In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force
than either willpower or inspiration . . . Just set one day’s work in front of
the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it
does.
John Steinbeck, Diary ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/02/john-steinbeck-working-days/?mc_cid=ba07e5d069&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Jensen Comment
I think the same applies to learning.
Google URL Shortener ---
https://goo.gl/
What To Expect From The Apple Watch—The Good, The Bad And The Unknown
---
http://readwrite.com/2015/03/07/apple-watch-what-to-expect
I'm tempted to call this a worm for Apples
The New $79 Dongle ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/apple-to-sell-79-dongle-to-add-ports-to-new-113198533904.html
Jensen Comment
Be really careful of a dongle port on a device. I was careless with the tiny
port on my Kindle Fire, and now sometimes it gives me fits getting Netflix to
project videos to our television set.
Yeah Right
IG Audit: 6.5 Million People With Active Social Security Numbers Are 112 or
Older (Yeah Right)
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/ig-audit-65-million-people-active-social-security-numbers-are-112-or-older
Jensen Comment
And the mother of Norman Bates received Social Security checks without eating a
bite while seated in the same chair for 10 years. She got enormous earned income
credit refunds for her annual tax returns --- did she really clean the motel
rooms?. This stoic woman even voted by absentee ballot every two years ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_%281960_film%29
Accountics Scientists Should Take Note
Alan Alda Uses Improv to Teach Scientists How to Communicate Their Ideas ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/alan-alda-uses-improv-to-teach-scientists-how-to-communicate-their-ideas.html
Jensen Comment
Accountics scientists are very poor communicators of their research. Most of
their sessions at annual meetings only need about ten chairs. One time I was on
a panel with Bill Cooper and Yuji Ijiri. Only the panel showed up at the
session.
One time when an accountics scientist received a Notable Contributions to the
Literature Award at an American Accounting Association, he said that in a
previous year when he presented his research at an AAA meeting the only people
who showed up came to borrow chairs for the session next door.
Not one accountics scientist has a blog. Nor do they tell about their
research on listservs or at Websites.
Some professors of mathematics, statistics, and econometrics have great
blogs. Why doesn't a single accountics scientist have a blog?
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
Zaytuna College ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaytuna_College
Home Page ---
http://www.zaytuna.org/
Zaytuna's unique curriculum emphasizes key
foundational texts; an in-depth examination of critical methodological
issues; a command of the Arabic language; a familiarity with the most
important Islamic sciences; and grounding in law, history, philosophy,
science, astronomy, literature, ethics, and politics.
First Muslim University in U.S. Is Accredited ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/03/12/first-muslim-university-us-accredited
"Learn math without fear, Stanford expert says," by Clifton B. Parker,
Stanford News. January 29. 2015 ---
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/january/math-learning-boaler-012915.html
Jensen Comment
For me it was age and maturation. I avoided math courses until I spent five
years in Stanford's doctoral program. Then I took math courses every quarter,
for four years because math became my favorite subject.
It was also perfect timing on my part.
Math was a great part of my other coursework in the doctoral program. My
fellow students in those courses, some of whom were engineers, struggled with
the math because they had been away from math courses for so many years. I
remember one statistics course final examination where the professor (Chuck
Bonini) goofed in a problem that could not be solved without integrating the
normal distribution. The other students didn't have a clue. But I was so current
in advanced calculus that I could shift to polar coordinates and integrate the
normal distribution. I looked like a genius, which was definitely not the case.
I was simply more current in advanced calculus. Chuck later became my
dissertation chairman.
10 Retailer Chains Closing the Most Stores in 2015 ---
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/03/12/10-retailers-closing-the-most-stores/2/
"Illinois Bill Threatens Professors’ Cherished Perk: Tuition Breaks for
Their Children," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education,
March 12, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Illinois-Bill-Threatens/228437/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Illinois lawmakers have put a benefit commonly
offered to college employees — tuition breaks for their children — on the
chopping block at public universities in response to a big expected cut in
state spending on higher education.
A measure pending before the Illinois House of
Representatives’ State Government Administration Committee would phase out
tuition waivers for public-university employees. Strongly opposed by the
universities and unions representing their faculty and staff members,
House Bill 403 calls for the repeal of laws that
provide a 50-percent tuition waiver to the children of people who have been
employed by one or more of the state’s public universities for at least
seven years.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Many years ago when I was visiting Dartmouth College, a senior accounting
professor named Len Morrissey remarked that he could not leave Dartmouth even if
he had an opportunity to double his salary (salaries were much, much lower in
those years). As I recall he had five sons, and Dartmouth had the most generous
tuition deals for employees of any college in the USA. Dartmouth would pay for
tuition of any faculty member's child up to the amount of the Dartmouth's very
high tuition. And the child could attend any college in the world. I don't know
if that benefit still exists at Dartmouth College.
Many private universities modified their plans to tuition exchange plans
among only selected partners. When I was at Trinity university many of those
partnership plans were dropped, but some of my Trinity colleagues still managed
to send their children to Rice University free of charge.
"Educators Point to a ‘Crisis of Mediocre Teaching’," by Vimal Patel,
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Educators-Point-to-a-Crisis/145901/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=enW
Even elite institutions acknowledge that the
classroom experience is not all it should be. Harvard University and the
University of Michigan have dedicated tens of millions of dollars to support
experiments to improve teaching, particularly at the undergraduate level.
"Teaching Revival Fresh attention to the classroom may actually
stick this time," by Dan Barrett, Chronicle of Higher Education,
March 9, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-revival-Fresh/228203/?cid=at
Read More About 10 Key Trends in Higher Education ---
http://chronicle.com/section/The-Trends-Report/869/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
What Students Are Not Getting --- The Teaching Enthusiasm of Top
Researchers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz
"Don’t Divide Teaching and Research," by Carolyn Thomas, Chronicle
of Higher Education, March 9, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2015/03/09/dont-divide-teaching-and-research/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
We excel, in the research university, at preparing
our students to do world-class research — everywhere except the classrooms
in which they teach. From the beginning we insist that Ph.D. applicants
explain their research plans. When they arrive we put them through their
paces in methodology classes, carefully taking apart their ideas of what
they want to accomplish and introducing them to the hard work of gathering
data, performing analyses, testing and retesting hypotheses, and exploring
all possible outcomes.
We want students to understand that what they think
is true has to be questioned, repeatedly, and that their findings have to be
defended. It is an iterative process, and we expect them to be rather poor
at it when they begin — improving through honest critique and firm
mentorship over time.
When it comes to teaching, however, the message
they receive is very different. We don’t ask prospective students to address
their teaching experience or philosophy in graduate-school applications, and
we do not typically talk about teaching in coursework or qualifying
examinations. Often it is not until graduate students enter the classroom,
as teaching assistants responsible for their own sections, that they begin
to think about what it might require to teach successfully.
In the midst of papers to grade and sections to
prepare, conversations between even the best faculty instructors and
assistants lean more toward the pragmatic. There is little room or incentive
to see one’s time as a teaching assistant as an opportunity to
simultaneously teach and analyze classroom success.
Some of this is because of the importance placed on
graduate-student research. This makes a great deal of sense: Training the
next generation of Ph.D.s to be world-class researchers in their chosen
disciplines is a chief responsibility of modern universities. Time spent in
the classroom is often seen as time spent away from one’s archive or
laboratory, away from the process of inquiry and original analysis that
leads to cutting-edge findings and future academic employment. This makes it
all too easy to teach our graduate students that they must be skillful
researchers, and only adequate teachers.
The fault line between teaching and research,
however, is also created and maintained by our own misunderstanding, as
largely 20th-century faculty, of the place of teaching in the 21st-century
research university. With an increased national emphasis on graduation
rates, student persistence, and student learning, rising undergraduate
tuition costs, and the need to distinguish brick-and-mortar institutions
from online offerings, teaching has become a much higher priority for all
public institutions.
Merits and promotions are shifting to take teaching
into greater account, new faculty are being given increased resources and
encouragement to develop their pedagogy, and in some cases new positions are
being created for tenure-track faculty who undertake what a recent National
Research Council report has called “Discipline-Based
Education Research.”
Whether current graduate students ultimately apply
for traditional tenure-track research positions or in such new positions as
pedagogy experts, they will be well served if their time in the classroom is
time when they are encouraged to study how students learn in their field and
adapt their practices for greatest success. Studying how undergraduates
learn in a field actually also strengthens graduate students’ research
processes in their own work. Breaking down the barrier between
“discipline-based research” and “research into teaching” offers a win-win.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
If there were enormous accounting teaching databases to be purchased accountics
scientists would jump on it with their GLM software. Sadly, accountics
scientists don't like to create their own databases (with a few noteworthy
exceptions like Zoe-Vonna Palmrose) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccounticsWorkingPaper450.pdf
March 10, 2015 reply from Richard Sansing
For a commentary by accounting academics on this
issue, I recommend the following.
Demski, J. and J. Zimmerman. 2000. On “Research vs.
Teaching”: A Long-Term Perspective. Accounting Horizons 14
(September): 343-352.
The gist of their commentary is that teaching and
research are complementary activities as opposed to substitutes.
Here is an excerpt from the first paragraph of their commentary.
In this commentary we argue that teaching and
research are strong complements, not substitutes. Doing more of one
increases the value of the other. Few important social- science research
findings have come from think tanks. Virtually all leading academics are
located at institutions dedicated to both teaching and research. To
preview our conclusion, we reject any notion of separating research and
teaching. Students demand relevant course content—questions and answers
that enhance their human capital. This helps guide our research and
helps prevent us from teaching irrelevant material. In parallel fashion,
we stress generation and consumption of research as essential to
understanding both the relevance of what we teach and what we research
and hence the impact of relevance on research.
Richard Sansing
March 10, 2015 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Richard,
I agree in theory, but accountics scientists seem to be very limited in
their approach to education research. Interestingly, many top accountics
scientists like yourself teach from cases such a Harvard-style cases. But
their published articles in research journals, with the notable exception of
Bob Kaplan's articles, seem to be limited to research using equations. Try
getting a case without equations published in TAR, JAR, or JAE.
I can't find where TAR published a mainline research article in decades
that does not have equations. Teaching research submissions that do not have
equations are directed toward Issues in Accounting Education. This would be
fine with me if IAE was an equal partner with TAR in terms of attaining
tenure and promotions. But, in my opinion, hits in IAE just do not count as
dearly as TAR hits for faculty in R! universities.
I find little focus on teaching in accountics science dissertations from
R1 universities. Are there noteworthy accounting education and teaching
research research dissertations in the past two decades from Chicago,
Stanford, Wharton, MIT, Yale, University of Texas, University of Illinois,
Northwestern, Michigan, etc.?
Thanks,
Bob
Added Jensen Comment
What we find happening in undergraduate accounting programs is that it's
harder and harder to find North American accounting Ph.D. graduates who are
knowledgeable about financial accounting and auditing and tax. The doctoral
programs themselves teach a lot about the quantitative tools of research
(like the General Linear Model and its software) and virtually nothing about
accounting, auditing, tax, and teaching.
Teaching "professional: accounting increasingly is being transferred to
adjuncts who are also not trained in teaching..
The Pathways Commission found a divide between teaching and research and
carried this into its final recommendations ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/31/updating-accounting-curriculums-expanding-and-diversifying-field
The report includes seven recommendations:
- Integrate accounting research, education
and practice for students, practitioners and educators by bringing
professionally oriented faculty more fully into education programs.
- Promote accessibility of doctoral
education by allowing for flexible content and structure in doctoral
programs and developing multiple pathways for degrees. The
current path to an accounting Ph.D. includes lengthy, full-time
residential programs and research training that is for the most part
confined to quantitative rather than qualitative methods.
More flexible programs -- that might be part-time, focus on applied
research and emphasize training in teaching methods and curriculum
development -- would appeal to graduate students with professional
experience and candidates with families, according to the report.
- Increase recognition and support for
high-quality teaching and connect faculty review, promotion and
tenure processes with teaching quality so that teaching is respected
as a critical component in achieving each institution's mission.
According to the report, accounting programs must balance
recognition for work and accomplishments -- fed by increasing
competition among institutions and programs -- along with
recognition for teaching excellence.
- Develop curriculum models, engaging
learning resources and mechanisms to easily share them, as well as
enhancing faculty development opportunities to sustain a robust
curriculum that addresses a new generation of students who are more
at home with technology and less patient with traditional teaching
methods.
- Improve the ability to attract
high-potential, diverse entrants into the profession.
- Create mechanisms for collecting,
analyzing and disseminating information about the market needs by
establishing a national committee on information needs, projecting
future supply and demand for accounting professionals and faculty,
and enhancing the benefits of a high school accounting education.
- Establish an implementation process to
address these and future recommendations by creating structures and
mechanisms to support a continuous, sustainable change process.
Demski and Zimmerman wrote the following in the article you cited:
Students demand relevant course content—questions
and answers that enhance their human capital. This helps guide our research
and helps prevent us from teaching irrelevant material. In parallel fashion,
we stress generation and consumption of research as essential to
understanding both the relevance of what we teach and what we research and
hence the impact of relevance on research.
I'm not sure most of our new accounting Ph.D. graduates know what is relevant
to teach in intermediate and advanced accounting, auditing, and tax. In their
accountics science research they pass over the hard professional and clinical
and teaching research questions where there are no databases to purchase ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccounticsWorkingPaper450.pdf
Research shows that there's a considerable decline in the proportion of
accounting Ph.D. graduates with CPA credentials ---
http://business.umsl.edu/seminar_series/Spring2012/Further Tales of the Schism -
3-01.pdf
. . .
This paper attempts to document and chart the
trajectory of such a division by observing the extent to which academic
accountants possess the essential practice credentials. The absence of such
credentials suggests a gr owing departure in the training and values of the
two groups. The results show a considerable decline in the tendency for
accounting faculty to hold practice credentials such as the CPA. This trend
occurs in most segments of the professoriate, but is more pronounced for the
tenure track faculty or doctoral institutions, for more junior faculty and
for faculty employed by more prestigious academic organizations. The paper
shows this to be a problem experienced by individuals in the financial
accounting sub-field of the discipline.
Continued in article
"Our Compassless Colleges," by Peter Berkowitz, The Wall Street
Journal, September 5, 2007; Page A17 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118895528818217660.html
At universities and colleges throughout the land,
undergraduates and their parents pay large sums of money for -- and federal
and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support --
"liberal" education. This despite administrators and faculty lacking, or
failing to honor, a coherent concept of what constitutes an educated human
being.
To be
sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today
the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists
of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter.
Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences
proudly promulgate doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard
or measure defining an educated person, and so legitimate the
compassless curriculum over which they preside. In these
circumstances, why should we not conclude that universities are
betraying their mission?
Many
American colleges do adopt general distribution requirements.
Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their
choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the
humanities, decorated perhaps with a dollop of fine arts,
rudimentary foreign-language exposure, and the acquisition of basic
writing and quantitative skills. And all students must choose a
major. But this veneer of structure provides students only
superficial guidance. Or, rather, it reinforces the lesson that our
universities have little of substance to say about the essential
knowledge possessed by an educated person.
Certainly this was true of the core curriculum at Harvard, where I
taught in the faculty of arts and sciences during the 1990s. And it
remains true even after Harvard's recent reforms.
Harvard's aims and aspirations are in many ways admirable. According
to this year's Report of the Task Force on General Education,
Harvard understands liberal education as "an education conducted in
a spirit of free inquiry undertaken without concern for topical
relevance or vocational utility." It prepares for the rest of life
by improving students' ability "to assess empirical claims,
interpret cultural expression, and confront ethical dilemmas in
their personal and professional lives." But instead of concentrating
on teaching substantive knowledge, the general education at Harvard
will focus on why what students learn is important. To
accomplish this, Harvard would require students to take
single-semester courses in eight categories: Aesthetic and
Interpretive Understanding, Culture and Belief, Empirical Reasoning,
Ethical Reasoning, Science of Living Systems, Science of the
Physical Universe, Societies of the World, and The United States in
the World.
Unfortunately, the new requirements add up to little more than an
attractively packaged evasion of the university's responsibility to
provide a coherent core for undergraduate education. For starters,
though apparently not part of the general education curriculum,
Harvard requires only a year of foreign language study or the
equivalent. Yet since it usually takes more than a year of college
study to achieve competence in a foreign language -- the ability to
hold a conversation and read a newspaper -- doesn't Harvard, by
requiring only a single year, denigrate foreign-language study, and
with it the serious study of other cultures and societies?
Furthermore, in the search for the immediate relevance it disavows,
Harvard's curriculum repeatedly puts the cart before the horse. For
example, instead of first requiring students to concentrate on the
study of novels, poetry, and plays, Harvard will ask them to choose
from a variety of courses on "literary or religious texts,
paintings, sculpture, architecture, music, film, dance, decorative
arts" that involve "exploring theoretical and philosophical issues
concerning the production and reception of meanings and the
formation of aesthetic judgment."
Instead of first requiring students to gain acquaintance with the
history of opinions about law, justice, government, duty and virtue,
Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on how to
bring ethical theories to bear on contemporary moral and political
dilemmas. Instead of first requiring students to survey U.S. history
or European history or classical history, Harvard will ask them to
choose from a variety of courses that examine the U.S and its
relation to the rest of the world. Instead of first teaching
students about the essential features of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam, Harvard will ask them to choose from a variety of courses on
almost any aspect of foreign societies.
Harvard's general education reform will allow students to graduate
without ever having read the same book or studied the same material.
Students may take away much of interest, but it is the little in
common they learn that will be of lasting significance. For they
will absorb the implicit teaching of the new college curriculum --
same as the old one -- that there is nothing in particular that an
educated person need know.
Of
course, if parents, students, alumni donors, trustees, professors
and administrators are happy, why worry? A college degree remains a
hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable social networks, a
signal to employers that graduates have achieved a certain
proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and
getting along with peers.
The
reason to worry is that university education can cause lasting harm.
The mental habits that students form and the ideas they absorb in
college consolidate the framework through which as adults they
interpret experience, and judge matters to be true or false, fair or
inequitable, honorable or dishonorable. A university that fails to
teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with
enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for public and private life.
Moreover, properly conceived, a liberal education provides
invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students,
it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read widely
and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that
formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other
peoples and cultures. A proper liberal education liberalizes in the
old-fashioned and still most relevant sense: It forms individuals
fit for freedom.
The
nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an
informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest
from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the
claims of justice and the opportunities for -- and limits to --
realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy
whose citizens practice different religions and no religion at all,
in which individuals have family heritages that can be traced to
every continent, and in which the nation's foreign affairs are
increasingly bound up with local politics in countries around the
world is particularly dependent on citizens acquiring a liberal
education.
Crafting a core consistent with the imperatives of a liberal
education will involve both a substantial break with today's
university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher
education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require
all students to take semester courses surveying Greek and Roman
history, European history, and American history. It would require
all students to take a semester course in classic works of European
literature, and one in classic works of American literature. It
would require all students to take a semester course in biology and
one in physics. It would require all students to take a semester
course in the principles of American government; one in economics;
and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require all
students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. It would require all students to take a semester course
of their choice in the history, literature or religion of a
non-Western civilization. And it would require all students to
demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language of their choice by
carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper
in the language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two
years of college study, or four semester courses.
Such a
core is at best an introduction to liberal education. Still,
students who meet its requirements will acquire a common
intellectual foundation that enables them to debate morals and
politics responsibly, enhances their understanding of whatever
specialization they choose, and enriches their appreciation of the
multiple dimensions of the delightful and dangerous world in which
we live.
It is
a mark of the politicization and clutter of our current curriculum
that these elementary requirements will strike many faculty and
administrators as benighted and onerous. Yet the core I've outlined
reflects what all successful individuals outside of academia know:
Progress depends on mastering the basics.
Assuming four courses a semester and 32 to graduate, such a core
could be completed in the first two years of undergraduate study.
Students who met the foreign-language requirement through high
school study would have the opportunity as freshman and sophomores
to choose four elective courses. During their junior and senior
year, students could devote 10 courses to their major while taking
six additional elective courses. And students majoring in the
natural sciences, where it is necessary to take a substantial
sequence of courses, would enroll in introductory and lower-level
courses in their major during freshman and sophomore years and
complete the core during junior and senior years.
Admittedly, reform confronts formidable obstacles. The major one is
professors. Many will fight such a common core, because it requires
them to teach general interest classes outside their area of
expertise; it reduces opportunities to teach small boutique classes
on highly specialized topics; and it presupposes that knowledge is
cumulative and that some books and ideas are more essential than
others.
Meanwhile, students and parents are poorly positioned to affect
change. Students come and go, and, in any event, the understanding
they need to formulate the arguments for reform is acquired through
the very liberal education of which universities are currently
depriving them. Meanwhile, parents are too distant and dispersed,
and often they have too much money on the line to rock the boat.
But
there are opportunities. Change could be led by an intrepid
president, provost or dean of a major university who knows the value
of a liberal education, possesses the eloquence and courage to
defend it to his or her faculty, and has the skill to refashion
institutional incentives and hold faculty and administrators
accountable.
Reform
could also be led by trustees at private universities -- the
election in recent years of T.J. Rodgers, Todd Zywicki, Peter
Robinson and Stephen Smith to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees on
platforms supporting freedom of speech and high academic standards
is a start -- or by alumni determined to connect their donations, on
which universities depend, to reliable promises that their gifts
will be used in furtherance of liberal education, well understood.
And
some enterprising smaller colleges or public universities, taking
advantage of the nation's love of diversity and openness to
innovation, might discover a market niche for parents and students
eager for an education that serves students' best interests by
introducing them in a systematic manner to their own civilization,
to the moral and political principles on which their nation is
based, and to languages and civilizations that differ from their
own.
Citizens today are called on to analyze a formidable array of hard
questions concerning war and peace, liberty and security, markets
and morals, marriage and family, science and technology, poverty and
public responsibility, and much more. No citizen can be expected to
master all the issues. But liberal democracies count on more than a
small minority acquiring the ability to reason responsibly about the
many sides of these many-sided questions. For this reason, we must
teach our universities to appreciate the aims of a liberal
education. And we must impress upon our universities their
obligation to pursue them responsibly.
Mr. Berkowitz, a
senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, teaches
at George Mason University School of Law. This commentary draws from
an essay that previously appeared in Policy Review. |
"Three Radical Changes That Can Save Business Schools From Extinction,"
by Cory Weinberg, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 16, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-16/business-schools-will-go-out-of-business-unless-they-radically-reinvent-themselves
Unethical Publishers: Among the dubious acts is selling open source
materials
"New Predatory Publishing in Old Bottles," by Barbara Fister,
Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/new-predatory-publishing-old-bottles
Many academic authors by now have heard the phrase
“predatory publishers.” It’s usually associated with
a list of fraudulent pseudo-publishing operations
maintained by Jeffrey Beall, whose crusade to name and shame these shady
opportunists has made it to
The New York Times.
What worries me far more than these fairly obvious scams are the emerging
business practices being used by highly profitable publishers with long and
distinguished pedigrees that are treating open access as a new revenue
stream that can be both open and closed – earning money through
subscriptions and author fees. (Monica Berger and and Jill Cirasella
have just published an excellent article on why we
need a broader understanding of predatory publishing practices.) But
double-dipping isn't enough. Witness a blogger’s report that Elsevier
(founded in 1880) is
selling articles published by Wiley (founded in
1807) as open access articles. Elsevier’s PR team responded quickly by
removing the article from its for-sale options. Apparently, though, the
company continues
to sell open access articles originally published
by Wiley under the same terms.
So far as I can tell, here’s how it went down (and
hat tip to
David Flander for alerting me to this curious
story): Whoever funded the author paid Wiley something like $3,000 to make
the work open access. Wiley published it as an open access work, and then
apparently turned around and licensed the same work for an unknown sum to
Elsevier so that Elsevier could sell it through its Science Direct platform
for upwards of $30.
Apparently through some clever language in the
author agreement, Wiley retains the rights to
license open access works for a fee under its contracts with authors when
Wiley take money from them (or more accurately, from the authors’ funders)
to make an article open access. Though it is an unethical practice on its
face, it may be legal. Toward the bottom of the lengthy document is the
phrase “Use of Wiley Open Access articles for commercial,
promotional, or marketing purposes requires further explicit permission from
Wiley and will be subject to a fee” (my emphasis).
It's entirely possible that mistakes were made,
that giant publishers ingesting paid-for open access articles into massive
piles of content that they license without noticing that some of it has had
its freedom ransomed for a fee. It may be that bit of author agreement
language got left in by mistake. It could be these publishers are so big and
so deeply involved in swapping intellectual property rights that they are
unable to keep their records straight, rather like those bankers
who couldn't keep track of mortgages as they were bundled, rebundled and
resold, contributing to a global financial catastrophe. Even if this
relicensing and selling of open access articles was in error, it would
be a worrying sign of incompetence by publishers who may well feel too big
to fail.
One of the McGuffins in this caper is the Creative
Commons license under which these open access articles are published. The
article first written about was published under a
CC-NC-ND license, which is quite restrictive and,
as such, made this commercial reuse seem a breach of contract - except for
that pesky language in the agreement which seems to give Wiley the right to
exploit the work commercially post-publication anyway. CC-BY
allows anyone to reuse a work with attribution. A lot
of scientists and scholars
have argued
the fewer restrictions on scholarly publications, the
better, but it makes some scholars nervous.
I personally am in favor of reserving as few right
as possible for my scholarly and even frivolous work (like this blog). Yes,
at times I’ve been surprised to see where things I wrote turns up, but I
haven't been harmed by this reuse. It’s my small way of shaking my fist at
the many ways that copyright has been distorted by moneyed interests since
the power to grant limited monopolies to authors to encourage creativity was
granted to congress in the U.S. constitution. At the time, the copyright
term was 14 years (with a one-time renewal) and it required action on the
part of the copyright holder. Now everything is all rights reserved by
default, unless you takes steps to reserve fewer than all rights, and the
copyright term is much longer. Most of the cultural production of the past
century is either copyrighted or potentially under a copyright held by
people or companies you cannot identify to seek permission to use it. This
is not what the founders had in mind when they gave Congress this tool "to
promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”
Likewise, reselling open access articles is not
what the authors (or funders) of those articles intended. Fooling people
into paying for open access articles is conduct unbecoming. Scholars,
funding agencies, and the scholarly societies that often outsource their
publishing program to commercial firms should hold publishers' feet to the
fire and prohibit this triple dipping.
Meanwhile, our best bet is to avoid predatory
publishers, including those not on Beall’s list - Elsevier, Wiley, or any
other “legitimate” publisher that knowingly or carelessly resells work that
was intended by its authors to be available for free. It may be legal, but
it isn’t right.
Oligopoly Publishers With a History of Ripping Off Libraries and
Universities Like Cornell With Guts Enough to Say No ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals
"The weaker sex: Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school
and university, and the gap is widening," The Economist, March 7,
2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21645759-boys-are-being-outclassed-girls-both-school-and-university-and-gap
Jensen Comment
This is certainly the case in accountancy higher education programs. Women are
especially encouraged by 21st Century hiring of more women than men by CPA
firms. Women must, however, be willing to accept the negatives of public
accounting employment, including job stresses, overnight travel, and week ends
away from home and families. Accountancy is somewhat conducive to work at home
even when employed by the large firms, but this is not always an option for
career advancement when working at home year after year after year.
There's some evidence in education, nursing, and accountancy that men,
especially minority males, shy away from careers requiring licensing
examinations. However, there are exceptions in engineering and technology where
more males are still being licensed than females. Some of the real negatives of
certain types of consulting work are the months away from home and families.
Long-term absences from families are common in consulting engagements. Those
occasional weekends at home just aren't enough for some mothers.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Subaru's new EyeSight technology is an auto-industry game changer ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/subaru-eyesight-helps-prevent-car-crashes-2015-3
NYT: Everything But the Truth
George W. Bush and his wife Laura marched in the Selma bridge crossing, but
The New York Times cropped them out of the photographs ---
http://www.ijreview.com/2015/03/266170-whats-missing-new-york-times-frontpage-selma-march-speaks-volumes/
"Artificial Photosynthesis Takes a Step Forward: Researchers have
demonstrated a long-lasting device for making hydrogen from sunlight and
water—but funding is running out," by Kevin Bullis, MIT's Technology Review,
March 9, 2015 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/535686/artificial-photosynthesis-takes-a-step-forward/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150310
"The Discouraging Humanities Job Market, in One Vivid Chart," by Brock
Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, 2015 ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/931-the-discouraging-humanities-job-market-in-one-vivid-chart?cid=VTEVPMSED1
From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Search for the Latest Job Openings in any Discipline of Interest ---
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 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Bob Jensen's threads on the higher education faculty job
market ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#AccountingFaculty
Houellebecq Skewers French Academe ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Houellebecq-Skewers-French/228215/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
The decision maker should review all charges from
vendors. Time and time again vendors fail to give credit for returns or special
price adjustments and the ever too present false charges to business credit
cards cost companies.
Deadra Mayhew, CPA A CPA Secret to a Better Business
http://www.smartbrief.com/quote/01/10/14/better-bread-happy-heart-wealth-vexation#.VP2f5OFkZLc
The Prado Museum Creates the First Art Exhibition for the Visually
Impaired, Using 3D Printing ---
The Prado Museum Creates the First Art Exhibition for the
Visually Impaired, Using 3D Printing
Bob Jensen's threads on new technologies for disabled students, including the
sight and hearing impaired ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
The Economist: 10 Most Expensive Cities in the World ---
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/03/daily-chart
The most expensive components are often housing and schooling.
Regions are sometimes more of a problem than cities themselves. For example,
housing costs in the entire Silicon Valley are high and going through the roof.
There's not much housing cost relief in San Francisco and the accompanying
Silicon valley relative to NYC where housing is very high in Manhattan but more
affordable in the other parts of NYC like the Bronx.
A highly variable expense in major cities is education. For example, NYC
public schools are lousy relative to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Singapore,
Oslo, Zurich, etc. Living costs are a whole lot less for parents who do not have
to pay for private schools.
Some of my students used to be surprised when they had accounting firm job
offers from San Francisco but were turned down by San Antonio offices. I told
them that working in San Francisco was terrific as long as you didn't mind
sharing the rent with five roommates and putting off marriage and family.
Living expenses are especially problematic for lower-paid support staff
working in high expense regions. For example, Palo Alto provides housing or
generous housing allowances for fire fighters and police. In Hong Kong police
and soldiers live in baracks.
"A world of pain: The giants of global finance are in trouble,"
The Economist, March 5, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21645807-giants-global-finance-are-trouble-world-pain
ONLY pop music and pornography embraced
globalisation more keenly than banks did. Since the 1990s three kinds of
international firm have emerged. Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs deal
in securities and cater to the rich from a handful of financial hubs such as
Hong Kong and Singapore. A few banks, such as Spain’s Santander, have “gone
native”, establishing a deep retail-banking presence in multiple countries.
But the most popular approach is the “global network bank”: a jack of all
trades, lending to and shifting money for multinationals in scores of
countries, and in some places acting like a universal bank doing everything
from bond-trading to car loans. The names of the biggest half-dozen such
firms adorn skyscrapers all over the world.
This model of the global bank had a reasonable
crisis in 2008-09: only Citigroup required a full-scale bail out. Yet it is
now in deep trouble. In recent weeks Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan
Chase, has been forced to field questions about breaking up his bank. Stuart
Gulliver, the head of HSBC, has abandoned the financial targets that he set
upon taking the job in 2011. Citigroup is awaiting the results of its annual
exam from the Federal Reserve. If it fails, calls for a mercy killing will
be deafening (see next story). Deutsche Bank is likely to shrink further.
Standard Chartered, which operates in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, is
parting company with its longstanding boss, Peter Sands.
Domestic lenders that global banks have long
sneered at are doing far better. In Britain, Lloyds has recovered smartly
over the past two years. In America the most highly rated banks—based on
their share price relative to their book value—are Wells Fargo and a host of
midsized firms.
The panic about global banks reflects their weak
recent results: in aggregate the five firms mentioned above reported a
return on equity of just 6% last year. Only JPMorgan Chase did passably well
(see chart). Investors worry these figures betray a deeper strategic
problem. There is a growing fear that the costs of global reach—in terms of
regulation and complexity—exceed the potential benefits.
It all seemed far rosier 20 years ago. Back then
banks saw that globalisation would lead to an explosion in trade and capital
flows. A handful of firms sought to capture that growth. Most had inherited
skeleton global networks of some kind. European lenders such as BNP Paribas
and Deutsche Bank had been active abroad for over a century. HSBC and
Standard Chartered were bankers to the British empire. Citigroup embarked on
a big international expansion a century ago; Chase, now part of JPMorgan
Chase, opened many foreign branches in the 1960s and 1970s.
As they expanded in the 1990s and 2000s all of
these firms concentrated on multinationals, which required things like trade
finance, currency trading and cash management. But all expanded beyond these
activities to varying degrees and in different directions; today they
typically account for only a quarter of sales. Deutsche and StanChart bulked
up in investment banking. BNP built up retail operations in America. At the
most extreme end of the spectrum Citi and HSBC tried to do everything for
everyone everywhere, through lots of acquisitions. They sold derivatives in
Delhi and originated subprime debt in Detroit.
This model is in trouble for three reasons. First,
these giant firms proved hard to manage. Their subsidiaries struggled to
build common IT systems, let alone establish a common culture. Synergies
have been elusive and global banks’ cost-to-income ratios, bloated by the
costs of being in lots of countries, have rarely been better than those of
local banks. As a result these firms have all too often been tempted to make
a fast buck. Citi made a kamikaze excursion into mortgage-backed bonds in
2005-08. StanChart made loans to indebted Asian tycoons.
Second, competition proved to be fiercer than
expected. The banking bubble in the 2000s led second-rate firms such as
Barclays, Société Générale, ABN Amro and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to
expand globally, eroding margins. In 2007 RBS bought ABN in a bid to rival
the big network banks. It promptly went bust, proving that two dogs do not
make a tiger. The global giants also lost market share in Asia to so-called
“super-regional” banks, such as ANZ of Australia and DBS of Singapore. Big
local banks in emerging markets, such as ICBC in China, Itaú in Brazil and
ICICI in India, also began to build out cross-border operations.
If mismanagement and fierce competition were
problems before the crisis, the regulatory backlash after it has been
brutal. American officials have begun to enforce strict rules on
money-laundering, tax evasion and sanctions, meaning that global banks must
know their customers, and their customers’ customers, if they want to
maintain access to America’s financial system—which is essential given that
the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Huge fines have been imposed on
StanChart, BNP and HSBC, among others, for breaking these rules.
Bank supervisors, meanwhile, have imposed higher
capital standards on global banks. Most face both the international “Basel
3” regime and a hotch-potch of local and regional regimes. A rule of thumb
is that big global banks will need buffers of equity (or “core tier one
capital”) equivalent to 12-13% of their risk-adjusted assets, compared to
about 10% for domestic firms. National regulators increasingly demand that
global banks ring-fence their local operations, limiting their ability to
shift capital around the world. The cost of operating the systems that keep
regulators happy is huge. HSBC’s compliance costs rose to $2.4 billion in
2014, 50% higher than the year before. JPMorgan is spending $3 billion more
on controls than it did in 2011.
One measure of these firms’ viability is their
“best case” return on equity (ie, assuming that the huge, supposedly,
one-off legal fines and restructuring costs incurred over the past
half-decade suddenly stop, but the new capital standards are fully
implemented). On this basis most global banks barely achieve 10% (see prior
chart). The overall figures hide lots of rot. After three decades of trying
to diversify from its base in Asia, HSBC still makes the bulk of its money
there; the other two-thirds of its business underperforms badly for the most
part. JPMorgan Chase’s profits are more evenly spread, but about two-thirds
of its businesses fail to cross the 10% hurdle. The same is true of
StanChart. From the outside—and perhaps from the inside, too—Citi’s
reporting system is too crude to make any sensible judgment. Deutsche looks
better than most, but many of its rivals question its capital calculations.
Another test of viability is to compare the
benefits of being global with the costs. In February JPMorgan Chase said
that the revenue uplift and cost savings it gets from its scale boost
profits by $6 billion-7 billion a year. There is a plausible case that the
extra capital it must carry, and the regulatory costs its complexity incurs,
offset a big chunk of that benefit. (If they dared to reveal them, the
figures for other banks would probably look far worse.) Scale does not seem
to mean cheaper funding. It is no cheaper to buy a credit-default swap,
which pays out if a borrower goes bust and so is a reasonable proxy for
borrowing costs, on the debt of JPMorgan Chase or Citi than it is on that of
mid-sized American banks. All are regarded by debt investors as
government-backed.
Continued in article
2015 Index of Economic Freedom ---
http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
The USA did not make the Top 10
The Open Utopia ---
http://theopenutopia.org/
Virtual reality headsets this week — here's why Vive beats Oculus ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-oculus-versus-htc-vive-2015-3#ixzz3ThMdc4BK
20 amazing scientific discoveries that have already been made this year
---
http://www.businessinsider.com/20-amazing-scientific-discoveries-of-2015-so-far-2015-3
Converting financial files to and from various formats – pdf, csv, xls,
etc. ---
https://www.moneythumb.com/
Thank you Scott Bonacker for the heads up.
Law School Applicants From Top Colleges Plunge 39% ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/03/law-school-applicants-.html
The 10 Best and Worst Undergraduate Majors for Getting Jobs (without
getting additional credentials) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-college-majors-2014-6
Top students in the "worst majors" in the past often went on to law school.
They are still doing so but in fewer numbers and greatly dampened prospects for
working in law firms after law school graduation. Law school losses of students
are often MBA program gains. Options in accounting, engineering, nursing,
pharmacy are not so great due to all the undergraduate prerequisites that must
be satisfied before going to graduate school in those specialties.
Because there are so many graduates in business, neither an undergraduate
degree nor an MBA degree is a very good path to a career without extremely high
grades or specialties in demand like accounting. Sometimes a combination of
degrees greatly improves job prospects such as an undergraduate engineering or
computer science degree topped off with an MBA from a top school.
Students planning to get MD or science Ph.D. degrees need to carefully plan
their undergraduate studies in advance of going to graduate school.
Unfortunately, graduate studies in those fields, especially medicine, can be
quite long and expensive. For example, most MD or science Ph.D. graduates must
also plan for low-paying post-graduate residency or post-doc years before they
can make significant progress in paying down their student loans.
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Hoyle on Characteristics of Great Teachers
March 6, 2015 message from Joe Hoyle
. . .
I recently did an informal survey of my 77 students
(77???). I asked them to describe the characteristics of great teaching. I
was curious as to what they would tell me. I didn’t ask them about good
teaching or okay teaching. I wanted to know how they viewed great teaching.
I wrote up the results and posted it to my teaching
blog. Because it is so cold and snowy, I thought you might enjoy having
something to read. The URL for this posting is below.
If you ever want to grab a coffee and discuss
teaching (great or otherwise), let me know.
Joe
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2015/03/great-teaching-what-i-learned-from-my.html
Jensen Comment
Students also need other ingredients not found in motherhood and apple pie. Not
mentioned are spinach, turnip greens, lemons, and caster oil. Are philosophy
professors really doing you a favor by inspiring you to become a philosophy
professor or a professor of music where the probabilities of eventually
obtaining tenure track employment in the Academy are less than one percent. It's
good to be inspirational as long as there's no deception about reality.
Not mentioned in-depth expertise of the subject matter, making us learn
better by making us learn on our own, and tough grading to a point where even a
B grade exceeds the grades of most students in the class.
Not mentioned is the fact that many of the best physicians often have lousy
personalities. Many are arrogant and have very little empathy chit chat time
even though they are great and diagnostics and skills like surgical skills. I'm
told (fortunately never needed one) that some of the best psychiatrists are
tough with patients to a point where patients don't think their psychiatrists
are empathetic.
Some of my best college professors rated poorly on many of the criteria
listed by Joe.
My point is that trying to be what you are not
should not detract from being the best in what counts for a parent or a teacher
or a doctor or an accounting professor. More importantly the best parent
or teacher or doctor or accounting professor may not be the most loved.
The proof in academe are the results of teaching evaluations at the end of a
course versus teaching evaluations two decades later. Some worst-rated teachers
occasionally move to the top two decades after graduation.
"New York school abolishes homework. Does homework do any good? A growing
number of schools are doing away with homework. Some experts think it's a step
in the right direction," by Lisa Suhay, Yahoo News, March 6, 2015 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/york-school-abolishes-homework-does-homework-good-203439594.html
Jensen Comment
First we reduced the 7-8 hours of school to 4-5. Now we take away the homework.
Are kids really better off with video games, cold pizza and watching
television?
The worst thing we can do is make students work at learning. Yeah Right!
The experimental Charter School evidence shows that students really learn
more with more time (including Saturdays) in school and intense learning
assignments. But we want happy and fat kids on welfare more than skinny kids
sweating buckets to get into Harvard.
Home Schooled
"17-year-old becomes one of the world’s youngest CPAs:
Through hard work and determination, Belicia Cespedes (an immigrant) earned the
credential before she was even eligible to vote," by Samiha Khanna,
Global CPA Report, February 17, 2015 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/InterestAreas/YoungCPANetwork/Resources/Career/Pages/worlds-youngest-cpa-belicia-cespedes.aspx
Poor thing! She probably had homework and will not be eligible for welfare.
We'd rather be obese on benefits than thin and
working.
Janice and Amber Manzur
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11347454/Mother-and-daughter-weigh-a-total-of-43-stone-and-get-34k-a-year-handouts-but-refuse-to-diet.html
The oldest living CIA 'spy girl' reveals her greatest schemes ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-oldest-living-cia-spy-girl-reveals-her-greatest-schemes-2015-3#ixzz3TnCT8Xg1
Jensen Comment
This reveals that one of the most important skills is to have fluency in at
least one other language.
Top 10 Blogs about Postsecondary Next Gen Learning ---
http://www.educause.edu/blogs/millichap/top-10-blogs-about-postsecondary-next-gen-learning
To these I would add the following favorites of mine:
"Blogging changes the nature of academic research, not just how it is
communicated," by Patrick Dunleavy, London School of Economics, January 2015
---
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/12/28/shorter-better-faster-free/
Academic blogging gets your work and research
out to a potentially massive audience at very, very low cost and relative
amount of effort.
Patrick Dunleavy argues blogging and
tweeting from multi-author blogs especially is a great way to build
knowledge of your work, to grow readership of useful articles and research
reports, to build up citations, and to foster debate across academia,
government, civil society and the public in general.
One of the recurring themes (from many different
contributors) on the LSE Impact of Social Science blog is that a new
paradigm of research communications has grown up — one that de-emphasizes
the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time
academic communication. Blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link
to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to
from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and Google+ news-streams and
communities. So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most
important things that an academic should be doing right now.
But in addition, STEM scientists, social scientists
and humanities scholars all have an obligation to society to contribute
their observations to the wider world. At the moment that’s often being done
- in ramshackle and impoverished ways
- in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums
- in difficult language where you need to look
up every second word in Wikipedia. Some of this is necessary for
condensed specialist communication. But much of it is just unneeded
jargon and poor writing dressed up as necessary vocabulary
- with acres of ‘dead-on-arrival’ data (that
will never be used by anyone else in the world), often presented in
unreadable tables
- and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded
timescales. From submission to publication in some top economics
journals now takes 3.5 years. At the end of such a process any published
paper is no more than a tombstone marking where happening debate and
knowledge used to be, four or five years earlier.
So the public pay for all or much of our research
(especially in Europe and Australasia). And then we shunt back to them a few
press releases and a lot of out-of-date, arcanely phrased academic junk.
Types of blogs
A lot of people think that all blogs are solo
blogs, but this is a completely out of date view. A ‘blog’ is defined by
Wikipedia as:
‘a truncation of the expression web log… [It]
is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web
and consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in
reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first). Until
2009 blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of
a small group, and often covered a single subject. More recently
“multi-author blogs” (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large
numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers,
other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups and
similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic.
The rise of Twitter and other “microblogging” systems helps integrate
MABs and single-author blogs into societal newstreams’. [Accessed 29
August 2014]. (Let me pause here to reassure some academic readers who
may be bristling at being asked to read Wikipedia text – I know this
passage is sound since I co-wrote much of it).
Actually the evolution of academic blogs
specifically has now progressed even further, so that we can distinguish
group or collaborative blogs as an important intermediate type between solo
blogs and multi-author blogs. The two tables below summarize how these three
types of blogs now work, drawing attention to their very different
advantages and disadvantages.
Continued in article
The 15 best blogging and publishing platforms on the Internet today. Which
one is for you?
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/08/16/best-blogging-services/
Bob Jensen's threads on listservs, blogs, and social
networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Stanley Milgram ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram
Stanley Milgram’s studies endure not because they clarify our capacity for
evil, but because his work doesn’t prove what he claimed it does ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/
In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram's electric-shock
studies showed that people will obey even the most abhorrent of orders. But
recently, researchers have begin to question his conclusions—and offer some
of their own.
Minerva For-Profit Education Project ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerva_Project
"An Entrepreneur Sets Out to Do Better at Education Than His College Did,"
by Jeffrey J. Salingo, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 69, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/An-Entrepreneur-Sets-Out-to-Do/228267/?cid=wc
"The Man Who Would Overthrow Harvard: Can the Minerva Project do to Ivy
League universities what Amazon did to Borders?" by Matthew Kaminski, The
Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2013 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578627712224845012.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h
'If you think as we do," says Ben Nelson,
"Harvard's the world's most valuable brand." He doesn't mean only in higher
education. "Our goal is to displace Harvard. We're perfectly happy for
Harvard to be the world's second most valuable brand."
Listening to Mr. Nelson at his spare offices in San
Francisco's Mid-Market, a couple of adjectives come to mind. Generous (to
Harvard) isn't one. Nor immodest. Here's a big talker with bold ideas.
Crazy, too, in that Silicon Valley take-a-flier way.
Mr. Nelson founded and runs the Minerva Project.
The school touts itself as the first elite—make that "e-lite"—American
university to open in 100 years. Or it will be when the first class enters
in 2015. Mr. Nelson, who previously led the online photo-sharing company
Snapfish, wants to topple and transcend the American academy's economic and
educational model.
And why not? Higher education's product-delivery
system—a professor droning to a limited number of students in a room—dates
back a thousand years. The industry's physical plant (dorms, classrooms,
gyms) often a century or more. Its most expensive employees, tenured
faculty, can't be fired. The price of its product (tuition) and operating
costs have outpaced inflation by multiples.
In similar circumstances, Wal-Mart took out
America's small retail chains. Amazon crushed Borders. And Harvard will have
to make way for . . . Minerva? "There is no better case to do something that
I can think of in the history of the world," says Mr. Nelson.
Some people regarded as serious folks have bought
the pitch, superlatives and all. Larry Summers, the former Harvard
president, agreed to be the chairman of Minerva's advisory board. Former
Sen. Bob Kerrey, who led the New School in New York from 2001-10, heads the
fundraising arm. Stephen Kosslyn, previously dean of social sciences at
Harvard, is Minerva's founding academic dean. Benchmark, a venture-capital
firm that financed eBay and Twitter, last year made its largest-ever seed
investment, $25 million, in Minerva.
Mr. Nelson calls Minerva a "reimagined university."
Sure, there will be majors and semesters. Admission requirements will be
"extraordinarily high," he says, as at the Ivies. Students will live
together and attend classes. And one day, an alumni network will grease job
and social opportunities.
But Minerva will have no hallowed halls, manicured
lawns or campus. No fraternities or sports teams. Students will spend their
first year in San Francisco, living together in a residence hall. If they
need to borrow books, says Mr. Nelson, the city has a great public library.
Who needs a student center with all of the coffee shops around?
Each of the next six semesters students will move,
in cohorts of about 150, from one city to another. Residences and high-tech
classrooms will be set up in the likes of São Paulo, London or
Singapore—details to come. Professors get flexible, short-term contracts,
but no tenure. Minerva is for-profit.
The business buzzword here is the "unbundling" of
higher education, or disaggregation. Since the founding of Oxford in the
12th century, universities, as the word implies, have tried to offer
everything in one package and one place. In the world of the Web and Google,
physical barriers are disappearing.
Mr. Nelson wants to bring this technological
disruption to the top end of the educational food chain, and at first look
Minerva's sticker price stands out. Freed of the costs of athletics, the
band and other pricey campus amenities, a degree will cost less than half
the average top-end private education, which is now over $50,000 a year with
room and board.
His larger conceit, inspired or outlandish, is to
junk centuries of tradition and press the reset button on the university
experience. Mr. Nelson offers a fully-formed educational philosophy with a
practiced salesman's confidence. At Minerva, introductory courses are out.
For Econ or Psych 101, buy some books or sign up for one of the MOOCs—as in
massive open online course—on the Web.
"Too much of undergrad education is the
dissemination of basic information that at that level of student you should
expect them to know," he says. "We just feel we don't have any moral
standing to charge you thousands of dollars for learning what you can learn
for free." Legacy universities move students to their degrees through
packed, required lecture classes, which Mr. Nelson calls their "profit
pools." And yes, he adds, all schools are about raking in money, even if
most don't pay taxes by claiming "not-for-profit" status.
In the Nelson dream curriculum, all incoming
students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core won't make
students read the Great Books. "We want to teach you how to think," Mr.
Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical
writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything
from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral
econ."
Over the next three years, Minervaites take small,
discussion-heavy seminars via video from their various locations. Classes
will be taped and used to critique not only how students handle the
subjects, but also how they apply the reasoning and communication skills
taught freshman year.
The idea for Minerva grew out of Mr. Nelson's
undergraduate experience. As a freshman at Penn's Wharton School, he took a
course on the history of the university. "I realized that what the
universities are supposed to be is not what they are," he says. "That the
concept of universities taking great raw material and teaching how it can
have positive impact in the world is gone."
Undergraduates come in, take some random classes,
settle on a major and "oh yeah, you're going to pick up critical thinking in
the process by accident." By his senior year, Mr. Nelson was pushing for
curriculum changes as chairman of a student committee on undergraduate
education. As a 21-year-old, he designed Penn's still popular program of
preceptorials, which are small, short-term and noncredit seminars offered
"for the sake of learning."
A Wharton bachelor's degree in economics took him
to consulting at Dean & Company in Washington, D.C. "My first six months,
what did the consulting firm teach me? They didn't teach me the basics of
how they do business. They taught me how to think. I didn't know how to
check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude. I didn't have habits
of mind that a liberal arts education was supposed to have given me. And not
only did I not have it, none of my other colleagues had it—people who had
graduated from Princeton and Harvard and Yale."
After joining Snapfish in 1999 and leaving as CEO a
little over a decade later, Mr. Nelson, who is 38 and married with a
daughter, wrote and shopped around his business plan for Minerva. He says he
considered partnering with existing institutions, but decided to build a
21st-century school from scratch to offer the "ideal education."
Ideas like his are not in short supply. The catch?
No one has found a way to make a steady profit on an ed-tech startup.
Going back to the Internet bubble of the late
1990s, many have tried. With $120 million from Michael Milken and Larry
Ellison and a board of big names, UNext launched in 1997 as a Web-based
graduate university. It failed. Fathom, a for-profit online-learning venture
founded by Columbia University in 2000, closed three years and several
million in losses later.
In the current surge of investment in new
educational companies, Minerva has no direct competitor but plenty of
company. Udacity and Coursera, two prominent startups, are looking to
monetize the proliferation of MOOCs. UniversityNow offers cheap, practical
courses online and at brick-and-mortar locations in the Bay Area. And so on.
Education accounts for 8.7% of the U.S. economy,
but less than 1% of all venture capital transactions in 1995-2011 and only
0.3% of total public market capitalization, as of 2011, according to Global
Silicon Valley Advisors. The group predicts the market for postsecondary
"eLearning" and for-profit universities will grow by double digits annually
over the next five years.
Mr. Nelson's vision will be beside the point if
Minerva fails to attract paying students. He makes a straightforward
business case. Harvard and other top schools take only a small share of
qualified applicants, and for 30 years have refused to meet growing demand.
A new global middle class—some 1.5 billion people—desperately wants an elite
American education. "The existing model doesn't work," he says. "The market
was begging for a solution."
Audacious ideas are easy to pick apart, and Mr.
Nelson's are no exception. He repeats "elite" to describe a startup without
a single student. Reputations are usually earned over time. Many prospective
students dream of Harvard for the brand. Even at around $20,000 a year—no
bargain for middle-class Chinese 18-year-olds—Minerva won't soon have the
Harvard cachet.
Any education startup must also brave a regulatory
swamp. By opting out of government-backed student-loan programs, Minerva
won't have to abide by many of the federal rules for so-called Title IV (of
the relevant 1965 law) schools. Americans won't have an edge in admissions
and Minerva expects most students will come from abroad.
But Mr. Nelson wants to be part of the club whose
price of entry is accreditation. A cartel sanctioned by Congress places a
high barrier to entry for newcomers, stifling educational innovation.
Startups face a long slog to get accredited. So last month Minerva chose to
partner with the Keck Graduate Institute, or KGI, a small school founded in
1997 that is part of the Claremont consortium of colleges near Los Angeles.
Minerva degrees will now have, pending the regulatory OK, an accreditor's
seal of approval.
With this move, Mr. Nelson eased one headache and
raised some questions. KGI offers only graduate degrees in life sciences, an
unusual fit for an undergraduate startup. KGI isn't a recognizable
international name for Minerva to market. Yet Mr. Nelson says the schools
are "completely complementary" and the deal represents "zero change in our
mission."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The Minerva Project might lay claim to "overthrowing Harvard," but at best it
might overthrow only a small part of Harvard in terms of attracting students who
prefer to study in cities around the world. Will Minerva overthrow the Harvard
Medical School? Yeah right! Will Minerva overthrow the billions of dollars in
research laboratories on the Harvard campus? Yeah right! Is Minerva a better
choice than Harvard for natural science, nursing, pharmacy, and premed students?
I doubt it!
Is Minerva better for humanities, social science, and business majors?
Possibly in isolated instances. But there may be gaps in curricula that are
important prerequisites for graduate school studies. Students intent on becoming
CPAs in five years should never choose Minerva simply because Minerva does not
and probably will never offer the prerequisite courses required for taking the
CPA examination after five full-time years of study. Of course these same
students should never choose Harvard since Harvard has no undergraduate
accounting program feeding into its accounting Ph.D. program.
Will Minerva displace the networking advantages to students of having the
world's most successful, powerful, and well-connected Harvard alumni base? For
example, many new graduates of the Harvard Business School find that networking
with HBS alumni, especially on Wall Street, is more valuable than what was
learned in HBS classes.
Minerva will never overthrow Harvard, although it may steal away a miniscule
number top first-year prospects. But will Harvard admissions officers lose any
sleep over these losses? Yeah right!
Lastly, if Harvard ever pours billions into a program to compete with Minerva
it will be no contest.
"Are Elite Colleges Worth It?" by Pamela Haag, Chronicle of Higher
Education, October 30, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Elite-Colleges-Worth-It-/129540/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Added Jensen Question
Would you recommend the Minerva degree for your child relative to a degree from
an Ivy League University, Stanford, USC, or even a degree from a flagship state
university or other top-rated non-profit college? Much depends on the child, but
I think that at least 999 out of 1,000 children are better off with a
traditional degree --- especially in terms of having a credential for further
graduate study. Minerva graduates will have to make up a lot of undergraduate
prerequisites for most types of graduate study such as medicine, engineering,
science, business, accountancy, etc.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Gosh!
Walgreen and CVS never mention net leasing
in their TV commercials.
This is a long article so I will only quote a short bit of it.
"Walgreens and CVS Declare War on Property Taxes," by Patrick Clark,
Bloomberg, March 5, 2015 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-05/walgreens-and-cvs-declare-war-on-property-taxes?cmpid=BBD030515&alcmpid=
. . .
Walgreens, CVS, and other big drugstore chains have
been challenging property tax assessments in courts around the country for
the past decade, with little national notice. They argue, sometimes
successfully, that the rent they pay their commercial landlords doesn’t
accurately reflect property values. When they win, they get their tax bills
slashed.
Here’s how it works:
Most national retailers would rather rent their
stores than tie up billions of dollars in real estate. Walgreens leased 80
percent of its 8,300 stores as of August 2014, according to company filings.
CVS owned just 5 percent of its 7,800 stores as of the end of last year.
The basic idea is to rent stores under contracts,
called net leases, that make the tenants—the drugstores—responsible for
property taxes and other expenses. To compensate the investors who sink cash
into the real estate, Walgreens and other retailers pay rents that include a
premium above the cost of building the store. Once the stores are occupied,
net leases often trade among investors.
It’s a hefty market. About $45 billion in net
leases for U.S. properties changed hands in 2014, according to Will Pike, a
senior vice president at commercial real estate firm CBRE.
In tax board and judicial appeals that have sought
to cut levies by more than 50 percent, Walgreens and CVS have argued that
the price investors will pay to own a drugstore lease is the wrong tool for
determining the tax. Instead, they say, the assessments should hinge on the
amount the landlord could get if the drugstore moved out and another
retailer moved in. That would lower the assessment, because the pharmacy
chains have proved willing to pay higher rents than other tenants.
So the same premium that entices investors to buy
the net leases gives the drugstores leverage in their tax arguments.
The chains complain that counties are taxing
corporate debt instead of sticks, bricks, and mud—assessors’ slang for land
and buildings.
“CVS Health is committed to being a good corporate
citizen in the communities we serve and to paying our fair share of property
tax,” said Mike DeAngelis, director of public relations for the company.
Walgreens, too, says it is committed to paying
what's fair. “We’ve become more concerned in recent years with the use of
valuation methodologies based on the value of our long-term leases in
addition to the value of the real estate itself,” said spokesman Phil
Caruso.
The strategy has met with mixed results. In Florida
and New York, where Rite Aid has challenged its assessments, courts have
rejected the net lease argument.
Wisconsin has ruled in favor of pharmacies. Tax assessors scored in the Ohio
courts but saw their points erased when the state’s legislature revised the
tax law in the pharmacies’ favor.
More cases could be on the way. A Walgreens
employee named Anna Pelts testified during the Fayette County case that the
company was appealing the majority of its assessments over $3.5 million,
according to legal briefs filed in the case.
Commercial property taxes fund public schools,
roads, and other infrastructure in many states. Big-box stores and other
national retailers have tried out the drugstores’ argument, said Tim Wilmath,
a tax assessor in Hillsborough County, Fla., whose office won a state court
case against CVS in 2013. But the pharmacy chains have the most at stake.
That’s because of the premium they’re willing to pay for stores in busy
locations, and because they lease a lot of stores, relative to other
retailers.
“If they can sell the argument, they reap
tremendous reward,” Wilmath said.
Continued in article
If you can't fight it live with it in a sensible way!
"Integrating Wikipedia in Your Courses: Tips and Tricks," by Adeline Koh,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/integrating-wikipedia-in-courses/59301?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Has Technology Changed Us?: BBC Animations Answer the Question with the
Help of Marshall McLuhan ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/has-technology-changed-us.html
Grammar Conundrums
"Hard questions, not easy answers," The Economist, March 4, 2015
---
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/03/johnson-grammar
TODAY is National Grammar Day in America. (It
really should be International Grammar Day, but Johnson’s
urging on this point
has been unheeded.) It was founded by a group called the Society for the
Promotion of Good Grammar, and though the society itself seems to have last
updated its website in 2012, Grammar Day has outlived it. Many will
celebrate by venting about their most hated grammar mistakes: Poynter.org
asks, typically, "What
are your biggest grammar pet peeves?"
This column, instead, will celebrate some of
grammar’s more curious corners. Grammar is not a list of do’s and don’ts,
but a description of the rules of a language. Below are three legitimate
grammar controversies, where good arguments can be made on different sides.
Pondering hard questions, in your columnist’s view, is a better use of
National Grammar Day than spouting frustration at internet denizens who
can’t keep your and you’re straight.
This is one of those things that drives me
crazy. Many readers will pause mid-sentence on reading this. Should
it not be This is one of those things that drive me crazy? After
all, things is plural; should not the verb agree with that? The
answer is maddeningly unclear: there are two possible ways of parsing the
sentence. It can be understood as both
This is one [of those things] that drives me
crazy
And
This is one of [those things that drive me crazy]
One parse has one of those things as the
noun phrase in question. The other has those things. This is a real
ambiguity. It has generated many efforts to impose hard-and-fast rules, but
they are misguided. The best thing about this is that there are two possible
interpretations—and they are both flawless English. A gift to nervous
writers everywhere on National Grammar Day.
Conundrums? Yes. What to do with
foreign words in English is a conundrum, and there are many such conundrums
in English. English has fairly regular rules for forming plurals. Add –s
or –es, mostly. But English has also imported many foreign
words. Must it also import the pluralisation rules with them? Some people
would have you write conundra, which is the plural in Latin. After
all, we write data and media, not datums and
mediums. But ultimata and quora look odd;
ultimatums and quorums are more natural. Fora has a
long history in English, but
since 1930, forums has been more common in English books.
Once again, there simply is no hard-and-fast rule.
“Always use the grammar of the foreign language” will make you the only
person at the Italian café in London insisting on a panino with two
espressi. The person behind the counter may be one of London’s many
Italians, but if not, you are likely to receive either a nonplussed stare or
a heavy sigh.
So what is the rule? There are no rules, only
tendencies. Datums is almost non-existent, while forums
is not just common but preferred. Choose a style book (The Economist’s
has a
section on just this issue) or use Google’s tool
to search published books, and go with the majority. The only rule here is
to be internally consistent.
A date which will live in infamy.
Many American style books will tell you that the preceding phrase, used by
Franklin Roosevelt to describe the bombing of Pearl Harbour, is
ungrammatical. Instead, they propose the following rule: that
should introduce relative clauses that define and restrict the
preceding noun. (In other words, they should tell us which day is meant.)
Meanwhile, which should merely introduce some extra information
that is not crucial to defining the preceding noun. (The Porsche, which
is yellow, is for sale describes a Porsche which just happens to be
yellow.)
H.W. Fowler suggested this rule to neaten English
grammar in the 1920s. But it was only a suggestion: he confessed that
relative pronouns as of his time were already “an odd jumble”. The Lord’s
Prayer addresses our father which art in Heaven and, despite the
long pause it is often given in church services, is meant to refer to the
heavenly father as opposed to the earthly one. In other words, it
is a supposedly forbidden "restrictive which".
So which with a “restrictive” clause is
perfectly fine. Any “rule” forbidding it can be no more than a preference,
without a solid anchoring in syntax. That said, it is a good preference.
Which is used more often with non-restrictive clauses, and that
is only used for restrictive clauses. (No one says The Porsche,
that is yellow, is for sale). Americans are more likely than Britons to
observe the distinction. But it is worth observing, as a preference if not a
rule. Though commas do most of the work making clear which clauses are
restrictive and which are not, keeping that for one kind and
which for the other reinforces the work that the commas do. This aids
the reader a bit.
There are very good reasons for thinking hard about
grammar, and National Grammar Day is as good a time as any for that. But
resist the temptation to think that “grammar” always provides an easy,
exceptionless answer to tough questions. It is precisely because tough
questions remain that grammar is worth taking seriously.
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Fee-Based Distance Education Degree Experiments at Yale and Stanford
"Yale Announces ‘Blended’ Online Master’s Degree," by Steve Kolowich,
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-announces-blended-online-masters-degree/56003?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Yale University is creating a master’s program that
will hold many courses online, continuing the Ivy League institution’s foray
into “blended” learning.
The online program, to be offered by the Yale
School of Medicine, would aim to replicate its residential program for
training physicians’ assistants. Students would meet in virtual classrooms
where they would discuss course material using videoconferencing technology.
They would also have to complete field training — accounting for roughly
half of the coursework — in person, at Yale-approved clinics near where they
live.
It is the second professional school at Yale to try
the “blended” model for a graduate program, following the Yale School of
Nursing, which
opened a partially
online doctoral degree in 2011.
Yale has taken an active but measured interest in
online education in the past decade. In 2007 it became one of the first
elite institutions to post lecture videos online at no charge. In 2011 it
began offering online summer courses to small groups of undergraduates for
credit. In 2013 it
joined with Coursera and started building MOOCs.
But a degree program that includes fully online
courses is a step toward a different vision of how Yale and other highly
selective traditional universities are likely to incorporate online
education. Free online courses might make headlines, but tuition-based
professional degrees in high-demand fields such as health care are where
online courses, and the companies that help build them, are gaining a
foothold.
Other top-tier universities have created online
versions of their professional-degree programs, which is something Yale
noticed when
taking stock of its online presence in 2012. The
Johns Hopkins University, for example, offers an online master’s program in
public health that delivers about
80 percent of its coursework on the web.
2U, the online “enabler” company that is helping
Yale develop the new program, previously built nursing programs at
Georgetown University and Simmons College, as well as programs in public
health and health administration at George Washington University.
Institutions typically
sign contracts with companies like 2U when they
want to create new online programs as fast as possible without spending a
lot of cash upfront. That is an especially attractive option for
universities that are trying to grab a larger chunk of the market for
high-demand professional degrees in fields such as health, nursing, data
science, and business. It is there that 2U and others have found their sweet
spot. The companies provide the technology platform and marketing expertise,
and take a large share of the tuition revenues.
Yale would hire new instructors to teach courses in
the program, which is still awaiting accreditation approval. The tuition and
faculty-to-student ratio would be roughly equivalent to the residential
program.
James Van Rhee, director of the program, said he
did not know if the online version would be more profitable, but he did
expect it would expand the medical school’s reach — especially in rural
areas. The institution hopes to increase enrollments from 40, the size of
the current program, to around 300.
“I don’t know if it will be cost-efficient for us,”
said Robert J. Alpern, dean of the medical school, but “hopefully it will be
cost-efficient for the students, because they’ll be able to do it from
home.”
Distance Education: Stanford Center for Professional Development
Stanford University was probably the first prestigious university to offer an
online masters degree in engineering in a video program called ADEPT. That has
since been replaced by an expanded online program in professional development
that offers certificates or full masters of science degrees in selected
programs, especially engineering. The program is highly restrictive in that
students must work for employers Must be members of Stanford's Corporate
Education Graduate Program. For example, to earn a masters of science degree the
requirements are as follows:
For details go to
http://scpd.stanford.edu/home
Most other top universities in the USA now have selected online certificate
and degree programs offered in their extension programs. Go to a university of
interest and search for "extension." It's still rare to find an online doctoral
program at a top university. For-profit universities offer more online doctoral
programs, but these tend not to be accepted very well for employment in the
Academy. In fact it may be better to not mention such doctoral degrees when
seeking employment in the Academy.
"Stanford (Graduate School of Business) Bets Big on Virtual (online)
Education," by Natalie Kitroeff and Akane Otani, Bloomberg Businessweek,
November 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-05/stanford-gsb-offers-executive-certificate-program-completely-online
Stanford’s
Graduate School of Business took its relationship
with online education to the next level on Wednesday, when it announced that
a new program for company executives will be delivered entirely by way of
the Internet.
“I don’t know of anything else like this,” says
Audrey Witters, managing director of online executive education at Stanford
GSB. “We’ve put together something for a very targeted audience, people who
are trying to be corporate innovators, with courses where they all work
together. That’s a lot different from taking a MOOC [massive open online
course].”
Stanford said it will admit up to 100 people to the
LEAD Certificate program, which will begin in May
2015 and deliver the “intimate and academically rigorous on-campus Stanford
experience” to students from the comfort of their computer screens. In an
effort to make students “really feel connected to each other, to Stanford,
and to the faculty,” the eight-course program will encourage students to
interact through message boards, online chats, Google Hangouts, and phone
calls over the course of its yearlong duration, Witters says.
“We really want to create the high-engagement,
community aspect that everyone who comes to Stanford’s campus feels,” she
says.
The classes will be offered on a platform supplied
by Novoed, a virtual education company started by former Stanford professor
Amin Saberi and Stanford Ph.D. student Farnaz Ronaghi. The B-school has
invested a significant chunk of its resources in launching the program:
About 10 to 15 faculty members are slated to teach the courses. In addition
to building a studio where it will film course videos, the school has hired
a growing pool of educational technology experts and motion graphic
designers to work on the courses, according to Witters.
“This is by far the most serious and most
significant initiative by GSB in the online realm,” Saberi says.
People go to business school for more than just
lectures, Saberi says, and online programs should be as good at teaching the
numbers of business as the art of it. “What we are planning to do is to
create a very similar environment online where they can acquire softer
skills and build a network of peers.”
The program’s $16,000 price tag dwarfs the online
offerings of Stanford’s competitors, including
Harvard Business School’s $1,500
nine-week online program and the
Wharton School’s entirely free
first-year MBA classes, which it put on the virtual platform Coursera
last fall.
The program may seem less pricey, though, to the
company executives it’s intended for. Business schools have traditionally
sold certificates to working professionals for tens, if not hundreds, of
thousands of dollars. Stanford’s own six-week, on-campus
program costs
executives $62,500.
To Novoed, which also provides technology to
Wharton, the
Haas School of Business, and the
Darden School of Business, the Internet is an
obvious place for business schools to expand their lucrative executive
education programs.
Saberi says companies are interested in elite
training programs that don’t require employees to leave their desks. “We
expect that programs like this are going to grow.”
From US News in 2014
Best Online Degree Programs (ranked) ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
Central Michigan is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
Indiana University is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
Northern Illinois is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
Columbia University is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Information Technology
Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
The University of Southern California is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
St. Xavier University is the big winner
US News Degree Finder ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders
US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they
don't seem to want to provide the data.
Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based education and training alternatives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm
The University of Wisconsin Experiments With a Different Kind of MOOC
"MOOCs for Wisconsin and the World," by Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, Jeffrey
Russell, Linda A. Jorn, and Joshua Morrill, Educause Review, March 2,
2015 ---
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/moocs-wisconsin-and-world \
A new MOOC initiative from the University of
Wisconsin–Madison ties the topics to communities in the state of Wisconsin
and gives residents an opportunity to meet in person.
Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, Provost and Vice
Chancellor for Academic Affairs; Jeffrey S. Russell, Vice Provost for
Lifelong Learning and Dean, Division of Continuing Studies; Linda A. Jorn,
Associate Vice Provost of Learning Technologies and Division of Information
Technology (DoIT) Director of Academic Technology; and Joshua H. Morrill,
Evaluator, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Imagine a massive open online course (MOOC) that
doesn't feel so massive; one that's intimately tied to a region, with
opportunities for meaningful face-to-face encounters in community settings.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison will offer six such courses in its
latest round of massive open online courses
for 2015–16. One course
will invite those interested in climate change to attend discussions
throughout Wisconsin, thanks to partnerships with 21 public libraries.
Another course, focused on hunting and conservation, features an event with
hunters and chefs in the southern Wisconsin city of Baraboo.
UW–Madison began its experiment with massive open
online courses in 2013. Hosted on Coursera, the
four courses
in our first phase reached about 135,000 learners from 141 countries and all
50 states.1 Despite reservations about MOOCs in academic circles,2
university leaders believe these courses have a part to play in our future,
tying them to a larger push for institutional change called
Educational Innovation:
an attempt to prepare students and communities for the 21st century. In
launching a second phase of MOOCs, we're thinking more carefully about our
audiences so we can use the platform to engage with people in both Wisconsin
and the world.
Our phase-one MOOCs focused on topics of general
interest, such as human evolution and financial markets. For phase two,
however, the topics are more strongly associated with the state of
Wisconsin. Five of the six new MOOCs have an environmental theme,
acknowledging that Wisconsin—home of "A Sand County Almanac" author Aldo
Leopold and Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson—is a cradle of the conservation
movement.3 Continuing this legacy, our faculty and staff will
offer courses on such topics as Leopold's Land Ethic and changing climate in
the Great Lakes region.
Through MOOCs, we will invite citizens from around
the globe to engage in discussions on some of the most important issues of
our time. But even more important, we will extend this invitation to people
in Baraboo, for example (see below), along with other state residents. In
this way, we can offer a UW–Madison experience to Wisconsin citizens who
might not otherwise feel connected to the university.
Knowing Our Audience
UW–Madison's phase-one MOOCs gave faculty members a
chance to explore new ways of teaching, research, and outreach, supported by
a project team that could provide strategic planning, online course
development, and evaluation. This initial offering consisted of four
courses: "Video Games and Learning," "Markets with Frictions," "Human
Evolution: Past and Future," and "Globalizing Higher Education and Research
for the 'Knowledge Economy.'"
The MOOCs were faculty-centered, following a
traditional classroom model. Instructors shared their expertise with an
audience of learners—albeit widely scattered learners who, rather than
raising their hands in a classroom, watched instructional videos, engaged in
activities relevant to their day-to-day lives, and typed their questions in
discussion forums.
We approached phase one as an experiment in which
we could learn by doing. We hoped to:
- Develop standards for a quality MOOC
- Document the needs of faculty, learners, and
support staff
- Evaluate the learning-platform requirements
The experiment succeeded from the institution's
standpoint. We learned how to design MOOCs and serve a more diverse
audience. The participating faculty explored new ways of teaching and
expressed satisfaction with the results.
More significantly, we learned about the people who
signed up for our MOOCS. We conducted a pre-MOOC survey, a mid-MOOC survey,
and a post-MOOC survey that collected perceptual, attitudinal, and
demographic information. The
surveys
showed that phase-one MOOC participants fell into three overlapping
motivational segments.
- General interest: people who
wanted to find out what a MOOC was like, were interested in a topic, and
sought a connection with like-minded participants.
- Career: people who wanted to
prepare for a job or enhance existing job skills.
- Educational: students and
teachers who were interested in a MOOC's content for their own research
and classes.
Participants could have multiple motivations (see
table 1). Nearly all participants fell into the General Interest category,
but the Career and Educational categories were more mutually exclusive.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of MOOCs from prestigious universities
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
"How airlines could cheat you out of frequent flier miles," by Ben
Geier, Fortune, March 3, 2015 ---
http://fortune.com/2015/03/03/airlines-frequent-flyer-miles/?xid=newsletter-brief
Some airlines are rewarding you for dollars spent
rather than miles traveled
Frequent flier miles may not be actual cash, but
for many, jetsetters they’re just as good. Some airlines, though, may not be
giving you all the miles you think you deserve.
A new PricewaterhouseCoopers study shows that if
airlines switch to frequent flyer programs based on dollars spent rather
than miles traveled, around 45% of passengers could lose out on points,
USA Today reports. Meanwhile, around 40% of
flyers would actually get more points, while 15% would see no change.
People who buy cheap tickets for long distances
will lose points, while those who buy expensive, short flights will gain.
Several airlines, including
Delta, have already made this change, while others
are considering similar moves. Giving additional points to people who spend
more money on tickets incentivizes that extra spending, helping airlines
make bigger profits.
"Former Pittsburg State (Kansas) finance professor pleads guilty to fraud,"
KAKE, March 4, 2015 ---
http://www.kake.com/home/headlines/Former-Pittsburg-State-professor-pleads-guilty-to-fraud-294996191.html
A former Pittsburg State University professor has
admitted defrauding a Nigerian graduate student exchange program he led at
the university out of more than $140,000.
The Joplin Globe reports 61-year-old Michael
Muoghalu pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Wichita to wire fraud and
money laundering.
In exchange for the plea agreement, the prosecutor
agreed to recommend a lower sentence. He will also be required to repay the
university $148,430.
Prosecutors allege that beginning in 2006 Muoghalu
worked with an unknown accomplice in Nigeria to persuade 15 Nigerian
students to give him part of the refunds they received after they deposited
money with the university for tuition and fees.
Muoghalu, who
taught finance at the school for 23 years,
resigned last September.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Does Beauty Matter in Undergraduate Education?" by Tatyana Deryugina
and Olga Shurchkov, SSRN, August 15, 2013 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2332265
Abstract:
Physically attractive individuals achieve greater success in terms of
earnings and status than those who are less attractive. However, much about
the mechanism behind this “beauty premium” remains unknown. We use a rich
dataset to shed light on its nature at the college level. We find that
students judged to be more attractive perform significantly worse on
standardized tests but, conditional on test scores, are not evaluated more
favorably at the point of admission. Controlling for test scores, more
attractive students receive marginally better grades in some cases. Finally,
there is substantial beauty-based sorting into areas of study and
occupations.
. . .
Conclusion
The issue of beauty-based discrimination has gained increasing attention in
recent years. Prior literature has found that more attractive people earn
more on average. However, much remains unknown about the origins and
evolution of the beauty premium, including whether there are differences in
academic capability between more and less attractive individuals, and the
extent of bias and sorting that occurs. We contribute to the literature by
considering whether there is a beauty advantage before and during college
and by estimating the extent to which beauty-based sorting occurs. 27
We find that more attractive women do not appear
more academically capable at the point of college admissions. On the
contrary, they receive lower admission ratings, even though the application
readers never directly observe applicant appearance. This is because more
attractive women receive lower SAT scores. Although previous researchers
have found that standardized test scores are positively correlated with
measures of cognitive ability (see, e.g., Frey and Detterman 2004, Beaujean
et al. 2006, Rohde and Thompson 2006, and Koenig et al. 2008), these
findings do not necessarily contradict earlier findings that more attractive
people have higher IQs. SAT scores are likely to be a function of both
innate ability and effort. It may be that more attractive people rationally
exert less effort on the SAT because the other advantages available to them
make it optimal to invest fewer resources into scoring higher on the SATs.
Testing this hypothesis is beyond the scope of this paper, but should be a
worthwhile avenue for future research.
We find substantial beauty-based sorting into areas
of study, with more attractive women being significantly less likely to
major in the sciences and much more likely to major in economics. They are
also subsequently less likely to work in science-related or technical fields
and more likely to become consultants, analysts, or managers. Overall, our
findings show that the main difference between more and less attractive
people during college appears to lie not in the grades they receive but
rather in the major and career choices they make.
Unfortunately, we cannot determine whether the
observed sorting into majors is socially optimal, which is important for
estimating welfare effects and deriving policy implications. However, even
if inefficient sorting is present, policy tools capable of addressing it
would be controversial and perhaps impossible to implement.
Jensen Comment
I always thought beauty was in the eye of the beholder. There are all sorts of
things about this study that raise questions apart from the big question about
what is "beauty?"
Some of my doubts before reading the study were no longer such glaring doubts
after the study.
Firstly, in most colleges use of grades as a criterion would be a bad joke since
grade inflation virtually destroys a grading system integrity (such as the
common situation in which the average grade in a class is an A-, A, or A+)
according ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
However, the university in this study had a grade inflation policy as
follows:
Starting in the fall semester of 2004, the college
implemented an anti-grade-inflation policy that capped the average grade in
introductory and intermediate courses with ten or more students to a B+.7
This policy change disproportionately affected humanities courses. If there
is beauty-based selection into humanities courses, this policy change may
bias our estimates. To control for the potential impacts of the anti-grade
inflation policy, we identify departments that had average grades exceeding
a B+ and label beginning and intermediate courses with more than ten
students in those departments as “treated.” We then control for the treated
indicator and its interaction with a “post-fall-semester-2004” indicator in
all course-level regressions.
Secondly, the college in question appears to not have professional programs
like engineering and business. This means that new arrivals at this college
pre-selected a college without such professional programs. This creates a
possible pre-selection bias.
Thirdly, the college in question only admits women. This means that new
arrivals at this college pre-selected a college without male students. This
creates a possible pre-selection bias.
Fourthly, being the male chauvinist pig that I am I judge beauty in terms of
the entire body of a female. This study only judged beauty based upon mug shots
on ID cards. For example, Karen Carpenter was skin on bones before her disease
(anorexia) commenced to show in her lovely face. Her mug shots remained
beautiful long after the disease ravaged her body ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Carpenter
Fiftly, grades are only measured on an original scale 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0. I
question the use of correlation and regression tests that assume at least
interval scaling on ordinal data ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsScienceStatisticalMistakes.htm
I could keep going with some more doubts, but I will only raise one more
doubt. A sample of 794 subjects is relatively large for statistical inference.
The problem is that more often than not insignificant differences in large
samples are deemed statistically significant ---
The Cult of Statistical Significance:
How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
"New Scams Targeting University Employees," Inside Higher Ed,
March 2, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/03/02/new-scams-targeting-university-employees
Faculty and staff at
Carnegie Mellon University who last weekend clicked on a
link in an e-mail titled "Your salary raise information"
were disappointed when they didn't find a pay increase
but an attempt to steal their personal information. The
university has since warned the campus community against
the phishing scam and locked down the compromised
accounts, WPXI
reported.
Hackers often target university employees' wallets. In
the last several months, the Research and Education
Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or
REN-ISAC, has identified
threats against
university payroll systems and
personal tax returns.
The organization on
Friday released a new advisory, warning colleges and
universities about a "resurgence" in scams that involve
fake wire transfers. In one version of the scam, a vice
president at a university received an e-mail from a
hacker impersonating the president asking for help with
an outgoing wire transfer. REN-ISAC recommended
university officers who can conduct wire transfers be
suspicious of instructions sent by e-mail.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
The Econometric Theory (Historical) Interviews
"The ET Interviews," by David Giles, Econometrics Blog, March
2, 2015 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-et-interviews.html
Right from its inception in
1985, the journal
Econometric Theory has
featured the "ET Interviews". These are published
interviews with key figures who have helped to shape the
discipline of econometrics as we know it.
Many of these interviews
have been conducted by ET Editor,
Peter Phillips, but other
interviewers ave also participated. This invaluable contribution
provides us with a unique "window" on the history of
econometrics, and the ET Interviews should be required
reading for all of our graduate students.
The very first issue of ET included
Peter's interview with Denis Sargan - one of the most
influential British econometricians of all time, and Peter's
Ph.D. supervisor at the LSE. Since then, interviews with 38
other econometricians and statisticians have been added to the
collection. These recorded memories will become increasingly
valuable with each passing year.
The majority of the
interview articles can be downloaded freely from Peter's website
(although they're not shown as links). In the following list of
all of the "ET Interviews" to date, those articles that
have to be accessed through the
journal site itself are flagged with an asterisk (*):
The ET Interviewees
T. W. (Ted) Anderson
A. R. (Rex) Bergstrom
Herman Bierens*
Greogry C. Chow
Manfred Deistler*
Phoebus J. Dhrymes
James Durbin
Robert F. Engle (Nobel
Laureate, 2003)
Eric Ghysels*
Arthur S.
Goldberger
Christian Gourieroux &
Alain Monfort*
Clive W. J. Granger (Nobel
Laureate, 2003)
E. J. (Ted) Hannan
Michio Hatanaka
Sir David F.
Hendry*
Cheng
Hsiao*
Alan T. James
George G.
Judge*
Joseph B. (Jay) Kadane
Lawrence R. Klein (Nobel
Laureate, 1980)
Jan
Kmenta*
G. S. Maddala
Edmmond Malinvaud
Marc L. Nerlove
B. L. S. Prakasa
Rao*
C. R. Rao
Olav Reiersol
Peter M.
Robinson*
J. D. (Denis) Sargan
Sir J. R. N. (Richard) Stone (Nobel
Laureate, 1984)
Katsuto
Tanaka*
George C. Tiao
Jan Tinbergen (Inaugural
Nobel Laureate, 1969)
James Tobin (Nobel
Laureate, 1981)
Herman O. A. Wold
Arnold Zellner
Reply from Ken Hummel on March 2, 2015
Bob,
I thought you would like to know that an early
figure in Econometrics was Harold T Davis, a professor in the Mathematics
Department when I came to Trinity in 1969. This was his last post after
several positions at various bigger name universities.
He had written books on the subject: here is one
link
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1805820?sid=21106001165683&uid=4&uid=3739256&uid=3739600&uid=2
as well as many others.
He had given me a signed copy of one of his
economics books. When I retired I gave the old copy to Joe Davis.
Harold was a very interesting guy. He had the habit
of getting involved in interesting conversations with people in many
departments in the old coffee shop, but very few now at Trinity would know
him.
Here is a short bio (without mentioning Trinity-
too bad)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Thayer_Davis
Ken
Also see
http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/archive/reprints/memior-of-davis.pdf
Jensen Comment
You can read more about most of the above scholars in Wikipedia.
Measuring Student Debt and Its Performance PDF ---
http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr668.pdf
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?
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Harvard Business School hopes to fundamentally change online education
with its new $1,500 pre-MBA program (only three non-credit courses for openers)
Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wharton_School_of_the_University_of_Pennsylvania
Harvard Business School ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Business_School
Jensen Comment
The Wharton School shocked the world when it commenced to provide free
(non-credit) MOOCs of its actual MBA core courses. Aside from curiosity seekers
and business faculty around the world wondering how the prestigious Wharton
School teaches its core courses, many of the students taking these MOOCs are
prospective MBA students who want to get an edge before entering MBA programs of
their choice ---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/moocs-upend-traditional-business-education/
Although Harvard provides hundreds of MOOCs in various disciplines, the
Harvard Business School has not been providing MOOCs. Now the HBS is proposing a
pre-MBA distance education program with a relatively low fee that may also shake
up the MBA world. Since it is not free and has admission standards it cannot be
called a MOOC.
"Harvard Business School hopes to fundamentally change online education
with its new $1,500 pre-MBA program," by Richard Feloni, Business Insider,
February 27, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-business-school-hbx-1500-online-program-2015-2
This week, Harvard Business School launched an
innovative new online education program to the public that it thinks is so
far ahead of free online courses that it's worthy of a $1,500 price tag.
The 11-week pre-MBA program called CORe accepts
about 500 students and is taught in the school's signature case-study
method. The first official session started on Feb. 25, and applications are
open for spring and summer sessions.
CORe is the flagship offering from HBS's new
digital platform,
HBX, which aims to
become a full-fledged branch of the school rather than a place to dump video
recordings of classroom lectures.
CORe is made up of three courses —
economics for managers, business analytics, and
financial accounting — and primarily
targets young professionals with liberal arts backgrounds who aspire to rise
to management or are considering getting an MBA.
Students who pass the program receive a certificate
that carries the weight of one from HBS's executive education program.
HBX chair Bharat Anand tells Business Insider that
most online course offerings are still in their infancy, where long video
lectures posted alongside multiple choice questions is the norm.
Conversely, HBX CORe is built on a proprietary
platform that uses the case-study technique that distinguishes HBS. "This
has some very interesting and exciting potential for education," Anand says.
It started as a way to find an online tool to
address the "non trivial" 20% to 30% of students accepted to HBS's MBA
program who lacked the necessary background in "the language of business":
accounting, economics, and data analysis. These students always had access
to a two-week primer before matriculating in the fall, but Anand says the
short time was insufficient for achieving a thorough understanding, and
traveling to HBS's campus before the school year officially starts could be
an inconvenience for many students.
Jensen Comment
The Wharton set of free MOOCs will probably be a better choice for students
wanting to learn a wider spectrum of business knowledge that includes things
like marketing and finance that Harvard's pre-MBA program will not offer, at
least not initially.
But there are advantages of Harvard's pre-MBA distance education program
relative to MOOCs. Firstly, there's the prestige of being one of only 500
admitted to the program. Secondly, there will be more student-to-student
learning interactions in Harvard's fee-based program. Unlike the HBS MBA program
itself I doubt if there are writing assignments and examinations that are graded
by faculty.
Given the low price and limited enrollments, I suspect that this pre-MBA
program is not (at least not yet) intended to be a cash cow program relative to
the massive cash cow MBA program and Executive MBA programs at the HBS.
"18 Free Online Business Courses That Will Boost Your Career," by John
A. Byrne, Business Insider, December 18, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-free-online-business-courses-in-january-2014-12
. . .
To learn more about these courses — and register
for them — click on the links below.
Gamification / Wharton / January 26
Globalization of Business Enterprise / IESE / January 19
Entrepreneurship 101 and Entrepreneurship 102 / MIT / January 9
ContractsX: From Trust to Promise to Contract / Harvard / January 8
Technology Entrepreneurship / Stanford / January 6
Asset Pricing – Part One / University of Chicago / January 18
Innovation and Commercialization / MIT / January 13
Grow To Greatness: Smart Growth For Private Businesses – Part II /
University of Virginia / January 12
Financial Analysis of Entrepreneurial Ideas / Babson College / January or
February
Time to Reorganize! Understand Organizations, Act, and Build a Meaningful
World / HEC Paris / January 13
Game Theory II: Advanced Applications / Stanford / January 11
U.Lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self / MIT / January 7
Make An Impact: Sustainability for Professionals / University of Bath /
January 12
Managing People: Engaging Your Workforce / University of Reading / January
12
Decision Making in a Complex and Uncertain World / University of Groningen /
January 19
Project Management for Business Professionals / January 26
Subsistence Marketplaces / University of Illinois / January 26
DQ 101: Introduction to Decision Quality / Strategic Decisions Group /
January 15
More from John A. Byrne:
This article originally appeared at
LinkedIn. Copyright 2014. Follow LinkedIn on
Twitter.
Read more:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-mooc-courses-business-john-a.-byrne#ixzz3MLx1WEeQ
Most MOOCs are college courses
that comprise part of the curriculum at a university,
usually a leading university. The typical MOOC is the filmed
version of a complete live course on campus where onsite
students get credits for taking the course in a campus
classroom.
Online MOOC viewers usually watch the videos of an onsite
course and may even get together in online learning teams,
but viewers typically do not pay for or receive transcript
credit unless they take competency examinations that are
usually not administered by the MOOC professors. Prestigious
universities created EdX and Udacity for purposes of
competency testing and granting of transcript credits.
Most Webinars are much shorter
training modules conducted live that were never intended to
provide college course credits. They may be replayed as videos,
but viewers can usually ask questions online and interact with
the Webinar leaders only when the Webinar was first filmed.
Business firms like KPMG usually provide Webinars. Webinars are
not commonly provided by colleges and universities. Typically
Webinars are intended for employees, customers, or clients, but
these Webinars may be shared freely with college faculty and
students worldwide. Organizations like the FASB also conduct
Webinars bit do not offer MOOCs. Webinars may also be conducted
for continuing education (CEP) credits.
Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of
MOOC courses and instructions on how to sigh up for (free) MOOCs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Contrary to popular belief, the typical
MOOC is not an introductory course in a discipline. More commonly a
MOOC is an advanced specialty course in a college. For example,
MOOCs are available on the writings of great poets but not
introductory courses how to write compositions or poems. There are
exceptions of course and often the most popular MOOCs are less
advanced such as an introductory MOOC in social psychology versus an
advanced MOOC on memory and metacognition.
Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of free MOOCs from prestigious
universities around the world ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Bob Jensen's threads on tens of thousands of fee-based distance education
courses around the world ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm
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."
Competency-Based Learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge
"If B.A.’s Can’t Lead Graduates to Jobs, Can Badges Do the Trick?" by
Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/If-BA-s-Can-t-Lead/228073/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Employers say they are sick of encountering new
college graduates who lack job skills. And colleges are sick of hearing that
their young alumni aren’t employable.
Could a new experiment to design employer-approved
"badges" leave everyone a little less frustrated?
Employers and a diverse set of more than a
half-dozen universities in the Washington area are about to find out,
through a project that they hope will become a national model for
workplace badges.
The effort builds on the burgeoning national
movement for badges and other forms of "microcredentials." It also pricks
at much broader questions about the purpose and value of a college degree in
an era when nearly nine out of 10 students say their top reason for going to
college is to get a good job.
The "21st Century Skills Badging Challenge" kicks
off with a meeting on Thursday. For the next nine months, teams from the
universities, along with employers and outside experts, will try to pinpoint
the elements that underlie skills like leadership, effective storytelling,
and the entrepreneurial mind-set. They’ll then try to find ways to assess
students’ proficiency in those elements and identify outside organizations
to validate those skills with badges that carry weight with employers.
The badges are meant to incorporate the traits most
sought by employers, often referred to as "the four C’s": critical thinking,
communication, creativity, and collaboration.
"We want this to become currency on the job
market," says Kathleen deLaski, founder of the
Education Design Lab,
a nonprofit consulting organization that is coordinating the project.
No organizations have yet been selected or agreed
to provide validations. But design-challenge participants say there’s a
clear vision: Perhaps an organization like
TED
issues a badge in storytelling. Or a company like
Pixar,
or
IDEO,
the design and consulting firm, offers a badge in
creativity.
If those badges gain national acceptance, Ms.
deLaski says, they could bring more employment opportunities to students at
non-elite colleges, which rarely attract the same attention from recruiters
as the Ivies, other selective private colleges, or public flagships. "I’m
most excited about it as an access tool," she says.
‘Celebrating’ and ‘Translating’
The very idea of badges may suggest that the
college degree itself isn’t so valuable—at least not to employers.
Badge backers prefer a different perspective. They
say there’s room for both badges and degrees. And if anything, the changing
job market demands both.
Through their diplomas and transcripts, "students
try to signal, and they have the means to signal, their academic
accomplishments," says Angel Cabrera, president of George Mason University,
which is involved in the project. "They just don’t have the same alternative
for the other skills that employers say they want."
Nor is the badging effort a step toward
vocationalizing the college degree, participants say. As Ms. deLaski puts
it: "It’s celebrating what you learn in the academic setting and translating
it for the work force."
Yet as she and others acknowledge, badges by
themselves won’t necessarily satisfy employers who now think graduates don’t
cut it.
That’s clear from how employer organizations that
may work on the project regard badges. "We’re presuming that there is an
additional skill set that needs to be taught," says Michael Caplin,
president of the Tysons Partnership, a Northern Virginia
economic-development organization. "It’s not just a packaging issue."
In other words, while a move toward badges could
require colleges to rethink what they teach, it would certainly cause them
to re-examine how they teach it. At least some university partners in the
badging venture say they’re on board with that.
"Some of what we should be doing is reimagining
some disciplinary content," says Randall Bass, vice provost for education at
Georgetown University, another participant in the project.
Mr. Bass, who also oversees the
"Designing
the Future(s) of the University" project at
Georgetown, says many smart curricular changes that are worth pursuing, no
matter what, could also lend themselves to the goals of the badging effort.
(At the master’s-degree level, for example, Georgetown has already begun
offering a one-credit courses in grant writing.)
"We should make academic work more like work," with
team-based approaches, peer learning, and iterative exercises, he says.
"People would be ready for the work force as well as getting an engagement
with intellectual ideas."
Employers’ gripes about recent college graduates
are often hard to pin down. "It depends on who’s doing the whining," Mr.
Bass quips. (The critique he does eventually summarize—that employers feel
"they’re not getting students who are used to working"—is a common one.)
Where Graduates Fall Short
So one of the first challenges for the badging
exercise is to better understand exactly what employers want and whether
colleges are able to provide it—or whether they’re already doing so.
After all, notes Mr. Bass, many believe that
colleges should produce job-ready graduates simply by teaching students to
be agile thinkers who can adapt if their existing careers disappear. "That’s
why I think ‘employers complain, dot dot dot,’ needs to be parsed," he says.
Mr. Caplin says his organization plans to poll its
members to better understand where they see college graduates as falling
short.
Continued in article
MOOCs ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOCs
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
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Dilbert on Beating the Averages ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/02/dilbert-beating-the-average/
Warren Buffett's Golden Anniversary (actually Warren recommends against
investing in gold because of insignificant societal economic benefits)
Warren Buffett's 50th letter to Berkshire shareholders ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-2014-berkshire-hathaway-letter-to-shareholders-2015-2
Berkshire Hathaway
just released its 2014 letter to shareholders.
First things first, Berkshire Hathaway earned $2,412 per Class A share in
the fourth quarter of 2014, missing expectations for earnings of $2,702.
As of December 31, Berkshire Hathaway's book value
per Class A share was $146,186.
For the first time, Berkshire included the
historical stock price in this year's annual letter.
And while Buffett said that the intrinsic value of
the company and the price of the shares isn't always exact — in fact that
relationship used to be closer than it is today — Buffett and his partner
Charlie Munger believe the increase the share price and the increase and
intrinsic value is roughly equal.
That increase over the last 50 years?
1,826,163%
Buffett said that Berkshire's "Powerhouse Five" —
the company's largest non-insurance businesses — earned $12.4 billion
pre-tax, up from $1.6 billion in 2013. These businesses include, Berkshire
Hathaway Energy (formerly MidAmerican Energy), BNSF, IMC (I’ve called it
Iscar in the past), Lubrizol and Marmon. If the US economy continues to
improve in 2015, Buffett expects earnings for these companies will improve
as well.
BNSF's results, however, was the major spot of bad
news for the company in 2014, and the company plans to spend $6 billion on
plant and equipment in 2015, which Buffett says is nearly 50% more than any
other railroad has spent in a single year. "A truly extraordinary amount,"
Buffett wrote.
In all, Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiaries spent $15
billion on plants and equipment in 2015, with 90% of that money spent in the
US.
Berkshire Hathaway also completed its acquisition
of Van Tuyl Automotive, a group of 78 auto dealerships with annual sales of
$9 billion. With this deal, Buffett said, "we are now 'car guys.'"
And the company is clearly open to more
acquisitions.
Buffett wrote: "With the acquisition of Van Tuyl,
Berkshire now owns 9 1/2 companies that would be listed on the Fortune 500
were they independent (Heinz is the 1/2). That leaves 490 1/2 fish in the
sea. Our lines are out."
The 5 Greatest Letters Warren Buffett Has Ever Written ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-top-5-warren-buffett-letters-2013-3#ixzz3T2yxicav
Warren Buffett: 'The mother lode of opportunities runs through America'
---
http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-on-america-2015-2#ixzz3T2wkT0Tn
My apologies for posting something patriotic!
From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Search for Job Openings in Higher Education ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/job_search/new
"The Anemic Law Jobs Recovery," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog,
February 25, 2015 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/02/the-anemic-.html
Law School ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_school
"American Bar Association Releases 'Bleak' Jobs Data for 2013 Law School
Grads," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, April 10, 2014 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/04/aba-releases-.html
Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) : American Legal Education: The First
150 Years ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-leiter/american-legal-education-_b_4581672.html
"Law Students Sue Their Law Schools for Deceptive Employment Reporting
Practices," Gy Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, March 11, 2014 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/03/law-students-.html
University of North Carolina: N.C.AA finds fake courses for
20 years ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
University of Syracuse: N.C.A.A. finds that university employees
completed coursework for athletes -- and questions why it took
8 years to complete investigation into such a
serious problem.
"Academic Fraud at Syracuse," by Jake New, Inside Higher Ed,
March 9, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/09/ncaa-suspends-syracuse-u-basketball-coach-vacates-108-wins
In 2005, following a season of poor academic
performance from his players, Syracuse University’s head basketball coach,
Jim Boeheim, hired a new director of basketball operations and gave him an
imperative: “fix” the academic problems of his athletes.
The director’s solution, according to the National
Collegiate Athletic Association, was for athletics staff members to access
and monitor the e-mail accounts of several players, communicate directly
with faculty members as if they were the athletes, and then complete
coursework for them. In one case, an athlete had his eligibility restored by
turning in a paper to raise a grade he had earned the previous year. The
paper was written by the director and a basketball facility receptionist.
This sort of fraud had lasted more than half a
decade at Syracuse, finally coming to light after a lengthy series of
investigations by the university and the N.C.A.A. On Friday, the N.C.A.A. announced
a number of sanctions against Syracuse, including
vacating more than 100 of Boeheim’s wins and suspending him for 9 conference
games next season. "Over the course of a decade, Syracuse University did not
control and monitor its athletics programs," the N.C.A.A. said in a
statement. "And its head men's basketball coach failed to monitor his
program."
The decision comes at a time when the N.C.A.A. is
under increasing pressure to improve the academic integrity of big-time
college sports. The association is currently investigating more than 20
institutions for academic misconduct,
including the University of North Carolina, where
some university employees knowingly steered about 1,500 athletes toward
no-show courses that never met and were not taught by any faculty members,
and where the only work required was a single research paper that received a
high grade no matter the content.
During a press call Friday, Britton Banowsky, chief
hearing officer and commissioner of Conference USA, said while the N.C.A.A.
is attempting to be proactive, it still believes the onus for investigating
cases of academic fraud should be on the institution. At the same time,
Banowsky said, the sheer length of Syracuse’s investigation -- eight years
-- does raise questions about how such probes are handled. The incident
could lead to new rules that would bar investigations from dragging on for
“an extremely excessive time," he said.
“As we have to sit back and wait for this to be
self-reported, it is unacceptable for our membership to have cases go on
this long,” Banowsky said. “Our first step is to be deferential to the
university system, but ultimately we had a situation where the desire to
achieve success on the basketball court overrides the academic integrity. It
really demonstrated some clearly misplaced priorities, and that’s where the
N.C.A.A. process comes in. I think you’ll see over the next several months a
more focused dialogue about where those lines are drawn.”
In a series of statements released by
administrators Friday, Syracuse
admitted the investigation was too lengthy, saying
it may in fact be the longest infractions investigation ever and that the
blame is on both the university and the N.C.A.A. The university, which
self-reported many of the violations, disagreed with several of the
association’s other assertions, however, in particular that Boeheim was
responsible for his staff’s actions, saying that their actions were "done in
secret."
Boeheim, a revered and larger-than-life figure at
Syracuse who has had a decades-long career coaching the university's storied
basketball team, is expected to appeal the sanctions. Boeheim skipped his
postgame press conference on Friday, what would have been the last of the
season, saying in a statement that he was considering his "options moving
forward."
Syracuse said that it would support the coach if he
chooses to appeal. “Coach Boeheim has demonstrated that he is a person of
character,” the university stated in a seven-page response
to the N.C.A.A.’s report. “He is a coach who
expects excellence and integrity, both on and off the basketball court. The
university believes the N.C.A.A. was wrong to find that he failed in his
responsibilities.”
During the press call Friday, Banowsky reiterated
that the N.C.A.A. views the coach -- and the university -- as culpable.
Boeheim hired the director of basketball operations to be his “academic
point man,” making him responsible for the director’s actions, Banowsky
said. The N.C.A.A. also faulted Boeheim and Syracuse for fostering an
environment in which staff members who were aware of the fraud were too
afraid to say anything.
The director of student-athlete support
services, who suspected the misconduct, told the N.C.A.A. that he did
nothing because he sensed that “men’s basketball might have a ‘little bit of
special treatment,’” the association wrote in its report. "He acknowledged
that he believed the director of basketball operations was behind the fact
that a former academic support employee had been 'pushed out' after 20 years
of service, and as a new employee, was mindful of that event.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
To be fair the NCAA should have given Syracuse 12 more years before taking
corrective action.
Tennessee Athletics Accused of Pushing Leniency for Athletes ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/03/09/tennessee-athletics-accused-pushing-leniency-athletes
"More lawsuits in UNC academic scandal; whistleblower settles with
university," by Sara Ganim, CNN, February 25, 2015 ---
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/us/unc-academic-fraud/
Three more athletes who say they were scammed out
of an education at the University of North Carolina are now suing over
academic fraud, and the whistleblower who exposed the fake-class system has
now settled her lawsuit with the university.
Former basketball player Kenya McBee has joined
former football player Mike McAdoo's federal class-action lawsuit, claiming
the university denied him and thousands of other athletes education when
advisers forced him to take classes that never met.
Former basketball player Leah Metcalf, and former
football player James Arnold filed a separate but similar class-action
lawsuit in state court in North Carolina.
Ken Wainstein, who was hired by the university to
act as an independent investigator, revealed in October that academic fraud
had taken place at UNC for 18 years, and that UNC officials were wrong when
they denied -- for nearly five years -- that anyone in athletics was
involved.
Instead it was players, like McAdoo, who were
blamed by the university for cheating and punished by the NCAA.
"All of these student-athletes were promised a
legitimate UNC education, were implored to trust UNC academic advising, and
were then guided into academically bereft courses against their interests,"
said attorney Jeremi Duru, one of the attorneys representing these athletes.
Earlier this year high-profile attorney Michael
Hausfeld filed a class-action suit against UNC and the NCAA over the same
scandal. About 3,100 students -- nearly half of them athletes -- who
enrolled in the fake classes could easily join these lawsuits.
Mary Willingham, the whistleblower who began
revealing details about the sham classes, accused UNC of retaliating against
her before she quit last year, and then sued the university to get her job
back.
Willingham told CNN that she reached a settlement
agreement with the school this week, although it had not yet been approved
by a judge. It would compensate her financially but not restore her job as a
learning specialist and adviser.
Continued in article
"Former UNC Student-Athletes Detail Fake 'Paper Classes' (for nearly
20 years) In New Lawsuit Against School And NCAA," by Peter Jacobs,
Business Insider, January 23, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/lawsuit-against-unc-over-paper-classes-2015-1
Cheated
by Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham
Potomac, 280 pages, $26.95
Book Review of Cheated
Dark Days in Chapel Hill: If you ran a college and knew there was
substantial money to be had from sports but no requirement to educate athletes,
you might cut corners—that’s exactly what the University of North Carolina did
for nearly two decades.
Mr. Smith is a history professor at the University
of North Carolina, Ms. Willingham was for many years an academic counselor
there who brought attention to the scandal by granting interviews to the
Raleigh News & Observer. The authors accuse their state’s prestige public
campus of “broad dishonesty” and of stocking its teams in football and men’s
basketball—the “revenue sports”—with athletes to generate profit, then
breaking its promise to educate them. Ms. Willingham resigned last year and
later sued the school—a settlement was reached this week—and both authors
recount being shunned in Chapel Hill for helping bring the scandal to light,
so they may have an ax to grind. At times, their account flirts with a tone
of “if only they’d listened to me.” Nonetheless “Cheated” sounds an
important call for reform.
Details of the scheme confirm the worst fears about
“student athletes,” at least as regards football and men’s basketball.
(Other men’s and all women’s collegiate sports generally have good academic
reputations.) Some Tar Heels men’s basketball players, Ms. Willingham
contends, read at a third-grade level. (A university official last year
dismissed her research as “a travesty.”) As a student at Chapel Hill, Green
Bay Packers star Julius Peppers failed real courses but got B’s in what were
known as “paper classes,” barely supervised independent-study courses that
required only a single research paper. (Mr. Peppers claims that he “earned
every grade” he got at UNC.) “Cheated” reports that Rashad McCants, key to
the Tar Heels’ 2005 March Madness title, “saw his GPA rise significantly—he
even made the dean’s list—after a semester in which he had done no academic
work.”
Like many large universities, Chapel Hill has a
committee that grants admission waivers to top sports recruits. “Cheated”
says that the committee admitted players who scored below 400 on the verbal
SAT—that’s the 15th percentile, barely north of illiterate—or who were
chronically absent from high school except on game days. There is no chance
that a student so poorly prepared for college will earn a diploma. All he
can do is generate money for the university.
Most of the phony classes described in the report
were in the African and Afro-American Studies Department, under Prof. Julius
Nyang’oro and a departmental administrator. The department had multiple
subject codes for its courses, including AFRI, AFAM and SWAH (for Swahili).
This allowed transcripts to appear to satisfy Chapel Hill’s distribution
requirement, even if most of an athlete’s “classes” were within the same
department. Mr. Nyang’oro resigned in 2012 and was eventually indicted for
fraud, accused of accepting pay for “teaching” that was imaginary. Charges
were dropped when he agreed to assist investigators.
“Cheated” details how Mr. Nyang’oro liked to hang
around with athletes: He was even invited to serve as a “guest coach” for
the football team. Tutors and academic-support staffers also enjoyed
friendly access to the jocks. At football-factory and basketball-power
programs, teachers and tutors who avert their eyes from grade fixing may be
rewarded with courtside seats and sideline passes.
The authors and the report agree that Mr. Nyang’oro
and the administrator perceived that their role was partly to make academic
problems go away so that stars could tape their ankles. University of North
Carolina officials did not want to know how athletes who had barely bested
chance on their SATs were suddenly pulling A’s at a selective college.
“Cheated” recounts two instances when staffers told superiors that football
or men’s basketball stars handed in plagiarized work. The university took
swift, decisive action, the authors write: It punished those who made the
reports.
Last year, according to Education Department data,
UNC–Chapel Hill cleared $30 million in profit on football and men’s
basketball, a number that does not include whatever part of the $297 million
in gifts and grants received by the school last year was prompted by
athletics, or $130 million in assets held by the athletic foundation
affiliated with the college. Some of the gain is expended on sports that
lose money, but football and men’s basketball are still profit centers. At a
prestige university, the African-American studies department became a
mechanism to exploit African-Americans. Players may as well have been
picking cotton.
Across the big-college landscape, around $3 billion
annually flows from networks to schools in rights fees for national TV
broadcasts of football and men’s basketball. Ticket sales and local
marketing add to the total. Meanwhile, the NCAA almost never sanctions
colleges that don’t educate scholarship athletes.
Coaches and administrators make out well themselves
even if their players don’t get educations. Tar Heels men’s basketball coach
Roy Williams and football coach Larry Fedora each earn $1.8 million per
year, according to the USA Today NCAA salary database. Speaking and
endorsement fees for coaches rise with victory totals. Athletic director
Lawrence Cunningham draws $565,000 annually, plus bonuses for wins.
Perhaps the reader is thinking: Why this worry
about diplomas? Don’t big-college athletes go on to wealth in the pros?
Surely starry-eyed teens with Greek-god physiques arriving at the University
of North Carolina, or at any powerhouse program, believe they’re headed for
professional glory in prime time.
Yet most scholarship players never receive a pro
paycheck. “Cheated” reports that the Chapel Hill swindle went into full
swing in 2003, when the school was trying to rebuild its basketball
reputation. Since that year, 54 Tar Heels have been drafted by the NFL or
NBA. That’s less than a fifth of University of North Carolina football and
men’s basketball scholarship holders during the period. And Chapel Hill does
better than most: Broadly across NCAA football and men’s basketball, only
about 2% of athletic-scholarship recipients are drafted. Because a
bachelor’s degree adds about $1 million to lifetime earnings, the diploma is
the potential economic reward for the overwhelming majority of college
athletes.
Of course, athletes have only themselves to blame
for not taking their studies seriously. But many are encouraged by coaches
to believe pipe dreams about the pros, to focus all their effort on winning
so the coach gets his victory bonus. By the time NCAA athletes realize
they’ve been duped, their scholarships are exhausted. Used up and thrown
away, they are easily replaced by the next batch of starry-eyed teens who
believe their names will be called on draft day.
After the Chapel Hill scandal went public, the
school commissioned a flurry of reports, the two most prominent of which
appeared to tell all but were at heart whitewashes. The first, overseen by
former North Carolina Gov. Jim Martin, in 2012 declared “with confidence”
that the Tar Heels athletic department knew nothing, nothing: “This was not
an athletic scandal,” the report stated. “Sadly, it was clearly an academic
scandal; but an isolated one.” Mr. Smith and Ms. Willingham write that in
“an amazing display of evasiveness and dishonesty,” Chapel Hill chancellor
Holden Thorp pretended that the Martin report concluded the matter. Later
Mr. Thorp resigned and floated away to the provost’s post at Washington
University in St. Louis. The best-case analysis of Mr. Thorp is that he was
hopelessly incompetent; explanations go downhill from there. Yet he paid
little professional price. If an NCAA athlete commits a petty violation, he
can be thrown out of school. University leaders know that if their schools
are caught systematically cheating, a wrist slap will be their fate.
The second report, conducted by a law firm and
released in 2014, revealed that the first report was a fairy tale. Though
Mr. Thorp denied knowing about the “paper classes,” it concluded that he
knew Mr. Nyang’oro’s department “issued higher grades than most other
departments and was popular among student-athletes.” Why wasn’t this a red
flag? But this document, too, largely exonerated those who commissioned it.
Thousands of students got A’s in fake classes. Yet “the higher levels of the
university” were guilty only of “a loose, decentralized approach to
management” that prevented “meaningful oversight,” even though the existence
of “easy-grading classes with little rigor” was widely known.
The second report attached no blame to basketball
coach Williams, the most marketable figure in Chapel Hill athletics,
reporting his insistence that he “constantly preaches that [the] number one
responsibility [of] coaches and counselors is to make sure their players get
a good education.” The men’s basketball program has seven coaches for a
roster that averages 16—the kind of instructor-to-student ratio normally
found only in doctoral programs. Yet we’re asked to believe there’s no way
the coaches could have noticed that many players never seemed to need to be
in class. Mr. Williams should have been fired for presiding over an
institutionally corrupt program. Instead he was given a pass.
Cheating may have gone over the top at Chapel Hill,
but in collegiate sports, institutional corruption is a norm. The NCAA works
assiduously to change the subject from football and men’s basketball
graduation rates, a straightforward measure that anyone can understand.
Instead it offers Academic Progress Rate, a hocus-pocus metric seemingly
designed to be incomprehensible.
Currently the overall APR of big-college sports is
976 out of 1000. That sounds as if everyone’s nearly perfect. But on this
scale, perfection is achieved if all players have at least a 2.0 GPA. Since
the average GPA at public universities is 3.0, what the NCAA touts as
“academic progress” may equate to significantly below-average outcomes in
the classroom.
But the APR shifts the spotlight from actual
grades. Last fall, Louisville announced to fanfare that football coach Bobby
Petrino will receive a $500,000 bonus for his players’ academic performance.
Sound enlightened? The bonus is triggered by the team hitting a 935 APR.
Since the average for NCAA football programs is 951, academic excellence at
Louisville is now defined down to below average.
Cynicism regarding athletics and education pervades
the big-college system. The networks that are “broadcast partners” (their
term) with the NCAA—ABC, CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Turner—have a financial
stake in college sports income and so steer clear of issues like grades and
graduation rates.
Nobody much seems to care so long as money flows.
Steven Spielberg is a member of the board of trustees at USC, where the
graduation rate for African-American men’s basketball players is 25% and 38%
for African-American football players. The reason these numbers are terrible
isn’t that athletes are departing early for the pros—in the past decade,
more than two-thirds of USC football and men’s basketball players were not
drafted. The numbers are terrible because players are used for revenue
without receiving educations. Mr. Spielberg has made two powerful movies
depicting the historical exploitation of African-Americans, “The Color
Purple” and “Amistad.” Where is his movie about present-day exploitation of
African-Americans in college athletics? He need only look out the window at
USC. Or he could buy the rights to “Cheated.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the UNC scandal and the many, many other athletics
cheating scandals at major universities in the USA ---
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/us/unc-academic-fraud/
We're led to believe that they nearly all cheated at one time or another. The
UNC scandal was unique in that it entailed fake courses and grade changes for
nearly two decades and covered multiple sports and even students who were not
into athletics. The sad thing is that many of the principle coaches and faculty
who cheated moved on from UNC before the scandal broke and are still thriving
unpunished in their careers.
Most of the students now suing UNC were not innocent victims and were
knowingly cheaters. They are victims in a larger sense that they were promised
an education (such as learning how to read) that was denied them in their years
at UNC.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Admitting Politically-Connected Dummies to the University of Texas Law School
Number of 'Subpar' Applicants Admitted to Texas Law School Surged After Dean
Sager's Ouster ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/02/number-of-subpar-applicants-admitted-.html
The number of subpar applicants admitted to the
University of Texas School of Law surged after President Bill Powers forced
Larry Sager to resign as dean of the law school in 2011, according to
numbers from a recent report on admissions favoritism by Kroll Associates.
.
Continued in article
The near and far future of libraries ---
http://lisnews.org/the_near_and_far_future_of_libraries
Return on Investment (ROI) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/nba-highest-salaries-2015-2
How to Mislead With Statistics
Most of the NBA's highest-paid players aren't worth it ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/nba-highest-salaries-2015-2#ixzz3T30XleVh
Jensen Comment
The above article does not estimate ROI for these highest-paid players. The
problem with both the article and ROI in general is that often factors
contributing to financial returns have higher order effects called
covariances, non-convexities, or whatever in mathematics. When these are
significant in a positive or negative sense they make attributions of
performance of a single factor extremely difficult or impossible. For example,
when Cleveland brought back LeBron James this year the entire sports world
refocused on Cleveland, including advertisers, ticket buyers, other players,
etc. Because there are so many higher order positive and negative effects it's
impossible to assess a single player's true worth to the team.
It's also impossible to judge the worth of a veteran player for a single
season since players like Kobe Bryant had enormous impacts across many seasons.
It's also impossible to judge the value a a player because there are so many
unknown opportunity values of alternative investments that might have been made.
For example, if Cleveland had decided to not invest in LeBron for this season in
favor of one or two of the best rookies who play elsewhere we cannot really be
sure how well those rookies would be playing for Cleveland's team since there
are so many team factors that affect a single performer. Exhibits A-Z are the
many players let go by teams who become stars on other teams.
"Fennell: Do Not Cite Or Circulate," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog,
February 24, 2015 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/02/fennell-.html
This short essay ponders why legal scholars attach
formulations such as "Do Not Cite or Circulate" to draft works. It argues
against the practice in most circumstances, particularly for work posted on
the Internet.
SSRN Link ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2565446
Jensen Comment
This stipulation on a working paper is an invitation to have ideas plagiarized.
I'm not referring to lifting of text verbatim. But a more common form of
plagiarism is to borrow ideas and reword text in ways that depart greatly from
cut and past quotations. Authors who are inclined to cite sources in papers that
they circulate may be tempted to cleverly get around the "Do Not Cite or
Circulate" clause. It is better to instead request that quotations from the
article be short and cited.
Also references listed in the original paper may be cited without mentioning
the original paper. For example, consider the following article:
"Milton
Friedman's 1964 theory on booms and busts explains what's happening in Europe,"
by Grégory Claeys and Thomas Walsh, Bruegel, Business Insider,
February 25, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/milton-friedmans-plucking-model-and-europe-2015-2
If the above article (in working paper form) had a "Do Not Cite or Circulate"
clause readers might be tempted to reference Friedman's "Plucking Model" without
even mentioning the Claeys and Bruegel article.
"A new report says that BYU has a better value MBA than Harvard, by
Melissa Stanger, Business Insider, February 26, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-value-business-schools-in-america-2015-2
Jensen Comment
I'm always suspicious of rankings in general, because so much depends upon
criteria used versus criteria neglected in the rankings. For years, Harvard was
and still is, in my opinion, the best value for MBA graduates. So is Wharton in
the East and Stanford in the West. The reason, in my opinion, is not so much in
the education experience as it is in the relations with business firms
themselves, relations that are improved greatly with the numbers of alumni and
the closeness with alumni in terms of providing new MBA graduates with
outstanding entry-level job opportunities. Harvard is King of the Hill in the
East, followed closely by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Stanford is King of the West followed closely by USC, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. In
the Midwest there are noted MBA programs at Northwestern and the University of
Chicago.
Sometimes the numbers of alumni are not as important as the intense closeness
of alumni with alma maters. Here the Tuck School at Dartmouth stands out
where alumni really lend a tremendous helping hand to Tuck MBA graduates. The
BYU MBA program has extremely close relations with alumni, but I'm suspicious
that alumni are closer with MBA graduates who are also Mormon.
For careers in accounting it's probably best to avoid MBA programs in favor
of masters programs in accounting. Many of the most prestigious universities do
not even have accounting undergraduate or masters programs, and some that do
(like Cornell) are not necessarily the best choices for masters of accounting
programs. Masters of accounting programs are probably not as dependent upon
alumni for employment, although alumni (think CPA firm partner power) can be
important in fund raising.
I think the top masters of accounting programs are found in universities
that have the top undergraduate accounting programs. Here BYU is the Number 1
program in 2015 according to US News ---
http://www.accounting-degree.org/best-accounting-schools/
I think those rankings also hold true for accounting doctoral programs
although some of the best accounting undergraduate and masters programs like BYU
do not have accounting doctoral programs.
BYU does have an excellent pre-doctoral masters program for accounting
graduates seeking to enter accounting doctoral programs.
The focus of the program is on mathematics and statistics rather than
business and accounting. Some accounting doctoral programs like the program at
the University of Florida will not even matriculate accounting doctoral students
until they complete advanced mathematics and statistics prerequisites.
Aside from powerful and helpful alumni, what makes a graduate school in
the Top 25?
In my opinion the key variable is level of admission standards in terms of
GMAT and GRE scores. Like it or not, admission quality is generally a function
of prestige of the university in total. Most of the prestigious universities now
have MBA programs. Some do not have undergraduate or masters programs in
accounting., and as mentioned above those that do have undergraduate accounting
programs do not necessarily have the top-ranked undergraduate accounting
programs. Admission standards are very high, however, for the top-ranked
accounting programs even if the universities themselves are more of the flagship
type even if they are not in the Ivy League.
Make Your Own College Rankings ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Make-Your-Own-College-Rankings/151473/?cid=inline-promo
Jensen Comment
The above custom rankings software and most major college ranking outcomes in
the media exclude for-profit universities. This is
because all for-profit universities refuse to provide performance data for
ranking systems.
"The Ever-Growing World of College Rankings," by Goldie Blumenstyk,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Ever-Growing-World-of/190437/?cid=at
Another day, another college ranking. Or so it
seems.
Last year at least three new rankings emerged from
national publications or major companies, joining a long line of magazines
that have entered the rankings game since U.S. News & World Report
started publishing its list annually, in 1985.
With the August 2014 debut of Money
magazine’s Best Colleges, the ranks of rankers now include Kiplinger’s
Personal Finance, Forbes, and The Washington Monthly, along
with employment-focused companies like LinkedIn, which introduced its
University Rankings in October, and PayScale,
which will release its sixth annual return-on-investment ranking in March,
just before U.S. News publishes the latest edition of its Best
Graduate Schools.
And all the activity doesn’t even count the
ratings proposed by the Obama administration.
To Corbin Martin Campbell, an assistant professor of higher education at
Teachers College of Columbia University, who studies rankings, the
proliferation reflects "a bizarre paradox": There are more rankings than
ever, but "they really don’t speak to the education core of an institution."
At the same time, she notes, colleges possess "this
incredibly rich data" about learning—thanks to accreditation, curriculum
reviews, syllabus analyses, and creative ways of
assessing college teaching—that never make their
way into any kind of consumer ranking. "The public is really left wanting,"
she says.
For other rankings skeptics—and they are legion—the
proliferation is easier to understand. "It’s click bait, basically,"
contends Richard A. Hesel, principal at the Art & Science Group, a
consulting company that works in higher education.
Make Your Own College Rankings ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Make-Your-Own-College-Rankings/151473/?cid=inline-promo
How to Mislead With Statistics
So what's wrong with performance ranking systems in general?
Bob Jensen's answers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm
Sometimes I'm (slightly) Wrong
For example, I used to argue that it was virtually impossible for a teacher
scoring poorly on "course easiness" to be chosen as a top teacher on
RateMyProfessor. In general that is still true, but there are some exceptions in
the top-ranked teachers in the 2013/2014 academic year ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/blog/toplist/top-professors-of-2013-2014/
For example see the easiness score of Monessa Cummins ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=209108
In general, however, the average grade in the class is A+ for a top rated
professor who also is rated as teaching an easy course. For example, note
Kenneth Andersen at
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/blog/toplist/top-professors-of-2013-2014/
This is so typical in this era of disgraceful grade inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Information content of nonverbal vocal communication
Note that in these days of video transmission across the Internet, nonverbal
communication does not ipso facto require physical presence. Much depends upon
whether video captures the nonverbal communication.
Book Review by Michael Minnisis (University of Chicago)
The Accounting Review, January 2015, Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. 395-398 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/accr-10411
Speech Analysis in Financial Markets, Foundations and Trends® in
Accounting (Hanover, MA: now Publishers Inc., 2013, ISBN 978-1-60198-652-8,
Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. ix, 60)
Authors
WILLIAM J. MAYEW and MOHAN VENKATACHALAM,
Mayew and Venkatachalam's monograph (hereafter, MV)
reviews the budding literature examining the information content of
nonverbal vocal communication. The monograph defines nonverbal vocal
communication as “the communication process that is distinct from verbal
usage,” which “includes facial expressions, gestures, postures, body
movements, vocal tone” among other features (p. 2). The monograph focuses on
features of the vocal tone portion of nonverbal communication.
While the objective of my review is to critically
assess MV, not to review the literature per se, I ultimately do a bit of
both. My overarching assessment of the monograph is that it provides the
critical starting point for any researcher interested in investigating
nonverbal communication in finance and accounting. The monograph is thorough
(conditional on a focus of nonverbal vocal communication within the
accounting and finance literatures, with a specific focus on vocal tone) and
is clearly written. It includes citations to, and a very useful discussion
of, both the linguistics and human behavior literatures, allowing readers
who are even relatively ignorant of this area, admittedly including me, an
expedient foray into the literature. While the initial results of the
literature are certainly intriguing, I agree with MV that this research is
in an “embryonic state” (p. 47). Causal interpretations and the relative
economic importance of the statistical results need to be assessed, and I
also agree with the authors that theoretical frameworks need to more
rigorously motivate the research. Collectively, though, MV describes a
research area with potentially exciting research possibilities, and the
monograph provides an excellent starting line.
MV contains five chapters, with Chapters 2 and 3
containing the overwhelming majority of the substantive content. Chapter 2
sets the stage for the monograph by describing the elements of nonverbal
research analysis. The authors describe two elements that are required for
empirical nonverbal vocal research: a recording of speech, and a method to
encode the speech. MV highlights various possibilities for both elements. A
laboratory setting (providing a high-fidelity recording) and an intensively
trained human judge may provide ideal circumstances, but the authors argue
that corporate finance provides a novel setting, in the form of earnings
conference calls, to study how humans' nonverbal communication is related to
capital allocation in the economy. Corporate earnings conference calls are
high-stakes events, occurring relatively frequently, and catalogued by data
providers. While alternative settings may exist to study executives—such as
analyst days and annual meetings—the interaction between analysts and
managers (and between managers within the firm) provided during earnings
conference calls provides a sufficiently high-quality recording to
researchers in a relatively inexpensive format. With the minor exception of
the statement on page 9, which states a common misperception that “every
major corporation in America” offers a quarterly conference call, the
authors describe this setting well and provide ample motivation for studying
conference calls.1
After introducing the reader to the prerequisites
of nonverbal vocal communication research in Chapter 2, the authors present
and discuss extant empirical research in Chapter 3. Over half of the content
of the monograph resides in this chapter. Framed mostly around the authors'
own research, they discuss three themes that have been examined in nonverbal
vocal research: market reaction to executive vocal tone, deception
prediction, and managerial trait assessment. I will discuss each.
The authors articulate that tests of market
reaction to managers' nonverbal cues require three factors: (1) the presence
of nonverbal cues that are informative about either the discount rate or a
firm's future cash flows (which are orthogonal to the text and numbers
presented by the manager); (2) a process to measure the nonverbal cues; and
(3) the ability of the market to recognize the cues and impound them into
price (i.e., low frictions to receiving the message or trading on it). If
one of the necessary conditions does not exist—e.g., managers are not
sending information in their vocal cues, or analysts are not able to
interpret it, or researchers cannot measure the cues effectively—then the
null hypothesis of no relation between managers' nonverbal vocal cues and
the market reaction is credible. The authors then discuss the results of
Mayew and Venkatachalam (2012a), which finds that a manager's positive
(negative) affective state as measured from vocal cues using LVA software is
positively (negatively) associated with the firm's abnormal returns around
the conference call date. Moreover, they extend and reinforce the results of
Mayew and Venkatachalam (2012a) by replicating the results with a more
recent sample of conference calls and find very similar results.
The monograph does a thorough job of describing the
main result of Mayew and Venkatachalam (2012a), and the replication results
are a useful reinforcement; however, the monograph is certainly not a
substitute for reading the research paper itself (given the length of the
original research paper, this is understandable). The monograph omits
discussion of long-term return results and analyst reaction results, which
are included in the original paper. Moreover, the monograph does not go much
beyond discussing the statistical relation between CAR and measured
managerial affect. For example, it does not provide much discussion about
why this relation may exist. What is the news that the affect is
revealing—cash flow or discount news? Is the market reacting in the right
direction, or is the market temporarily misled by the manager's affect? The
authors also do not provide the reader with much interpretation of the
economic magnitude of the relation. For example, Table 2 in MV shows that
the coefficient on PAFF (the measure of the manager's positive affect in his
or her vocal cues) is 0.1690. Using the standard deviation from Table 1 of
0.0373, I calculate that a one standard deviation increase in PAFF results
in an increase in CAR of only about 0.6 percent, or about 5 percent of one
standard deviation of CAR. In comparison, a one standard deviation in
POSWORDS (the number of positive words spoken by the manager) results in a
1.4 percent increase in CAR, or about 12 percent of one standard deviation.
These results suggest that what is said has a stronger relation than how it
is said. Of course, this could simply indicate that measurement of
managerial affect is still in its infancy, with much more noise than the
measurement of what is said. Regardless, discussion of the economic meaning
would be helpful to the reader throughout the monograph.
Regarding the measurement of the manager's affect,
the authors do a commendable job throughout highlighting weaknesses in the
measures and reinforcing the idea that causal interpretations are limited.
However, the monograph does not reference an informative exchange of
unpublished work and blog posts between the authors and Francisco Lacerda, a
linguistic academic, which occurred subsequent to the publication of Mayew
and Venkatachalam (2012a). Because the monograph includes the concerns of
Lacerda (2009)—wherein Lacerda asserts that the LVA software is essentially
useless and does little more than generate noise—the omission of the
subsequent exchange between the authors and Lacerda is not a serious gap;
however, the exchange is informative, and future researchers in this area
will likely want to be aware of both the concerns of Lacerda and the
authors' response.
Continued in article
|
Hobson, J., W. Mayew, and M. Venkatachalam.
2012.
Analyzing speech to detect financial misreporting. Journal
of Accounting Research 50 (2): 349–392.
[CrossRef]
|
|
Lacerda, F. 2009.
LVA-Technology—The illusion of “lie
detection.” In FONETIK 2009,
220–226.
Stockholm, Sweden: Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University.
|
|
Lacerda, F. 2012.
Money Talks: The Power of Voice:
A Critical Review of Mayew and Venkatachalam's The Power of Voice:
Managerial Affective States and Future Firm Performance.
Available at:
http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:509721
|
|
Lisowsky, P., and M. Minnis.
2013. Financial Reporting
Choices of U.S. Private Firms: Large Sample Analysis of GAAP and
Audit Use. University of Chicago Booth Research Paper No.
14-01. Available at:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2373498
|
|
Mayew, W., and M. Venkatachalam.
2012a.
The power of voice: Managerial affective states and future firm
performance. The Journal of Finance 67 (1):
1–43.
[CrossRef]
|
|
Mayew, W., and M. Venkatachalam.
2012b.
A Reply to: Money Talks: The Power of Voice. A critical
review of Mayew and Venkatachalam's The power of voice: Managerial
affective states and future firm performance. Unpublished
manuscript. Available at:
https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/∼vmohan/bio/files/Lacerdaresponse.pdf
|
1 Of course, the definition of “major
corporation” is arbitrary, but in recent research with Pete Lisowsky, we use
confidential IRS tax returns and find that there are three times as many
privately held than publicly held U.S. firms with more than $100 million in
revenues, suggesting that, in fact, most major corporations in the U.S. do
not host quarterly conference calls, because they are privately held (Lisowsky
and Minnis 2013).
2 Note that the omission of this exchange
could have been a result of publication timelines for the monograph rather
than an editorial choice. The exchange that I am referring to includes
Lacerda (2012) and
Mayew and Venkatachalam (2012b). Further responses are located at:
http://stockholmuniversityphonetics.com.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on March 9, 2015
It’s easy to forget at this late date
that Apple Inc.
was once a personal-computer company with naysayers aplenty in the investor
community. But those people are eating crow,
the WSJ reports, as
they watch the world’s most-valuable company join the Dow Jones Industrial
Average this month, replacing
AT&T Inc. Apple
also recently reported record quarterly profits.
“Apple skews things,” said Tim Daubenspeck,
senior research analyst at
ClearBridge Investments, which manages $108 billion. “I spent 15 to
16 years covering phones and the mobile industry, and I never thought I’d
see a company do what they’re doing from a cash standpoint and a dominance
standpoint today.”
And now with Apple Watch, the
technology juggernaut is crossing into high-end fashion with a device that
blurs the lines between jewelry and gadgetry. That unusual marriage is also
leading Apple to take some
unusual steps for both its product line and its
pricing. Apple has traditionally released a
single size and color for each new device, such as the initial iPhone, iPod
and iPad. But this time, Apple is releasing different versions that shoppers
can customize, yielding a price that can run anywhere from $349 for the
sport version to a yellow-gold watch that analysts expect could top $10,000.
Will Apple’s pricing experiment help it crack the nascent market for
wearables? Tell us what you think.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 26, 2015
What clever robots
mean for jobs ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-clever-robots-mean-for-jobs-1424835002
Experts are rethinking the belief that technology always lifts employment as
machines take on skills once thought uniquely human. Technology has long
displaced humans, always creating new, often higher-skill jobs in its wake. But
recent advances including driverless cars and computers that can read facial
expressions have pushed experts to consider that automation may be nearing a
tipping point, when machines master traits that have kept human workers
irreplaceable. But we’re not there yet. Tasks that require dexterity, such as
folding laundry, are still simple for people but difficult for robots to master.
Google's Loon Balloons: Billions of People Will Have Access to the
Internet for the First Time Where Cell Towers Don't Reach ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534986/project-loon/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150225
. . .
Google says these balloons can deliver widespread
economic and social benefits by bringing Internet access to the 60 percent
of the world’s people who don’t have it. Many of those 4.3 billion people
live in rural places where telecommunications companies haven’t found it
worthwhile to build cell towers or other infrastructure. After working for
three years and flying balloons for more than three million kilometers,
Google says Loon balloons are almost ready to step in.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on March 4, 2015
Almost half of global audits have problems
http://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2015/03/03/almost-half-of-global-audits-have-problems/?mod=djemCFO_h
Nearly half of global audits inspected last year were
deficient in some way, an international accounting consortium said
Tuesday, CFO Journal’s Maxwell Murphy
reports. Top concerns included internal controls testing, measuring fair
value of assets, and revenue recognition, according to the International
Forum of Independent Audit Regulators. The organization examined almost 950
reports from 29 countries.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 27, 2015
Electric-car resale prices tumble
---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/resale-prices-tumble-on-electric-cars-1424977378
With gasoline prices down 33% from a year ago and
buyers cooling toward electric vehicles,
Nissan Motor Co.
dealers worry that weak demand for used electric Leaf cars will put a flood
of used models on the market. Buyers who get a $7,500 federal tax credit on
purchase of a new Leaf see little reason to shop for a preowned model.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on February 26, 2015
What clever robots mean for jobs
---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-clever-robots-mean-for-jobs-1424835002
Experts are rethinking the belief that technology
always lifts employment as machines take on skills once thought uniquely
human. Technology has long displaced humans, always creating new, often
higher-skill jobs in its wake. But recent advances including driverless cars
and computers that can read facial expressions have pushed experts to
consider that automation may be nearing a tipping point, when machines
master traits that have kept human workers irreplaceable.
But we’re not there yet.
Tasks that require dexterity, such as folding laundry, are still simple for
people but difficult for robots to master.
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?
Berkshire Hataway ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is an American
multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska,
United States, that oversees and manages a number of subsidiary companies.
The company wholly owns GEICO, BNSF, Lubrizol, Dairy Queen, Fruit of the
Loom, Helzberg Diamonds, FlightSafety International, and NetJets, owns half
of Heinz and an undisclosed percentage of Mars, Incorporated, and has
significant minority holdings in American Express, The Coca-Cola Company,
Wells Fargo, IBM and Restaurant Brands International. Berkshire Hathaway
averaged an annual growth in book value of 19.7% to its shareholders for the
last 49 years (compared to 9.8% from the S&P 500 with dividends included for
the same period), while employing large amounts of capital, and minimal
debt.[2]
The company is known for its control by investor
Warren Buffett, who is the company's chairman, president, and CEO, and
Charlie Munger, the company's vice-chairman. Buffett has used the "float"
provided by Berkshire Hathaway's insurance operations (paid premiums which
are not held in reserves for reported claims and may be invested) to finance
his investments. In the early part of his career at Berkshire, he focused on
long-term investments in publicly quoted stocks, but more recently he has
turned to buying whole companies. Berkshire now owns a diverse range of
businesses including confectionery, retail, railroad, home furnishings,
encyclopedias, manufacturers of vacuum cleaners, jewelry sales; newspaper
publishing; manufacture and distribution of uniforms; as well as several
regional electric and gas utilities.
According to the Forbes Global 2000 list and
formula Berkshire Hathaway is the fifth largest public company in the
world.[3][4] On 14 August 2014, the price of the company's 'A' shares hit
$200,000 per share for the first time in the history of the company.
How to Mislead With Statistics
When you are dealing with a giant investment conglomerate to reveal all the
details might take over a million pages in an annual repor6t.
The following article is a little like writing about the performance of
superstar LaBron James for this season by focusing on two or three of his games
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeBron_James
Two or three games do not make a season's performance.
"Warren Buffett's Transparency Problem," by Lynnley Browning,
Newsweek, February 24, 2015 ---
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/03/06/berkshire-hathaways-transparency-problem-309127.html
. . .
Among the unanswered questions: How much risk are
Gen Re and Geico, whose businesses are notoriously volatile, exposed to?
It’s not a question investors or analysts can answer easily, because unlike
most big insurers, Berkshire Hathaway does not break out key metrics such as
growth in written premiums, underwriting expenses, net earned premiums and
the like. Under SEC rules, it doesn’t have to.
For Clayton Homes, a risky consumer-lending
business catering to typically lower-income borrowers, Berkshire Hathaway
provides no disclosures on the degree to which it allows borrowers to assume
big payments on homes of lower value, a key metric known as the
loan-to-value ratio; on how many borrowers are delinquent on payments or
borrowers’ average credit scores; or on repossessions.
And what about Berkshire Hathaway’s exposure to
derivatives, the fancy financial contracts that upended Wall Street during
the 2008 mortgage meltdown and credit crisis? (In 2002, Buffett called them
“financial weapons of mass destruction.”) Shanahan says, “We don’t know what
risks they’re taking and whether the company should sell some of the
businesses.”
Nobody is suggesting Berkshire Hathaway is doing
anything improper with its disclosures or accounting. But because insurance
companies have different accounting rules from financial services companies
like Berkshire Hathaway, a lot of its insurance-related risks do not show up
in SEC filings.
Jonathan Terrell, a former senior executive at
Swiss insurer Zurich Financial Services and the founder and president of
KCIC, a risk-management consulting firm in Washington, D.C., says that
through a series of complex transactions involving transfers of losses from
other insurers to Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s company, unbeknownst to many
observers, contains the biggest concentration of legacy insurance
liabilities, mostly related to asbestos and environmental claims, in
history.
Terrell cites a separate, required annual
disclosure filed by Berkshire Hathaway’s National Indemnity Company
subsidiary, known as NICO, in 2013 to the National Association of Insurance
Commissioners (NAIC), an industry regulator. NICO is the core Berkshire
Hathaway subsidiary that handles loss transfers through a complex financial
instrument known as retroactive reinsurance, a derivatives-heavy business in
which an insurer assumes coverage for liabilities that were originally
insured by another insurer.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The author of this article, Lynnley Browning, asked me some questions about this
without sharing the draft of her article. I've not looked at a Berkshire
Hathaway annual report in years. Actually I was stumped by her questions so I
asked Denny Beresford for help.
Reply from Denny Beresford
Bob,
I haven't looked at BH's financials for a while. But I would guess that the
answer to the question is simply materiality. BH is a big, complex company
and the reporter's questions appear to be at a fair degree of detail that
might not be material. I recall reading that the SEC has challenged BH on a
couple of accounting issues and made them change their filings. So in spite
of Buffett's reputation, I think the BH reporting is subject to a lot of
scrutiny and it's doubtful that they "get away" with anything.
Denny
I forwarded Denny's reply plus a somewhat longer reply by Tom Selling to
Lynnley Browning. She totally ignored their replies --- possibly because they
put a damper on her sensationalism.
Obamacare Cadillac Tax on High Quality Medical Insurance Plans ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2015/feb/high-cost-health-plans-201511869.html
"IRS asks for comments on proposed rules for high-cost health plans,"
by Sally P. Schreiber, Journal of Accountancy, February 24, 2015 ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2015/feb/high-cost-health-plans-201511869.html
To prepare for the new excise tax on so-called
Cadillac high-cost health insurance plans, the IRS is asking for comments on
proposed approaches to creating guidance on issues involving the tax when it
becomes effective in 2018 (Notice
2015-16). The notice focuses on the definition of
“applicable coverage,” how to determine the cost of applicable coverage, and
applying the annual dollar limit to the cost of applicable coverage. The
notice does not discuss calculation or assessment of the tax, but the IRS
says that, before issuing proposed regulations, it expects to release
another notice that will invite comments on those issues.
Sec. 4980I, enacted as part of the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act, P.L. 111-148, imposes an excise tax on
insurers (including employers with self-funded plans) if the aggregate value
of employer-sponsored health insurance coverage for an employee (including,
for purposes of the provision, any former employee, surviving spouse, and
any other primary insured individual) exceeds a threshold amount. The tax is
equal to 40% of the excess benefit, i.e., the aggregate value that exceeds
the threshold amount. For 2018, the threshold amount is $10,200 for
individual coverage and $27,500 for family coverage, multiplied by the
health cost adjustment percentage (as defined in Sec. 4980I) and increased
by the age and gender adjusted excess premium amount (also defined in Sec.
4980I).
Sec. 4980I(d)(1)(A) provides that applicable
coverage means coverage under any group health plan the employer makes
available to the employee that is excludable from the employee’s gross
income under Sec. 106 (or would be if it were employer-provided coverage).
The cost of applicable coverage is determined under the same rules that
apply to Sec. 4980B for COBRA continuation coverage.
The IRS explained that, to determine the cost of
applicable coverage, it anticipates that employer contributions to health
saving accounts (HSAs) and Archer medical savings accounts (Archer MSAs),
including salary reduction contributions, will be included in applicable
coverage, and employee after-tax contributions to those accounts will be
excluded.
In addition, the cost of on-site medical clinics
will be included in applicable coverage only if they provide benefits beyond
first aid to employees during working hours, although the IRS is requesting
comments on how to determine whether the costs of these clinics should be
included.
The IRS is also requesting comments on its proposal
to exercise its regulatory authority to exclude the cost of
employee-assistance programs from the cost of applicable coverage under Sec.
4980I, even though they are not specifically excluded under the statute.
Finally, the notice contains an in-depth discussion
of how to determine the cost of applicable coverage under the proposed
rules, which will be similar to the rules for determining the cost of
coverage under COBRA. The cost of that applicable coverage for an employee
will be based on the average cost of that type of applicable coverage for
similarly situated employees.
Jensen Comment
What is truly unfair about the Cadillac Taxes the way President Obama exempted
some organizations like labor unions from having to pay the tax on their
employees as well as those high quality medical insurance plans paid for Federal
Government employees.
The real advantage of a Cadillac plans are that they sometimes provide access
to the highest quality doctors and hospitals that will not accept the lower
quality ACA-insured patients. Or alternately the higher quality plans might let
patients be scheduled sooner for elective procedures such as new knees, hip, and
shoulders.
Many national health plans have two options that can lead to differential
quality of coverage. For example, in Germany there's the "free" national health
plan paid by taxpayers and the private plan supplements paid by patients that
can afford to pay for added insurance.
Health Insurance in Germany ---
http://www.toytowngermany.com/wiki/Health_insurance
In other nations physicians and hospitals cannot
be paid more than what the national health plans will pay. Or they may not be
able to provide faster service for such things as new knees, hips, and
shoulders. Price fixing in this manner often leads to longer waits and/or poorer
quality service for everybody when price-controlled pricing discouraging
students for spending 12 or more years in medical schools to become specialized
physicians.
Price Fixing generally leads to one of more of these three unhappy events":
- Reduction in quality of service such as bait and switch substitution of
physicians assistants for MDs in general practitioner offices
- Shortage of goods and services such as the empty shelves in Venezuela
- Soaring black market prices such as the $700 condom packets in Venezuela
For USA for persons covered by ACA insurance, prices of physician services
were fixed relatively low in order to both reduce the premium subsidies and keep
premium rates affordable, because higher premiums more and more people would opt
out of coverage.
"How Obamacare Is Ruining Health Insurance," by John C. Goodman,
Forbes, February 11, 2015 ---
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2015/02/11/how-obamacare-is-ruining-health-insurance/
The health insurance market is changing. And the
changes are not good. Even before there was Obamacare, most insurers most of
the time had perverse incentives to attract the healthy and avoid the sick.
But now that the Affordable Care Act has completely changed the nature of
the market, the perverse incentives are worse than ever.
Writing in Sunday’s New York Times
Elizabeth Rosenthal gives these examples:
- When Karen Pineman of Manhattan sought
treatment for a broken ankle, her insurer told her that the nearest
in-network doctor was in Stamford, Connecticut – in another state.
- Alison Chavez, a California breast cancer
patient, was almost on the operating table when her surgery had to be
cancelled because several of her doctors were leaving the insurer’s
network.
- When the son of Alexis Gersten, a dentist in
East Quogue New York, needed an ear, nose and throat specialist, the
insurer told her the nearest one was in Albany – five hours away.
- When Andrea Greenberg, a New York lawyer,
called an insurance company hotline with questions she found herself
speaking to someone reading off a script in the Philippines.
- Aviva Starkman Williams, a California computer
engineer, tried to determine whether the pediatrician doing her son’s
2-year-old checkup was in-network, the practice’s office manager “said
he didn’t know because doctors came in and out of network all the time,
likening the situation to players’ switching teams in the National
Basketball Association.”
But aren’t these insurers worried that if they
mistreat their customers, their enrollees will move to some other plan?
Here’s the rarely told secret about health insurance in the Obamacare
exchanges: insurers don’t care if heavy users of medical care go to some
other plan. Getting rid of high-cost enrollees is actually good for the
bottom line.
To appreciate how different health insurance has
become, let’s compare it to the kind of casualty insurance people buy for
their home or their cars.
Dennis Haysbert is the actor I remember best for
playing the president of the United States in the Jack Bauer series, 24.
You probably know him better as the spokesman for Allstate. In one
commercial he is standing in front of a town that looks like it has been
demolished by a tornado. “It took only two minutes for this town to be
destroyed,” he says. And he ends by asking “Are you in good hands?”
The point of the commercial is self-evident.
Casualty insurers know you don’t care about insurance until something bad
happens. And the way they are pitching their products is: Once the bad thing
happens, we are going to take care of you.
Virtually all casualty insurance advertisements
carry this message, explicitly or implicitly. Nationwide used to run a
commercial in which all kinds of catastrophes were caused by a
Dennis-the-Menace type kid. In a State Farm ad, a baseball comes crashing
through a living room window. Nationwide’s “Life comes at you fast” series
features all kinds of misadventures. And of course, the Aflac commercials
are all about unexpected mishaps.
My favorite casualty
insurer print ad is sponsored by Chubb. It features a man fishing in a small
boat with his back turned to a catastrophe. He is about to go over what
looks like Niagara Falls. Here’s the cutline: “Who insures you doesn’t
matter. Until it does.”
Now let’s compare those messages
to what we see in the health insurance exchange. Federal employees have been
obtaining insurance in an exchange, similar to the Obamacare exchanges, for
several decades. Every fall, during “open enrollment,” they select from
among a dozen or so competing heath plans. In Washington, DC where the
market is huge, insurers try to attract customers by running commercials on
TV, in print and in other venues.
Continued in article
The Case Against Obamacare: An eBook From Forbes
Don’t be fooled. The new health law has disrupted coverage for millions,
and driven up costs for millions more.
From the Scout Report on February 27, 2015
If This Then That ---
https://ifttt.com
If This Then That (IFTTT) is an innovative
web-based service that helps users easily and automatically facilitate
numerous computerized tasks. The service operates on the premise of
user-initiated "recipes" - a combination of two "channels," or services.
Readers simply enter a "trigger channel" and an "action channel" to create a
recipe. Each time the trigger occurs, the action follows. For instance,
readers may ask IFTTT to email them any time the temperature falls below
freezing, or text them anytime the Philadelphia Eagles appear in the news.
Sign up is free, and the website is simple and intuitive. IFTTT works
compatibly with numerous apps, including Instagram, Dropbox, and Blogger.
Survey Monkey ---
https://www.surveymonkey.com
For readers who would like a simple, free online
survey platform, Survey Monkey is one of the top contenders. The basic
service, in which readers may create surveys using more than 15 types of
questions, customize logos, and send out their products by mobile, web, and
social media, is free. Sign up takes less than five minutes, and surveys can
be designed quickly and easily
A Cup of Coffee a Day Just Might Keep the Doctor Away
It's official: Americans should drink more coffee
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/21/its-official-americans-should-drink-more-coffee/
Coffee's Great, U.S. Panel Says in Official Diet Recommendations
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/coffee-s-great-u-s-panel-says-in-official-diet-recommendations
Coffee: 5 Surprising Reasons Why You Should Be Drinking More of It
http://www.inc.com/peter-economy/coffee-5-surprising-reasons-why-you-should-be-drinking-more-of-it.html
Healthful diet report: Sugary drinks out; coffee, eggs in
http://news.yahoo.com/healthful-diet-proposal-sugary-drinks-180456942.html
Current Worldwide Annual Coffee Consumption per capita
http://chartsbin.com/view/581
Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee
http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/10-chapter-5/d5-5.asp
From the Scout Report on March 6, 2015
poetic.io ---
https://poetic.io/
poetic.io is a simple and secure way to transfer
files. Sign up just requires an email address. From there, users may drag
and drop files as large as 3GB to the poetic.io page, enter destination
emails, and then send. (To put this in perspective: the average full-length
movie is about 1GB.) Besides speed and efficiency for large file movement,
the site also provides basic security, so that readers know only their
recipients will receive the data. The site is free and accessible from any
computer with an Internet connection, and can be a welcome tool for teachers
who need to share data with students and each other, co-workers who are
working on data-heavy projects, and others who share large data files
(video, graphics, photos) in their work and play.
1OneTab ---
http://www.one-tab.com
Here at Scout we work with a lot of open tabs -
sites to annotate, reviews of those sites, various searches, historical
references, all while answering emails, updating social media, and looking
for the latest news stories. So sometimes the proliferation of open tabs can
be a little overwhelming. OneTab is designed to address this problem with an
elegant trick. When the reader finds too many tabs are open, she can click
the OneTab icon to convert all open tabs to a simple savable list. In
addition to simplifying screen clutter, this saves up to 95% of memory by
reducing the number of open tabs, which can speed up a computer that has
been bogged down. The OneTab add-on is available for both Google Chrome and
Firefox, and can be installed within a matter of seconds. For readers who
constantly multitask on the Internet, the service offers a welcome respite
from the glut of information through which most of us swim.
In Louisiana, a Dangerous Bacteria Escaped the Lab
Escape of dangerous bacterium leads to halt of risky studies at Tulane
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/03/escape-dangerous-bacterium-leads-halt-risky-studies-tulane
Deadly bacterium 'released from US high-security lab'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11443881/Deadly-bacteria-released-from-US-high-security-lab.html
Dangerous Bacteria Mysteriously Escapes From Louisiana Monkey Lab
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/dangerous-bacteria-mysteriously-escapes-louisiana-monkey-lab/story?id=29327907
The little-known Tulane Primate Center: What sort of research is done
there, why; what's it's future?
http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/news/11577906-172/the-little-known-tulane-primate-center
How secure are labs handling the world's deadliest pathogens?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/15/us-health-biosecurity-idUSTRE81E0R420120215
Tulane National Primate Research Center
http://tulane.edu/tnprc/
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Measuring Student Debt and Its Performance PDF ---
http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr668.pdf
Georgia Education ---
http://www.georgiaeducation.org/
Engineer Your Life (engineering careers and education) ---
http://www.engineeryourlife.org/
Maker Space at NYSCI (science and engineering)
http://makerspace.nysci.org/
From Google: Made with Code ---
https://www.madewithcode.com/
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
Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections ---
http://www.learner.org/courses/neuroscience/
Has Technology Changed Us?: BBC Animations Answer the Question with the Help
of Marshall McLuhan ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/has-technology-changed-us.html
CCRC Responds to Obama's Free Community College Tuition Proposal ---
http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/announcements/thomas-bailey-comments-free-community-college.html
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Collections ---
http://www.oscars.org/oral-history/collections
Bob Jensen's bookmarks for multiple disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
eGFI Dream Up the Future (STEM and Engineering) ---
http://www.egfi-k12.org/
Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald (science & engineering news) ---
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks
American Institute of Physics ---
http://www.aip.org/history-programs/physics-history
Open Source Physics ---
http://www.compadre.org/osp/
Physics News ---
http://phys.org/physics-news/
International Journal of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences ---
http://www.pharmaresearchlibrary.com/ijcps/
Maker Space at NYSCI (science and engineering)
http://makerspace.nysci.org/
TED Talks: How to go to space, without having to go to space ---
https://www.ted.com/talks/angelo_vermeulen_how_to_go_to_space_without_having_to_go_to_space#t-36817
Charles Darwin Letters ---
http://digitalcollections.library.ubc.ca/cdm/landingpage/collection/darwin
16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writing on Evolution Now Digitized and
Available Online ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/6px2DY_zYXs/16000-pages-of-charles-darwins-writing-on-evolution-now-available-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections ---
http://www.learner.org/courses/neuroscience/
Tom Wark's Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog ---
http://fermentationwineblog.com/
One Earth Sangha (Buddhism and climate change) ---
http://www.oneearthsangha.org/
From Google: Made with Code ---
https://www.madewithcode.com/
Engineer Your Life (engineering careers and education) ---
http://www.engineeryourlife.org/
Code.org (computer science education and learning) ---
http://code.org/
Fire Lab Research ---
http://www.firelab.org/research
Playing With Fire (fire retardants) ---
http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.ht
From the Scout Report on March 6, 2015
In Louisiana, a Dangerous Bacteria Escaped the Lab
Escape of dangerous bacterium leads to halt of risky studies at Tulane
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/03/escape-dangerous-bacterium-leads-halt-risky-studies-tulane
Deadly bacterium 'released from US high-security lab'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11443881/Deadly-bacteria-released-from-US-high-security-lab.html
Dangerous Bacteria Mysteriously Escapes From Louisiana Monkey Lab
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/dangerous-bacteria-mysteriously-escapes-louisiana-monkey-lab/story?id=29327907
The little-known Tulane Primate Center: What sort of research is done
there, why; what's it's future?
http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/news/11577906-172/the-little-known-tulane-primate-center
How secure are labs handling the world's deadliest pathogens?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/15/us-health-biosecurity-idUSTRE81E0R420120215
Tulane National Primate Research Center
http://tulane.edu/tnprc/
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
Measuring Student Debt and Its Performance PDF ---
http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr668.pdf
Beyond the Numbers (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) ---
http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/
2015 Index of Economic Freedom ---
http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
The USA did not make the Top 10
Claudio Beagarie Photographs of California Farm Workers ---
http://digital.boisestate.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15948coll5
Tom Wark's Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog ---
http://fermentationwineblog.com/
GenealogyInTime Magazine ---
http://www.genealogyintime.com/
Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency ---
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/tendency
Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences ---
http://www.humanitiescommission.org
Has Technology Changed Us?: BBC Animations Answer the Question with the Help
of Marshall McLuhan ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/has-technology-changed-us.html
The Whitney Plantation (slavery in history) ---
http://whitneyplantation.com/
The Muse (St. John's, Newfoundland student newspaper since 1950) ---
http://themuse.ca/
National Center for Transgender Equality ---
http://transequality.org/
Material on the Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, and Transgendered Society
University of South Florida Libraries: LGBT Collections ---
University of South Florida Libraries: LGBT Collections
http://www.lib.usf.edu/special-collections/lgbt-collections/
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
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
History Tutorials
Guidelines for Handling William Faulkner’s Drinking During Foreign Trips From
the US State Department (1955) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/guidelines-for-handling-william-faulkners-drinking.html
The oldest living CIA 'spy girl' reveals her greatest schemes ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-oldest-living-cia-spy-girl-reveals-her-greatest-schemes-2015-3#ixzz3TnCT8Xg1
Presidential Oral History ---
http://millercenter.org/oralhistory
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Collections ---
http://www.oscars.org/oral-history/collections
The Whitney Plantation (slavery in history) ---
http://whitneyplantation.com/
American Battle Monuments Commission ---
http://www.abmc.gov/
Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire &
Kierkegaard ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/philosophers-drinking-coffee.html
Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences ---
http://www.humanitiescommission.org
A Final Wish: Terminally Ill Patients Visit Rembrandt’s Paintings in the
Rijksmuseum One Last Time ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/terminally-ill-patients-visit-rembrandt-paintings.html
Margaret Herrick Library: Academy Awards Collection ---
http://digitalcollections.oscars.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15759coll9
Internet Archive: Cultural & Academic Films
---
http://archive.org/details/culturalandacademicfilms
Discover the Oldest Beer Recipe in History Dating Back to 1800 BC, and Then
Maybe Brew Your Own Batch ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-oldest-beer-recipe-in-history.html
Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts ---
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cookbooks/
Abbott and Costello ---
http://abbottandcostello.net/
Claudio Beagarie Photographs of California Farm Workers ---
http://digital.boisestate.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15948coll5
Charles Darwin Letters ---
http://digitalcollections.library.ubc.ca/cdm/landingpage/collection/darwin
16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writing on Evolution Now Digitized and
Available Online ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/6px2DY_zYXs/16000-pages-of-charles-darwins-writing-on-evolution-now-available-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
GenealogyInTime Magazine ---
http://www.genealogyintime.com/
The First Customer Service Complaint in Recorded History (1750 B.C.) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-first-recorded-customer-service-complaint-from-1750-b-c.html
The Muse (St. John's, Newfoundland student newspaper since 1950) ---
http://themuse.ca/
California Mission Postcards ---
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/california-mission-postcards
The Nature and Nurture of Genius: The Sweet Illustrated Story of How Henri
Matisse's Childhood Shaped His Creative Legacy ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/10/the-iridescence-of-birds-henri-matisse/?mc_cid=ba07e5d069&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
From Open Culture Newsletter on March 10, 2015
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Music Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force
than either willpower or inspiration . . . Just set one day’s work in front of
the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it
does.
John Steinbeck, Diary ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/02/john-steinbeck-working-days/?mc_cid=ba07e5d069&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Virginia Woolf on Writing and Self-Doubt ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/25/virginia-woolf-writing-self-doubt/?mc_cid=4bdb09d104&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
February 25, 2015
February 27, 2015
February 28, 2015
March 2, 2015
Mstvh 3, 2015
March 4, 2015
Patients May Not Need Pre-Anesthesia Sedative
Protein Tied to Alzheimer's Found in Young Adults
Fried Foods Tied to Raised Heart Failure Risk
What’s At Stake: Health Law At Supreme Court Again
Just How Big Is a Normal Penis?
In Vitro Births Continue to Rise in U.S.
Close Monitoring of Thyroid Growths Questioned
Typical Adult Over 30 Gets Flu Twice Every Decade
Long-Term Acetaminophen Use and Health Risks
March 5, 2015
March 6, 2015
March 7, 2015
March 9, 2015
March 10, 2015
March 11, 2015
March 12, 2015
March 13, 2015
The 50 Healthiest Foods of All Time ---
http://time.com/3724505/50-healthiest-foods/?xid=newsletter-brief
Jensen Comment
Of course no one food satisfies all of our nutritional needs over the long haul.
Globally, poor people sustain themselves primarily with corn or rice and
whatever fruits and vegetables they can obtain in season. In some parts of the
world like Ethiopia poor people tap cow throats for blood.
A physician friend in Sweden says that a very important part of our diet
should be berries. His theory is that humans evolved from eras where they were
gatherers of nuts and berries. He contends that due to pricing or whatever most
people today do not enough berries. Only his farm there are nearly 20 varieties
of berries.
He also recommends pasta and recommends against potatoes.
Music and Dementia: Belting Out Show Tunes is Good for the Brain
But what if you can't remember the lyrics? Oh no!
Does humming count?
https://theamericanscholar.org/music-and-dementia/?utm_source=email#.VPcDkuFkZLc
Do millennials even know any show tunes?
Also
"Tame the red-pencil-wielding teacher in your head. Write past the fear of
doing it wrong." ---
https://theamericanscholar.org/forgive-yourself/?utm_source=email#.VPcFTuFkZLc
I forgive myself every day for not proofing what I write on the fly.
Homeopathy Is Not an Effective Treatment, Experts Say ---
http://time.com/3741212/homeopathy-not-effective/?xid=newsletter-brief
Guidelines for Handling William Faulkner’s Drinking During Foreign Trips From
the US State Department (1955) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/guidelines-for-handling-william-faulkners-drinking.html
A Bit of Humor February 26-March 14, 2015
Dilbert on Beating the Averages ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/02/dilbert-beating-the-average/
Abbott and Costello ---
http://abbottandcostello.net/
Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency ---
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/tendency
29 Clever License Plates that Slipped by the DMV ---
http://www.odometer.com/lifestyle/5787/29-clever-license-plates-that-slipped-past-the-dmv#slide/0
Imprint of license plate in snowbank at crime scene leads to arrest of 2
burglary suspects ---
http://www.usnews.com/news/offbeat/articles/2015/03/10/imprint-of-license-plate-in-snow-leads-to-burglary-suspects
Gambling Quotations (a few are humorous) ---
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/gambling.html
Brainy Quotes ---
http://www.brainyquote.com/
Humor Between February 1-28, 2015
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q1.htm#Humor022815
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
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
Update in
2014
20-Year Sugar Hill Master Plan ---
http://www.nccouncil.org/images/NCC/file/wrkgdraftfeb142014.pdf
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
The Cult of Statistical Significance:
How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
How Accountics Scientists Should Change:
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review
I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accounting and Taxation News Sites ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for
free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM
(Educators)
http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.
Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for
accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting
education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial
accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing,
doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics)
research, publication, replication, and validity testing.
|
CPAS-L
(Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ (Closed
Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo (Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB
and the International Accounting
Standards Board on this financial
reporting blog from Financial Executives
International. The site, updated daily,
compiles regulatory news, rulings and
statements, comment letters on
standards, and hot topics from the Web’s
largest business and accounting
publications and organizations. Look for
continuing coverage of SOX requirements,
fair value reporting and the Alternative
Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such
as the subprime mortgage crisis,
international convergence, and rules for
tax return preparers. |
|
|
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker
[lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as
well as a practicing CPA)
I found another listserve
that is exceptional -
CalCPA maintains
http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/
and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.
There are several highly
capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and
the answers are often in depth.
Scott
Scott forwarded the following message from Jim
Counts
Yes you may mention info on
your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any
CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is
possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not
have access to the files and other items posted.
Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in
top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and
in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I
will get the request to join.
Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage
people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then
via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in
your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the
inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.
We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in
California.... ]
Please encourage your members
to join our listserve.
If any questions let me know.
Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk
|
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's
Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
All
my online pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu