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
- Amazon does not usually carry inventories of used books but will sell
used copies that are shipped directly from vendors (like you or me) who have
one or more used copies on hand. The used-book vendor sets the price and
ships the book directly to the Amazon customer. Amazon does the billing and
sends the vendor the net price for the book plus shipping costs. Amazon
customers thereby do not have to take the risk of giving credit numbers out
to strangers. Amazon also guarantees satisfaction with the advertised
quality of the used book. Used books can be returned to Amazon for full
refunds. I assume that Amazon waits a reasonable length of time before
sending money to the used-book vendor.
- Infrequently the lowest used book price substantially exceeds the new
book price. Used-book sellers are anticipating that the limited supply of
new books will soon be exhausted and that the used copies will be in greater
demand. Sometimes the differential premium for a used book copy seems
absurd, but this is capitalism at its best. Buyer beware!
- Amazon does carry many new books in its own warehouses. I assume that it
buys the copies on hand but negotiates the new book price with the
publisher, because publishers in this instance like to retain control over
prices of their new books. Amazon also sells eBook versions of many books.
However, publishers negotiate prices of electronic digital versions as well.
Amazon may also carry consignment books that are still owned by the
publisher.
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
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
- She found that 10 per cent read at elementary
school level
- A majority of players' reading level was
between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year for
University of North Carolina
Continued in article
J
ensen 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.
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:
- Brian Grissler could be lying through his teeth.
- Brian Grissler may not have thoroughly investigated the ultimate
resolution of this bill by his staff.
- Steven Brill could be lying through his teeth.
- 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.
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?
-
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
-
Don't overlook the Discussion tab in Wikipedia. Here's
where some information is turned into knowledge by scholars.
-
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 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
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."
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
- Drag-and-drop: experimental block-based coding
for those with less-developed typing skills and on tablet devices (ages
8+).
- Typing: keyboard-based coding (ages 10+).
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
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
The Cult of Statistical Significance:
How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
How Accountics Scientists Should Change:
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review
I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accounting and Taxation News Sites ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for
free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM
(Educators)
http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.
Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for
accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting
education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial
accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing,
doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics)
research, publication, replication, and validity testing.
|
CPAS-L
(Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ (Closed
Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo (Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB
and the International Accounting
Standards Board on this financial
reporting blog from Financial Executives
International. The site, updated daily,
compiles regulatory news, rulings and
statements, comment letters on
standards, and hot topics from the Web’s
largest business and accounting
publications and organizations. Look for
continuing coverage of SOX requirements,
fair value reporting and the Alternative
Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such
as the subprime mortgage crisis,
international convergence, and rules for
tax return preparers. |
|
|
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker
[lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as
well as a practicing CPA)
I found another listserve
that is exceptional -
CalCPA maintains
http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/
and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.
There are several highly
capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and
the answers are often in depth.
Scott
Scott forwarded the following message from Jim
Counts
Yes you may mention info on
your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any
CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is
possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not
have access to the files and other items posted.
Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in
top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and
in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I
will get the request to join.
Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage
people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then
via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in
your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the
inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.
We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in
California.... ]
Please encourage your members
to join our listserve.
If any questions let me know.
Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk
|
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's
Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
All
my online pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu