Richard III
http://www.popsci.com/its-official-skeleton-parking-lot-was-richard-iii

Identification of the remains of King Richard III
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141202/ncomms6631/full/ncomms6631.html

BBC - History - King Richard III
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/king_richard_iii



How to Mislead With Science Reports

From the Scout Report on December 12, 2014

Level Money --- https://levelmoney.com 

Designed for millennials who need a little help with budgeting, the Money Level app is good looking and easy to use. The goal is to "create a secure future for the next generation" by promoting smart, everyday financial decisions. An accompanying Blog is also accessible from this site and offers great posts, such as "7 Things You Need to Know about Student Loan Refinancing" and "Mobile Banking in Public: Staying Safe and Secure." Level Money is available for Android 4.0+ and iOS 7.0+.  

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


Nearpod --- http://www.nearpod.com 

If you're a teacher who uses technology as a way to present information in a creative and engaging way, then Nearpod might be a welcome addition to your interactive curriculum. It combines presentation, collaboration, and real-time assessment tools into a single, integrated program. Users can create their own presentations or select from a number of Ready-to-Use Nearpods. Note, there are four pricing options for education users- the Silver Edition is free. Nearpod is multiplatform, allowing teachers and students to interact through iOS devices, Android devices, Windows 8.1 devices, tablets, and any PC or MAC


Exaggeration of Scientific Claims Is Already Present in Academic Press
Releases, New Study Finds
The Point When Science Becomes Publicity
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/as-academia-melts/383570/2/

Science and health news hype: where does it come from?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/dec/10/science-health-news-hype-press-releases-universities

Most Exaggeration in Health News is Already Present in Academic Press
Releases
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-12-exaggeration-health-news-academic.html

The association between exaggeration in health related science news and
academic press releases: retrospective observational study

http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7015

Preventing Bad Reporting on Health Research
http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7465

Are Scientists Themselves to Blame for Exaggerated Claims in Science
Journalism?

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/17/are-scientists-themselves-to-blame-for-exaggerated-claims-in-science-journalism/

 




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


Education Tutorials

World Digital Library --- http://www.wdl.org/en/

General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard Committee --- http://archive.org/details/generaleducation032440mbp

Advanced Technological Education Television (over 200 videos) --- http://www.atetv.org

Inspiring Science: Casting light on great ideas --- http://inspiringscience.net/category/series/

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

The Economist Magazine's Recommended Books of 2014 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21635446-best-books-2014-were-about-south-china-sea-fall-berlin-wall-kaiser?fsrc=nlw|hig|4-12-2014|NA

Free From the Khan Academy ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/
Note that the Khan Academy has greatly expanded its tutorials in accounting, economics, finance, and information technology.

Hour of Drawing with Code: Learn to program using JavaScript, one of the world's most popular programming languages via two great options:
http://emails.khanacademy.org/523a1d5a191b2a646d943fa621xpa.7unbw/VH89x0mOdl6HTK8TD903a

 

Hour of Webpages: Learn to make your own webpages using the basics of HTML and CSS (ages 10+).
http://emails.khanacademy.org/523a1d5a191b2a646d943fa621xpa.7unbw/VH89x0mOdl6HTK8TE3e97

Hour of Databases: Learn the fundamentals of databases using SQL to create tables, insert data into them, and do basic querying (ages 12+).
http://emails.khanacademy.org/523a1d5a191b2a646d943fa621xpa.7unbw/VH89x0mOdl6HTK8TF0bf7

 

Free From the Khan Academy
Tutorials on Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/macroeconomics/gdp-topic/piketty-capital

 

 

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Einstein's Papers Archive (as if most readers could comprehend them) ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/12/05/princeton-u-press-launches-open-all-digital-version-einstein-papers-project

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory --- https://www6.slac.stanford.edu

Inspiring Science: Casting light on great ideas --- http://inspiringscience.net/category/series/

Chemistry: Challenges and Solutions --- http://www.learner.org/courses/chemistry/index.html

Advanced Technological Education Television (over 200 videos) --- http://www.atetv.org

A Year in the Life of Earth’s CO2: A Striking Visualization ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/CD_xpZZxL2s/a-year-in-the-life-of-earths-co2-a-striking-visualization.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
These 6 Countries Are Responsible For 60% Of CO2 Emissions (China, India, USA, Russia, Japan, Germany) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-countries-are-responsible-for-60-of-co2-emissions-2014-12

LIGO - Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory --- http://www.ligo.caltech.edu

NASA Astrobiology: Life in the Universe --- https://astrobiology.nasa.gov

Animal Diversity Web (ADW) --- http://animaldiversity.org/

Medicine Effectiveness and Side Effects
PubMed Health - National Library of Medicine --- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/

Shelf Life: American Museum of Natural History Creates New Video Series on Its 33 Million Artifacts ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/YAVl68h7m1E/shelf-life.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Comparative Mammalian Brain Collections --- http://brainmuseum.org/index.html

NIAMS Kids Pages (arthritis health) --- http://www.niams.nih.gov/Health_Info/Kids/default.asp

American Psychological Association Help Center --- http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/index.aspx

BMC Psychiatry --- http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcpsychiatry

Neuropod Podcasts --- http://www.nature.com/neurosci/neuropod/index.html

16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writing on Evolution Now Digitized and Available Online ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/6px2DY_zYXs/16000-pages-of-charles-darwins-writing-on-evolution-now-available-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

From Billions to None
Project Passenger Pigeon (extinct by 1914, but it was once the most abundant bird in North America) --- http://www.passengerpigeon.org

Stockholm Environment Institute (data) --- http://sei-international.org

Mitigation of Climate Change 2014 --- http://mitigation2014.org

Nagasaki City: Atomic Bomb Survivors --- http://www.city.nagasaki.lg.jp/peace/english/survivors/index.html

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


Social Science and Economics Tutorials

HathiTrust Digital Library: 19th-20th Century Psychology Texts (millions of articles) --- http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=715130871

American Psychological Association Help Center --- http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/index.aspx

The Personality Disorders Institute --- http://www.borderlinedisorders.com

David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness? ---
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_chalmers_how_do_you_explain_consciousness?language=en

YaleGlobal Online Magazine (international studies) --- http://yaleglobal.yale.edu

National Service Knowledge Network (AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, etc.) --- https://www.nationalserviceresources.gov

Eastern Philosophy Explained with Three Animated Videos by Alain de Botton’s School of Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/eastern-philosophy-explained-with-three-animated-videos.html

Podcasts from the 37th Annual Society of Ethnobiology Conference --- http://ethnobiology.org/conference/2014/podcasts

Gender Equality Data and Statistics --- http://datatopics.worldbank.org/gender/

LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxemourg --- http://www.lisdatacenter.org

Laogai Research Foundation (China human rights and history)) --- http://laogai.org

G. E. E. Lindquist Native American Photographs --- http://lindquist.cul.columbia.edu/

The Economist Magazine's Recommended Books of 2014 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21635446-best-books-2014-were-about-south-china-sea-fall-berlin-wall-kaiser?fsrc=nlw|hig|4-12-2014|NA

United Nations World Food Programme --- http://www.wfp.org

Oregon Main Street (historic preservation) --- http://www.oregon.gov/oprd/HCD/SHPO/pages/mainstreet.aspx

Nagasaki City: Atomic Bomb Survivors --- http://www.city.nagasaki.lg.jp/peace/english/survivors/index.html

From MIT:  Philosophy of Love in the Western World ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-261-philosophy-of-love-in-the-western-world-fall-2004/index.htm

To understand the economics of space exploration, look to Zheng He, leader of an elite band of eunuch adventurers in 15th-century China ---
The Tricky Ethics of Intergalactic Colonization ---
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/future-of-space-exploration/

From Hugh Hefner to Gloria Steinem, Reinhold Niebuhr to Groucho Marx: These 100 people defined the 20th century – at least according to The New Republic
100 Years 100 Thinkers ---
http://www.newrepublic.com/feature/thinkers/
Accountants are overlooked.

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

YaleGlobal Online Magazine (international studies) --- http://yaleglobal.yale.edu

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


Math Tutorials

"The World’s First Computer Is Much Older Than Previously Thought," by Kukil Bora, International Business Times via Business Insider,  Novenmber 29, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-first-computer-is-much-older-than-previously-thought-2014-11

Do The Math --- http://www.slate.com/articles/life/do_the_math.html

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


History Tutorials

World Digital Library (across 3,000 years) --- http://www.wdl.org/en/

Eastern Philosophy Explained with Three Animated Videos by Alain de Botton’s School of Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/eastern-philosophy-explained-with-three-animated-videos.html

See The Size Of The World's Largest Armies From Antiquity To Present ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-ambitious-graphic-shows-the-size-of-standing-armies-from-antiquity-to-the-present-2014-11

HathiTrust Digital Library: 19th-20th Century Psychology Texts (millions of articles) --- http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=715130871

Dostoyevsky Got a Reprieve from the Czar’s Firing Squad and Then Saved Charles Bukowski’s Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/dostoyevsky-saved-bukowskis-life.html

Benjamin Franklin, a Sage Man --- http://lisnews.org/benjamin_franklin_a_sage_man

The Pennsylvania Gazette 1728-1800 http://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/the-pennsylvania-gazette/

Wittgenstein and Hitler Attended the Same School in Austria, at the Same Time (1904) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/wittgenstein-and-hitler-attend-the-same-school-in-austria.html

From Billions to None
Project Passenger Pigeon (extinct by 1914, but it was once the most abundant bird in North America) --- http://www.passengerpigeon.org

The Digital Dostoevsky: Download Free eBooks & Audio Books of the Russian Novelist’s Major Works ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/download-free-ebooks-audio-books-of-dostoevsky.html

Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion (Chinese American Art & Photography) ---
http://chineseamerican.nyhistory.org/explore/

The Incredible History Of The Navy SEALs, America's Most Elite Warriors ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-history-of-americas-most-elite-warriors-2014-12

Albert Camus: The Madness of Sincerity — 1997 Documentary Revisits the Philosopher’s Life & Work ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/RbW3Sz6RD-g/albert-camus-the-madness-of-sincerity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Gender Equality Data and Statistics --- http://datatopics.worldbank.org/gender/

Thug Notes Demystifies 60 Literary Classics (from Shakespeare to Gatsby) with a Fresh Urban Twist ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/thug-notes-demystifies-60-literary-classics.html

Staging the Self: National Portrait Gallery --- http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/staging/index.html

G. E. E. Lindquist Native American Photographs --- http://lindquist.cul.columbia.edu/

LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxemourg --- http://www.lisdatacenter.org

Dickens in Massachusetts Virtual Tour --- http://library.uml.edu/dickens/exhibit/VirtualTour.html

16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writing on Evolution Now Digitized and Available Online ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/6px2DY_zYXs/16000-pages-of-charles-darwins-writing-on-evolution-now-available-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

About Art History --- http://arthistory.about.com

Colossal (Art History) --- http://www.thisiscolossal.com/

Creative Time (art history) --- http://creativetime.org

"The World’s First Computer Is Much Older Than Previously Thought," by Kukil Bora, International Business Times via Business Insider,  Novenmber 29, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-first-computer-is-much-older-than-previously-thought-2014-11
Bob Jensen's threads on the history of computing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#---ComputerNetworking-IncludingInternet

Laogai Research Foundation (China human rights and history)) --- http://laogai.org

Imperial War Museums --- http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections-research

Barnard & Gardner Civil War Photographs --- http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/rubenstein_barnardgardner/

Amazing American Civil War Photos Turned Into Glorious Color ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazing-american-civil-war-photos-turned-into-glorious-color-2014-12

Lauren R. Donaldson Collection (first atomic bomb tests) --- http://content.lib.washington.edu/donaldsonweb/

Atomic Energy & Nuclear History Learning Curriculum ---
http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/omeka/exhibits/show/atomic

Nagasaki City: Atomic Bomb Survivors --- http://www.city.nagasaki.lg.jp/peace/english/survivors/index.html

Nuclear Systems Design Project
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/nuclear-engineering/22-033-nuclear-systems-design-project-fall-2011/

Nuclear Threat Initiative Research Library --- http://www.nti.org/e_research/e_index.html

The Nixon Administration and the Indian Nuclear Program, 1972-1974 --- http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb367/

James H. Doolittle Collection (World War II) --- http://libtreasures.utdallas.edu/xmlui/handle/10735.1/1522

 

"The 85 Most Disruptive Ideas in Our History," Bloomberg Businessweek, 2014  (scroll down)
http://www.businessweek.com/features/85ideas/?campaign_id=DN120414
Accounting is overlooked (but not securitization) --- but I'm not sure we had any disruptive ideas since 1494 unless we count the USA income tax commencing in 1861. Now that was more "disruptive" than the 85 ideas in the article. Other things were far more disruptive. Forget Air Jordans and think air conditioning did more than anything else to provide jobs and reduce poverty across the entire southern USA in addition to destroying most of the numerous family summer resorts in North America. Interstate highways greatly reduced the importance of railroads and opened up commerce and second homes in rural parts of the USA.

From Hugh Hefner to Gloria Steinem, Reinhold Niebuhr to Groucho Marx: These 100 people defined the 20th century – at least according to The New Republic
100 Years 100 Thinkers ---
http://www.newrepublic.com/feature/thinkers/
Accountants are overlooked --- not that it matters.

Flirting in Morse code. 19th-century telegraph operators were a surprisingly literary bunch, with a knack for the romance novel ---
The Golden Age of Telegraph Literature
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/11/telegraph_literature_from_19th_century_was_surprisingly_modern.single.html

Ezra Pound --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound
"The Tragic Hero of Literary Modernism Ezra Pound’s generous spirit looms over 20th-century literature, and in the early years his megalomania seemed harmless," by David Mason, The Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-ezra-pound-poet-the-epic-years-1921-1939-by-a-david-moody-1417818046?tesla=y&mod=djemMER_h&mg=reno64-wsj

Art Works Blog
http://arts.gov/art-works

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

San Francisco Symphony - American Orchestra Forum Podcasts
http://www.sfsymphony.org/Watch-Listen-Learn/Podcasts-and-Music/American-Orchestra-Forum-Podcasts

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

Jazz on the Tube: An Archive of 2,000 Classic Jazz Videos (and Much More) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/jazz-on-the-tube-an-archive-of-2000-classic-jazz-videos-and-much-more.html

Latin Music USA | PBS --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/latinmusicusa/

Review of
Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs, by Graham Johnson Yale, 2,820 pages, $300 ($240-$270 on Amazon)

"A Shakespearean Songbook:  A monumental work of scholarship catalogs all of Schubert’s 700 songs—and explains why he was called Mushroom," by Matthew Gurewitsch, The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2014 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-franz-schubert-the-complete-songs-by-graham-johnson-1418423518?tesla=y&mod=djemMER_h&mg=reno64-wsj

While he lived, the schoolmaster’s son Franz Schubert made no great splash in the world. Intimates called him Schwammerl, or Mushroom, supposedly because he was small and round. His occasional travels never took him more than 200 miles from his native Vienna. Before his death, much of his music was played only at private gatherings or not at all. Yet the catalog of symphonies, piano sonatas, chamber music and sacred works he brought forth in his brief 31 years—four years fewer than Mozart’s, 26 fewer than Beethoven’s—places him well and truly in the company of the immortals. Arguably most impressive of all is his legacy of song, inexhaustible in its Shakespearean variety, upward of 700 items, each, to the mind of Graham Johnson, “a law unto itself.”

Within that phrase lies the raison d’être of Mr. Johnson’s three-volume, 2,800-page study “Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs,” an encyclopedia in all but name, informed as much by practical musicianship as by musicology and academic research. Organized alphabetically, the volumes offer an entry for each song, with full German text and Richard Wigmore’s sturdy English translation; a biography for of each of Schubert’s 120-plus poets; portraits of the composer’s Tolstoyan circle of friends and associates; and some three dozen monographs on general topics, ranging from accompaniment, chronology and dedicatees to pedaling, publishers, tonality and transposition. There is also a full complement of erudite appendices, among them “A Schubert Song Calendar,” placing the songs against a timeline of Schubert’s life. The wealth of illustrations range from the familiar to the rarest of the rare.

While Mr. Johnson’s judgments in contentious matters strike balances worthy of Solomon, his voice is consistently personal, energetic and full of surprises. Here is a man who can effect a seamless segue from Rimbaud the symbolist poet to Rambo the action hero, drop an apt quote from Woody Allen, and grant the genius of Goethe without glossing over his longueurs. Mr. Johnson knows where to find a guitar arrangement of Schubert’s bleak song cycle “Winterreise,” as well as (more improbably still) a swing version of “Der Leiermann,” the sequence’s last and most disconsolate song. And he remembers, because he was there, the recording session when the perfectionist American baritone Thomas Hampson threw a music stand across the studio in a fit of self-criticism.

Acknowledging that his maximum opus required a small army of helping hands, Mr. Johnson writes: “None of us perhaps realized how much work was involved in preparing and proofing such a detailed encyclopaedia, especially when written by a travelling accompanist rather than a team of full-time scholars”—a traveling accompanist, be it said, who not only maintains a punishing concert schedule but also serves as senior professor of accompaniment at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

Well, no one will accuse Mr. Johnson of having rushed into print. The work now at hand crowns a project that he has been working on for the better part of three decades. In the beginning came the Hyperion Schubert Edition (1987-99), the first comprehensive survey of the songs ever recorded, with Mr. Johnson in charge throughout as casting and programming director, accompanist, and author of the uncommonly informative liner notes.

Lending the Schubert venture instant and much-needed credibility, the national treasure Janet Baker signed on for the inaugural release, an anthology of settings of Goethe and Schiller, the twin pillars of German classicism. The international galaxy of singers who gravitated to Hyperion in her wake, some 50 in all, included stars at their zenith (Thomas Allen, Elly Ameling, Arleen Auger, Lucia Popp, Margaret Price); new planets just then swimming into view (Ian Bostridge, Matthias Goerne, Simon Keenlyside, Christopher Maltman, Christine Schäfer); and the quartet of trailblazers with whom Mr. Johnson had founded the ensemble known as the Songmakers’ Almanac (Felicity Lott, Ann Murray, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Richard Jackson).

In its way, the note on Ms. Baker’s opening track, the first of Schubert’s three settings of “Der Jüngling am Bache,” was as prophetic as her program. The dulcet pastorale of a pensive youth by a brook—“in effect Schubert’s first song,” Mr. Johnson argues, though it was preceded by some unwieldy student exercises—prompted references to Mozart (Schubert’s idol), Salieri (Schubert’s teacher) and the 15-year-old composer’s purposeful departures from strophic form (varying the melody from stanza to stanza without losing sight of its primary contour). The implicit themes of influence, craftsmanship and invention would continue to reverberate throughout Mr. Johnson’s commentaries.

Continued in article

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


Writing Tutorials

The Close Reading of Poetry --- http://web.uvic.ca/~englblog/closereading/

H.P. Lovecraft Highlights the 20 “Types of Mistakes” Young Writers Make ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/h-p-lovecraft-highlights-the-20-types-of-mistakes-young-writers-make.html

"Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Catalog of Beautiful Untranslatable Words from Around the World," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, November 24, 2014 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/24/lost-in-translation-ella-frances-sanders/ 

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



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

November 25, 2014

November 29, 2014

December 1, 2014

December 3, 2014

December 4, 2014

December 5, 2014

December 6, 2014

December 9, 2014

December 10, 2014

December 11, 2014

December 12, 2014

December 136, 2014

 

 


How to Mislead With Statistics:  Over-Diagnosis and Over-Treatment
"The Case Against Early Cancer Detection," by Christie Aschwanden, Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog, November 24, 2014 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-case-against-early-cancer-detection/ 


Don't Laugh
Laughing gas studied as depression treatment -
--
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-12-gas-depression-treatment.html


How to beat jet lag, according to sleep scientists ---
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7275117/jet-lag-remedies


Medicine Effectiveness and Side Effects
PubMed Health - National Library of Medicine --- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/


NIAMS Kids Pages (arthritis health) --- http://www.niams.nih.gov/Health_Info/Kids/default.asp


A Google-Owned Company Invented A Spoon That Allows People With Tremors To Eat Without Spilling ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-invented-a-spoon-that-allows-people-with-tremors-to-eat-without-spilling-2014-11


A startup called Gyroscope wants to build you a personal website that’s automatically updated with your own data (such as health and workout data) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532881/your-online-journal-built-from-heartbeats-sleep-patterns-and-hikes/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141205
Jensen Comment
Our Littleton Regional Hospital provides a somewhat similar service for health data recording.




A Bit of Humor

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


Forwarded by Paula
A born salesman Ole, the smoothest-talking Norske in the Minnesota National Guard, got called up to active duty. Ole's first assignment was in a military induction center. Because he was a good talker, they assigned him the duty of advising new recruits about government benefits, especially the GI life insurance to which they were entitled.

The officer in charge soon noticed that Ole was getting a 99% sign-up rate for the more expensive supplemental form of GI insurance. This was remarkable because it cost these low-income recruits $30 per month for the higher coverage, compared to what the government was already providing at no charge.

The officer decided he'd sit in the back of the room at the next briefing and observe Ole's sales pitch. Ole stood up before the latest group of inductees and said, "If you haf da normal GI insurans an' yoo go to Afghanistan an' get yourself killed, da governmen' pays yer beneficiary $20,000.

If yoo take out da supplemental insurans vich cost you only t'irty dollars a mont, den da governmen' got ta pay yer beneficiary $200,000!"

"Now," Ole concluded, "Vich bunch you tink dey gonna send ta Afghanistan first?"

 




Humor Between November 1-30, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q4.htm#Humor113014

Humor Between October 1-31, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q4.htm#Humor103114

Humor Between September 1-30, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q3.htm#Humor093014

Humor Between August 1-31, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q3.htm#Humor083114

Humor Between July 1-31, 2014--- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q3.htm#Humor073114

Humor Between June 1-31, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q2.htm#Humor063014

Humor Between May 1-31, 2014, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q2.htm#Humor053114

Humor Between April 1-30, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q2.htm#Humor043014

Humor Between March 1-31, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q1.htm#Humor033114

Humor Between February 1-28, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q1.htm#Humor022814

Humor Between January 1-31, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q1.htm#Humor013114

Humor Between December 1-31, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q4.htm#Humor123113

Humor Between November 1-30, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q4.htm#Humor113013,

Humor Between October 1-31, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q4.htm#Humor103113

Humor Between September 1 and September 30, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q3.htm#Humor093013

Humor Between July 1 and August 31, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q3.htm#Humor083113

Humor Between June 1-30, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q2.htm#Humor063013

Humor Between May 1-31, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q2.htm#Humor053113

Humor Between April 1-30, 2013 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book13q2.htm#Humor043013

 




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