Tidbits on February 26, 2015
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Pictures of the  The 2015 Hard Winter in New England
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Snow/Set07/SnowSet07.htm 

 

Tidbits on February 26, 2015
Bob Jensen

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

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


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


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

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

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

 




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

A Generous Act of Caring ---

Watch the Coen Brothers’ TV Commercials: Swiss Cigarettes, Gap Jeans, Taxes & Clean Coal ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/watch-the-coen-brothers-tv-commercials.html

Found footage shows the 1915 Chicago River ship disaster that killed 844 people ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/video-ss-eastland-disaster-ship-chicago-river-2015-2

This Video Of The Largest Breakage Of Ice From A Glacier Ever Filmed Is Absolutely Frightening ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/largest-ice-glacier-calving-filmed-2015-1
Read more: http://www.slate.com/articles/video/video/2015/02/ss_eastland_disaster_footage_lost_images_of_famous_chicago_shipwreck_found.html#ixzz3S194OW4T

What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke & Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/what-makes-us-human-chomsky-locke-marx.html

Busy as a Beaver ---
http://i.imgur.com/Y6MD1Hk.gifv


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

Sing Out! (folk music and political activism) --- http://singout.org/

Hear The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” With a Re-Discovered George Harrison Solo ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/here-comes-the-sun-with-a-re-discovered-george-harrison-solo.html

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

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

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

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


Photographs and Art

Unreal photos of New England buried in historic snow ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-new-england-buried-in-historic-snow-2015-2

22 Photos That Prove The Oscars Were Ridiculously Fun In The '70s ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/academy-awards-photos-1970s-2014-2?op=1#ixzz3STXFTd30
There are no miracle cures for aging and death prevention.

Urban Sketchers (artistic sketching) --- http://www.urbansketchers.org/

Check Out The Incredible Armored Trains Of World War I And World War II ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/armored-trains-of-world-wars-i-and-ii-2014-11?op=1#ixzz3STYcpOtL

NASA has released images of the other side of the Moon that we've never seen before ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-images-dark-side-moon-earth-lunar-reconnaissance-orbiter-2015-2
Apparently the man on the moon can hide anywhere

19 Stunning Pictures from the World Press Photo Contest ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/world-press-photos-of-the-year-2014-2015-2

19 award-winning pictures from the World Press photo contest ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/world-press-photos-of-the-year-2014-2015-2

.Yahoo News Photos of the Day on February 10, 2015 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/photos-of-the-day-february-10-2015-1423604342-slideshow/

28 Romantic photos of Michelle and Barack Obama ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/28-romantic-photos-of-michelle-and-barack-obama-2015-2

Birds of North America --- https://www.audubon.org/field-guide

Water Snow Frozen Niagara Falls It's so cold out that Niagara Falls has partially frozen over ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/images-of-frozen-niagara-falls-2015-2

Amazing Google Street View photos from Greenland ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/stunning-pictures-from-google-street-view-in-greenland-2015-2

Advertisements from Japan’s Golden Age of Art Deco ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/advertisements-from-japans-golden-age-of-art-deco.html

Laughing Squid (art history) --- http://laughingsquid.com/

There's a terrifying place called Snake Island that's home to thousands of the deadliest vipers on Earth ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/snake-island-home-to-golden-lancehead-vipers-2015-2

40 maps that explain the Roman Empire --- http://www.vox.com/2014/8/19/5942585/40-maps-that-explain-the-roman-empire

Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations --- http://medievalmap.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do

Typewriter Artist ---
 http://cp.mcafee.com/d/5fHCN8p4x8idEI9IIcFELL6XCQQmbEzChMVASzuXbX1EVhsjdFEInh7czxP1IKyrdCQ43hOwegovW_6zB5B5d7HTbFIELsyCNtYtvBHEShjlKejVkffGhBrwqrhdECXYyMCY-ehojd79KVI04mGTdIx_bVWF3QcEp50IGYu2mnaADvSrsvemfQJYhl3VX8ZrifCP9W6CpkDYglJj-ndEETKYr19prP4pj-9Ew48PBipJ4srQZLIw1ip2ocn

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

Read the Lost Sherlock Holmes Story That Was Discovered in a Scotland Attic in 2015 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/read-the-lost-sherlock-holmes-story-that-was-just-discovered-in-a-scotland-attic.html

Predict Which 21st Century Novels Will Enter the Literary Canon? And Which Overrated Ones Won’t? ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/predict-which-21st-century-novels-will-enter-the-literary-canon.html

7 Short Stories by Junot Díaz Free Online, In Text and Audio ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/seven-stories-from-junot-diaz-free-online-in-text-and-audio.html

Read 4,500 Unpublished Pages of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/05/read-4500-unpublished-pages-of-madame-bovary.html

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




Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on February 26, 2015
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2015/TidbitsQuotations022615.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




Number of Internet Users by Country --- http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/

Numbers of Computers Per Capita by Country --- http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Media/Personal-computers/Per-capita

The extent to which computers and the Internet can be freely accessed varies greatly by nation. For example, China has the most computers with the most Internet access but this access is severely controlled.


HTTP2 = HTTB/2 --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2

Everything You Need To Know About HTTP2 ---
http://readwrite.com/2015/02/18/http-update-http2-what-you-need-to-know

Microsoft is trying to lure Dropbox users to its cloud storage service by offering 100 GB of space for free ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-offering-100-gb-free-storage-to-dropbox-users-2015-2#ixzz3STY0u6kv


From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Search for the Latest Job Openings in any Discipline of Interest in Higher Education---
https://chroniclevitae.com/job_search/new?cid=VTECHNJOBSL1

Jensen Comment
When I search for "Accounting" and "Faculty & Research" today there are 256 jobs posted in the past 30 days. However, not all of these jobs seem property classified as both "Accounting" and "Faculty & Research." Also I know of some job openings for accounting professors that are not listed for major universities.

For persons seeking jobs as accounting faculty in the USA perhaps a better place to look might be the American Accounting Association Career Center ---
http://aaahq.org/Career-Center
Job seekers may also post their resumes at this center.

Since there are so many faculty vacancies in accountancy, job seekers with Ph.D. degrees from AACSB-accredited universities are advised to contact colleges and universities where they would most like to be employed.

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


Apple has finally admitted there's a big problem with old MacBook Pros ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-2011-macbook-pro-repair-program-faulty-graphics-cards-2015-2


From MIT's Technology Review
Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending February 21, 2015)
---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/535291/recommended-from-around-the-web-week-ending-february-21-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150220
Are you curious about the virtual sex robotics article? Blowup dolls are so antiquated.

187 Big Thinkers Answer the Question: What Do You Think About Machines That Think? ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/14ba1f48c399d77c


Map: The Most Common Job in Every State (changing times 1978-2014) --- 
 http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state

Jensen Comment
It's interesting to see how some professions declined since the 1970s. I guess word processing software and answering machines have taken their toll on secretaries.

Robotics are going to change careers even more in the future. I anticipate a time when covered lanes for drones and robot trucks will be developed in an effort to replace those parked delivery trucks blocking traffic on the streets. Farmers no longer will be in their tractors working in the fields. And students will be going one-on-one with robotic teachers.

Amazon now sells over 100,000 books that were written by computers.

Where will people find jobs?


Question
What will the new initiative by the New York Times to "offer courses" really bring to higher education?

Answer
It's only bringing its brand name and not its resources. The real purpose is to sell its brand name for desperately needed cash.

"The New York Times to Offer Courses as Part of New Education Effort," by Casey Fabris, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 19, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/the-new-york-times-to-offer-courses-as-part-of-new-education-effort/94351?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The New York Times is re-entering the world of education with a new effort called NYT EDUcation, the company announced on Wednesday, though officials revealed few details.

The Times is collaborating with the CIG Education Group, which helps create branded academic institutions like Sotheby’s Institute of Art, to develop the program. Michael Greenspon, general manager of news services and international for the Times, said the effort had come from the business side rather than the newsroom.

Journalists on the Times staff are busy with their day jobs and would not be required to participate, though he said he could see them offering guest lectures or particularly interested staff members becoming otherwise involved—as long as it did not conflict with their editorial duties.

The Times has tried and failed at such educational efforts before. Its Knowledge Network, an online-education program the newspaper started in 2007 in collaboration with Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and other colleges, was suspended in 2012.

NYT EDUcation differs from the Knowledge Network primarily in its business model. “The Knowledge Network relied primarily on the New York Times brand alone, and I think the combination of the New York Times brand with the educators and the practitioners that CIG brings just is a combination that we alone could not beat,” Mr. Greenspon said.

When the Times suspended the Knowledge Network, it wasn’t trying to get out of the education game completely, he said.

“We took a step back, we didn’t take a step out,” Mr. Greenspon said. “For us, it was really just trying to figure out what was the right way to get back in.”

Though the plan is to offer courses starting this fall, the development of the courses is still in its very early stages. Officials did not say what topics would be covered, who would be teaching them, or how much the courses would cost.

“All the options are on the table,” said Michael Chung, chief executive of CIG. Some courses could be online, others could meet face to face, or they could be hybrids, he added.

Jensen Comment
This begs the question of what the NYT will bring to the colleges and college courses. It would seem that mostly it's bringing a brand name that, in theory, is a stamp of quality. But how rigorous will be the tests of quality? Is the NYT really entering the accreditation business. I don't think so. Is the NYT trying to raise revenue from its brand. I think so.

The Washington Post went even further by buying the for-profit Kaplan University. We must ask what the name name "Washington Post" did for the profits of Kaplan University and vice versa. I don't think it was a whole lot since The Washington Post was going down the tubes until the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, bought The Washington Post and Kaplan University that now operate under a new name called Graham Holdings ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Holdings_Company#2013_sale_of_The_Washington_Post

Instead of bringing an image of quality of The Washington Post name Kaplan University dragged The Washington Post name down with legal battles over admission scams and poor academic quality of Kaplan University ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan_University#Criticisms

Question
What is the biggest deceit in the NYT re-emergence in higher education?

Answer
The biggest deceit is that the NYT is bringing resources to bear on higher education. It's quite the opposite. The NYT is trying to sell its brand name to higher education.

The fact of the matter is that the NYT has no spare resources to bring to anything.

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

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

This post was originally published on October 29,2014.

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

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

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

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

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

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


Liberty University --- http://www.liberty.edu/

"An Online Kingdom Come:  How Liberty U. became an unexpected model for the future of higher education," by Jack Stripling, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Liberty-U-Became-an/190247/?cid=wc

Maybe Jerry Falwell was right.

The late evangelist always figured that most people would dismiss anything that started in this little city, where he founded Liberty University.

"They think of my hometown as a rather primitive Blue Ridge Mountain village, a backwater on the James River," he wrote in his autobiography, Strength for the Journey.

More than four decades after Liberty’s founding, in 1971, few in higher education would count the Rev. Falwell among academe’s historic visionaries. But college leaders, grappling with how to position their institutions for the future, might want to take a closer look at the legacy of Mr. Falwell, who is often better remembered for his divisive reputation as a firebrand conservative.

The little experiment that Mr. Falwell started in his hometown is a pretty big deal now, and the residential campus here does not begin to tell the story. Liberty’s online program boasts nearly 65,000 students, more than any other nonprofit college in the United States, according to federal data. Only the University of Phoenix, the for-profit behemoth with an enrollment of 207,000, trumps Liberty.

At most colleges, the question about online education is no longer so much about whether it will play a role, but rather how big a role and how soon. Nearly three-quarters of academic leaders describe online education as crucial to their institutions’ long-term strategies, a recent national survey found. Yet the traditional classroom experience still dominates. Professors, concerned that face-to-face instruction is pedagogically imperative, can be particularly dubious about scaling up an educational operation to reach a mass audience online.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I doubt that every college trying to expand its ratio of online students to onsite students will achieve the success of Liberty University. Liberty is tied into a population of Christian families seeking a college culture of Christianity among students and faculty. The small town location does not hurt recruitment of onsite students as well where crime rates are lower than in most colleges located in larger cities. There are certain advantages to recruitment of faculty in small towns as well, faculty seeking shorter commutes and safer neighborhoods. Acreages may be more reasonably priced for living with a few horses. Of course, other faculty will prefer some of the life style advantages afforded by larger cities.

And certainly a large block of faculty will shy away from the religious and political culture of Liberty University. But not all small town colleges are religious and conservative. For example, nearly all the small colleges in Vermont are to the left of liberal. But the student recruiting base of liberal colleges is not as well defined as that of the recruiting base of Liberty University.

One problem with many small liberal arts colleges seeking to expand their online degree programs is that they may not have the undergraduate feeder programs into career. For example, I always look to see if a small liberal arts college has an accounting degree program. Since accounting faculty get paid more than most other faculty (aside from faculty in medical schools) many liberal arts colleges avoid having accounting degree programs.

Liberty currently has 45 degree programs (including certificate and associate degree alternatives)  ---
http://www.liberty.edu/academics/
I noticed that Liberty has both onsite and online accounting degree programs. Keep in mind that in most states an accounting graduate has to take at least one more year to satisfy the 150-hour requirement to sit for the CPA examination.  In also noticed that Liberty now has a masters (MS) program in accounting as well.

 


Wall Street's brightest minds reveal the most important charts in the world ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/bi-most-important-charts-in-the-world-2015-2?op=1#ixzz3SOBmAzjV


There are only 9 states in the US with little-to-no income tax
How do they pay their bills?
---
http://www.businessinsider.com/there-are-only-9-states-in-the-us-with-little-to-no-income-tax-2015-2

Jensen Comment
Property taxes are considered high in New Hampshire, but I think the property taxes were slightly higher in Texas. Property taxes valuations do not change very often in New Hampshire, whereas in Bexar County where I lived in Texas the valuations changed every year at a minimum. My valuations never went down in New Hampshire or Texas even when the values of my homes clearly declined. I just recently got a slight valuation downward adjustment in New Hampshire but the valuation is still much higher than what I could sell this home and land for in the dismal real estate market up in these mountains. NH does not in general re-value homes to the sales prices of recent transactions. This tends to frustrate buyers who bought their homes in arms length honest transactions and much less than property tax valuations. Our village tax assessor insists that when anybody buys property for less than the tax valuation amount it is, by definition, a "bahgain purchase."

Vermont taxes everything under the sun, but the loudest complaint I hear from Vermonters is about property taxes. Actually the property taxes are not any worse than those of New Hampshire, but New Hampshire does not tax everything else.  For example, NH has no regressive sales tax --- which is one of the reasons people in Vermont come to NH to shop for big ticket items like HDTVs and new sets of tires. New cars registered in Vermont must pay a sales tax whereas cars registered in NH have no sales tax no matter where they are purchased. This slightly helps car dealers in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts survive.

What I don't understand in the above article is the claim that Wyoming property owners pay a 9.5% property tax. That is a whopping rate relative to most states that have less than a 2%-5% property tax rate. Perhaps the base in in Wyoming is not truly the current fair value of the property.


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 20, 2015

A whistleblower’s horror story
Recent exposés of less than proprietary behavior in government and in business has led 
Rolling Stone Magazine  to call this era the age of the whistleblower. As Matt Taibbi writes, “whistleblowers are becoming to this decade what rock stars were to the Sixties — pop culture icons, global countercultural heroes.” But today’s whistleblowers tend to partake in little of the spoils and almost none of the glamour. In fact their lives are very often almost destroyed in the process.

Bob Jensen's threads on other whistleblower horror stories ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#WhistleBlowing


Nonparametric (Distribution-Free) Statistics --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonparametric_statistics

Nonparametric Regression --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonparametric_regression

Nonparametric regression is a form of regression analysis in which the predictor does not take a predetermined form but is constructed according to information derived from the data. Nonparametric regression requires larger sample sizes than regression based on parametric models because the data must supply the model structure as well as the model estimates.

From the Econometrics Beat Blog of David Gilles on February 19, 2015
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/02/applied-nonparametric-econometrics.html

Applied Nonparametric Econometrics

 
Recently, I received a copy of a new econometrics book, Applied Nonparametric Econometrics, by Daniel Henderson and Christopher Parmeter.

 
The title is pretty self-explanatory and, as you'd expect with any book published by CUP, this is a high-quality item.

 
The book's Introduction begins as follows:
"The goal of this book is to help bridge the gap between applied economists and theoretical econometricians/statisticians. The majority of empirical research in economics ignores the potential benefits of nonparametric methods and many theoretical nonparametric advances ignore the problems faced by practitioners. We do not believe that applied economists dismiss these methods because they do not like them.  We believe that they do not employ them because they do not understand how to use them or lack formal training on kernel smoothing."
The authors provide a very readable, but careful, treatment of the main topics in nonparamteric econometrics, and a feature of this book is the set of empirical examples. The book's website provides the data that are used (for replication purposes), as well as a number of routines in R. The latter provide useful additions to those that are available in the np package for R (Hayfield and Racine, 2008).

Jensen Comment
In general nonparametric analyses of data make fewer assumptions about model structures and error distributions. The hope is that the models will be more robust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robust_statistics

Robust statistics are statistics with good performance for data drawn from a wide range of probability distributions, especially for distributions that are not normal. Robust statistical methods have been developed for many common problems, such as estimating location, scale and regression parameters. One motivation is to produce statistical methods that are not unduly affected by outliers. Another motivation is to provide methods with good performance when there are small departures from parametric distributions. For example, robust methods work well for mixtures of two normal distributions with different standard-deviations, for example, one and three; under this model, non-robust methods like a t-test work badly.

Added Jensen Comment
To illustrate one of the possible sacrifices of of nonparametric analysis versus parametric analysis is to compare the information content of an ordinal scale versus ratio scales (with a common zero points) and interval scales (no common zero points). For example, 100 students in a class are commonly given ordinal-ranks A,B,C,D, or F. We can convert them to numerics that are still only ordinal such as 4,3,2,1, or 0. There are no outliers that identify best student in the class as long as multiple students receive A grades in a given course.

Ordinal scales are not usually conducive to parametric analyses with assumed distributions like the normal distribution. But there are nonparametric tests for ordinal scales.

Temperature is recorded in one of two common interval scales --- Celsius or Fahrenheit. These scales can identify outliers but they are not ratio scales because they do not have a common zero point. Parametric analyses can be conducted but care must be taken since the choice of a scale can affect the outcomes.

Weight and distance and many other things can be measured on ratio scales such as the Metric System. Ratio scales have a common zero point no matter what the units of measurement. This greatly increases the types of parametric alternatives for statistical analysis.

My point is that nonparametric analysis is more useful when the measurements are crude such with binary or ordinal scales. Parametric analyses add power to the analyses when the measurements are more refined to identify degrees of separation between points and degrees of exceptionalism (outliers).

Both forms of analysis can be misleading when applied to data derived from non-stationary processes. For example, the grade point averages derived from ordinal grades of students in 40 courses spread across four years of study can be misleading for students who are severely trending upward or downward. For example, a grade point average of 2.83 for a typical male student who was very immature when entering college can be very misleading when rotten grades the first two years are offset by outstanding grades in the last two years. Comparing this outcome with the 2.83 gpa student who started out with all top grades and then became very troubled with terrible grades the last two years suggests that the two students are similar when in fact they are very dissimilar in the nonstationarities of academics.

A very common way that analysts mislead is to apply parametric analyses to data measured in binary or ordinal scales. For example a regression least-squares regression analysis might be applied to models with dummy (binary) variables. Or least-squares regression might be conducted on Likert-scale Reponses of persons where respondents are only given five choices (1 for lowest versus five for highest) that are really only ordinal but assumed to be ratio scaled ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale

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


February 18, 2015 message from Joe Hoyle

Hi  Bob
I just wanted to let you know that I recently posted a new entry to my college teaching blog:  

Teaching -- Getting the Most from Your Students

This new entry (my 205th entry) is titled:   "Can Anyone Learn to Become a Great Teacher?"   It can be found at the following URL.   Please take a moment to read it.   
 

http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2015/02/can-anyone-learn-to-become-great-teacher.html

 
I hope that you are having an absolutely great semester.   We are having lots of cold and snow here in Richmond.

Joe

February 18, 2015 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Joe,

I think the first way to personally answer this question is to recall as many of your own teachers as possible K-12 and in college. In my case I think over half my teachers were not good in terms of subject matter knowledge or scholarship in general. A few of these, however, were inspirational.

The first thing you have to do is define what you mean by "great teacher" and "great educator." I did not have many teachers who were both scholars and inspirational. More importantly, I had a few great educators who took a personal interest in my motivation to learn and work.

At one of the colleges I attended the Department Chair was a terrible teacher and did not know accounting beyond basic bookkeeping. He most certainly was not a scholar in any sense of the word. However, Wayne had outstanding relationships with the local accounting firms and took pride in obtaining part-time employment for virtually every accounting major who wanted part-time work with an accounting firm while working on a degree. I worked part-time with Ernst &Ernst (now EY) before joining this office full-time after graduating.

Wayne also rode my butt mercilessly to pass the CPA exam before earning a bachelors degree. Later on when I was in the MBA program he gave me Principles of Accounting sections to teach to see if I liked being a teacher.

Was this lousy teacher inspirational. In his own way? You bet!
He got us into an accounting careers early on so we could decide for ourselves if we wanted to stick with accounting as a major. Some of his students became our best-known professors --- several became Presidents of the American Accounting Association.

As an assistant professor I observed another Department Chair who was not a great teacher but took personal interest in his students to a point where they were highly motivated. He was what I call a great educator. Many of his students became partners in the Big 8 or top executives in Fortune 500 companies.

Like a great coach he attracted top talent into his doctoral program but did not teach in that program --- guys like me (assistant coaches?) taught in that doctoral program. Some of those doctoral students became prolific authors in TAR and JAR and outstanding leaders in our Academy. Exhibit A is Bill Kenney recently admitted to the Accounting Hall of Fame.

I've had other teachers who were well-known scholars and were poor teachers and were not all that inspirational. They were poorly prepared for class and didn't take much interest in their students.

I've had some teachers who I would not call great teachers but they were most important in my education because they were so demanding. I got a B+ in intermediate accounting from a teacher named Kesselman who gave one A per decade. I worked harder for that B+ than I worked for all the A grades that let me graduate summa cum laude.

I think that B+ grade enabled me, more than anything else, to pass the CPA examination while I was still a senior in college.

My point Joe is that "great teachers" like "great coaches" can be defined in many ways. Some were great simply because they set such high standards that their students who met these standards were on their way. ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#Randy 

Some were great because they took personal interests in their students. Alice Nichols at Florida State University (when I was Chair of the Department) was not great in the classroom, but she spent 40+ extra hours one-on-one with her intermediate students to a point I considered her to be the best teacher in the College of Business. She was totally unselfish with her time and patient well beyond the limits most of us would have patience with students.

Finally can we make all teachers great teachers? Never!

Can we make some teachers great teachers? Maybe, but I don't know how to do it. The best we can do is to be tolerant of different types of pedagogy and not judge all teachers by their scholarship.

Can we make some teachers great educators? Most certainly, but don't ask me how to do it. One thing I've noticed about great educators is that they seem to have an above-normal need for back stroking. They are usually extroverted and become close with practitioners and parents as well as students.

I do think some poor teachers become great educators due to a determination to overcome their teaching and/or scholarly limitations. Some become tough as nails so that getting through their courses with a high grade is a fantastic accomplishment. Some take a personal interest in the giving of their time --- like Alice Nichols.

Keep the faith,
Bob

February 19, 2015 reply from Joe Hoyle

Hi Bob,

Sorry for the slow response. I’ve been suffering with double ear infections that have slowed me down. It is hard to teach students using the Socratic Method when you cannot hear what they are saying.

I think your response to my question is excellent. I think you can make the argument that no one person alone can be an absolutely great teacher because different students need different things. But, perhaps, a group of teachers together can make up a great department because they are each able to provide some essential aspect of greatness. Students need to be exposed to motivation, hard work, individual attention, the development of critical thinking skills, and a broad arena of topical coverage at a proper depth. Maybe that really is beyond any one person but a solid group of 4-7 professors can provide all those things. Kind of like a football team where the left tackle provides a different set of skills than does a middle linebacker. For a winning team, you don’t need a left tackle or a middle linebacker but you do need both. Of course, that means that schools have to be willing to recognize and reward people who provide different attributes to the group. You and I both know that is not always the case.

I do think historically that the question of great teaching has only been raised in kind of a hypothetical sense like “are there really mermaids?” I would think, over the next decade, that – unless the cost of college education begins to drop appreciably which doesn’t seem likely – the role of colleges as “educational institutions” is going to become more in question. There is just too much student debt and too many students who graduate with a questionable education. If that happens, eventually someone is going to point a finger at the person standing in front of the classroom and ask the question of the Board of Trustees: “If you are really an educational institution as you claim and you charge $200,000 for an education, why are you allowing this person to be one of your teachers?” If you go to a very expensive restaurant and get a bad meal, you will blame the chef and ask the owner why that chef is allowed to do the cooking.

But, evolution is always interesting.

Joe

"How Great Coaches Ask, Listen, and Empathize," by Ed Batista, Harvard Business Review Blog, February 18, 2015 --- Click Here
https://hbr.org/2015/02/how-great-coaches-ask-listen-and-empathize?utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date&cm_lm=rjensen%40trinity.edu&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&referral=00563&cm_ven=Spop-Email&cm_ite=DailyAlert-021915+%281%29

. . .

Coaching is about connecting with people, inspiring them to do their best, and helping them to grow. It’s also about challenging people to come up with the answers they require on their own. Coaching is far from an exact science, and all leaders have to develop their own style, but we can break down the process into practices that any manager will need to explore and understand. Here are the three most important:

Ask

Coaching begins by creating space to be filled by the employee, and typically you start this process by asking an open-ended question. After some initial small talk with my clients and students, I usually signal the beginning of our coaching conversation by asking, “So, where would you like to start?” The key is to establish receptivity to whatever the other person needs to discuss, and to avoid presumptions that unnecessarily limit the conversation. As a manager you may well want to set some limits to the conversation (“I’m not prepared to talk about the budget today.”) or at least ensure that the agenda reflects your needs (“I’d like to discuss last week’s meeting, in addition to what’s on your list.”), but it’s important to do only as much of this as necessary and to leave room for your employee to raise concerns and issues that are important to them. It’s all too easy for leaders to inadvertantly send signals that prevent employees from raising issues, so make it clear that their agenda matters.

In his book Helping, former MIT professor Edgar Schein identifies different modes of inquiry that we employ when we’re offering help, and they map particularly well to coaching conversations. The initial process of information gathering I described above is what Schein calls “pure inquiry.” The next step is “diagnostic inquiry,” which consists of focusing the other person’s attention on specific aspects of their story, such as feelings and reactions, underlying causes or motives, or actions taken or contemplated. (“You seem frustrated with Chris. How’s that relationship going?” or “It sounds like there’s been some tension on your team. What do you think is happening?” or “That’s an ambitious goal for that project. How are you planning to get there?”)

The next step in the process is what Schein somewhat confusingly calls “confrontational inquiry”. He doesn’t mean that we literally confront the person, but, rather, that we challenge aspects of their story by introducing new ideas and hypotheses, substituting our understanding of the situation for the other person’s. (“You’ve been talking about Chris’s shortcomings. How might you be contributing to the problem?” or “I understand that your team’s been under a lot of stress. How has turnover affected their ability to collaborate?” or “That’s an exciting plan, but it has a lot of moving parts. What happens if you’re behind schedule?”)

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Sometimes coaches seem mean when they care the most
Sometimes teachers are more demanding when they care the most. Do the best players and the best scholars and the best workers come from Lake Wobegon where coaches and teachers coddle everybody along?
I don't think so. Empathy is one thing. Giving every competitor the same blue ribbon is probably dysfunctional after the age of 10.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon

Grade inflation in both K-12 schools and colleges is a disaster these days when an A- grade is the median grade more often than not for the wrong reasons (so teachers can get higher evaluations from students) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor

Randy Pausch said it very well when he wrote about his tough old football coach, Coach Graham, in Chapter Seven of The Last Lecture (Hyperion Books, 2008, IABN 978-1-4013-2325-7).

. . . one of the assistant coaches came over to reassure me. "Coach Graham rode you pretty hard , didn't he?" he said.

I could barely muster a "yeah."

"That's a good thing," the assistant told me. "When you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you."

. . .

There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give;  it's something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it:  You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and your just keep repeating the process.

When Coach Graham first got hold of me, I was this wimpy kid with no skills, no physical strength, and no conditioning. But he made me realize that if I work hard enough, there will be things I can do tomorrow that I can't do today. Even now, having just turned forty-seven, I can give you a three point stance that any NFL lineman would be proud of.

I realize that, these days, a guy like Coach Graham might get thrown out of a youth sports league. He'd be too tough. Parents would complain.

I remember one game when our team was playing terribly. At halftime, in our rush for water, we almost knocked over the water bucket. Coach Graham was livid:  "Jeez! That's the most I've seen you boys move since this game started!" We were eleven years old, just standing there, afraid he'd pick us up one by one and break us with his bare hands. "Water?" he barked. "You boys want water?" He lifted the bucket and dumped all the water on the ground.

. . .

It saddens me that many kids today are so coddled. I think back to how I felt during that halftime rant. Yes, I was thirsty. But more than that, I felt humiliated. We had all let down Coach Graham, and he let us know it in a way we'd never forget. He was right.

. . .

I haven't seen Coach Graham since I was a teen, but he just keeps showing up in my head, forcing me to work harder whenever I feel like quitting, forcing me to be better. He gave me a feedback loop for life.

Bob Jensen's football coach would've viewed Coach Graham as a wimp. My Algona High School coach's name was "The" Coach Tony Gazowski. Tony grew up Polish and tough in the shadows of the steel mills in Pittsburgh. He became an "All-Big-Ten" defensive end at the University of Iowa and never did catch on that later in life he was a football coach and not a Marine drill instructor (he was also a former Marine sergeant). Coach Gazowski did for me what Coach Graham did for Randy, but Coach Gazowski sometimes went a bit too far in urging us to play a bit rougher than the rules allowed if we thought we could get away with it. This might be a good thing to do on a wartime battlefield, but it's not something I recommend in athletics and most other aspects of life.

You can read more about Randy and find the link to the video of his "Last Lecture" and commentaries that followed at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2008/tidbits080415.htm

 


Subprime Lending --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_lending

In finance, subprime lending (also referred to as near-prime, non-prime, and second-chance lending) means making loans to people who may have difficulty maintaining the repayment schedule, sometimes reflecting setbacks such as unemployment, divorce, medical emergencies, etc.[1] Historically, subprime borrowers were defined as having a FICO scores below 640, although "this has varied over time and circumstances."[2]

These loans are characterized by higher interest rates, poor quality collateral, and less favorable terms in order to compensate for higher credit risk.[3] Many subprime loans were packaged into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and ultimately defaulted, contributing to the financial crisis of 2007–2008.[4]

Proponents of subprime lending maintain that the practice extends credit to people who would otherwise not have access to the credit market. Professor Harvey S. Rosen of Princeton University explained, "The main thing that innovations in the mortgage market have done over the past 30 years is to let in the excluded: the young, the discriminated-against, the people without a lot of money in the bank to use for a down payment."

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 19, 2015

The proportion of loans awarded to subprime borrowers has risen to its highest level since the beginning of the financial crisis. As the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Zibel and Annamaria Andriotis report, the rise of a new breed of company extending credit to applicants with relatively low credit scores and the growth in car financing has fuelled the boom in subprime loans. These finance firms targeting subprime borrowers are often backed by Silicon Valley cash and subject to less scrutiny than conventional banks.

Almost four of every 10 loans for autos, credit cards and personal borrowing in the U.S. went to subprime customers during the first 11 months of 2014, according to data compiled by Equifax . That amounted to more than 50 million consumer loans and cards totaling more than $189 billion, the highest levels since 2007, when subprime loans represented 41% of consumer lending outside of home mortgages. Equifax defines subprime borrowers as those with a credit score below 640 on a scale that tops out at 850.

Lenders’ interest in customers hardest hit by the financial crisis reflects both the relative health of the U.S. economy and firms’ desires to take more risks at a time when ultralow interest rates are depressing profits. It also shows Americans are willing to take on more debt: a New York Fed report released Tuesday that showed total household debt increased $306 billion, or 2.7%, in the fourth quarter of 2014 from the year-ago period, to the highest level since the third quarter of 2010.

Jensen Comment

There's generally a huge difference with respect to subprime loans on assets that can  increase or decrease in value (such as houses and education) versus assets that will only go down in value (e.g., cars and trucks). The real estate bubble that burst in 2007 led borrowers to take out mortgages before 2007 that they had zero hope if repaying before subprime rates jumped up to market rates. The house flipping strategy was based on an assumption by home buyers that their home values would soon jump in value so they could sell it for a profit before the subprime mortgage rate jumped up.

Subprime borrowers on auto loans are not buying those automobiles for purposes of flipping gains because those automobiles will increase in value. Automobiles do not increase in value unless they've reached the status of being antiques. Generally such buyers either assume that they will have sufficient income to eventually pay the higher interest rates or that they will trade in the vehicle for a new vehicle with another subprime loan. However, generally frequent trading in for new vehicles does not pay except for commercial users that put lots and lots of miles on a vehicle every year.

Subprime borrowers on credit cards are sometimes desperate for cash. They borrow at subprime rates thinking they will change their spending habits so they can draw down credit card debt before the credit card rates jump to higher levels. Some succeed, but the majority fail to change their spending habits. Some take on partners (e.g., girl friends or husbands) hoping that the partnership will draw down old credit card debts. Sometimes this works, but often the new partners refuse to take on old debts of partners. This leads to a lot of dissolved partnerships. For example, divorces are caused more by money problems than problems in bed.

Student loans are generally subprime loans with rates that kick up after students graduate. These students assume that the added training or education will sufficiently increase their incomes so that they can afford the higher rates that kick in. However, when those hoped for increases in income do not kick in (beyond the income that would be earned without a diploma) then graduates often default on their loans. For example, college majors that graduate and are still waiting on tables and flipping burgers are highly likely to default or live with their parents because almost everything they earn goes toward paying back their student loans.

President Obama is now forgiving tens of millions of those student loans for the most unfortunate borrowers. However, the majority of graduates who default will not have their loans automatically forgiven by the President. A Republican Congress is less likely than a Democratic Congress to expand the student loan forgiveness program.


Two Sides of the Debate over Whether Concealed Carry is a Deterrent to Rape or Getting Away With Rape

"A Q&A With the Nevada Lawmaker Who Says Guns Will Help Prevent Campus Rape," by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Q-A-With-the-Nevada-Lawmaker/190235/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

"Concealed Handguns Mainly Miss the Mark as an Answer to Campus Rape," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Concealed-Handguns-Mainly-Miss/190233/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
First I might add that one of the most difficult things to analyze is whether a thing deters a crime.

  1. Do audits or beefed up internal controls in general deter fraud due to increased, albeit unknown, probabilities of getting caught?
  2. Do household guns deter home invasions when residents are at home?
  3. Do guns on campus or public places in general  reduce the likelihood of shootings by bad guys?
  4. Do concealed weapons deter violent assaults (including rapes)?
  5. Does capital punishment deter murders?

The problem is that we can never know how many crimes were deterred that never took place. We can analyze trends before and after prevention measures are put into place (such as beefed up internal controls or expanded rights to carry concealed weapons) but trends can be misleading for processes that are not stationary.

For example, some states expanded the rights of homeowners to have household guns and made self defense a stronger justification for shooting home invader. Some analysts might point to the fact that home invasions actually increased after liberalization of household gun laws and self-defense justifications. But this analysis is misleading because we will never know what the home invasion statistics might have been without changes in the law. We do know that the use of drugs is on the rise, and many home invasions are caused by dangerous addicts in need or stealing prescription drugs, cash, or items that can be sold for cash needed to buy drugs.

The same problem arises with analysis of whether concealed carry permits deter violent assaults. We do know that there's an increase in risk of accidents and of exacerbating damages. A rapist that is wounded by a gunshot might wrestle the gun away and shoot the victim in the head. Accidents also happen. A woman recently shot herself dead while adjusting her bra holster ---
http://perezhilton.com/2015-02-19-woman-dies-accidentally-shoots-self-in-head-bra-holster#.VOcXKS5kZLc

There are tragic cases where children find a household gun and shoot themselves or somebody else. A two-year old child recently extracted a pistol from his mother's purse in an Idaho Wal-Mart and killed his mother ---
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/toddler-accidentally-shoots-woman-in-idaho-walmart-9950847.html

Virtually every deterrent to crime comes at a costs. Increased auditing and tightening of internal controls can be costly. Guns are dangerous on the body and in the home.

Personally, I think women with gun permits should be allowed to carry concealed guns when in dangerous situations such as jogging in the woods.. A friend of mine has a gun that looks exactly like a fountain pen. It only has one bullet, but I would like to see that bullet end up in the head of a violent criminal about to commit a rape. Sure there are dangers in carrying such a pocket weapon, and the pen gun, like a derringer, is almost useless when trying to stop a berserk gunman in a mall. But when the bad guys are close and personal I think victims need more tools to take out the bad guys.

I'm not a gun nut. I do have a couple in the cottage that have never been fired. That's probably not smart since guns should be cleaned and maintained better than that. Mine may have spider webs or lady bug nests in the barrels. We get a lot of lady bugs in these mountains, although there are no bugs in the winter when most days are not getting up to 0F these days. I'm also a little weary of having to blow snow every day. It's turning into one of our hardest winters since Erika and I retired in these mountains. One thing about winter is that a big pot of soup on the stove just tastes better when it's below zero.


"Lessons from Teaching with Games," by Anastasia Salter, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 19, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/lessons-from-teaching-with-games/59247?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment (including gamification)  ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment


In general student loans are subprime loans

Question
How do you repo a college education?

The nation’s student-loan balance climbed by $31 billion last quarter to $1.16 trillion. That makes it the largest source of debt after mortgages, which gained $39 billion to $8.2 trillion in the fourth quarter. Auto-loan debt increased by $21 billion to $955 billion.
"Student-Loan Delinquencies Rise in U.S.," by Jeanna Smialek, Bloomberg News, February 17, 2015 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/student-loan-delinquencies-rise-in-u-s-as-education-debt-swells?cmpid=BBD021715&alcmpid=

(Bloomberg) -- Student-loan delinquencies increased at the end of 2014, a troubling sign that Americans are failing to keep up with payments as education debt climbs, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Data from the New York Fed released Tuesday showed 11.3 percent of student loans were delinquent in the final three months of 2014, up from 11.1 percent in the prior quarter. The share of auto loans at least 90 days overdue also rose, climbing to 3.5 percent from 3.1 percent the prior period, even as fewer credit card and mortgage loan payments were late.

“Although we’ve seen an overall improvement in delinquency rates since the Great Recession, the increasing trend in student-loan balances and delinquencies is concerning,” Donghoon Lee, research officer at the New York Fed, said in an e-mailed statement. “Student-loan delinquencies and repayment problems appear to be reducing borrowers’ ability to form their own households.”

The nation’s student-loan balance climbed by $31 billion last quarter to $1.16 trillion. That makes it the largest source of debt after mortgages, which gained $39 billion to $8.2 trillion in the fourth quarter. Auto-loan debt increased by $21 billion to $955 billion.

Education loan balances have skyrocketed over the past decade. In the first quarter of 2005, outstanding student debt stood at $363 billion -- about a third of the current level, based on a 2013 New York Fed report.

Delinquency rates for student loans probably understate the actual situation, according to today’s report. About half of the student loans are in deferment, in grace periods or in forbearance, temporarily removing them from the repayment cycle.

Education debt delinquency levels have come down since 2013, when the rate reached 11.8 percent, yet remain elevated from around 6 percent a decade ago, according to the New York Fed. Student loans are the type of debt most likely to be past-due, having surpassed credit-card delinquency rates in 2012.

Jensen Comment
When car and truck owners default a repo guy shows up in the dead of night and takes the vehicle to the bank. How do you repo a college education?


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 20, 2015

The Obama administration is taking a new approach to addressing rising U.S deficits. The White House is advocating an emphasis on boosting the American workforce and its productivity, to balance out the impending departure of baby boomers retiring from the ranks of the working population.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos reports, President Barack Obama ’s economic advisers now say the focus should be on the next surge of retirees that will strain the social safety net for the next 20 years, rather than merely seek to balance the budget and sharply reduce the debt. Shaun Donovan, the president’s budget chief, said making changes to entitlement programs like Social Security only get harder “if we don’t have more workers per retiree.” When it comes to the national debt, he added, “what’s acceptable in the next 20 years is different from what might be acceptable in the long term.”

The argument, amplified in Mr. Obama’s annual economic report to Congress on Thursday, is aimed at blunting criticism that the White House has backed away from unpopular entitlement curbs that both parties have said will be needed to cut deficits. This is needed as a wave of retiring workers demand more federal spending while shrinking the tax rolls.

Jensen Comment
The Whitehouse proposal for more productivity per worker to support the burgeoning bubble of retired and disabled folks in the USA is little better than wishing on a cloud without making the hard political decisions needed to anticipate the entitlement crises down the road. The real crisis is not Social Security payments. The real crises are Medicare and Medicaid since, under present laws, it's impossible to spend our way out of those entitlements with inflation. The prices of doctors, hospitals, and medicines go up up and away as the purchasing power declines years down the road. Medicare and Medicaid will break the U.S. Treasury unless something is done to curtail benefits and/or make recipients pay for a greater share of their medical bills.

Entitlements are two-thirds of the federal budget. Entitlement spending has grown 100-fold over the past 50 years. Half of all American households now rely on government handouts. When we hear statistics like that, most of us shake our heads and mutter some sort of expletive. That’s because nobody thinks they’re the problem. Nobody ever wants to think they’re the problem. But that’s not the truth. The truth is, as long as we continue to think of the rising entitlement culture in America as someone else’s problem, someone else’s fault, we’ll never truly understand it and we’ll have absolutely zero chance...
Steve Tobak ---
http://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/2013/02/07/truth-behind-our-entitlement-culture/?intcmp=sem_outloud

"CEOs want to raise the retirement age to 70," by Suzy Khimm, The Washington Post, January 18, 2013 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/18/ceos-want-to-raise-the-retirement-age-to-70/

A lot of CEOs have gotten on the deficit-reduction bandwagon, but they’ve often been loath to push for specific proposals, endorsing instead an overall “framework” for fiscal consolidation that’s big and bipartisan.

That’s now starting to change: A group of the country’s leading CEOs from the Business Roundtable has put out an entitlement reform plan that proposes to raise the eligibility age for both Social Security and Medicare to 70.

Leading Republicans have long rallied to raise the eligibility age for Social Security to 70, but the Business Roundtable’s recommendations for Medicare go significantly further than the GOP consensus: During the fiscal cliff negotiations, for instance, Boehner proposed raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 years, while the CEOs want to push it three years higher.

The group wants a slew of other changes as well: higher premiums for wealthy beneficiaries, chained CPI and more private competition for Medicare and private retirement programs.

“Even though most of these modernization initiatives would be phased in gradually, the immediate benefits would be enormous. First, they would put Medicare and Social Security on the sound financial footing needed to provide a sustainable retirement safety net. This would represent a major step forward in reducing the growth of government spending,” Gary Loveman, CEO of Caesars Entertainment Corp. and Business Roundtable participant, wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

The Business Roundtable believes its proposals would save the government $300 billion in Medicare spending and extend Social Security’s solvency for 75 years. But the changes would also come with costs to others as well. By eliminating Medicare coverage for those between 65 and 70 years old, the plan would send more individuals into Medicaid and the newly created health-insurance exchanges, as not everyone would continue to work or be covered by their employers’ insurance, explains Tricia Neuman, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

That would drive up health-care premiums overall in the exchanges, as there would be older, sicker people getting coverage, says Neuman. In states that don’t elect to participate in the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, lower-income people in their mid- to late-60s could also become uninsured, particularly those who are in physically demanding jobs they might not be able to continue until they’re 70. Overall, raising the eligibility age “would reduce federal spending but would do so in a way that shifts costs to other payers and raises overall health care costs,” says Neuman, who’s examined the impact of raising the age to 67.

On the flip side, proponents of the changes argue that raising the retirement age makes sense given the rise in life expectancy, and that sacrifices are necessary to ensure the solvency of entitlement programs. “What has happened to Social Security over years is because people are living much more longer, it’s moved more toward a middle-aged retirement system,” says Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

Continued in article

World Life Expectancy Map --- http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/index.php

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


EMC Corporation (Data Strorage, Security and mining) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_Corporation

New IBM Business Model
"In another brilliant move, IBM just budgeted $1 billion to take down EMC," Julie Bort, Business Insider, February 17, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-budgets-1-billion-to-take-down-emc-2015-2

On Tuesday, IBM announced that it is investing $1 billion over the next five years in a hot new area of enterprise tech called "software-defined storage."

This is important and interesting for a whole bunch of reasons — and shows that CEO Ginni Rometty has her competitive game on.

She's got a plan to move her massive 400,000-ish strong workforce from shrinking businesses and towards growth areas, even though it's painful, with a number of quiet layoffs involved.

To understand why this new $1 billion investment is cool, you need to know two things:

  1. "Software-defined" is a huge trend in the $3 trillion enterprise technology market.
  2. This is the second big move that IBM has made that puts it on a collision course with storage giant EMC, and the $17 billion storage market that it dominates with about 30% market share, according to IDC as reported by Forbes.

Software is eating the enterprise data center

"Software-defined" is a term that refers to taking expensive hardware, removing the all the fancy features from it that makes it expensive and putting those fancy features into software apps that run on special computers. You still need the hardware, but you need less of it, less expensive varieties and your data center becomes faster, more efficient, and less expensive — important for today's cloud computing needs.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is already happening, forcing market leader Cisco to respond.

Continued in article

 


How to Mislead With Statistics

Question
Where are 2,214 (a non-random sample) of MLA languages (including English) graduates analyzed who earned Ph.D.s from 1996-2011?
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/18/new-mla-analysis-sheds-light-much-discussed-humanities-job-market

Answer
Those 2,214 analyzed found jobs in many places, but nearly half report that they are now tenured or still in tenure tracks in the Academy. The 2,214 respondents comprise a "sample" that, according to MLA, "isn’t big enough to be representative, but that it’s at least suggestive of where Ph.D.s are working." This begs the question of how misleading the "sample" is in terms of conclusions regarding employment. No mention is made regarding how many Ph.D. degrees were awarded in languages (including English) in the 1996-2011 years. All we're told is that the "sample" of 2,214 is too small to be representative. Presumably it is also not a random sample for reasons that I suggest below.

The study does reveal that a miniscule proportion of respondents analyzed are unemployed but are actively seeking employment. But by going way back to prosperous 1996-2006 decade for universities the population is biased toward graduates having employment, especially tenure-track employment. The world economy collapsed in 2007. The job outlook picture may be quite different for the 2007-2011 graduates still seeking employment relative to the 1996-2006 graduates who lucked out to graduate in relatively good times for tenure track jobs.

The study seemingly excludes graduates who voluntarily dropped completely out of the job market, e.g., to become a full-time mom or a full-time dad. It's not clear but it would appear that those voluntarily "unemployed" graduates are completely outside the population that was sampled or were excluded from the set of 2,214 responses analyzed.

The study also does not reveal non-response rates. Presumably the 2,214 subjects are only those that responded appropriately and perhaps were at a minimum employed or seeking employment. The study also did not reveal anything about respondents working totally outside their fields such as those now running day care centers or working as flight attendants, salespersons, hotel concierges, etc.

I'm also dubious of those who declare themselves as self-employed.
For example, suppose a newly-minted Ph.D. is 100% financially supported by a partner or parents while trying to produce an incomplete novel over the past five years. Is that writer "self-employed" having not yet sold a single manuscript? Is an artist "self-employed" who has never sold more than $10,000 in artwork over the past five years?

The study study fails to distinguish full-time employment versus part-time employment.
What proportion of the non-tenure track jobs are part-time?
What proportion of the "self-employed" really only work part time?

The bottom line is that this study is probably misleading in terms of painting a rosier picture of the language Ph.D. job market that is actually the case.

For example, at a new job searching service of the Chronicle of Higher Education there are only 18 jobs posted today for "Faculty&Research" under the category "Modern Languages" posted in the last 30 days. For "Accounting" there are 256 postings ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/job_search/new?cid=VTECHNJOBSL1


"Physics in finance: Trading at the speed of light," by Mark Buchanan, Nature, February 11, 2015 ---
http://www.nature.com/news/physics-in-finance-trading-at-the-speed-of-light-1.16872

Financial traders are in a race to make transactions ever faster. In today's high-tech exchanges, firms can execute more than 100,000 trades in a second for a single customer. This summer, London and New York's financial centres will become able to communicate 2.6 milliseconds (about 10%) faster after the opening of a transatlantic fibre-optic line dubbed the Hibernia Express, costing US$300 million. As technology advances, trading speed is increasingly limited only by fundamental physics, and the ultimate barrier — the speed of light.

Through glass optical fibres, information travels at two-thirds of the speed of light in a vacuum (300,000 kilometres per second). To go faster, data must travel through the air. The corridors between Chicago and New York and New Jersey, and between London and Frankfurt, are bristling with efficient microwave and millimetre-wave links. An even more efficient network of lasers — based on military technology for in-flight signalling between aeroplanes — has been installed to link the New York and New Jersey as well as the London and Frankfurt financial exchanges1.

Next up may be hollow-core fibre cables, through which light would travel in a tiny air gap at light speed. Trading firms speculate about a fleet of balloons or uncrewed solar-powered drones carrying signal repeaters to support a network of links across the oceans. In a decade or so, firms may even communicate using neutrinos, which travel at the speed of light and can go through obstacles, including Earth. It all spells big profits for high-tech trading firms, which now account for around 50% of equity trading in the United States and in Europe.

But some firms claim that uneven access to extreme speed erodes trading fairness. And system-wide failures occur when algorithms interact in unforeseen ways — such as in the 'flash crash' of 6 May 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by the largest daily amount ever within minutes (see 'Flash crash'). No one knows when a similar event might spill over into global markets.

Avoiding these risks will require intensive research on how markets work — as complex ecologies of interacting algorithms — and how countermeasures could avert disasters. Getting ahead

High-frequency trading relies on fast computers, algorithms for deciding what and when to buy or sell, and live feeds of financial data from exchanges. Every microsecond of advantage counts. Faster data links between exchanges minimize the time it takes to make a trade; firms fight over whose computer can be placed closest; traders jockey to sit closer to the pipe. It all costs money — renting fast links costs around $10,000 per month.

Communications technology is a limiting factor. Fibre-optic cables carry the most data, but do not give the speed required. The fastest links carry information over a geodesic arc — the shortest path on Earth's surface between two points. So line-of-sight microwaves are a better option; millimetre waves and lasers are better yet, because they have higher data densities.

Open-air communications systems are prone to weather disruption. Anova Technologies, a network provider for trading firms headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, has augmented its New York laser network with millimetre waves to overcome rain, fog and snow. Adaptive alignment mechanisms keep the links working even if winds make towers twist by up to 3°. But microwaves and lasers cannot be used over long distances without repeaters. They attenuate quickly in the atmosphere and do not curve around Earth.

Continued in article

History of High Frequency Trading ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/02/history-of-high-frequency-trading/

The big investors cheating the small investors
High Frequency Trading and Its Insider Trading Frauds (not exactly insider trading but, yeah, insider trading)
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading

"Is High-Frequency Trading Insider Trading?" by Matthew Philips, Bloomberg Businessweek, April 4, 2014 ---
 http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-04/is-high-frequency-trading-insider-trading?campaign_id=DN040414
Watch the Video

Ever since Michael Lewis went on 60 Minutes Sunday night to accuse high-frequency traders of rigging the stock market, it has been hard to avoid the debate over HFT’s merits and evils. Some of it’s been useful; most has been a lot of angry yelling. The peak of the frenzy came on Tuesday afternoon in a heated segment on CNBC with IEX’s Brad Katsuyama and BATS Chief Executive Officer William O’Brien.

To me, this debate is just circling the ultimate question: Should high-frequency trading be considered insider trading?

Classically defined, insider trading means having access to material, non-public information before it reaches the rest of the market; it’s like getting a heads-up about a merger before it’s announced, or maybe a phone call from a Goldman Sachs (GS) board member saying that Warren Buffett is about to invest $5 billion in the bank. Over the past few years, federal prosecutors have collected a number of big insider-trading convictions of people who got early word about a piece of highly valuable information and made a lot of money as a result.

To its most vehement critics, high-frequency trading is not terribly dissimilar. The most common accusation is that these traders get better information faster than the rest of the market. They do this through three primary methods:

First, they put computer servers next to those of the exchanges, cutting down the time it takes for an order to travel from their computers to the exchanges’ electronic matching engines. Second, they use faster pathways—fiber-optic cables, microwave towers, and yes, even laser beams—to trade more quickly between far-flung markets such as Chicago and New York.

Last, they pay exchanges for proprietary data feeds. This is where it gets really complicated. These proprietary feeds are different than the public, consolidated data feed maintained by the public exchanges, called the securities information processor, or the SIP. Though it’s now a piece of software, the public feed is the modern-day equivalent of the ticker tape that provided stock price data to brokers, traders, and media outlets. It’s what feeds the stock quotes crawling along the bottom of the screen on CNBC (CMCSA) Bloomberg TV, or on financial websites; when the public feed broke in August, trading on NASDAQ stopped for 3 hours.

While the purpose of the public feed is to ensure that everyone gets the same price information at the same time, the playing field isn’t as level as it would seem since exchanges sell proprietary feeds. And not just to HFT firms. Lots of different types of investors buy proprietary market data from exchanges. By law, prices must be entered into the SIP and the proprietary feeds at the same time, but once the data leaves the exchanges, the proprietary systems often process and transmit the information faster. These feeds arrive sooner and contain more robust information—including all prices being offered, not just the best ones.

From 2006 to 2012, Nasdaq’s proprietary market data revenue more than doubled, to $150 million. The money it earns from the public feed fell 21 percent over roughly the same period. So while Nasdaq used to earn more money from its public feed, it now makes more from proprietary ones. Especially after the August outage, this has stirred a lot of complaints from market players that the SIP has been neglected in favor of prop feeds. For its part, Nasdaq has been lobbying the committee that oversees the SIP to beef it up.

Speed traders spend a lot of money for faster access to better information. This allows them to react more quickly to news and, in some cases, jump in front of other people’s orders by figuring out which way the market is going to move. So is that insider trading?

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has called HFT “insider trading 2.0″ on a number of occasions. His office is looking into the relationships between traders, brokers and exchanges and asking whether it all needs to be reformed. The FBI spent the last year looking to uncover manipulative trading practices among HFT firms; the federal agency is now asking speed traders to come forward as whistleblowers.

U.S. laws dealing with insider trading were first passed 80 years ago. Some restrict the way corporate executives and board members can trade in and out of their company’s shares. Others deal with the fair disclosure of important information—which, when it comes to high-frequency trading, is what we’re talking about here. These laws essentially require companies to release material information, such as earnings, to everyone at the same time. No playing favorites.

The SEC does nothing and continues to look the other way
The Unending High-Frequency Rip-Off ---
http://investmentwatchblog.com/the-unending-high-frequency-rip-off/

"The Trading Profits of High Frequency Trading," by Matthew Baron, Jonathon Brogaard, and Andre Kerilenko, University of Chicago Working Paper, November 2012 ---
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/teaching/35150_advanced_investments/baron_brogaard_kirilenko.pdf

Abstract:
W e examine the profitability of high frequency traders (HFTs). Using transaction level data with user identifications, we find that high frequency trading (HFT) is highly profitable: HFTs collectively earn over $23 m illion in trading profits in the E - mini S&P 500 futures contract during the month of August 2010. The profits of HFTs are mainly derived from Opportunistic traders, but also from Fundamental (institutional) traders, Small (retail) traders, and Non - HFT Market Makers. While HFTs bear some risk, they generate unusually high avera ge Sharpe ratios with a median of 4.5 across firms in August 2010. Finally, HFTs profits are persistent, new entrants have a higher propensity to underperform and exit, and the fastest firms (in absolute and in relative terms) earn the highest profits

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


Racial and Other Social Inequality in the Academy
"Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks," by Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore, Science Advances, February 1, 2015 ---
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005 

The faculty job market plays a fundamental role in shaping research priorities, educational outcomes, and career trajectories among scientists and institutions. However, a quantitative understanding of faculty hiring as a system is lacking. Using a simple technique to extract the institutional prestige ranking that best explains an observed faculty hiring network—who hires whose graduates as faculty—we present and analyze comprehensive placement data on nearly 19,000 regular faculty in three disparate disciplines. Across disciplines, we find that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality. Furthermore, doctoral prestige alone better predicts ultimate placement than a U.S. News & World Report rank, women generally place worse than men, and increased institutional prestige leads to increased faculty production, better faculty placement, and a more influential position within the discipline. These results advance our ability to quantify the influence of prestige in academia and shed new light on the academic system.

INTRODUCTION

Faculty hiring is a ubiquitous feature of academic disciplines, the result of which—who hires whose graduates as faculty—shapes nearly every aspect of academic life, including scholarly productivity, research priorities, resource allocation, educational outcomes, and the career trajectories of individual scholars . Despite these fundamental roles, a clear and systematic understanding of the common patterns and efficiencies of faculty hiring across disciplines is lacking.

From the institutional perspective, faculty hiring is an implicit assessment: when an institution u hires as faculty the graduate of another institution v, u makes a positive assessment of the quality of v’s teaching and research programs. Similarly, when an individual accepts a job offer from u, he or she makes a positive assessment of u’s quality. As a collection of such pairwise assessments, a discipline’s faculty hiring network (Fig. 1) represents a collective assessment (5) of its own educational and research outcomes. When institutions are unequally successful in faculty placement, achieving more placements at other successful institutions implies a more positive collective assessment of that institution’s outcomes.

 
Fig. 1 Prestige hierarchies in faculty hiring networks. (Fig. 1 not quoted here)

(Top) Placements for 267 computer science faculty among 10 universities, with placements from one particular university highlighted. Each arc (u,v) has a width proportional to the number of current faculty at university v who received their doctorate at university u (≠v). (Bottom) Prestige hierarchy on these institutions that minimizes the total weight of “upward” arcs, that is, arcs where v is more highly ranked than u.

 

Differential success rates in such competitions are a hallmark of social hierarchy, which may emerge from either physical dominance or social prestige mechanisms (6). Among academic institutions, physical dominance may be neglected, leaving social prestige, in which less prestigious institutions seek to emulate the successful behaviors of more prestigious institutions in an effort to bolster their own prestige (7, 8). In this context, prestige in faculty hiring is an operational variable that encompasses differences in both scholastic merit and nonmeritocratic factors such as social status or geography. If such factors are irrelevant, then prestige is equivalent to merit. More realistically, nonmeritocratic factors play a role, and the greater their importance, the lesser the correlation between prestige and merit.

Continued in article

"NLJ: Minorities Gain at Less Prestigious Law Schools," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, February 17, 2015 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/02/nlj-minorities-gain-.html

The percentage of African-American and Hispanic students enrolled in law school increased between 2010 and 2013, but those gains came almost exclusively at less prestigious law schools with lower admission standards, according to new research.

Aaron Taylor, an assistant professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law, examined application trends, Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores and enrollment figures for minority and white students in both 2010 and 2013. He hoped to better understand how the dramatic downturn in law school applications nationwide has affected diversity.

He found that law schools at the bottom of the prestige ladder — those with the lowest median LSAT scores for incoming students — have relied disproportionately on African-American and Hispanic students to fill their classes. That shift may have served as an economic lifeline for law schools during a difficult period, but bolstered the racial stratification that already existed. Elite law schools with higher median LSAT scores actually saw a proportional decrease in African-American and Hispanic students between 2010 and 2013, Taylor found.

"You've got more black and Hispanic students attending schools that are considered less prestigious in 2013," he said of his paper, Diversity As A Law School Survival Strategy, which will appear in the Saint Louis University Law Review.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on
Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action Hiring and Pay Raises
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#AffirmativeAction


Albert Einstein described the secret of learning to his 11-year-old and it's wonderfully simple ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/albert-einstein-described-the-secret-of-learning-to-his-11-year-old-and-its-wonderfully-simple-2015-2

. . .

I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don't notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. Also play ringtoss with Tete. That teaches you agility. Also go to my friend Zangger sometimes. He is a dear man.

Read more: http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/02/albert-einstein-learning/#ixzz3S0p17QXx
 

Jensen Comment
One problem is that enjoyment of learning of a topic or skill varies with age, sometimes coming too late in life. For example, before I was a graduate student in college I did not enjoy learning mathematics. In graduate school it became my favorite subject even though by then I was committed to a Ph.D. program in accounting that, fortunately, had opportunities for learning more mathematics. In high school I hated practicing the piano. When I was over 50 years of age I longed to play the piano, but my commitments to my academic career just were too great to find time to seriously learn to play the piano.

A favorite line in countless graduation speeches is:  "Follow that which you enjoy the most." This should be tempered with:  "But consider your future happiness when doing that what you think currently is what you enjoy most." The world would otherwise have far more movie actor wannabes flipping burgers and sleeping in cars in Hollywood than college majors in accounting, marketing, computer science, and pharmacy.


Before reading the tidbits below you may want to watch a video on the Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards is a
"microcredential."

MOOC (including how to sign up for a free MOOC) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

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

Coursera /kɔərsˈɛrə/ is a for-profit educational technology company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University that offers massive open online courses (MOOCs). Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses in physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other subjects. Coursera has an official mobile app for iOS and Android. As of October 2014, Coursera has 10 million users in 839 courses from 114 institutions.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Note that by definition MOOCs are free courses generally served up by prestigious or other highly respected universities that usually serve up videos of live courses on campus to the world in general.  MOOC leaders in this regard have been MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Penn, and other prestigious universities with tens of billions of dollars invested in endowments that give these wealthy universities financial flexibility in developing new ways to serve the public.

When students seek some type of transcript "credits" for MOOCs the "credits" are usually not free since these entail some types of competency hurdles such as examinations or, at a minimum, proof of participation. The "credits" are not usually granted by the universities like Stanford providing the MOOCs. Instead credits, certificates, badges or whatever are provided by private sector companies like Coursera, Udacity, etc.

Sometimes Coursera contracts with a college wanting to give its students credits for taking another university's MOOC such as the now infamous instance when more than half of San Jose State University students in a particular MOOC course did not pass a Coursera-administered final examination.
"What Are MOOCs Good For? Online courses may not be changing colleges as their boosters claimed they would, but they can prove valuable in surprising ways," by Justin Pope, MIT's Technology Review, December 15, 2014 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/533406/what-are-moocs-good-for/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141215

The following describes how a company, Coursera, long involved with the history of MOOCs, is moving toward non-traditional "credits" or "microcredentials" in a business model that it now envisions for itself as a for-profit company. Also note that MOOCs are still free for participants not seeking any type of microcredential.

And the business model described below probably won't apply to thousands of MOOCs in art, literature, history, etc. It may apply to subsets of business and technology MOOCs, but that alone does not mean the MOOCs are no longer free for students who are not seeking microcredentials. They involve payments for the "microcredentials" awarded for demonstrated competencies. However these will be defined in the future --- not necessarily traditional college transcript credits. A better term might be "badges of competency."  But these will probably be called microcredentials.

Whether or not these newer types of microcredentials are successful depends a great deal on the job market.
If employers begin to rely upon them, in addition to an applicant's traditional college transcript, then Coursera's new business model may take off. This makes it essential that Coursera carefully control the academic standards for their newer types of "credits" or "badges."

 

"Specializations, Specialized," by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, February 12, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/12/coursera-adds-corporate-partners-massive-open-online-course-sequences

Massive open online course providers such as Coursera have long pointed to the benefits of the data collected by the platforms, saying it will help colleges and universities understand how students learn online. Now Coursera’s data is telling the company that learners are particularly interested in business administration and technology courses to boost their career prospects -- and that they want to take MOOCs at their own pace.

As a result, Coursera will this year offer more course sequences, more on-demand content and more partnerships with the private sector.

Asked if Coursera is closer to identifying a business model, CEO Rick Levin said, “I think we have one. I think this is it.”

Since its founding in 2012, Coursera has raised millions of dollars in venture capital while searching for a business model. Many questioned if the company's original premise -- open access to the world's top professors -- could lead to profits, but with the introduction of a verified certificate option, Coursera began to make money in 2013. By that October, the company had earned its first million.

In the latest evolutionary step for its MOOCs, Coursera on Wednesday announced a series of capstone projects developed by its university partners in cooperation with companies such as Instagram, Google and Shazam. The projects will serve as the final challenge for learners enrolled in certain Specializations -- sequences of related courses in topics such as cybersecurity, data mining and entrepreneurship that Coursera introduced last year. (The company initially considered working with Academic Partnerships before both companies created their version of Specializations.)

The announcement is another investment by Coursera in the belief that adult learners, years removed from formal education, are increasingly seeking microcredentials -- bits of knowledge to update or refresh old skills. Based on the results from the past year, Levin said, interest in such credentials is "palpable." He described bundling courses together into Specializations and charging for a certificate as “the most successful of our product introductions." Compared to when the sequences were offered as individual courses, he said, enrollment has “more than doubled” and the share of learners who pay for the certificate has increased “by a factor of two to four.”

“I think people see the value of the credential as even more significant if you take a coherent sequence,” Levin said. “The other measure of effectiveness is manifest in what you’re seeing here: company interest in these longer sequences.”

Specializations generally cost a few hundred dollars to complete, with each individual course in the sequence costing $29 to $49, but Coursera is still searching for the optimal course length. This week, for example, learners in the Fundamentals of Computing Specialization were surprised to find its three courses had been split into six courses, raising the cost of the entire sequence from $196 to $343. Levin called it a glitch, saying learners will pay the price they initially agreed to.

The partnerships are producing some interesting pairings. In the Specialization created by faculty members at the University of California at San Diego, learners will “design new social experiences” in their capstone project, and the best proposals will receive feedback from Michel "Mike" Krieger, cofounder of Instagram. In the Entrepreneurship Specialization out of the University of Maryland at College Park, select learners will receive an opportunity to interview with the accelerator program 500 Startups.

As those examples suggest, the benefits of the companies’ involvement mostly apply to top performers, and some are more hypothetical than others. For example, in a capstone project created by Maryland and Vanderbilt University faculty, learners will develop mobile cloud computing applications for a chance to win tablets provided by Google. “The best apps may be considered to be featured in the Google Play Store,” according to a Coursera press release.

Anne M. Trumbore, director of online learning initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said the capstone projects are an “experiment.” The business school, which will offer a Specialization sequence in business foundations, has partnered with the online marketplace Snapdeal and the music identification app Shazam, two companies either founded or run by Wharton alumni.

“There’s not a sense of certainty about what the students are going to produce or how the companies are going to use it,” Trumbore said. “Snapdeal and Shazam will look at the top projects graded highest by peers and trained staff. What the companies do after that is really up to them. We have no idea. We’re casting this pebble into the pond.”

Regardless of the companies' plans, Trumbore said, the business school will waive the application fee for the top 15 learners in the Specialization and provide scholarship money to those that matriculate by going through that pipeline.

“The data’s great, but the larger incentive for Wharton is to discover who’s out there,” Trumbore said.

Levin suggested the partnering companies may also be able to use the Specializations as a recruitment tool. “From a company point of view, they like the idea of being involved with educators in their fields,” he said. “More specifically, I think some of the companies are actually hoping that by acknowledging high-performing students in a couple of these capstone projects they can spot potential talent in different areas of the world.”

While Coursera rolled out its first Specializations last year, Levin said, it also rewrote the code powering the platform to be able to offer more self-paced, on-demand courses. Its MOOCs had until last fall followed a cohort model, which Levin said could be “frustrating” to learners when they came across an interesting MOOC but were unable to enroll. After Coursera piloted an on-demand delivery method last fall, the total number of such courses has now reached 47. Later this year, there will be “several hundred,” he said.

“Having the courses self-paced means learners have a much higher likelihood of finishing,” Levin said. “The idea is to advantage learners by giving them more flexibility.”

Some MOOC instructors would rather have rigidity than flexibility, however. Levin said some faculty members have expressed skepticism about offering on-demand courses, preferring the tighter schedule of a cohort-based model.

Whether it comes to paid Specializations versus free individual courses or on-demand versus cohort-based course delivery, Levin said, Coursera can support both. “Will we develop more Specializations? Yes. Will we depreciate single courses? No,” he said. “We don’t want to discourage the wider adoption of MOOCs.”

Continued in article

"The Credit System in Science is Outdated," by Terry McGlynn, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2015 ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/905-the-credit-system-in-science-is-outdated?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

As scientists, we get credit by having our names on journal articles. Authorship of a scientific paper is binary: Either you are one of the authors, or you aren’t. That coarse system is central to the practice of science but does not reflect the complex weave of collaborative work on which most scientific papers are built.

We are far more than just our papers, but those papers count, in the literal sense. How many papers you publish, and where they are published, affects who gets hired, who gets tenure, who gets funded, and with whom we collaborate. Other factors matter (such as gender, money, and personality), but authorship is foundational.

Now that authorship system is so outdated that it’s holding science back. We have the tools and volition to broadly collaborate and share information, but the formation of collaborations is hindered because the credit system does not adequately represent actual contributions.

What are the types of authorship? That varies among fields, but I can generalize quite a bit. The first author listed on a scientific paper did the most work and gets the most credit. That person usually ran the project and wrote most of the paper. Being first author is a big deal, so much so that we have invented a bizarre phenomenon: co-first authorship. In a co-first-authored paper, the first two authors allegedly share the honor of first authorship, by the grace of two asterisks indicating, “These authors contributed equally to this work.”

The final author named on the paper is often the senior scholar on the project. For scientists building their profile as a PI, being a senior author is important because it shows successful leadership in the laboratory and mentorship of junior scientists. Sometimes senior authors work really hard on the papers and are instrumental in the research. Other times, the senior author gets last position because he or she graciously let the first author use a shared desk in their lab.

But it’s not that simple. Sometimes the last author is not the senior author. The last author might have made the least contribution to the paper. How do you know? Unless you’re well involved in that subfield, I wish you luck. Sometimes the second-to-last author position is saved for the second-most senior scientist on the project. But you might not know for sure, because we don’t label senior authors as such. That would be uncouth.

What is middle authorship? It could mean almost anything. Someone listed in the middle could be instrumental or incidental. As a middle author, my contribution has ranged from a few hours to several weeks of working round-the-clock in challenging conditions. But there’s no way to tell just by looking at these papers or at my CV.

After a paper comes out, credit is harvested via citations.Suddenly authorship order no longer matters. I get the same measure of credit for a well-cited, single-authored paper as I do for a well-cited article in which I’m buried as middle author among dozens of other co-authors.

I hope I have convinced you that this nonsensical system is a hot mess. Is this truly how people who make career-altering decisions decide the magnitude of our scientific achievements? Oy.

To be fair, I do see some concern in scientific circles about preventing trivial co-authorships. Some journals list minimum criteria or have prescriptive publishing guidelines. An increasing proportion of journals require an “author contributions” section, wherein the individual contributions of each of the authors are specified. Nevertheless, as far as I can tell, these efforts haven’t changed the modus operandi within science.

There is a glaring disparity between what we claim about authorship, and how people actually become authors in practice. It is standard operating procedure to trade a contribution for authorship. Since authorship is the currency for credit, and few want to work for no credit, the only way to share effort is to make sure that all contributors are authors. That practice might subvert the official definition of authorship, but it is also the glue that keeps fertile collaborations intact.

When you help someone out, what qualifies as a professional courtesy and what constitutes grounds for middle authorship?

That depends on your altruism and negotiation skills. If a systematist publishes a paper with a taxonomic revision of a group of rare organisms, you don’t get authorship for sending especially needed rare samples. That’s just an expected courtesy. But if you have similar samples already sitting in your lab that are needed for a certain kind of specialized experimental project, then you can probably ask for authorship -- but not if you’ve already deposited those samples in a museum collection. - See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/905-the-credit-system-in-science-is-outdated?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en#sthash.a95RtVNZ.dpu

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Woman bites off attacker's tongue, keeps it as evidence ---
http://www.wpxi.com/news/news/national/woman-bites-attackers-tongue-keeps-it-evidence/nj3qP/

Jensen Comment
I wonder if this will be a problem in court since he can't tell his side of the story.


"The Face Detection Algorithm Set To Revolutionise Image Search," MIT's Technology Review, February 16, 2015 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/535201/the-face-detection-algorithm-set-to-revolutionise-image-search/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150217

The ability to spot faces from any angle, and even when partially occluded, has always been a uniquely human capability. Not any more.

Back in 2001, two computer scientists, Paul Viola and Michael Jones, triggered a revolution in the field of computer face detection. After years of stagnation, these guys’ breakthrough was an algorithm that could spot faces in an image in real time. Indeed, the so-called Viola-Jones algorithm was so fast and simple that it was soon built into standard point and shoot cameras.

Part of their trick was to ignore the much more difficult problem of face recognition and concentrate only on detection. They also focused only on faces viewed from the front, ignoring any seen from an angle. Given these bounds, they realised that the bridge of the nose usually formed a vertical line that was brighter than the eye sockets nearby. They also noticed that the eyes were often in shadow and so formed a darker horizontal band.

So Viola and Jones built an algorithm that looks first for vertical bright bands in an image that might be noses, it then looks for horizontal dark bands that might be eyes, it then looks for other general patterns associated with faces.

Detected by themselves, none of these features are strongly suggestive of a face. But when they are detected one after the other in a cascade, the result is a good indication of a face in the image. Hence the name of this process: a detector cascade. And since these tests are all simple to run, the resulting algorithm can work quickly in real-time.

But while the Viola-Jones algorithm was something of a revelation for faces seen from the front, it cannot accurately spot faces from any other angle. And that severely limits how it can be used for face search engines.

Which is why Yahoo is interested in this problem. Today, Sachin Farfade and Mohammad Saberian at Yahoo Labs in California and Li-Jia Li at Stanford University nearby, reveal a new approach to the problem that can spot faces at an angle, even when partially occluded. They say their new approach is simpler than others and yet achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Farfade and co use a fundamentally different approach to build their model.  These guys capitalise on the advances made in recent years on a type of machine learning known as a deep convolutional neural network. The idea is to train a many-layered neural network using a vast database of annotated examples, in this case pictures of faces from many angles.  

To that end, Farfade and co created a database of 200,000 images that included faces at various angles and orientations and a further 20 million images without faces. They then trained their neural net in batches of 128 images over 50,000 iterations.

The result is a single algorithm that can spot faces from a wide range of angles, even when partially occluded. And it can spot many faces in the same image with remarkable accuracy.

The team call this approach the Deep Dense Face Detector and say it compares well with other algorithms.  “We evaluated the proposed method with other deep learning based methods and showed that our method results in faster and more accurate results,” they say.

What’s more, their algorithm is significantly better at spotting faces when upside down, something other approaches haven’t perfected. And they say that it can be made even better with datasets that include more upside down faces. “In future we are planning to use better sampling strategies and more sophisticated data augmentation techniques to further improve performance of the proposed method for detecting occluded and rotated faces.”

That’s interesting work that shows how fast face detection is progressing. The deep convolutional neural network technique is only a couple of years old itself and already it has led to major advances in object and face recognition.  

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Back in the 1970s a Stanford University statistics professor developed an algorithm for main frame computers to make cartoon faces where faces differ by outcomes of up to 18 variables. The idea was to have humans then compare faces and group them in cluster analysis according to differences/similarities in the faces. I applied this algorithm in a monograph comparing companies on the basis of environmental and social accounting variables ---
Scroll down to American Accounting Association Monograph No. 14. Phantasmagoric Accounting ---
http://aaahq.org/market/display.cfm?catID=5

Subsequent innovations replaced the cartoon faces with real faces that were multivariate composites generated from the FBI's mug book used identification of crime suspects. Each "real" face could then be compared with other faces depicting multivariate data.

My point is that the Viola and Jones facial recognition algorithm may regenerate interest in generating real faces that depict multivariate data outcomes from big databases combined with cluster analysis or pattern recognition analysis using the Viola and Jones facial recognition algorithm. Just a thought!

Bob Jensen's threads on Visualization of Multivariate Data (including faces) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm


Jensen Comment
The outcome of this lawsuit could have very expensive ramifications on tens of millions of online videos and live broadcasts. Many learning videos will simply be withdrawn from the Internet. It might be a good time to consider downloading and archiving the videos most likely to be withdrawn from the Internet such as those on YouTube learning channels and those now available at links provided at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
 

What I think is at issue here is whether free learning materials should be subject to the same criteria as fee-based materials.

For example, providers of fee-based courses and learning materials can factor in the extra cost of learning aids such as when a live course factors in the cost of employing "signers" when delivering a live course on campus or over the Internet ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_loss#Sign_language
 

"Harvard and MIT Are Sued Over Closed Captioning for Online Materials," by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/harvard-and-mit-are-sued-over-closed-captioning-for-online-materials?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

A new lawsuit accuses Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of failing to provide closed captioning in online teaching materials, in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws, The New York Times reports. The lawsuits were filed by the National Association of the Deaf, and seek an injunction requiring that closed captioning be provided for all online materials.

Both colleges provide extensive educational resources free online, including through their membership in edX, which offers dozens of MOOCs to students around the world.

Advocates for the deaf on Thursday filed a federal class action against Harvard and M.I.T., saying both universities violate antidiscrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials.

Bob Jensen's links to free learning materials, videos, tutorials, and complete courses provided free ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on new technology tools for disabled students, including the hearing and sight impaired, ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped


Monopoly: How the Original Version Was Made to Condemn Monopolies ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/the-original-monopoly-was-made-to-condemn-monopolies.html 

The Many and Varied Applications of the Monopoly Game in Accounting in Accounting, Economics, and Other College Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment

Open University in the United Kingdom --- http://www.open.ac.uk/

Open Courses, Tutorials, Videos, and Course Materials from Prestigious Universities in the USA ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Fee-Based Distance Education Alternatives Around the World ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


Instructor Indicted Over Textbook Sales ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/02/11/instructor-indicted-over-textbook-sales

Jensen Comment
Colleges should be very explicit about policies in this regard. It's common for authors of textbooks to adopt their own textbooks in classes they teach. However, the ethical thing to do is not to profit from those sales. It's difficult to refund textbook royalties to students. Some authors donate the funds to the university or charities, but they still might be capitalizing on tax breaks. Some authors, however, simply pocket the royalties from sales of the books to their own students.

In accounting it's common for publishers to seek out coauthors in their largest markets such as universities where thousands of students buy the textbook every term. With eBook publishing there are added incentives since there's no market for used eBooks.

I was at a university where there were two accounting professors who were coauthors on different basic accounting texts. To be "fair to the authors," the departmental policy became to alternate the basic textbook every year. Yeah right!

It's quite another matter to promote your own publishing company within a college. This may even intimidate assistant professors if the owner of the company is also the Department Chair or sits on the P&T Committee.

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


How to Mislead With Statistics
How Popularity on Saturday Night Live (SNL) is not highly correlated with subsequent career success (Eddie Murphy is an outlier)

Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog:  Who really had the best career after Saturday Night Live (SNL) ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/who-really-had-the-best-movie-career-after-snl/
And the winners are Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey, Jr.
The biggest losers are not ranked

Rolling Stone Magazine"  The entire cast of Saturday Night Live, all 40 years of it, ranked from top to bottom (actually bottom to top) ---
http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/lists/saturday-night-live-all-141-cast-members-ranked-20150211
And the winners are John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, and Tina Fey
The biggest losers are Robert Downey Jr..The  (gasp) Muppets, and Jim Breuer

Conclusions
Popularity on Saturday Night Live (SNL) is not highly correlated with subsequent career success (Eddie Murphy is an outlier)
The Muppets are probably better to watch when sober

 


Here are the best credit cards for 2015 (not all are free) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/sc/best-credit-cards-2015-2015-1 


February 6, 2014 Week's Top Five SSRN Downloads ---
http://ssrnblog.com/2015/02/06/weekly-top-5-papers-february-06-2015/

January 30, 2014 Week's Top Five SSRN Downloads ---
http://ssrnblog.com/2015/01/30/weekly-top-5-papers-january-30-2014/


What really caused the financial crisis beginning in 2007 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-what-really-caused-the-financial-crisis-1423785060?tesla=y

Jensen Comment
The above article (blaming government regulation) is wrong, and most other articles (blaming Wall Street) on this topic are wrong.

The primary cause of the financial crisis was fraud on Main Street. This fraud was enabled by letting Main Street banks and other mortgage lending companies to make high risk (often subprime) mortgage loans and sell them to Fannie, Freddie, and Wall Street banks without retaining any of the bad debt (default) risk. This encouraged reckless lending and outright fraud (e.g., property appraisal fraud). One of the best examples is how a woman on welfare got a $100,000+ mortgage on a $10,000 shack ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze

Marvene is a poor and unemployed elderly woman who lost her shack to foreclosure in 2008.
That's after Marvene stole over $100,000 when she refinanced her $10,000 (current value) shack with a subprime mortgage in 2007.
Marvene wants to steal some more or at least get her shack back for free.
Both the Executive and Congressional branches of the U.S. Government want to give more to poor Marvene.
Why don't I feel the least bit sorry for poor Marvene?
Somehow I don't think she was the victim of unscrupulous mortgage brokers and property value appraisers.
More than likely she was a co-conspirator in need of $75,000 just to pay creditors bearing down in 2007.
She purchased the shack for $3,500 about 40 years ago --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123093614987850083.html

Wall Street investment banks like Lehman Bros and various others exacerbated the fraud by slicing and dicing the financial risk of these subprime loans into collateralized (CDO) bonds on the basis of a flawed Gaussian copula formula.

Can the 2008 investment banking failure be traced to a math error?
Recipe for Disaster:  The Formula That Killed Wall Street --- http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all
Link forwarded by Jim Mahar ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/recipe-for-disaster-formula-that-killed.html 

Some highlights:

"For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart." The article goes on to show that correlations are at the heart of the problem.

"The reason that ratings agencies and investors felt so safe with the triple-A tranches was that they believed there was no way hundreds of homeowners would all default on their loans at the same time. One person might lose his job, another might fall ill. But those are individual calamities that don't affect the mortgage pool much as a whole: Everybody else is still making their payments on time.

But not all calamities are individual, and tranching still hadn't solved all the problems of mortgage-pool risk. Some things, like falling house prices, affect a large number of people at once. If home values in your neighborhood decline and you lose some of your equity, there's a good chance your neighbors will lose theirs as well. If, as a result, you default on your mortgage, there's a higher probability they will default, too. That's called correlation—the degree to which one variable moves in line with another—and measuring it is an important part of determining how risky mortgage bonds are."

I would highly recommend reading the entire thing that gets much more involved with the actual formula etc.

The “math error” might truly be have been an error or it might have simply been a gamble with what was perceived as miniscule odds of total market failure. Something similar happened in the case of the trillion-dollar disastrous 1993 collapse of Long Term Capital Management formed by Nobel Prize winning economists and their doctoral students who took similar gambles that ignored the “miniscule odds” of world market collapse -- -
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#LTCM  

The rhetorical question
is whether the failure is ignorance in model building or risk taking using the model?

Bob Jensen's threads on the economic collapse and subsequent bailout ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm


Is this Dumb? Russia claims it's in the early stages of developing an aircraft carrier that can hold 100 planes ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-claims-its-developing-massive-aircraft-carrier-2015-2

Jensen Comment
Even though I had several courses in military science in the 1960s, I'm no expert on military science. But you don't have to be an expert to question the wisdom of this gigantic aircraft carrier. With the accelerated evolution of technology and terrorism, big ships and planes and helicopters are increasingly vulnerable. For example, big warships having thousands of personnel are at increased risk of allowing a terrorist to slip on board. A terrorist need not carry the bombs on board. All the terrorist has to do is send out signals to communicate with the laser-guided bombs launched from drones.

It would seem two aircraft carriers with 50 planes increases security in a war relative to one ship with 100 planes where aircraft carriers are still value added. But the days of value added by aircraft carriers may be numbered. We may only have to have submarines that can launch drones.

Dependence on one thing is always risky.
A team that depends on one superstar is at risk. A business that's dependent upon one product is at risk. A nation that's dependent on one export like oil is at risk. A business firm that depends upon one supplier or outsource provider is at risk.

Think of those landline phone companies now struggling to survive. Think of all those power generating companies that are vulnerable to breakthroughs in cost-effective fuel cells that generate power for homes and businesses without use of ugly power lines vulnerable to wind and ice.

An auditing firm or a consulting firm that specializes in one type of client is at risk. A surgeon specializing in breast cancer must seek a new specialty if we learn how to prevent breast cancer.

As warfare goes, we're entering the phase of robotics, drones, and vicious terror. Old tactics entailing piloted aircraft, big warships, and soldiers on the march are doomed to obsolescence in everything except government budgeting.

Boots on the ground may one day be worn by our robot warriers.


Law Graduate Overproduction and Lawyers Per Capita by State ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/02/law-graduate-overproduction-.html

Jensen Comment
Finally I know why Vermont is such a progressive state up to its chin in laws and regulations.

This also explains why there are so many lawyers in national and state legislatures. There are so many unemployed lawyers that the public sector is the only place to turn for employment --- I hesitate to say "honest employment."


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 11, 2015

2015 Technology Industry Outlook
http://deloitte.wsj.com/cfo/2015/02/11/2015-technology-industry-outlook/

Enterprise quests for greater efficiency and competitive advantage through IT will drive significant tech sector growth in 2015 and beyond, says Paul Sallomi, vice chairman and U.S. Technology leader, Deloitte Tax LLP. Mr. Sallomi points to the Internet of Things and digital disruption as major trends that will create new tech sector opportunities this year and explains why being a large technology conglomerate could become a competitive disadvantage in the sector.

Continue Reading Today's Article »

Read more Deloitte Insights »


Lookup Table --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lookup_table

This is what separates the Excel masters from the wannabes ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/excel-index-match-vlookup-video-how-to-2015-2

Video for those still wanting to use VLOOKUP ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hJxIMBbmZY

Jensen Comment
There is a lot more to look up table computing than what you can do in Excel.

I think one of the things that separates Excel masters from wannabes are clever ways of using Excel functions.
For example create your own functions with Visual Basic ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ket3yEB9KIk
Also see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh409n2gGVU

Aksi advanced Excel users learn and master logic functions ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyG_vJfpWEc
I used these for learning modules.


"On the Impossibility of Fighting ISIS," by James Fallows, The Atlantic, February 15, 2015 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/on-the-impossibility-of-fighting-isis/385530/?utm_source=SFG%2B

"I have come to the conclusion that there is no military solution to this issue that can be generated by the U.S. But I believe there is a political solution." How to think about the next war, as we consider getting into it.

. . .

I simply do not understand our strategy, assuming we really have one. If our goal is defeating ISIS's ideology and its support of international terrorism this cannot be done by indirect fire, PERIOD! If [conclusive defeat] is our objective we only have limited choices: either military control of 25 million Syrian/Iraqi Sunnis, which will require a sustained force of 500,000 for decades; or creating conditions whereby the majority of Sunni Arabs will see it in their self interest to subjugate the ideological minority.

If our objective is simply to maintain the borders set by colonial powers in 1919, then air power alone will suffice. But the inevitable result will be Shia control of Syria and Iraq and a strengthening of ISIS ideology and terrorism.

The use of air power is our only feasible military option, but using air power to liberate urban areas, like Mosul means destroying them! That will only create more enemies.

I have come to the conclusion that there is no military solution to this issue that can be generated by the U.S. But I believe there is a political solution.

We have to give the Sunnis reason to reject ISIS. That would entail having the U.S. come out against the Sykes-Picot borders, supporting a break-up of Iraq into Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni countries, incorporating most of Syria, while simultaneously and carefully decimating ISIS leadership. I simply cannot understand why it is in the strategic interest of the U.S. to maintain current Middle Eastern borders, which are unsustainable. I see our current approach as guaranteed to fail.

Terrorism is murder, whether it is in Paris, Copenhagen, or any U.S. town. Every day about 70 Americans are murdered, most by guns. Unless the victims are famous or cute most are ignored by the media. But a minor terrorist attack gets headlines. A YouTube video of a beheading forces the U.S. president to go to " war" in order to avoid being called weak by his domestic political opposition. That's not leadership! Worse, the so-called hawks push for deeper involvement irrespective of military reality. They live in a fantasy world of U.S. military exceptionalism.

To me the issue is not whether we would be better served if the A-10 were being properly employed. Obviously we would be! Ditto [other military-reform concepts], which have always made sense to me. To me the issue is strategy ... and as I see it our use of force is currently counterproductive.

In Gaza the IDF has been able to assassinate Hamas leaders sometimes layers deep. So what! The occupants of Gaza have seen their society all but ripped apart, and they continue to support Hamas. If 125,000 were still employed in Israel instead of Asians I wonder how much support Hamas would have?

If I were a Sunni Arab I would know that when the Syrian Alawite (Shia) used poison gas the U.S. did nothing although thousands were massacred. Yet when two Americans were murdered we bombed Sunnis ... and then we expect Sunnis to love the U.S.

We have got caught up in tactics, and strategy has been caught up in domestic politics. Military reality is nowhere to be found.

I am profoundly worried.

A central argument of my "Tragedy of the American Military" article was that because Americans "honor" their military but don't really take it seriously, we repeatedly send our forces on missions at which they're destined to fail.

The "easy" part of dealing with ISIS is agreeing on its horror. The difficult part is thinking ahead five steps, about what the use of military power can and cannot do. Wood's reporting and Brower's military analysis are valuable steps in that direction.

Jensen Comment

The title of this article is a misleading. It suggests that there is no way to defeat the ISIS army with any kind of military action. The best way to defeat it is political according to the author but a viable political solution is never proposed by James Fellows. Instead the author proposes doing what we are doing now --- containing the ISIS army with (so what's new?) military action.

James Fellows never defines what we mean by "defeating ISIS."
If he means defeating the current ISIS army in the field then he's clearly mistaken. If he means defeating ISIS exportation of terror then  he's correct, but ISIS has never shown that it is better at exportation of terror than other terror organizations that are not subordinating themselves to ISIS. I remind you that Iran is fighting ISIS rather than bowing toward the ISIS military might.

Terror will never be defeated because lone wolf bands of terrorists, including vicious nut cases who are suicidal, can easily get their hands on weapons of terror on a small scale. Our worry is that small bands of terrorists may one day conduct more serious terror acts like destroying power grids, water supplies, food supplies, etc. in biological and chemical warfare where small bands of antagonists have big weapons.

In my opinion defeating the ISIS army  is possible (I think James Fellows agrees) in the short term or the long term depending upon when how quickly and how seriously the ISIS army becomes a threat to the West. Osama Bin Laden made a huge mistake killing over 3,000 people in one day in NYC. Such an act of terror would spell the doom of the ISIS army in a short time in spite of what James Fallows argues --- if he means that it's "impossible to defeat" the ISIS army in battle. Defeating ISIS is simply a matter of deciding how many innocent people the world powers are willing to take out in the process. After the Twin Towers imploded we carpet bombed Afghanistan. At the moment we're obsessed not carpet bombing ISIS in fear of taking out too many civilians. If ISIS should ever take out 3,000 civilians in the USA or Europe in one day the powers of the West will return the favor on every inch of land ISIS thinks it controls whether or not each ISIS fighter is hiding behind a civilian.

James Fellows is correct in that it most likely is impossible to stop terror by enemies that will never surrender
It may well be impossible to defeat anarchist terror in terms of stopping never-ending worldwide small acts of terror such as blowing up airplanes, suicide bombings, etc. That tactic is unstoppable and therein lies the problem for terrorist states like ISIS and Iran. All that needs to be done is to return the favor so to speak so that unstoppable terror against terrorists prevents terrorists from collecting their prize of world domination. Israel repeatedly demonstrates how to repeat the favor with such small acts of inhumanity necessary to achieve a temporary truce.

What is not clear is why ISIS will emerge as the leading terrorist organization among all of the contenders to terror activities.
ISIS is fighting a fairly traditional battle in the field where it's bound to lose. The allied forces against it are currently fighting a slow but methodical war of destroying the logistics of supplying ISIS fighters. The Napoleonic expansionist strategy of the ISIS army will be defeated the same way Napoleon was defeated --- because of having to supply a front lines with food, clothing, sex, medicine, weapons, ammunition, etc. Napoleon's  battlefield warfare is a losing strategy for ISIS.

I'm in full agreement with James Fellows that it's impossible to defeat anarchists who will never surrender.
Islam cannot defeat anarchists. Western powers cannot end anarchist terrorism. Either such terrorism becomes a way of life (like cancer) or we control it with Orwellian losses of freedoms that we prize so dearly.

My criticism of James Fellows is that he proposes that there is a "political solution" without providing even a hint of what that solution might be. The fact of the matter is that there is no political solution short of having Big Brother watching every move of every person on earth.

And if Putin keeps waving his nuclear arm there may not be many people left for Big Brother to watch. And who knows what might happen if North Korea or Pakistan sell out to Hitler-like terrorist states that are willing to destroy the world in a temper tantrum? Or might they themselves become ruled by insanity as bad as the Third Reich? We should always know where to find Dennis Rodman in case of a crisis.


Including an Online Tax Course
"8 Best Practices for Moving Courses Online at USC," by Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, February 111, 2015 ---
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/02/11/8-best-practices-for-moving-courses-online.aspx

The first time Patricia Mills was invited to serve as a "guinea pig" instructor for a new program to turn one of her face-to-face tax classes into an online course, she was open-minded but highly skeptical. This clinical professor of accounting at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business checked out samples of other courses created by Marshall's Online Learning unit, and couldn't see how her classes would work in that format.

"I had no clue how to envision it differently than the way we had always been doing it, which is getting up in front of the classroom, teaching from a textbook and Internal Revenue code and regulations, going through numbers and calculations and writing things on the board," she recalled.

On top of that, she had always assumed the students needed her presence and her lectures in order to learn the material. The proposed online format made her question the role of the instructor in the classroom. And she was concerned that somehow the USC "brand" might be watered down.

Now, Mills unequivocally states that going through the process of converting her course to an online format has made her a better instructor. Here's how USC Marshall works its magic.

Continued in article

Online Enrollment Growth Slows, But Still Outpaces Brick-and-Mortar ---
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/02/05/online-enrollment-growth-slows-but-still-outpaces-brick-and-mortar.aspx

So What's the Biggest Drawback of Online Teaching With Intensive Instructor-Student Communications (e.g., Instant Messaging)?
There's a high risk that if it's done correctly it will burn the teachers out in a short period of time ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm

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


Scientist’s radiation cover-up might have cost thousands of lives
"The fallout of the Nobel scam of 1946," by Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, February 10, 2015 ---
http://business.financialpost.com/2012/02/10/lawrence-solomon-the-fallout-of-the-nobel-scam-of-1946/

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


TurboTax is Suspected Since the Other Tax Preparation Software Has Not Yet Been Compromised
"FBI to Probe Fraudulent Tax Filings:   As States Move to Contain Bogus Returns Through TurboTax, Signs Emerge That Fraud May Involve Federal Filings," by Laura Saunders. Liz Moyer in New York, and Devlin Barrett, The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/fbi-to-probe-fraudulent-tax-filings-1423614826

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened a probe to determine whether a computer data breach led to the filing of false tax returns through TurboTax software, according to a person familiar with the case.

The move comes as states try to contain a wave of bogus state tax filings through TurboTax amid signs that the fraud may also involve federal returns, according to some security specialists and taxpayers.

FBI investigators are still working to determine exactly how personal information was obtained to file bogus returns in about 19 states and whether that information may have been stolen from TurboTax or somewhere else, the person said.

TurboTax parent Intuit Inc. says it believes recent instances of fraud didn’t result from a breach of its systems, based on a preliminary examination conducted with the assistance of independent security experts.

“Tax fraud is an industrywide issue and Intuit is actively engaged with federal and state governments, as well as industry associations, to fight fraud,” the company said in a statement. “Intuit has not been notified, nor are we aware, that we are the target of an FBI investigation. We work with law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI as appropriate, on matters such as identity theft.”

Continued in artile

Some States (e.g. Minnesota and Utah) Are Refusing eFiled TurboTax Returns

"Minnesota stops taking TurboTax returns due to possible fraud," by Mary Lynn Smith and Ricardo Lopez, Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 6, 2015 ---
http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/291008561.html

Possible fraud activity tied to the software will be investigated.

Minnesota has stopped accepting tax returns filed through TurboTax, a popular tax preparation software, because of possible fraudulent activity.

Just as tax season is ramping up, Revenue Department officials made the urgent announcement late Thursday after two taxpayers reported that they had logged into Intuit’s TurboTax to file but were advised a return had already been filed. Because it could indicate fraud, state officials are blocking new TurboTax returns from coming in. They also are reviewing a “couple of thousand” returns that have already been filed using TurboTax.

“If we identify a problem, we will contact the taxpayer,” said Revenue Commissioner Cynthia Bauerly.

Meanwhile, TurboTax says it has temporarily stopped processing state tax returns due to the increase in fraudulent fillings. Intuit Inc., the company behind the popular tax preparation software TurboTax, said it is working with security company Palantir to investigate the problem. So far, Intuit says there was no security breach of its systems. Instead, it believes personal information was taken elsewhere and used to file returns on TurboTax.

Intuit says state tax returns already filed since Thursday will be transmitted as soon as possible. Users can still submit their federal income tax returns.

Utah state tax officials also announced Thursday that they have discovered 28 fraudulent filings from third-party vendors. Some taxpayers there also reported logging into TurboTax to file and then getting a message that their returns already had been filed.

Utah officials said 18 other states have identified similar problems.

Minnesota officials said Intuit, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., will open a dedicated phone number beginning at 8 a.m. Friday for people with concerns about the issue. TurboTax users can call 1-800-944-8596.

Minnesota Revenue Department officials said they were made aware of the issue with TurboTax on Wednesday night and “worked around the clock” to investigate the problem. They will continue to accept returns filed with Intuit professional preparer products, including Lacerte, Intuit Tax Online and ProSeries.

Bauerly said the Department of Revenue systems have not been breached and that the state has a “robust fraudulent protection system in place.”

Bauerly said her department has contacted Intuit and requested information on their security solutions and any other issues the company has discovered, along with solutions to resolve them.

Efforts to reach Intuit for comments Thursday night were not successful.

Continued in article


Self Proclaimed “Queen Of IRS Tax Fraud” Gets 21 Years In Prison ---
http://thesource.com/2015/01/30/self-proclaimed-queen-of-irs-tax-fraud-gets-21-years-in-prison/

A Florida resident who taunted authorities as she stole millions from the IRS, has been jailed for 21 years

It’s tax season again, and everyone is waiting on the big refund check from good old Uncle Sam. For those who don’t save receipts, or think they can outsmart the IRS; think again.

Rashia Wilson, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft earlier this year, admitted to stealing over $3 million from the IRS. Tampa police were first alerted to the fraud in 2010 when they noticed a drop in drug dealing in the area. Wilson’s fraud was discovered during a two-year investigation called ‘Operation Rain Maker’. The multi-agency investigation included Hills­borough County Sheriff’s Office, Tampa Police Department, IRS-Criminal Investigations, the Secret Service, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

Wilson became a prime suspect in the investigation. Her mother was addicted to cocaine when she was born, while her father was in prison while she was growing up. She came up from a life of poverty, having been diagnosed as Bi-Polar when she was 14; and then suddenly becoming rich.

Those involved in the tax fraud operation used stolen social security numbers to file returns. The scam caused ordinary taxpayers to have to wait for up to a year to even receive their refunds.

She still claimed food stamps, and became reckless spending money she supposedly didn’t have…$90,000 on an Audi A8, $30,000 on her son’s first birthday party, designer handbags from Prada, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton, and custom jewelry. Then she wore a diamond studded piece holding racks of money, and put herself on blast on social media. When police searched her residence in Wimauma they removed electronic goods, including large flat-screen TV’s, and designer goods. Police say the number of security cameras around the property had raised suspicions.

Continued in article

 


How to Mislead With Statistics
The Net Worth Of The American Presidents: Washington To Obama
--- Click Here
http://247wallst.com/banking-finance/2010/05/17/the-net-worth-of-the-american-presidents-washington-to-obama/?utm_source=247WallStDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FEB132015A&utm_campaign=DailyNewsletter

Jensen Comment
I don't see how comparisons across over 300 years of vastly different economies are anything but misleading even if an attempt is made to adjust for changes in the purchasing power of the dollar. Inflation adjustments entail defining a market basket of goods and services, but there is no way to compare market baskets over such a long period of time. For example, For example, our earliest presidents bought and used slaves in their baskets. Modern day presidents have many goods and services in their baskets that did not exist 300+ years ago.

There's also a question of timing since wealth varies so much before, during, and after the presidency. For example, read the Bill Clinton module. Then read the George W. Bush module. The summary makes Bill Clinton look much more wealthy than Bush, but before and during their presidencies this was most certainly not the case. Clinton became very wealthy after the presidency.

There's also the question of how to compare the rather generous lifetime pensions of later-year presidents like with William Henry Harrison who "died penniless" versus Barack Obama who will have a generous pension for as long as he lives.

There's a question of whether a president's net worth can be separated from that of his spouse. William McKinley is a good example in terms of inherited wealth. If you combine what Bill Clinton earned after his terms in office with that of his wife Hillary you perhaps more than double the wealth shown for Bill Clinton in this study.

There's much mystery surrounding how some presidents became wealthy. For example, LBJ died having nearly $100 million after being born dirt poor and having only drawn a paycheck from taxpayers his entire life.

The study does attempt to distinguish presidents that were born wealthy are were part of family dynasties of great wealth such as the family of JFK versus Bill Clinton who started with no rich daddy.

Perhaps comparisons can be made across shorter intervals of time such as comparing the wealth of George Washington with John Adams or comparing the wealth of Barack Obama with Bill Clinton. But I would not try to compare the wealth of John Adams versus Barack Obama.

In conclusion the study does allow for very broad comparisons such as comparing the lifetime wealth of Woodrow Wilson (relatively poor) to the lifetime wealth of Teddy Roosevelt (quite wealthy). But when it comes to finer comparisons such as comparing the wealth of Jimmy Carter with William Henry Harrison forget it --- you are comparing peanuts with land values that are very hard to estimate in terms of 21st Century land valuations.


The Ages of USA Presidents

The oldest USA Presidents ---
http://history1900s.about.com/od/worldleaders/a/oldpresidents.htm

One of the reasons that liberals are working so hard to get Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2016 is that, after two terms of Hillary Clinton, Senator Warren will be 75 years of age. No President of the USA has commenced office at such an advanced age ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_age

The rigor required for campaigning has gotten much worse in recent years. Very few people over 70 years of age have the physical and mental stamina required for such a daunting task.

 




From the Scout Report on February 13, 2015

History: Maps of the World --- https://seungbin.wordpress.com 

This app, which is designed to be compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch (iOS 5.0+) features 178 historical maps from around the world, organized by category or era. The maps are interactive and intended to highlight geopolitical and geographic shifts over time. Perfect for history teachers, or anyone fascinated by history.  


Wikipanion --- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipanion/id288349436?mt=8 

We all know the dangers of relying too faithfully on Wikipedia, which can sometimes lead us astray. But the platform remains a productive resource for initial forays into obscure topics. Wikipanion streamlines users' Wiki browsing and search activities with history grouped by visitor date, advanced bookmarking, and multiple search methods. Think of it as a quick and easy way to explore Wikipedia. Users can upgrade to Wikipanion Plus for a small fee, but there is plenty to enjoy here, including a fun link to Wiktionary, which will provide a dictionary type entry for each term entered. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch running iOS 7.0 or later.


New insights into the Earth’s ‘inner-inner core’
Heart of Earth’s inner core revealed
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31322817

Scientists find oddly behaving ‘inner-inner core’ at Earth’s center
http://www.cnet.com/news/theres-a-newly-discovered-core-inside-our-earths-core-and-it-behaves-oddly/

Scientists Find Mysterious Magnetism in Earth’s Inner Core
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/02/10/magnetism-earths-inner-core/#.VNueI2TF_pB

Earth’s Inner Core Found To Have a Core Of Its Own
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/10/earth-inner-core-discover_n_6647254.html

National Geographic Education: Core
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/core/?ar_a=1

Equatorial anisotropy in the inner part of Earth’s inner core from
autocorrelation of earthquake coda
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2354.html

 




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


Education Tutorials

Code.org (computer science education and learning) --- http://code.org/

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


What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke & Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/what-makes-us-human-chomsky-locke-marx.html


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Scientist’s radiation cover-up might have cost thousands of lives
"The fallout of the Nobel scam of 1946," by Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, February 10, 2015 ---
http://business.financialpost.com/2012/02/10/lawrence-solomon-the-fallout-of-the-nobel-scam-of-1946/

World Science Festival --- http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/

E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation --- http://eowilsonfoundation.org/e-o-wilson-laboratory-at-gorongosa/

Medical Xpress: Neuroscience News --- http://medicalxpress.com/neuroscience-news/

Biodiversity Heritage Library --- https://archive.org/details/biodiversity

Nature Plants --- http://www.nature.com/nplants/

Medical Xpress: Neuroscience News --- http://medicalxpress.com/neuroscience-news/

Scientia Salon --- https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/

Birds of North America --- https://www.audubon.org/field-guide

Code.org (computer science education and learning) --- http://code.org/

There's a terrifying place called Snake Island that's home to thousands of the deadliest vipers on Earth ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/snake-island-home-to-golden-lancehead-vipers-2015-2

From the Scout Report on February 13, 2015

New insights into the Earth’s ‘inner-inner core’
Heart of Earth’s inner core revealed
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31322817

Scientists find oddly behaving ‘inner-inner core’ at Earth’s center
http://www.cnet.com/news/theres-a-newly-discovered-core-inside-our-earths-core-and-it-behaves-oddly/

Scientists Find Mysterious Magnetism in Earth’s Inner Core
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/02/10/magnetism-earths-inner-core/#.VNueI2TF_pB

Earth’s Inner Core Found To Have a Core Of Its Own
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/10/earth-inner-core-discover_n_6647254.html

National Geographic Education: Core
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/core/?ar_a=1

Equatorial anisotropy in the inner part of Earth’s inner core from
autocorrelation of earthquake coda
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2354.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

The 19 greatest empires in history ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/greatest-empires-in-history-2015-2

Map: The Most Common Job in Every State (changing times 1978-2014) --- 
 http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state

State House Women's Leadership Project --- http://masshumanities.org/programs/shwlp/

Time to end extreme inequality: Oxfam International --- http://www.oxfam.org/en/research/time-end-extreme-inequality

National Park Service: African American Heritage --- http://www.nps.gov/history/aahistory/

Scientia Salon --- https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/

Sing Out! (folk music and political activism) --- http://singout.org/

Urban Sketchers (artistic sketching) --- http://www.urbansketchers.org/

40 maps that explain the Roman Empire --- http://www.vox.com/2014/8/19/5942585/40-maps-that-explain-the-roman-empire

Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations --- http://medievalmap.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do

Monopoly: How the Original Version Was Made to Condemn Monopolies ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/the-original-monopoly-was-made-to-condemn-monopolies.html

What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke & Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/what-makes-us-human-chomsky-locke-marx.html

"What Mathematics Reveals About the Secret of Lasting Relationships and the Myth of Compromise," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, February 18, 2015 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/18/hannah-fry-the-mathematics-of-love/?mc_cid=ec09e7202b&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

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

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


Math Tutorials

Not Sure About This One
"What Mathematics Reveals About the Secret of Lasting Relationships and the Myth of Compromise," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, February 18, 2015 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/18/hannah-fry-the-mathematics-of-love/?mc_cid=ec09e7202b&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

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


History Tutorials

40 maps that explain the Roman Empire --- http://www.vox.com/2014/8/19/5942585/40-maps-that-explain-the-roman-empire

Check Out The Incredible Armored Trains Of World War I And World War II ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/armored-trains-of-world-wars-i-and-ii-2014-11?op=1#ixzz3STYcpOtL

National Park Service: African American Heritage --- http://www.nps.gov/history/aahistory/

Urban Sketchers (artistic sketching) --- http://www.urbansketchers.org/

Laughing Squid (art history) --- http://laughingsquid.com/

Advertisements from Japan’s Golden Age of Art Deco ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/advertisements-from-japans-golden-age-of-art-deco.html

James Beard Foundation Blog (food and recipes) --- http://www.jamesbeard.org/blog

Fictitious Dishes: Elegant and Imaginative Photographs of Meals from Famous Literature (recipes) ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/04/16/fictitous-dishes-dinah-fried-book/

What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke & Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC-
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/what-makes-us-human-chomsky-locke-marx.html

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

Sing Out! (folk music and political activism) --- http://singout.org/

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

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


Writing Tutorials

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



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

February 11, 2015

February 12, 2015

February 14, 2015

February 16, 2015

February 17, 2015

February 18, 2015

February 19, 2015

February 20, 2015

February 21,l 2015

February 23, 2015

February 25, 2015


We’re Closer Than Ever to a Birth Control Pill for Men ---
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/male-birth-control-pills/


Vegan MYTHS Debunked with Lierre Keith Louder With Crowder [VIDEO] ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZSz4AmaMcs


That Glass Of Red Wine May Not Be As Good For Your Health As You Think ---
https://www.yahoo.com/health/that-glass-of-red-wine-may-not-be-as-good-for-your-110652814527.html

Jensen Comment
Sadly this does not mean that you should go for the double martini.

But what the heck! There's five feet of snow outside the window.




 

A Bit of Humor February 12-26, 2015

Dave Barry Learns Everything You Need to Know About Being a Husband From Reading 50 Shades of Grey ---
http://time.com/3030375/dave-barry-50-shades-of-grey/

10 Photos of Brian Through History ---
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/sarahjeanseman/2015/02/16/wheres-williams-brian-through-history-n1956665?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

Watch the Coen Brothers’ TV Commercials: Swiss Cigarettes, Gap Jeans, Taxes & Clean Coal ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/watch-the-coen-brothers-tv-commercials.html

'Dilbert' creator Scott Adams illustrates why 'goals are for losers and passion is overrated' ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/scott-adams-on-goals-and-passion-2015-2?op=1 

Those aren't so great, and these are better ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/funniest-dilbert-comics-on-idiot-bosses-2014-10

The ways people described computers in the 1990s are hilarious
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/02/16/ways-people-described-computers-1990s-hilarious/?china_variant=False&lang=en&uid=153834883
Thank you Linda Specht for the heads up


How Popularity on Saturday Night Live (SNL) is not highly correlated with subsequent career success (Eddie Murphy is an outlier)

Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog:  Who really had the best career after Saturday Night Live (SNL) ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/who-really-had-the-best-movie-career-after-snl/
And the winners are Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey, Jr.
The biggest losers are not ranked

Rolling Stone Magazine"  The entire cast of Saturday Night Live, all 40 years of it, ranked from top to bottom (actually bottom to top) ---
http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/lists/saturday-night-live-all-141-cast-members-ranked-20150211
And the winners are John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, and Tina Fey
The biggest losers are Robert Downey Jr..The  (gasp) Muppets, and Jim Breuer

Conclusions
Popularity on Saturday Night Live (SNL) is not highly correlated with subsequent career success (Eddie Murphy is an outlier)
The Muppets are probably better to watch when sober

 

More of them here ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/funniest-dilbert-comics-on-idiot-bosses-2014-10?op=1

 




Humor Between January 1-31, 2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q1.htm#Humor013115

Humor Between December 1-31, 2014 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q4.htm#Humor123114

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

I found another listserve that is exceptional -

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

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

Scott

Scott forwarded the following message from Jim Counts

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

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

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

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

Please encourage your members to join our listserve.

If any questions let me know.

Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

Some Accounting History Sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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