Tidbits on March 26, 2015
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Photographs of the Gale River
 http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Rivers/GaleRiver/GaleRiver.htm

 

Tidbits on March 26, 2015
Bob Jensen

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

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


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


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

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

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

 




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

TED Talks: How schools kill creativity --- http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en

Monica Lewinsky just gave 'one of the best, most courageous TED talks ever' ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/monica-lewinsky-ted-talk-online-harassment-2015-3

Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour Through Ancient Rome, 320 C.E. ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/rome-reborn-take-a-virtual-tour-through-ancient-rome-320-c-e.html

Nova Next --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/

Watch Meryl Streep Have Fun with Accents: Bronx, Polish, Irish, Australian, Yiddish & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/meryl-streep-has-fun-with-accents.html

An American Boy Attracts a Crowd in Normandy (warning:  this is patriotic) ---
http://swf.tubechop.com/tubechop.swf?vurl=8k9Si28k0Fk&start=0&end=438.55&cid

Hear John Lennon’s Final Interview, Taped on the Last Day of His Life (December 8, 1980) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/hear-john-lennons-final-interview-taped-on-the-day-of-his-death.html

Incredible video inside Hang Son Doong — the largest cave in the world ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-worlds-largest-cave-vietnam-hang-son-doong-2015-3

Nun and the Priest --- https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dn7RzXDsjYY
There are multiple humor videos at this link.

Kitten and the Scary Thing --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MqHN-4okZ4&


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

Andre Rieu -(child singer) -- https://www.youtube.com/embed/66-A2MyVDbU

Wu Han Plays Tchaikovsky, Month by Month --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91974368

Watch the “Youngest String Quartet Ever” Perform Vivaldi, Michael Jackson & Katy Perry ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/youngest-string-quartet-ever.html

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

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

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

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


Photographs and Art

Amazing image captures a cluster of baby stars --- http://www.businessinsider.com/star-nursery-photo-2015-3

A decade of observing Earth from space has given us these breathtaking views ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/earths-most-breathtaking-vistas-from-space-2015-3?op=1#ixzz3V7ERmpP2

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/google-puts-online-10000-works-of-street-art-from-across-the-globe.html

Late Rembrandts Come to Life: Watch Animations of Paintings Now on Display at the Rijksmuseum ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/late-rembrandts-come-to-life.html

United States Botanic Garden --- http://www.usbg.gov

Cherry Blossom Festival (Washington DC) --- http://www.nps.gov/cherry/cherry-blossom-history.htm

Sakura: Cherry Blossoms as Living Symbols of Friendship --- http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/cherry-blossoms/Pages/default.aspx

CyArk (3-D Library of Historical Sites) --- http://www.cyark.org/

Cover Browser (comic book archives) --- http://www.coverbrowser.com/

CivilWar@Smithsonian --- http://www.civilwar.si.edu/

Peace Corps: Passport Blog --- http://passport.peacecorps.gov/

The Many Things a Home Can Be ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/09/carson-ellis-home/?mc_cid=2fbdcf0df8&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Smithsonian Libraries: Butterflies and Moths --- http://www.sil.si.edu/imagegalaxy/imageGalaxy_collResult.cfm?term=Butterflies and Moths

Alpine Wildflowers of Glacier National Park, Montana, and Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta ---
http://www.lib.umt.edu/asc/alpinewildflower

Geologic Heritage in the National Parks --- http://www.nature.nps.gov/geology/geoheritage/index.cfm

Caroline Dean Wildflower Collection --- http://diglib.auburn.edu/collections/wildflower/
I looked up a destructive weed called an aster up here in the white mountains ---
http://content.lib.auburn.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/flora/id/405/rec/19
The asters reveal themselves in the late summer and I pull them everywhere I can in our wildflower field and wild roses. Down the road an outstanding lupine field was taken over with asters. It had to be plowed up and replanted with lupines (that are slow coming back).

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


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

Digital Collections - Trinity College Dublin --- http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/testing4/home/index.php

74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/74-books-curated-by-female-creatives.html

Poetry Foundation: Spring Poems --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/241410?gclid=COvs8sCdlMQCFUQ8gQods2wA6Q

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience --- http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/william-blakes-songs-of-innocence-and-experience

Allen Ginsberg Sings the Poetry of William Blake (1970) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/01/allen-ginsberg-sings-the-poetry-of-william-blake-1970.html

Cover Browser (comic book archives) --- http://www.coverbrowser.com/

The Walt Whitman Archive: Published Works --- http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/ 

The Walt Whitman Archive --- http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

Mickle Street Review: An Electronic Journal of Whitman and American Studies [iTunes]
http://micklestreet.rutgers.edu/index.htm

Poet at Work: Walt Whitman Notebooks 1850s-1860s ---  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/whitman/

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

Digital Public Library of America --- Search the archives of the libraries of major universities in various nations
I find it easier to use than Google Books

Go to http://dp.la/

Click on Bookshelf

Search for a topic like "Accounting"

Note the thousands of hits from various top university libraries

You can filter by library, nation, language, time period, etc.

Scroll down to "By Subject"

Then click on "More"

Once you have a desired set of hits in the middle column you can select a given hit
Note the red up and down arrows to bring up other hits

Once you expand a given hit note the options in the right hand column
To view the item click on View
Then click on Full View
Sometimes you can download all pages as image files (which you can save in PDF format)
Sometimes you have to click on a link

This is a great way to search for older books and articles
It is perhaps as current as archives in the stacks of a library before latest acquisitions have been taken to the stacks

Sometimes you will be allowed to save a page but not an entire book or article. Don't give up right away. Enter the title into Google Advanced Search
http://www.google.ca/advanced_search
Sometimes you can find another server that will allow you to download the entire item. A common alternative is Gutenberg Press ---
http://www.gutenberg.org/

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic literature searching alternatives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

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  


How to Transfer Data to Your Kindle Fire HD ---
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-transfer-data-to-your-kindle-fire-hd.html

SnagIt for Chrome ---
http://www.techsmith.com/snagit-google-chrome.html

Chrome File Management ---
https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/1056323?hl=en




Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on March 26, 2015
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2015/TidbitsQuotations012915.htm      

U.S. National Debt Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Also see http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Peter G. Peterson Website on Deficit/Debt Solutions ---
http://www.pgpf.org/

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

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

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




Free of charge as the world turns
Real Time Economics
(a Wall Street Journal blog on the changing world of economics and finance) --- http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/
I find this more news than opinion, although the comments on postings are often more opinion than news

Bob Jensen's threads on listservs, blogs, and the social media ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm


Our Politically Correct Law Schools in the USA

"Lindgren: The Most Under-Represented Groups in Law Teaching: Whites, Christians, Republicans, Males," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, March 21, 2015 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/03/lindgren-the-most-under-represented-groups-in-law-teaching-.html

This article is the first careful look at the demographic makeup of law faculties compared to the larger pools of lawyers and the general public. It examines which racial, gender, religious, and political groups were the most under- and overrepresented in 1997 and in 2013 compared to persons of similar ages in larger pools, including the U.S. full-time working population and the U.S. lawyer population.

The data show that in 1997 women and minorities were underrepresented compared to some populations, but Republicans and Christians were usually more underrepresented. For example, by the late 1990s, the proportion of the U.S. population that was neither Republican nor Christian was only 9%, but the majority of law professors (51%) was drawn from that small minority. Further, though women were strongly underrepresented compared to the full-time working population, all of that underrepresentation was among Republican women, who were—and are—almost missing from law teaching.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Political correctness is very pronounced in USA education, particularly in faculty hiring. There are tradeoffs. When it came to hiring a female conservative at the University of Iowa in 2009 political leanings outweighed gender. In 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court recently forced the case to have a new trial.

"U. of Iowa Staff Member Sues Law School for Discrimination," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2009 --- Click Here

A staff member in the law-school writing center at the University of Iowa has sued the school and its dean, saying she was turned down for teaching positions because of her conservative political views, Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.

Teresa Wagner filed the lawsuit against the school and its dean, Carolyn Jones, on Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

In the lawsuit, she states that in 2006, she applied for an advertised job as a full-time writing instructor, and that later, she applied for a part-time adjunct position teaching writing. She was rejected for both positions, even though she had collegiate teaching experience and strong academic credentials, the lawsuit says. She argues that affiliations listed on her résumé, including stints with groups like the National Right to Life Committee, did her in with a liberal-leaning faculty.

To bolster her case, the lawsuit dissects the political affiliations of the approximately 50 faculty members who vote on law-school faculty hires; 46 of them are registered as Democrats and only one, hired 20 years ago, is a Republican, the lawsuit states. Ms. Wagner also says that a law-school associate dean suggested that she conceal her affiliation with a conservative law school and later told her not to apply for any more faculty positions.

Steve Parrott, a spokesman for the University of Iowa, says the discrimination claim is “without merit.”

There Goes the Neighborhood
"U. of Colorado Is in Search of a Scholar of Conservative Thought U. of Colorado Is in Search of a Scholar of Conservative Thought," by Sydni Dunn, Chronicle of Higher Education., February 26, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Colorado-Is-in-Search-of/137567/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The University of Colorado at Boulder is adding a conservative-in-residence to its liberal-leaning faculty in an attempt to broaden intellectual diversity at the state's flagship campus.

The new position, the "visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy," is being paid for entirely by private money. A total of close to $1-million will finance the job, set to begin in the fall and to be housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, for at least three years.

Some professors and students are questioning the need for the new role and have been critical of the credentials of the finalists. Although two of the three finalists have Ph.D.'s and the third has a master's, they all are better known for political activism and policy work than for scholarly pursuits.

The finalists, each of whom visited Boulder and gave public speeches on the campus this month, are Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity; Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; and Steven Hayward, a fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University.

The search committee is scheduled to recommend a candidate for the hire the first week of March, said Keith E. Maskus, associate dean for social sciences and head of the search committee.

The idea for the conservative appointment goes back a decade, Mr. Maskus said, and was originally conceived of as an endowed position. When it didn't get "far off the ground" in terms of support or fund-raising, he said, the project was shelved. In 2008, however, the idea was revived and reconfigured, and a group of donors decided to convert the position to a privately financed, visiting role that is off the tenure track.

The position was created, in part, to change the public's perception of the institution, Mr. Maskus said. Most of the faculty present balanced viewpoints in the classroom, he said, but the university has a longstanding history of leaning left. And, he said, having a conservative scholar will help balance the perspectives to which students are exposed.

"We've appeared in the newspaper a few times; I'm sure you can think of a few of those headlines," said Mr. Maskus, hinting at the university's controversial firing, in 2007, of Ward Churchill, an ethnic-studies professor. The decision, which the university said was based on findings of research misconduct, came after Mr. Churchill became the focus of national outrage for a provocative essay he wrote about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in which he compared some American victims of terrorism to Nazi bureaucrats. Breaking the Mold

Some students have reacted positively to the creation of the conservative-scholar position.

They include Zach Silverman, who is president of the College Democrats at the Boulder campus and a senior majoring in political science. A university should be a marketplace of ideas, he said, and the new visiting job promotes that mission.

"For CU, this breaks the mold of being a liberal college, a biased college," Mr. Silverman said. "It shows we are interested in all opinions, left or right."

Mr. Silverman, who is 21, said his professors try to remain neutral in the classroom but that it can be obvious, particularly in political science, which way they lean politically. In a 2008 survey that included 825 faculty members at Boulder, only 23 were registered Republicans, according to Ed Rozek, a political-science professor who conducted the survey.

Embedding a conservative viewpoint in the classroom will encourage variety, Mr. Silverman said, but only if that person is actually a scholar. "This person needs a doctorate," he said.

Mr. Maskus, the associate dean, said one of the qualities the search committee sought was a strong record of published books or articles. All of the finalists fit that criterion, he said, though to different degrees. Ms. Chavez is the only finalist without a Ph.D., for example, but she has published three books and spent more than 40 years in the political arena.

Faculty members, Mr. Maskus said, have expressed concerns both about the scholarly credentials of candidates for the position and about whether the university should be taking donations to make a faculty appointment.

A group of private donors contributed to this position, and some of them sit on the 10-person search committee for the job, Mr. Maskus said. The committee has five tenured faculty members from the College of Arts and Sciences, and five "external community" members appointed by the chancellor. Mr. Maskus would not say how many of those people are donors who are supporting the new position. He also did not reveal how much money the donors who are serving on the committee collectively contributed to the project.

Mr. Maskus said he does not believe that having donors serve on the search committee and participate in hiring the scholar creates a conflict of interest. The committee is following procedures that were put in place "to avoid such conflicts," he said.

Other criticism, coming mostly from students, has questioned whether the position is necessary.

In a guest column published in a local newspaper, The Daily Camera, Matthew Aitken, a graduate student in physics, wrote that the creation of the position supports the assumption that all universities lack balance.

"Conservatism—like all other political ideologies—should be considered on its own merits, and no special position need be created for its proponents' voices to be heard," Mr. Aitken wrote. "That an esteemed institution like the University of Colorado would give credence to this specious notion of conservative victimhood is disappointing, at best." Taking a Risk

Ms. Chavez, a finalist who visited the university last week and gave a presentation titled "A Conservative Approach to Immigration Reform," said it was obvious that some students did not like the idea of the position. A number of students grilled her with questions after her speech.

"What I find fascinating is that students who disagree with me rarely actually read what I've written," she said. When students hear her point of view, she said, they realize they have some things in common. "We might differ, but our ultimate goals are the same."

Continued in article

The chair was designated a "visiting professorship" so the University of Colorado would not have to give tenure to a conservative --- or so it seems.

For years one of the hardest things to do is to be politically conservative when seeking a job in virtually any discipline in our Academy. Harvard's Harvey Mansfield advises against revealing conservatism at least until tenured ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias

Even more pronounced is the virtual impossibility of being legally admitted to the USA as a white immigrant ---
https://whitelocust.wordpress.com/multiculturalism-and-the-war-against-white-america/ 


Umberto Eco’s How To Write a Thesis: A Witty, Irreverent & Highly Practical Guide Now Out in English ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/umberto-ecos-how-to-write-a-thesis.html


Question
How do you revive a dying non-profit liberal arts college like Sweet Briar?

Jensen Comment
Although Sweet Briar College and Newberry College are both struggling with not enough student tuition to break even financially, there are key differences in their futures. Sweet Briar just announced that it will close down while Newberry announced that it has the biggest first-year class in its history.

Sweet Briar College --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Briar_College
Sweet Briar:  Scenes From the Death of a College
http://chronicle.com/article/Scenes-From-the-Death-of-a/228681/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Newberry College --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newberry_College
Newberry:  How One Small College Attracted Its Largest Incoming Class Ever ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-One-Small-College/228649/?cid=at

 

This begs the question of why relatively high tuition private colleges survived for over 100 years in an era where state-supported universities offered broader curricula with generally higher-paid faculty?

Both Sweet Briar and Newberry have beautiful campuses. The main attractions include relatively low faculty-student ratios and opportunity to live on campus and learn without being overwhelmed among throngs of students found at most state-supported universities. Incoming classes have 100-400 students at Sweet Briar and Newberry rather than over 10,000+ students in each graduating class. The Jester Hall dormitory complex at the University of Texas is so huge with thousands of residents that it has two postal zip codes for one residential complex. At both Sweet Briar and Newberry students live with and get to know virtually every other student before graduation.

Because enormous universities attract such a large number of varied students and non-students hanging out on campus, crime rates due to drugs, rape, assault, etc. are enormously higher relative safe environments of small colleges like Sweet Briar and Newberry. Parents seeking a relatively safe four-year transitions of their loved ones between a sheltered home life and the mean streets of the world are naturally inclined to the smallness and safeness of places like Sweet Briar and Newberry.

There also is a perception that academic competition will not be as stressful in a small private college. Exhibit A is one of our granddaughters who lived within two miles of the University of Maine (UMO) campus where her father is a professor. She could have attended UMO for free. She was a hard working student in a very competitive high school that instilled her with fear that UMO would be even more competitive than high school. So she opted instead for a very small private college where there was indeed much less (virtually zero) academic competition and paid a huge tuition each term for this assurance of less academic competition.

In May 2015 she will graduate with a Ph.D. in pharmacy and a mountain of student loans (over $150,000) that would be much less if she had not borrowed so much money for tuition as an undergraduate. Now her stress really begins when trying to pay down that debt while working at a VA hospital in Boston.

This begs the question of why most students end up in huge public universities rather than small private colleges?
It's largely a matter of tuition cost and opportunity. Those large state universities have much lower tuition rates. And they offer curriculum opportunities that you cannot find at Sweet Briar or Newberry. Exhibit A is engineering. Exhibit B is accounting. I think Newberry does offer some business courses, whereas Sweet Briar does not offer business.

And the surprising thing is tradition and prestige of flagship universities.
When my daughter graduated from the huge MacArther High School in San Antonio most of her classmates headed for college aspired to be admitted to one of two universities --- the University of Texas or Texas A&M. I'm serious that many of them would have turned down Ivy League invitations in favor of UT or A&M. My daughter, by the way, would not consider anywhere else after she was admitted to UT. She could even have attended the university where I was teaching (Trinity University) for free. But she would only go to UT because it was held in such high esteem by her high school classmates.

Who knows why in every case, but one of the reasons why UT, A&M, Ole Miss, and many other flagship universities are so popular is that parents are proud alumni of those huge universities and often met each other on those campuses.

 

Why is Newberry College growing while Sweet Briar College has declined in numbers to a point where it is closing down?

The following article tries to explain why in Newberry College had some successes in student recruitment in 2014 ---
Newberry:  One Small College Attracted Its Largest Incoming Class Ever 
http://chronicle.com/article/How-One-Small-College/228649/?cid=at 

The following article tries to explain why Sweet Briar College is folding its beautiful campus ---
Sweet Briar:  Scenes From the Death of a College
http://chronicle.com/article/Scenes-From-the-Death-of-a/228681/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The differences between these two colleges became magnified in the 21st Century. High school graduates increasingly choose coed campuses where men and women learn and live together on campus or in surrounding housing. Women's colleges like Sweet Briar in general are finding student recruitment more difficult.

Newberry no longer receives direct financial support from the Lutheran Church, but that church is a major base for recruiting students. Sweet Briar needs to expand its recruiting base in creative ways. I'm not sure what these might be at the moment. In this era of distance education, perhaps Sweet Briar could partner with a university that is offering some great distance education programs like accountancy and engineering that could be merged into the Sweet Briar curriculum.

Liberal arts colleges are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit undergraduates if their curricula does not offer career tracks such as in engineering and business. Sweet Briar has fewer career tracks than Newberry,

But there are more important considerations when colleges significantly decline in terms of tuition revenue without sufficient endowment income to make up the difference. In managerial accounting a major topic is called cost-profit-volume (CPV) analysis. Among other things the importance between fixed costsversus variable cost is emphasized. Variable costs have revenue elasticity in that when revenue goes up and down these costs such as dormitory food costs go up and down. Fixed costs like faculty, heating, air conditioning, and maintenance are less elastic in terms of revenue variations.

In terms of fixed costs it's very difficult to fire tenured faculty unless entire programs are eliminated.  Faculty costs are not totally locked in stone, but they are relatively fixed for tenured faculty. As Sweet Briar College enrollments declined substantially to where Sweet Briar has fewer than  half as many entering students as Newberry. Sadly, Sweet Briar is still stuck with twice as many tenured faculty from the days when it had twice as many entering first-year students as Newberry.

Newberry, being coeducational, understands the importance of offering varsity athletic opportunities to high school graduates even though in NCAA Division II there are no athletics scholarships. Trinity University is also in Division II where Tiger Football has zero dollars of revenue and costs are enormous such as the cost of flying 50 players out of state to places like the University of Chicago. I once asked the President of Trinity why we still had such a costly football program. His answer quite simply was that there are an enormous number of top male and female high school graduates who will only go to schools where they can compete in some type of varsity athletics. Exhibit A is a female chemistry major who went on to Cal Tech for a Ph.D. and chose Trinity for her undergraduate studies due to a phone call from a Trinity soccer coach when she was about to graduate from high school. Her parents were both faculty members at the University of Missouri and bore the higher tuition at Trinity University.

So what will Sweet Briar College have to do if it decides to not shut down?
 Firstly, it will have to recruit male students. Secondly, it will have to expand its curriculum to include more professional tracks. There will probably have to be more opportunities for students to participate in varsity athletics (maybe not a football team). Thirdly, it will probably have to consider all sorts of ways to cut fixed and variable costs. There will have to be fewer tenured faculty and more students in classrooms.

There are rumblings that the dying Sweet Briar College might be revived.
It will be interesting to see if and how this is accomplished.

 

 


Artificial Intelligence --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

"Artificial Intelligence Is Almost Ready for Business," by Brad Power, Harvard Business Review Blog, March 19, 2015 --- Click Here
https://hbr.org/2015/03/artificial-intelligence-is-almost-ready-for-business?utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date&cm_lm=rjensen%40trinity.edu&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&referral=00563&cm_ven=Spop-Email&cm_ite=DailyAlert-032015+%281%29

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an idea that has oscillated through many hype cycles over many years, as scientists and sci-fi visionaries have declared the imminent arrival of thinking machines. But it seems we’re now at an actual tipping point. AI, expert systems, and business intelligence have been with us for decades, but this time the reality almost matches the rhetoric, driven by the exponential growth in technology capabilities (e.g.Moore’s Law), smarter analytics engines, and the surge in data.

Most people know the Big Data story by now: the proliferation of sensors (theInternet of Things”) is accelerating exponential growth in “structured” data. And now on top of that explosion, we can also analyze “unstructured” data, such as text and video, to pick up information on customer sentiment. Companies have been using analytics to mine insights within this newly available data to drive efficiency and effectiveness. For example, companies can now use analytics to decide which sales representatives should get which leads, what time of day to contact a customer, and whether they should e-mail them, text them, or call them.

Such mining of digitized information has become more effective and powerful as more info is “tagged” and as analytics engines have gotten smarter. As Dario Gil, Director of Symbiotic Cognitive Systems at IBM Research, told me:

“Data is increasingly tagged and categorized on the Web – as people upload and use data they are also contributing to annotation through their comments and digital footprints. This annotated data is greatly facilitating the training of machine learning algorithms without demanding that the machine-learning experts manually catalogue and index the world. Thanks to computers with massive parallelism, we can use the equivalent of crowdsourcing to learn which algorithms create better answers. For example, when IBM’s Watson computer played ‘Jeopardy!,’ the system used hundreds of scoring engines, and all the hypotheses were fed through the different engines and scored in parallel. It then weighted the algorithms that did a better job to provide a final answer with precision and confidence.”

Beyond the Quants

Interestingly, for a long time, doing detailed analytics has been quite labor- and people-intensive. You need “quants,” the statistically savvy mathematicians and engineers who build models that make sense of the data. As Babson professor and analytics expert Tom Davenport explained to me, humans are traditionally necessary to create a hypothesis, identify relevant variables, build and run a model, and then iterate it. Quants can typically create one or two good models per week.

However, machine learning tools for quantitative data – perhaps the first line of AI – can create thousands of models a week. For example, in programmatic ad buying on the Web, computers decide which ads should run in which publishers’ locations. Massive volumes of digital ads and a never-ending flow of clickstream data depend on machine learning, not people, to decide which Web ads to place where. Firms like DataXu use machine learning to generate up to 5,000 different models a week, making decisions in under 15 milliseconds, so that they can more accurately place ads that you are likely to click on.

Tom Davenport:

“I initially thought that AI and machine learning would be great for augmenting the productivity of human quants. One of the things human quants do, that machine learning doesn’t do, is to understand what goes into a model and to make sense of it. That’s important for convincing managers to act on analytical insights. For example, an early analytics insight at Osco Pharmacy uncovered that people who bought beer also bought diapers. But because this insight was counter-intuitive and discovered by a machine, they didn’t do anything with it. But now companies have needs for greater productivity than human quants can address or fathom. They have models with 50,000 variables. These systems are moving from augmenting humans to automating decisions.”

In business, the explosive growth of complex and time-sensitive data enables decisions that can give you a competitive advantage, but these decisions depend on analyzing at a speed, volume, and complexity that is too great for humans. AI is filling this gap as it becomes ingrained in the analytics technology infrastructure in industries like health care, financial services, and travel.

The Growing Use of AI

IBM is leading the integration of AI in industry. It has made a $1 billion investment in AI through the launch of its IBM Watson Group and has made many advancements and published research touting the rise of “cognitive computing” – the ability of computers like Watson to understand words (“natural language”), not just numbers. Rather than take the cutting edge capabilities developed in its research labs to market as a series of products, IBM has chosen to offer a platform of services under the Watson brand. It is working with an ecosystem of partners who are developing applications leveraging the dynamic learning and cloud computing capabilities of Watson.The biggest application of Watson has been in health care. Watson excels in situations where you need to bridge between massive amounts of dynamic and complex text information (such as the constantly changing body of medical literature) and another mass of dynamic and complex text information (such as patient records  or genomic data), to generate and evaluate hypotheses. With training, Watson can provide recommendations for treatments for specific patients. Many prestigious academic medical centers, such as The Cleveland Clinic, The Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering are working with IBM to develop systems that will help healthcare providers better understand patients’ diseases and recommend personalized courses of treatment. This has proven to be a challenging domain to automate and most of the projects are behind schedule.

Another large application area for AI is in financial services. Mike Adler, Global Financial Services Leader at The Watson Group, told me they have 45 clients working mostly on three applications: (1) a “digital virtual agent” that enables banks and insurance companies to engage their customers in a new, personalized way, (2) a “wealth advisor” that enables financial planning and wealth management, either for self-service or in combination with a financial advisor, and (3) risk and compliance management.

For example, USAA, the $20 billion provider of financial services to people that serve, or have served, in the United States military, is using Watson to help their members transition from the military to civilian life. Neff Hudson, vice president of emerging channels at USAA, told me, “We’re always looking to help our members, and there’s nothing more critical than helping the 150,000+ people leaving the military every year. Their financial security goes down when they leave the military. We’re trying to use a virtual agent to intervene to be more productive for them.” USAA also uses AI to enhance navigation on their popular mobile app. The Enhanced Virtual Assistant, or Eva, enables members to do 200 transactions by just talking, including transferring money and paying bills. “It makes search better and answers in a Siri-like voice. But this is a 1.0 version. Our next step is to create a virtual agent that is capable of learning. Most of our value is in moving money day-to-day for our members, but there are a lot of unique things we can do that happen less frequently with our 140 products. Our goal is to be our members’ personal financial agent for our full range of services.”

In addition to working with large, established companies, IBM is also providing Watson’s capabilities to startups. IBM has set aside $100 million for investments in startups. One of the startups that is leveraging Watson is WayBlazer, a new venture in travel planning that is led by Terry Jones, a founder of Travelocity and Kayak. He told me:

“I’ve spent my whole career in travel and IT. I started as a travel agent, and people would come in, and I’d send them a letter in a couple weeks with a plan for their trip. The Sabre reservation system made the process better by automating the channel between travel agents and travel providers. Then with Travelocity we connected travelers directly with travel providers through the Internet. Then with Kayak we moved up the chain again, providing offers across travel systems. Now with WayBlazer we have a system that deals with words. Nobody has helped people with a tool for dreaming and planning their travel. Our mission is to make it easy and give people several personalized answers to a complicated trip, rather than the millions of clues that search provides today. This new technology can take data out of all the silos and dark wells that companies don’t even know they have and use it to provide personalized service.”

What’s Next

As Moore’s Law marches on, we have more power in our smartphones than the most powerful supercomputers did 30 or 40 years ago. Ray Kurzweil has predicted that the computing power of a $4,000 computer will surpass that of a human brain in 2019 (20 quadrillion calculations per second). What does it all mean for the future of AI?

Continued in article


"What We Can Learn from Ancient Athens’ Manufacturing Industry:  A former vice president at Boston Consulting Group analyzes an ancient sector and how it parallels changes in today’s economy," by Theodore Kinni, Insights from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, March 10, 2015 ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/what-we-can-learn-ancient-athens-manufacturing-industry


Here's an example you might want to use to teach ethics ---
Soccer player has wide-open goal, refuses to score because opponent is injured ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/player-refuses-score-injured-opponent-afc-cup-2015-3


TED Talks: How schools kill creativity --- http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

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


Although some of the most noted cheating scandals have been in Division 1 NCAA football, there have been scandals in cheating nearly all top universities in all sports. The following article deals with top basketball schools. Ivy League universities are excluded due to unavailable data for basketball players.

"Here’s Who Wins March Madness in the Classroom," by Sean Gregory and Dave Johnson, Time Magazine, March 17, 2015 ---
http://time.com/3745396/march-madness-classroom/?xid=newsletter-brief

. . .

 

Continued in article

And in last place --- Indiana University

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


Center for Humans & Nature (scholars addressing the big problems of life) --- http://www.humansandnature.org/


Question
Which law school graduates have the most debt?

Answer
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/grad-debt-rankings

School (Rank) Ave. Debt of 2014 Grads % Grads With Debt
Thomas Jefferson (Tier 2) $172,445 91%
New York Law School (127) $166,622 83%
Northwestern (12) $163,065 80%
Florida Coastal (Tier 2) $162,785 93%
American (71) $159,316 83%
Vermont (122) $156,713 84%
Touro (Tier 2) $154,855 85%
San Francisco (138) $154,321 88%
Columbia (4) $154,076 76%
Whittier (Tier 2) $151,602 91%

Thirteen law schools did not supply U.S. News with debt data on their graduates: 


From U.S. News
Find Online Degrees That Lead to a Top Job ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2015/03/10/find-online-degrees-that-lead-to-a-top-job

Top Online Business Degrees ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba

Jensen Comment
There are no online doctoral degrees from AACSB-Accredited Universities
In North America online doctorates don't count for much in the Academy
 

Online masters degrees from top universities that have AACSB accreditation can count just as much as onsite degrees although some states like Texas may require some onsite courses to sit for the CPA examination.


Question
What government agencies art the biggest piñatas for millions of fraudster?

"GAO: Improper Government Payments Increased 18% in 2014, to $125 Billion;  EITC's 27% Error Rate Is Highest of Any Program," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, March 18, 2015 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/03/gao-improper-government-payments-increased-18-in-2014-to-125-billion-.html

Government-wide, improper payment estimates totaled $124.7 billion in fiscal year 2014, a significant increase of approximately $19 billion from the prior year’s estimate of $105.8 billion. The estimated improper payments for fiscal year 2014 were attributable to 124 programs spread among 22 agencies.

The increase in the 2014 estimate is attributed primarily to increased error rates in three major programs: the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Medicare Fee-for-Service and Medicaid programs, and the Department of the Treasury’s Earned Income Tax Credit program. These three programs accounted for $80.9 billion in improper payment estimates, or approximately 65 percent of the government-wide total for fiscal year 2014. Further, the increases in improper payment estimates for these three programs were approximately $16 billion, or 85 percent of the increase in the government-wide improper payment estimate for fiscal year 2014.

The EITC's 27.2% error rate is far greater than any of the listed government programs.

Jensen Comment
At best these can be considered educated guesses subject to enormous margins of error. One problem is that the GAO has deemed that auditing is impossible for some agencies prone to fraudulent spending such as the Pentagon and the IRS. Government agencies are enormous Piñatas for millions of fraudsters.

I watched a woman being interviewed by CBS News who spent (tax free) her mother's Social Security payments that were automatically deposited into a checking account. Her mother has been dead for over 30 years.

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


"Meet USB Type-C, The All-In-One Cable Of The Future: It's the new champion of connection." by David Nield, ReadWriteWeb, March 13, 2015 ---
http://readwrite.com/2015/03/13/usb-type-c-explained


Black Students Showing Highest High School Graduation Rate Ever, Closing Gap With White Students ---
http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/03/17/black-students-showing-highest-high-school-graduation-rate-ever-closing-gap-with-white-students/


"Your Nosy Little Brother Will Love Yahoo’s “Secure” Disposable Passwords But you may not," by Adriana Lee, ReadWriteWeb, March 16, 2015 ---
http://readwrite.com/2015/03/16/yahoo-on-demand-passwords-email


How to mislead with statistics
Israel election: why were the exit polls wrong? ---
http://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2015/mar/18/israel-election-why-were-the-exit-polls-wrong


Jensen Comment
I recall a cartoon on a music professor's door that asserted composers have to die before their composures get widely noticed. The same might be said of artists and novelists. Dying is not a sufficient condition, but it may be a necessary condition.

"Why great novels don't get noticed now:   'Dear Thief’ was one of the best novels published last year. So why haven’t you heard of it? Gaby Wood meets its author, Samantha Harvey," The Telegraph, March 14, 2015 ---
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/11470185/Why-great-novels-dont-get-noticed-now.html  

Jensen Comment
This begs the question of how to define "widely noticed." Sales of hard copies and eBooks are an obvious way of being "noticed." Current sales are not particularly good for comparative purposes because sales of long-deceased famous writers may not be selling well in a recent year such as 2015. Accumulated sales numbers are misleading, e.g. the accumulated sales of a deceased author's book over 73 years sales of a living author's book over five years.

Apart from soaring competition for new writers, the traditional markets for new books are on the decline. Tens of thousands of libraries are operating under greatly reduced acquisition budgets at a time when the numbers of new books are soaring.

So what besides sales numbers what can be used to define "widely noticed." Both old and new books get widely noticed when they become films or television shows. But only a miniscule percentage of new and old books make it to television and movie theaters.

An economics professor friend (Bill Breit) who also co-authored a couple of murder mysteries intended to teach economics as well as be entertaining sail that sales floundered until some high school tachers commenced to require that students read the books. Why did the books get noticed by some high school teachers? Apparently it was because of a testimonial about the books made by the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman who just happened to have a close personal friendship with Bill Breit. Actually I don't think the books were all that good for teaching economics.

My point is that adoption of the book by high school and college teachers depends a whole lot on what famous scholars say about the books. Older books by deceased authors have a greater chance of having something great written about the books by scholars. For example, Virginia Woolf is still "getting noticed" because of what some scholars had said about her work.

I might add that most of the novels I read or commence to read are do to book reviews that catch my attention. Sometimes I subsequently disagree with the reviews such as my strong disagreement that  David Foster Wallace is a skilled author. But I totally agree with a favorable review about the short stories of William Trevor.

The bottom line is that the most important way to be noticed as a writer, an artist, or a composer is a review written by a respected scholar in a respected place such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, of some popular academic journal. Sadly, this can sometimes (not always)  be a fraudulent game where the publishers bribe reviewers in some way. That often is the way the world goes round and round.


Tables Comparing Higher Education Salaries By Discipline and Rank ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Median-Salaries-of-Tenured-and/228435/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
The title of this article is
"Median Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Professors at 4-Year Colleges, 2014-15"

But if you scroll down there are tables comparing median salaries at the various faculty ranks in all universities, including R1 research institutions.

Keep in mind these are median salary comparisons where half the faculty in a give category make more and half make less. There can also be considerable variances. The data are skewed downward by thousands of colleges operating at the financial margin that pay very low salaries.

The databases do not drill down into sub-disciplines such as accounting versus finance versus marketing versus management under the category "Business." For these comparisons it may be better to use AACSB databases. The AACSB databases have the added advantage in that they exclude those colleges that are not accredited by the AACSB, thousands of financially struggling colleges paying low salaries.

The AACSB databases are not free.


Edutopia: Assessment (a broader look at education assessment) ---  http://www.edutopia.org/assessment

Look beyond high-stakes testing to learn about different ways of assessing the full range of student ability -- social, emotional, and academic achievement.

Altmethrics
"Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 29, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/As-Scholarship-Goes-Digital/130482/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

In academe, the game of how to win friends and influence people is serious business. Administrators and grant makers want proof that a researcher's work has life beyond the library or the lab.

But the current system of measuring scholarly influence doesn't reflect the way many researchers work in an environment driven more and more by the social Web. Research that used to take months or years to reach readers can now find them almost instantly via blogs and Twitter.

That kind of activity escapes traditional metrics like the impact factor, which indicates how often a journal is cited, not how its articles are really being consumed by readers.

An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. "There's a gold mine of data that hasn't been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact," says Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea.

Interest in altmetrics is on the rise, but it's not quite right to call it a movement. The approach could better be described as a sprawling constellation of projects and like-minded people working at research institutions, libraries, and publishers.

They've been talking on Twitter (marking their messages with the #altmetrics hashtag), sharing resources and tools online, and developing ideas at occasional workshops and symposia. They're united by the idea that "metrics based on a diverse set of social sources could yield broader, richer, and timelier assessments of current and potential scholarly impact," as a call for contributions to a forthcoming altmetrics essay collection puts it.

Jason Priem, a third-year graduate student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a leader in this push to track impact via the social Web. Scholarly workflows are moving online, leaving traces that can be documented—not just in articles but on social networks and reference sites such as Mendeley and Zotero, where researchers store and annotate scholarship of interest. "It's like we have a fresh snowfall across this docu-plain, and we have fresh footprints everywhere," he says. "That has the potential to really revolutionize how we measure impact."

Mr. Priem helped write a manifesto, posted on the Web site altmetrics.org, which articulates the problems with traditional evaluation schemes. "As the volume of academic literature explodes, scholars rely on filters to select the most relevant and significant sources from the rest," the manifesto argues. "Unfortunately, scholarship's three main filters for importance are failing."

Peer review "has served scholarship well" but has become slow and unwieldy and rewards conventional thinking. Citation-counting measures such as the h-index take too long to accumulate. And the impact factor of journals gets misapplied as a way to assess an individual researcher's performance, which it wasn't designed to do.

"I'm not down on citations," Mr. Priem says. "I'm just saying it's only part of the story. It's become the only part of the story we care about."

That's where altmetrics comes in. It's a way to measure the "downstream use" of research, says Cameron Neylon, a senior scientist at Britain's Science and Technology Facilities Council, and another contributor to the manifesto. Any system that turns out to be a useful way to measure influence will tempt the unscrupulous to try and game it, though. One concern is that someone could build a program, for instance, that would keep tweeting links to an article and inflate its altmetrics numbers. Devising a Method

So how do you reliably measure fluid, fast-paced, Web-based, nonhierarchical reactions to scholarly work? That problem has been keeping Mr. Priem busy. He's part of the team that designed an altmetrics project called Total-Impact.

Researchers can go to the site and enter many forms of research, including blog posts, articles, data sets, and software they've written. Then the Total-Impact application will search the Internet for downloads, Twitter links, mentions in open-source software libraries, and other indicators that the work is being noticed. "We go out on the Web and find every sort of impact and present them to the user," Mr. Priem explains. When possible, they gather data directly from services' open-application programming interfaces, or API's.

These are very early days for Total-Impact, and there's a lot of information it doesn't gather yet. For instance, right now it only searches blogs indexed by the site Research Blogging. That "amounts to a very small subset of science blogs," according to Mr. Priem, who adds that most of the other metrics are more robust.

Continued in article

 

Jensen Comment
When I look at my own teaching, research, and service record over 40+ years, I sometimes wonder where and how I've made my major "impact" to date ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm

It's a no-brainer to conclude that virtually all instructors have impacts on students both in teaching and in counseling/advising. However, since over half my career was spent on the faculty of small universities, the numbers of students that I've impacted is relatively small.

I've had successes in research and publication, but I don't think these are what people to day think of if they know anything about the retired accounting professor named Bob Jensen. I was honored to be invited to a think tank for two years where I mingled with better thinkers than me, including two with Nobel Prizes in science.

Service is a very broad concept that includes both service to my employer and service to my profession in the form of committee appointments, serving as an officer, and making presentations at over 350 campuses and conferences. These probably did the most in the early days of education technology to further my career and reputation.

However, as I look back upon everything I've accomplished, I think my Website has had the greatest "impact" in the context of the above article ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ 

Website success, however, has been interactive with messaging on a listserv known as the AECM. I've undoubtedly sent more messages to the AECM than any other subscriber, but I've also probably benefitted more than any other subscriber in terms of posting messages for AECM scholars on my Website. Thus I alone will never take the credit for "my" Website. What I might call "my" Website is really the product of tens of thousands of messages that I sometimes did little more than archive the messages of others at :"my" Website. I've made comments favorable and critical of most of those messages of others, but the genuine value of the modules in question came from the outside.

My point here is that it's very difficult to assess "my" impact when much of what I've done is make it easier for the world to find my archives of the works of others. It's virtually impossible to partition what impacts are "mine" and what impacts I've merely "archived."

But that's the way scholarship and research work in academe. There are very few discipline-shaking seminal contributions, although there are many smaller seminal contributions that build on previous (hopefully always cited) previous knowledge.

What the digital age has provided us are the tools for more efficiently finding the knowledge to date on each given topic and to communicate the small tidbits we try to add to that knowledge.

The "impact" of each tidbit is tiny, tiny, tiny. But like grains of sand the tidbits pile on top of other tidbits until there's a heap of knowledge upon which to judge a scholar. However, because many of these tidbits are combinations of my own contributions mixed with the contributions of others, it becomes very difficult to take credit for the  aggregate "impact" that is "mine." But then who really cares whether the impact is "mine" or not. The important thing is that impact of each tidbit in what becomes a mountain of tidbits of scholarship heaped higher and higher by tidbits added one grain at a time.

As written above:

These are very early days for Total-Impact, and there's a lot of information it doesn't gather yet. For instance, right now it only searches blogs indexed by the site Research Blogging. That "amounts to a very small subset of science blogs," according to Mr. Priem, who adds that most of the other metrics are more robust.

It will never be possible in knowledge sharing to measure "my" Total-Impact. Superficial measures like numbers of hits on "my" Website or number of citations of my published research are meaningless since we have no way of assessing the ultimate value of one hit versus the value of any one of a million other hits. And the real value of my work may still lie in the future when scholars not yet born discover my works.

At this stage of my life in retirement it does not really matter to me what my score is on Total-Impact. What matters most is that I played a part, however large or small, in the accumulation of knowledge in my chosen specialties. Put another way, I don't much care about my "altmetrics." A note of appreciation from a friend or a total stranger means much more to me. And I appreciate it when others are critical of selected tidbits I've archived. The fact that it was worthwhile for them to take the time to criticize my work is a backhanded compliment. I truly do love to debate controversial issues.

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


Question
Is there such a thing as Lady Luck?

One Answer
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/does-lacky-luck-exist-or-do-you-make-your-own/

Jensen Comment
Just because there are phenomena that cannot be explained does not prove causation. For example, sightings in the heavens that have never been explained does not mean they were caused by aliens outside the earth. Just because the set of numbers in your Chinese fortune cookie won the lottery does not mean that chance phenomena can be predicted by fortune cookies.

Just because your wife was at your side cheering you on when you left the casino the last ten times with your pockets stuffed with cash does not mean your wife really is Lady Luck in the casino.  Has her lover had the same kind of luck?

There is, however, such a thing as Lady Luck if that lady increases the probabilities of success.  If your wife insists that you bring home one lottery ticket every week she has increased the probability that you win the lottery --- if only by the probability of 1/200 million. If your wife insists that you both enter a bridge tournament or a Super Bowl pool she has increased the probabilities of winning.

If your wife insists that you fly commercially to visit her mother in Iowa rather than drive from California she has increased the probability that you will arrive and return safely.

Yes, there is such a thing as Lady Luck!


The Many Things a Home Can Be ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/09/carson-ellis-home/?mc_cid=2fbdcf0df8&mc_eid=4d2bd13843


This year's Pi day was extra special on March 14, 2015 ---
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/13/8205807/pi-day


So the short answer is no. If you think a more expensive cable is going to deliver a better picture, then you’re mistaken. “Whether you have a $100 cable or a $5 cable, if they meet the same (high speed) specification requirements there should be no difference,” says Jeff, “From a technical point of view they are exactly the same.”
Are Expensive HDMI Cables Worth Buying? We Asked an Expert ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/are-expensive-hdmi-cables-worth-buying-we-asked-112518733919.html

Jensen Comment
I found that cheap HDMI mini-plugs work as well as more expensive plugs for a time, but that they are more prone to losing it after repeated use. So I keep a bunch of cheap HDMI mini-plugs on hand that I get from Amazon for $1.50 each. My cable is cheap and works fine all the time. The mini-plugs are very fragile in terms of movement if I happen to jiggle my Kindle Fire that I use for streaming Netflix movies.


Nation faces almost $8T retirement income shortfall The Pension Rights Center estimates the U.S. retirement income deficit now stands at $7.7 trillion, up from $6.6 trillion five years ago.
PlanAdviser.com (3/12)
http://www.planadviser.com/Retirement_Income_Gap_Projected_at_Nearly_Eight_Trillion.aspx


Jensen Comment
Mary Jo White sounded tough when she first became Chair of the SEC. Personally I'm disappointed in her alleged "toughness." She's beginning to sound more like a Wall Street pushover. Exhibit A is her stance on High Frequency Trading.
But then has there ever been a SEC chair that stood up to Wall Street?
Wall Street is too big to fail!

High-Frequency Trading --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
(Click on "Risks and Controversy"  (insider trading) and "Violations and Fines")

. . .

n a September 22, 2010 speech, SEC chairperson Mary Schapiro signaled that US authorities were considering the introduction of regulations targeted at HFT. She said, "high frequency trading firms have a tremendous capacity to affect the stability and integrity of the equity markets. Currently, however, high frequency trading firms are subject to very little in the way of obligations either to protect that stability by promoting reasonable price continuity in tough times, or to refrain from exacerbating price volatility."[77] She proposed regulation that would require high-frequency traders to stay active in volatile markets.[78] Current SEC chair Mary Jo White pushed back against claims that high-frequency traders have an inherent benefit in the markets.[79] SEC associate director Gregg Berman suggested that the current debate over HFT lacks perspective. In an April 2014 speech, Berman argued: "It's much more than just the automation of quotes and cancels, in spite of the seemingly exclusive fixation on this topic by much of the media and various outspoken market pundits. (...) I worry that it may be too narrowly focused and myopic."[80]

The Chicago Federal Reserve letter of October 2012, titled "How to keep markets safe in an era of high-speed trading", reports on the results of a survey of several dozen financial industry professionals including traders, brokers, and exchanges.[13] It found that

risk controls were poorer in high-frequency trading, because of competitive time pressure to execute trades without the more extensive safety checks normally used in slower trades. "some firms do not have stringent processes for the development, testing, and deployment of code used in their trading algorithms." "out-of control algorithms were more common than anticipated prior to the study and that there were no clear patterns as to their cause."

The CFA Institute, a global association of investment professionals, advocated for reforms regarding high-frequency trading,[81] including:

Promoting robust internal risk management procedures and controls over the algorithms and strategies employed by HFT firms. Trading venues should disclose their fee structure to all market participants. Regulators should address market manipulation and other threats to the integrity of markets, regardless of the underlying mechanism, and not try to intervene in the trading process or to restrict certain types of trading activities.

Flash trading

Another area of concern relates to flash trading. Flash trading is a form of trading in which certain market participants are allowed to see incoming orders to buy or sell securities very slightly earlier than the general market participants, typically 30 milliseconds, in exchange for a fee. This feature was introduced to allow participants like market makers the opportunity to meet or improve on the national best bid and offer price to ensure incoming orders were matched at the most advantageous prices according to Regulation NMS.

According to some sources, the programs can inspect major orders as they come in and use that information to profit.[82] Currently, the majority of exchanges do not offer flash trading, or have discontinued it. By March 2011, the NASDAQ, BATS, and Direct Exchange exchanges had all ceased offering its Competition for Price Improvement functionality (widely referred to as "flash technology/trading").[83][84] Insider trading

On September 24, 2013, it was revealed that some traders are under investigation for possible news leak and insider trading. Right after the Federal Reserve announced its newest decision, trades were registered in the Chicago futures market within two milliseconds. However, the news was released to the public in Washington D.C. at exactly 2:00 pm calibrated by atomic clock,[85] and takes seven milliseconds to reach Chicago at the speed of light.[86] Contrary to claims by high-frequency trader Virtu Financial,[87] anything faster is not physically possible. It was concluded the high-speed traders in question had to receive the news under embargo from proprietary feed servers in Chicago that were pre-loaded with the Fed's announcement.

Continued in article

A Year Ago Michael Lewis published a highly successful book called Flash Boys that became especially popular after his interview on CBS Sixty Minutes.

"Michael Lewis Reflects on His Book Flash Boys, a Year After It Shook Wall Street to Its Core," Vanity Fair, March 2015 ---
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/03/michael-lewis-flash-boys-one-year-later

. . .

In the months after the publication of Moneyball, I got used to reading quotes from baseball insiders saying that the author of the book couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about, as he was not a “baseball expert.” In the 11 months since the publication of Flash Boys, I’ve read lots of quotes from people associated with the H.F.T. lobby saying the author is not a “market-structure expert.” Guilty as charged! Back in 2012, I stumbled upon Katsuyama and his team of people, who knew more about how the stock market actually worked than anyone then being paid to serve as a public expert on market structure. Most of what I know I learned from them. Of course I checked their understanding of the market. I spoke with high-frequency traders and people inside big banks, and I toured the public exchanges. I spoke to people who had sold retail-order flow and people who had bought it. And in the end it was clear that Brad Katsuyama and his band of brothers were reliable sources—that they had learned a lot of things about the inner workings of the stock market that were unknown to the wider public. The controversy that followed the book’s publication hasn’t been pleasant for them, but it’s been fun for me to see them behave as bravely under fire as they did before the start of the war. It’s been an honor to tell their story.

The controversy has come with a price: it has swallowed up the delight an innocent reader might have taken in this little episode in financial history. If this story has a soul, it is in the decisions made by its principal characters to resist the temptation of easy money and to pay special attention to the spirit in which they live their working lives. I didn’t write about them because they were controversial. I wrote about them because they were admirable. That some minority on Wall Street is getting rich by exploiting a screwed-up financial system is no longer news. That is the story of the last financial crisis, and probably the next one, too. What comes as news is that there is now a minority on Wall Street trying to fix the system. Their new stock market is flourishing; their company is profitable; Goldman Sachs remains their biggest single source of volume; they still seem to be on their way to changing the world. All they need is a little help from the silent majority.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Mary Jo White sounded tough when she first became Chair of the SEC. Personally I'm disappointed in her alleged "toughness." She's beginning to sound more like a pushover. Exhibit A is her stance on High Frequency Trading.

Background from http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book14q1.htm  

"Speed Traders Play Defense Against Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys," by Matthew Philips, Bloomberg Businessweek, March 31, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-31/speed-traders-play-defense-to-michael-lewiss-flash-boys?campaign_id=DN033114 

In Sunday night’s 60 Minutes interview about his new book on high-frequency trading—Flash Boys—author Michael Lewis got right to the point. After a brief lead-in reminding us that despite the strongest bull market in years, American stock ownership is at a record low, reporter Steve Kroft asked Lewis for the headline: “Stock market’s rigged,” Lewis said nonchalantly. By whom? “A combination of stock exchanges, big Wall Street banks, and high-frequency traders.”

Flash Boys was published today. Digital versions went live at midnight, so presumably thousands of speed traders and industry players spent the night plowing through it. Although the book was announced last year, it’s been shrouded in secrecy. Its publisher, W. W. Norton, posted some excerpts briefly online before taking them down.

Despite a lack of concrete details, word started getting around a few months ago that Lewis had spent a lot of time with some of the HFT industry’s most vehement critics, such as Joe Saluzzi at Themis Trading. The 60 Minutes interview only confirmed what many people had suspected for months: Flash Boys is an unequivocal attack on computerized speed trading.

In the interview, Lewis adhered to the usual assaults: High-frequency traders have an unfair advantage; they manipulate markets; they get in front of bigger, slower investors and drive up the prices they pay to buy a stock. They are, in Lewis’s view, the consummate middlemen extracting unnecessary rents from a class of everyday investors who have never been at a bigger disadvantage. This has essentially been the nut of the HFT debate over the past five years.

Continued article

The Flash Boys book ---
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=flash%20boys%20michael%20lewis&sprefix=Flash+B%2Cstripbooks%2C236
The Kindle Edition is only $9.18

The three segments on the March 30, 2014 hour of CBS Sixty Minutes were exceptional. The most important to me was an interview with Michael Lewis on how the big banks and other operators physically laid very high speed cable between stock exchanges to skim the cream off purchase an sales of individuals, mutual funds, and pension funds. The sad part is that the trading laws have a loop hole allowing this type of ripoff.

The fascinating features of this show and a new book by Michael Lewis include how the skimming operation was detected and how a new stock exchange was formed to block the skimmers.

Try the revised links below. These are examples of links that will soon vaporize. They can be used in class under the Fair Use safe harbor but only for a very short time until you or your library purchases these and other Sixty Minutes videos.
 
But the transcripts will are available from CBS and can be used for free on into the future. Click on the upper menu choice "Episodes" for links to the transcripts.
 
Note the revised video links. a menu should appear to the left that can lead to the other videos currently available for free (temporarily).

 

The three segments on the March 30, 2014 hour of CBS Sixty Minutes were exceptional. The most important to me was an interview with Michael Lewis on how the big banks and other operators physically laid very high speed cable between stock exchanges to skim the cream off purchase an sales of individuals, mutual funds, and pension funds. The sad part is that the trading laws have a loop hole allowing this type of ripoff.

The fascinating features of this show and a new book by Michael Lewis include how the skimming operation was detected and how a new stock exchange was formed to block the skimmers.

Free access to the video is very limited, so take advantage of the following link now:
Lewis explains how the stock market is rigged ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/is-the-us-stock-market-rigged/

The big question remaining is why it is taking the SEC so long to put an end to this type of skimming?

Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

 

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


It's All Greek to Me:  What do the numbers 1 and 196,883 have in common?
"Mathematicians Chase Moonshine’s Shadow:  Researchers are on the trail of a mysterious connection between number theory, algebra and string theory" Erica Klareich, Quanta Magazine, March 12, 2015 ---
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150312-mathematicians-chase-moonshines-shadow/

In 1978, the mathematician John McKay noticed what seemed like an odd coincidence. He had been studying the different ways of representing the structure of a mysterious entity called the monster group, a gargantuan algebraic object that, mathematicians believed, captured a new kind of symmetry. Mathematicians weren’t sure that the monster group actually existed, but they knew that if it did exist, it acted in special ways in particular dimensions, the first two of which were 1 and 196,883.

McKay, of Concordia University in Montreal, happened to pick up a mathematics paper in a completely different field, involving something called the j-function, one of the most fundamental objects in number theory. Strangely enough, this function’s first important coefficient is 196,884, which McKay instantly recognized as the sum of the monster’s first two special dimensions.

Most mathematicians dismissed the finding as a fluke, since there was no reason to expect the monster and the j-function to be even remotely related. However, the connection caught the attention of John Thompson, a Fields medalist now at the University of Florida in Gainsville, who made an additional discovery. The j-function’s second coefficient, 21,493,760, is the sum of the first three special dimensions of the monster: 1 + 196,883 + 21,296,876. It seemed as if the j-function was somehow controlling the structure of the elusive monster group.

Continued in article


Jensen Comment
Over the years I've long been convinced that for good students how you teach does not matter nearly so much as what you require and how you grade. Students don't learn much if they don't have to sweat buckets for the grade. The teacher's pedagogy does not matter much for good students who will learn it however you teach it --- onsite lectures, videos, cases, online handouts and former examinations, Socratic method, or whatever. What is in the examinations, oral or written, matters most as long as the grades don't come easy. I don't think students learn as well when they can memorize answers. It's important to make them reason things out no matter how you teach the material.

For uninspired students with potential I think pedagogy does matter. For example, I find that for those students one-on-one teaching, whether onsite or online, does often make uninspired students take an interest in the subject matter and try harder to learn. Sometimes it begins by not wanting to let their beloved teachers or mentors down. Sometimes inspiration is more a matter of maturity than anything else. I would much rather teach older students than young and immature students.

Parents, even more than teachers, can be the great motivators of students. How parents and teachers successfully motivate varies with each and every student. Probably the most important thing is to be a great role model as a parent and as a teacher.

Pedagogy matters more for teachers than for students.
For example, having a lot of Camtasia videos on very technical coverage helps keep students from lining up outside faculty offices asking the same questions. With great videos students can repeat the parts they don't understand over and over until they finally get it.

Some teachers are not good at certain types of pedagogy. For example, some are fantastic at teaching by case method when they are not good at lecturing. Great lecturers sometimes cannot pull off the case method.

"'No Significant Differences' in Student Outcomes by Mode of Delivery," Inside Higher Ed, March 13, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/03/13/no-significant-differences-student-outcomes-mode-delivery

The nonprofit research organization Ithaka S+R is back with another look at the many studies that compare student outcomes from face-to-face and online or hybrid courses, and once again, the results show "no significant differences" between the two modes of delivery. Questions about the studies' methodology also remain. D. Derek Wu, an analyst at Ithaka, also noted that the "majority of studies still fall short in their efforts to fill in the gaps left by the prior literature -- particularly those related to the cost implications of online and hybrid delivery formats."

This year, Ithaka looked at 12 studies conducted in 2013 and 2014, but Wu found that many of them "are vulnerable to methodological limitations that endanger the robustness of their results." Wu suggested future research should focus on four areas: cost implications, individual features' impact on outcomes, online upper-level and humanities courses, and long-term results such as graduation and retention rates. Ithaka first began to track studies on student outcomes by delivery in 2012.

Jensen Comment
The phrase "no significant differences" is well known in higher education. Hundreds of studies tend, on the basis of statistical inference, point to no significant differences in pedagogy. But statistical inference tends to look for differences in mean averages. For examples of the best-known studies go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#AssessmentIssues

But statistical inference that makes conclusions about averages can be misleading for the outliers such as unmotivated or disabled students where pedagogy, in my opinion, does matter.


Massive Open (meaning free) Online Course (MOOC) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
Students may have to pay for certificates, badges, or transcript credits. Badges and credits entail competency testing.
MOOCs probably would not have gotten off the ground if thousands of these courses were not provided by the most prestigious universities in the world.

MOOC FAQ --- http://www.openculture.com/mooc_faq

"Cut Through the Hype, and MOOCs Still Have Had a Lasting Impact," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 13, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Cut-Through-the-Hype-and/228431/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

To some people in higher education, "MOOC" has become a punch line. The initial hype around so-called massive open online courses was so intense — promising a "tsunami" of change, according to one New York Times columnist, and a shuttering of most traditional colleges, according to one of the trend’s pioneersthat the reality was doomed to fall short.

"In some ways MOOCs have become the love child of a relationship that we regret," says George Siemens, an academic-technology expert at the University of Texas at Arlington who coined the term while teaching an experimental online course seven years ago. "You don’t even say it without someone rolling their eyes."

Despite the eye rolls, MOOCs haven’t gone away. A growing number of colleges offer them — more than 400 institutions, including 22 of the top 25 most selective universities, according to Class Central, a blog that tracks MOOCs. Venture-capital firms have thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into companies making or supporting the free courses.

So what are the lasting effects of MOOCs, according to those who help spark this revolution?

Perhaps the biggest legacy of free online courses is unintended: increased pressure on colleges to spend more money on teaching. Colleges spend $39,000 to $325,000 for each MOOC they make, according to an analysis last week in eCampus News. And many colleges are building new infrastructure to help produce the courses, hiring instructional designers or putting up studio facilities.

A commitment to creating MOOCs also can have consequences for overall enrollment. Prospective students now sometimes peek at MOOCs as they shop for colleges, and they can see the difference between a good course and a lackluster one. In that way, the courses function like Amazon’s "look inside the book" feature, which lets customers read free samples of books before they buy.

Viewed in a certain light, MOOCs may end up raising the cost of higher education, as colleges enter a new arms race to improve their support systems for teaching.

Of course, it’s not that simple. Many higher-education experts argue that such spending on improving teaching is long overdue, and that today’s digital-native students demand new styles of instruction. "Universities ignored the early wave of innovation in education — at least the larger ones did," says Mr. Siemens.

He also argues that focusing on cost and efficiency is the wrong way for nonprofit colleges to evaluate their efforts to improve teaching. Teaching, after all, is full of intangibles, and it’s linked to academe’s mission to turn out responsible citizens. "The experiment will have failed if we talk in terms of management, in terms of efficiency, instead of advancing the ability of everyone to learn," he argues.

In talking with a handful of MOOC pioneers like Mr. Siemens, here are some other key lessons from the first few years of experimentation.

MOOCs Can Serve a New — and Growing — Demographic of Students

Sebastian Thrun is the MOOC pioneer who once predicted that many colleges would soon go out of business. Since then he has recanted, and shifted his company, Udacity, to serve working adults in highly technical fields that change faster than traditional colleges can spin out new programs. "We’re discovering that there are a huge number of willing and eager lifelong learners that are underserved," he says.

He calls what those students need "upskilling," and Udacity now offers several short online programs, called "nanodegrees," to offer those skills. He sees the goal of Udacity’s courses as very different from the goals of the courses he used to teach at Stanford University. "We don’t need to make people’s IQ go from 100 to 200," he says. "We don’t help develop values, we don’t form character. We just give you the tools to form skills."

Coursera, another company that produces MOOCs, has recently added a series of short "microdegree" programs that seem to emulate that approach — though the company offers liberal-arts courses as well. "Over 50 percent of our learners are people who are working adults and are looking to get a step up in their career," says Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera. "The skills that they need today didn’t even exist 15 years ago."

Seen in that way, MOOCs are an update of traditional colleges’ extension programs.

MOOCs Are Driving Better Research Into Teaching

Anant Agarwal, the head of edX, a nonprofit MOOC provider that was created by Harvard and MIT, is fond of repeating key catchphrases to promote MOOCs. These days he often calls the technology platform his team is building to offer the free courses "a particle accelerator for learning."

The metaphor attempts to cast colleges’ investment in MOOCs as an investment in infrastructure rather than simply throwing money into a smattering of teaching experiments. His rhetorical gesture also highlights the size of the effort; he points out that edX has taught more than three and a half million students.

Continued in article

 
Summary information about the millions of students who take (but often do not complete) free non-credit MOOCs from prestigious universities
Surprise (maybe):  Only a third of the students are from North America

"8 Things You Should Know About MOOCs," by Jonah Newman and Soo Oh, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/8-Things-You-Should-Know-About/146901/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

1. The overwhelming majority of MOOC students are male

2. MOOCs attract students who already have college degrees

3. The median age of MOOC participants is 24

4. One-third of MOOC participants are from North America

5. Nearly half of registrants never engage with any of the content

6. Europeans view the most course content

7. Students with a doctorate viewed more course material

8. Serial students are the most engaged

What we still don't know

Granted, these data are still a relatively small sample from a limited number of MOOCs. As the number and variety of MOOCs has grown exponentially since these initial courses were offered in 2012-13 — EdX alone has offered more than 200 courses from more than 30 partner institutions — there are certainly more data that can shed light on other interesting questions. What are the motivations and goals of registrants? What kinds of content engage students the most? Do students cherry-pick lessons throughout the course, or tend to drop out as the class progresses?

These are the questions future MOOC data releases can help us answer, so we can learn even more about how such courses are being used and by whom.

 

"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 MOOC courses available online from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Quick Answers to Common Questions About Getting Into Medical School ---
http://web.jhu.edu/prepro/Forms/AAMC Quick Answers.pdf

How Many People Get Into Medical School ---
http://web.jhu.edu/prepro/Forms/AAMC Quick Answers.pdf
For most applicants the MCAT is the key to the kingdom

How to Get Into Medical School ---
http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Into-Medical-School

Jensen Comment
In some parts of the world (e.g., India and Parts of Europe) high school students go directly into intense medical schools that bypass the traditional undergraduate college experience. Johns Hopkins has an experimental program for admitting medical students after one or two years of undergraduate college. There may be some other medicals experimenting with this type of admission. However, for most students the processes described in the links above are still in effect.


"Heading towards disaster:  How a multinational Muslim empire was destroyed by the first world war," The Economist, March 7, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21645711-how-multinational-muslim-empire-was-destroyed-first-world-war-heading-towards

“UNTO us a son is born!” It was with great excitement that Enver Pasha, the most powerful of the triumvirate of Young Turks who ruled the Ottoman Empire, greeted the news that two German warships had sailed into neutral Turkish waters on August 10th 1914. The Goeben, a heavy battleship, and the Breslau, a light cruiser, had bombarded French Algerian ports at the start of the first world war, and were being pursued by French and British vessels across the Mediterranean.

The Turks extracted a high price for granting the ships haven, including recognition of their demands for the recovery of territories lost in earlier conflicts and financial help if they entered the war. To avoid immediate hostilities, though, the Turks ostensibly bought the German ships (and the services of their crews), replacing two dreadnoughts that had been ordered from, but requisitioned by, Britain.

Thus did Germany appear to gain a new ally, and Turkey a protector against dismemberment. The Ottomans came fully into the war two months later, when Germany sent the now Turkish-flagged Goeben to attack the Russian navy in the Black Sea. The European war turned global, with Indians, Australians and New Zealanders brought in to fight against Arabs and Turks. The conflict was to prove as disastrous for the Ottomans as for Germany, if not more so. A multinational Muslim empire that had once threatened Vienna was broken up; the first modern genocide, of the Armenians, was committed; the Arab provinces were parcelled up into benighted colonial “mandates”; the foundations of the future Jewish state were laid; and the caliphate, established in the earliest days of Islam, was abolished.

If Germany’s humiliation at Versailles set the stage for German revanchism in the second world war, then the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire created the festering sore that is today’s Middle East. “The legitimacy of Middle Eastern frontiers has been called into question since they were first drafted,” writes Eugene Rogan. “Arab nationalists in the 1940s and 1950s openly called for unity schemes between Arab states that would overthrow boundaries widely condemned as an imperialist legacy.” Nearly a century and several wars later, the worst exponents of that resentment—the jihadists of Islamic State—have proclaimed the recreation of the caliphate.

The story of how the Ottoman Empire stumbled into a conflict for which it was unprepared, how it put up a stronger fight than anyone expected and how its carcass was torn apart are the subject of Mr Rogan’s assured account. Amid myriad books about the slaughter in Europe, Mr Rogan, the director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University, sets out to tell the story through Ottoman eyes. Although he does not always succeed in delivering that viewpoint, the book stands alongside the best histories. Mr Rogan ably weaves the thinking and doings of the politicians and generals with their impact on the soldiers and civilian populations. He sketches many revealing vignettes: Anzac troops rioting around the brothels of Cairo; soldiers in the desert struggling to distinguish enemy combatants from harmless sheep; and a north African soldier-poet describing the carnage in a foreign field at Charleroi in Belgium: “They perished without anyone reciting the profession of faith for them, Lords! They lay exposed to the wild beasts, eagles and birds of prey.”

Mr Rogan offers a nuanced account of the greater and lesser moments—the Allied disaster at Gallipoli, the quagmire at Kut, the mass-murder of the Armenians, the Arab revolt, the conquest of Baghdad and Jerusalem, and the messy political scramble for Damascus.

But he is arguably at his most interesting in his account of the failure of what the Kaiser called Islampolitik, the idea that alliance with the Muslim power, and the authority of the caliphate, would weaken Britain and France by subverting the Muslim populations of their colonies in India and north Africa. There were isolated successes, including the enlisting of French north African prisoners-of-war to serve in Ottoman armies. But despite the call to jihad, for the most part Muslim populations and soldiers remained loyal to their colonial masters. Even the revelation of Allied double-dealing to carve up the Middle East, as detailed in the Sykes-Picot agreement, did not blunt the rebellion of the Arab Hashemites against the Ottomans.

The Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, which took Russia out of the war, might have ensured survival or even some kind of victory for the Ottomans, by freeing up troops from the east to go south. But it was squandered. Their capture of the oilfields of Baku left them vulnerable to the British breakthrough in Palestine. In the end, Mr Rogan writes, the Ottomans were more influential than many imagined; instead of being the weakest link among the Central Powers, they held out to the end.

The Ottomans had lost wars before, but never the empire itself. This time it was different. The demands imposed by the Allies provoked a revolt by Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, who pushed the Greeks and Italians out of Anatolia, deposed the sultan and abolished the caliphate. Turkish nationalism thus salvaged the rump of Anatolia. But Arab nationalism was stillborn; the promise of self-determination made by America’s president, Woodrow Wilson, was not applied to Egyptians demanding the end of British rule. Islam was the sword that the Kaiser had hoped to use; instead it was later grasped by disgruntled, disenfranchised Muslims against their own rulers, and against perceived foreign foes.

 

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

From the Scout Report on August 1, 2014

The World War I Centennial
Indiana University commemorating World War I centennial in 2014-15
http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/indiana-university-commemorating-world-war-i-centennial-in-2014-15-1.8932785

European Peace Walk commemorates WWI centennial
http://www.today.com/travel/european-peace-walk-commemorates-wwi-centennial-1D79975858

The Centennial of WWI
http://abcnews.go.com/International/photos/centennial-wwi-24667190/image-wwi-centennial-recalls-terror-trenches-24667492

Sarajevo Celebrates WWI Centennial With Joy And The Macabre
http://www.npr.org/2014/06/28/326406767/sarajevo-celebrates-wwi-centennial-with-joy-and-the-macabre

“One Century Later” panel to discuss enduring influence of Great War
http://worldwar-1centennial.org/

BBC: World War One Centenary
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww1

The animals that served in the first world war:  in pictures ---
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2014/sep/03/the-animals-that-served-in-the-first-world-war-in-pictures?CMP=twt_gu

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

World War I Photographic History in a French Village
Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt --- http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/remember-me/

World War One: The British Library
http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one

Centenary of the First World War, 1914-1918 --- http://www.awm.gov.au/1914-1918/

World War (I &II) Propaganda Posters --- http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/23520




From the Scout Report on March 13, 2015

Readability --- https://readability.com 

Most of us find articles we'd like to read, but don't have time in that moment to read them. Bookmarking them all creates clutter. So what if we had a network tool where we could stash our to-be-read articles? And what if that platform was really attractive? Enter Readability. Sign up for the service is free. Once a reader has created an account she may follow others and recommend stories. But the best part is the simple storing and reading experience on the site. To add an article, users simply click the plus sign and paste the URL from their desired article. Readability stores it in the user's personal archive, where it is available to read in a visually pleasing format at any time. Readability is available as a browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and as a mobile app for tablets and mobile devices running iOS 7.1 or later and Android 2.1 and up.


Google Docs --- https://docs.google.com 

Google Docs was launched in 2007 as a cloud-based answer to the Microsoft Office Suite of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. While Microsoft's applications are still engrained as most people's go-to for their basic office needs, Docs has been gaining ground, both in terms of market share and usability. Now part of the greater Google Drive collective, readers can create, edit, and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. In addition, it's web-based, which leads to important conveniences, like the ability to access documents from different computers or include multiple people when simultaneously drafting a document. Documents save automatically every few seconds, making loss of work nearly impossible, and users can also access revision history to see what changes have been made, when they were made, and by whom. For readers who have heard of Google Docs or Google Drive but haven't put it to full use quite yet, this is a handy and efficient way to tackle projects as a team.


The Wealth of a Celtic Prince Unearthed
Ancient Celtic Prince's Grave and Chariot Unearthed
http://www.livescience.com/50069-celtic-prince-tomb-uncovered.html

'Exceptional tomb of Celtic prince' found in France
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31747159

Impressive Tomb of Celtic Prince Found in France
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/impressive-tomb-of-celtic-prince-found-in-france-150305.htm

French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research
http://www.nearch.eu/partners/inrap

Top 10 archeological finds of all time after discovery of skeleton of
Richard III
http://metro.co.uk/2013/02/04/top-10-archaeological-finds-of-all-time-3379570/

Romancing the Stone: An Egyptologist explains the Rosetta Stone's lasting
allure
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/romancing-the-stone-175445099/?no-ist

 




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


Education Tutorials

2015: International Year of Light (commemorating Albert Einstein) ---  http://www.light2015.org

TED Talks: How schools kill creativity --- http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en

NASA Women of STEM --- http://www.nasa.gov/education/womenstem/

Nature: Toolbox (including software) --- http://www.nature.com/news/toolbox

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

Cover Browser (comic book archives) --- http://www.coverbrowser.com/

New York Public Library's Surprisingly Tricky Online Spelling Bee --- http://pages.email.nypl.org/spellingbeequiz

National Geographic Education: The Reason for the Seasons ---
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/activity/the-reason-for-the-seasons/

Smithsonian Libraries: Butterflies and Moths
http://www.sil.si.edu/imagegalaxy/imageGalaxy_collResult.cfm?term=Butterflies%20and%20Moths

NOVA: Journey of the Butterflies --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/journey-butterflies.html

United States Botanic Garden --- http://www.usbg.gov

Caroline Dean Wildflower Collection --- http://diglib.auburn.edu/collections/wildflower/
I looked up a destructive weed called an aster up here in the white mountains ---
http://content.lib.auburn.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/flora/id/405/rec/19
The asters reveal themselves in the late summer and I pull them everywhere I can in our wildflower field and wild roses. Down the road an outstanding lupine field was taken over with asters. It had to be plowed up and replanted with lupines (that are slow coming back).

National Geographic Education: The Reason for the Seasons ---
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/activity/the-reason-for-the-seasons/

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Solstice and Equinox ("Suntrack") Model (PDF) --- http://solar-center.stanford.edu/AO/Sun-Track-Model.pdf
Track the sun across the sky in all seasons from where you live
This is a physical model that must be built from materials available from lumber stores like Home Depot or Lowes

Nova Next --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/

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

Pathways to Science: STEM
http://www.pathwaystoscience.org

National Science Foundation: Resources for STEM Education
http://www.nsfresources.org/home.cfm

Springboard to STEM
http://stem.firstbook.org/

Change the Equation (STEM Education)  http://changetheequation.org/

National Science Foundation: Resources for STEM Education --- http://www.nsfresources.org/topic.cfm?topic=IM

Center on Education and The Workforce ( STEM) --- http://cew.georgetown.edu/stem

Journal of Young Investigators (mostly STEM topics in science, engineering, and technology) --- http://www.jyi.org/

STEM Planet --- http://www.stemplanet.org/

2015: International Year of Light (commemorating Albert Einstein) ---  http://www.light2015.org

Nature: Toolbox (including software) --- http://www.nature.com/news/toolbox

NASA Women of STEM --- http://www.nasa.gov/education/womenstem/

BioNews --- http://www.bionews.org.uk

Smithsonian Libraries: Butterflies and Moths
http://www.sil.si.edu/imagegalaxy/imageGalaxy_collResult.cfm?term=Butterflies%20and%20Moths

NOVA: Journey of the Butterflies --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/journey-butterflies.html

United States Botanic Garden --- http://www.usbg.gov

Caroline Dean Wildflower Collection --- http://diglib.auburn.edu/collections/wildflower/
I looked up a destructive weed called an aster up here in the white mountains ---
http://content.lib.auburn.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/flora/id/405/rec/19
The asters reveal themselves in the late summer and I pull them everywhere I can in our wildflower field and wild roses. Down the road an outstanding lupine field was taken over with asters. It had to be plowed up and replanted with lupines (that are slow coming back).

National Geographic Education: The Reason for the Seasons ---
http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/activity/the-reason-for-the-seasons/

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

TED Talks: How schools kill creativity --- http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en

Monica Lewinsky just gave 'one of the best, most courageous TED talks ever' ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/monica-lewinsky-ted-talk-online-harassment-2015-3

How Housing Matters --- http://howhousingmatters.org/category/education/

Peace Corps: Passport Blog --- http://passport.peacecorps.gov/

David Whyte on How to Break the Tyranny of Work/Life Balance ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/11/david-whyte-three-marriages-work-life/?mc_cid=2fbdcf0df8&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm


Law and Legal Studies

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


Math Tutorials

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


History Tutorials

Digital Collections - Trinity College Dublin --- http://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/testing4/home/index.php

CyArk (3-D Library of Historical Sites) --- http://www.cyark.org/

Cover Browser (comic book archives) --- http://www.coverbrowser.com/

The Walt Whitman Archive: Published Works --- http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/

CivilWar@Smithsonian --- http://www.civilwar.si.edu/

Cherry Blossom Festival (Washington DC) --- http://www.nps.gov/cherry/cherry-blossom-history.htm

Holi Festival 2015 (Hindu Spring Festival) --- http://www.holifestival.org

Celebrating Nowruz: A Resource for Educators (Persian New Year) ---  http://cmes.hmdc.harvard.edu/files/NowruzCurriculumText.pdf

May Day Celebrations --- (Christianity in Europe) --- http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/mayday/

Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour Through Ancient Rome, 320 C.E. ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/rome-reborn-take-a-virtual-tour-through-ancient-rome-320-c-e.html

Poetry Foundation: Spring Poems --- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/241410?gclid=COvs8sCdlMQCFUQ8gQods2wA6Q

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience --- http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/william-blakes-songs-of-innocence-and-experience

1637 Tulipmania (historic stock market bubble in Holland in 1617) ---
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/explore-the-collection/timeline-dutch-history/1637-tulipmania

1719 South Seas Bubble (historic stock market bubble in England in 1719) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company
The South Seas Company scandal (reporting stock sales as income and paying dividends out of capital)

From the Scout Report on March 13, 2015

The Wealth of a Celtic Prince Unearthed
Ancient Celtic Prince's Grave and Chariot Unearthed
http://www.livescience.com/50069-celtic-prince-tomb-uncovered.html

'Exceptional tomb of Celtic prince' found in France
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31747159

Impressive Tomb of Celtic Prince Found in France
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/impressive-tomb-of-celtic-prince-found-in-france-150305.htm

French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research
http://www.nearch.eu/partners/inrap

Top 10 archeological finds of all time after discovery of skeleton of
Richard III
http://metro.co.uk/2013/02/04/top-10-archaeological-finds-of-all-time-3379570/

Romancing the Stone: An Egyptologist explains the Rosetta Stone's lasting
allure
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/romancing-the-stone-175445099/?no-ist

 

Digital Public Library of America --- Search the archives of the libraries of major universities in various nations
I find it easier to use than Google Books

Go to http://dp.la/

Click on Bookshelf

Search for a topic like "Accounting"

Note the thousands of hits from various top university libraries

You can filter by library, nation, language, time period, etc.

Scroll down to "By Subject"

Then click on "More"

Once you have a desired set of hits in the middle column you can select a given hit
Note the red up and down arrows to bring up other hits

Once you expand a given hit note the options in the right hand column
To view the item click on View
Then click on Full View
Sometimes you can download all pages as image files (which you can save)
Sometimes you have to click on a link

This is a great way to search for older books and articles
It is perhaps as current as archives in the stacks of a library before latest acquisitions have been taken to the stacks

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic literature searching alternatives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

 

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

New York Public Library's Surprisingly Tricky Online Spelling Bee --- http://pages.email.nypl.org/spellingbeequiz

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm


Music Tutorials

Wu Han Plays Tchaikovsky, Month by Month --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91974368

Hamilton College: Jazz Archives --- http://www.hamilton.edu/jazzarchive

Guitar Heroes --- http://blog.metmuseum.org/guitarheroes/

The Greatest Jazz Films Ever Features Classic Performances by Miles, Dizzy, Bird, Billie & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-greatest-jazz-films-ever.html

Sing About Science & Math: Lesson Plans (oceanography sing along) --- http://singaboutscience.org/wp/lesson-plans/

Watch the “Youngest String Quartet Ever” Perform Vivaldi, Michael Jackson & Katy Perry ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/youngest-string-quartet-ever.html

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

I'm not certain whether some of these are good or bad
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/support/Writing/writing.caveats.html

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



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

March 16, 2015

March 17, 2015

March 18, 2015

March 20, 2015

March 21, 2015

March 26, 2015

 


Jack Kerouac on How to Meditate ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/12/jack-kerouac-how-to-meditate/?mc_cid=2fbdcf0df8&mc_eid=4d2bd13843


A novel therapeutic approach for an existing drug reverses a condition in elderly patients who are at high risk for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found ---
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-drug-brain-function-memory-early.html


Dr. Oz's dubious advice, in one chart (dubious advice at least half the time) --- 
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/13/8208189/dr-oz-science




A Bit of Humor

Watch Meryl Streep Have Fun with Accents: Bronx, Polish, Irish, Australian, Yiddish & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/meryl-streep-has-fun-with-accents.html

Nun and the Priest --- https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dn7RzXDsjYY
There are multiple humor videos at this link.

Umberto Eco’s How To Write a Thesis: A Witty, Irreverent & Highly Practical Guide Now Out in English ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/umberto-ecos-how-to-write-a-thesis.html

Kitten and the Scary Thing --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MqHN-4okZ4&


Forwarded by Mary Jo

WHY ST. PATRICK'S DAY IS CELEBRATED EACH YEAR IN AMERICA
  

The reason the Irish celebrate St. Patrick's Day is because this is when St. Patrick drove the Norwegians out of Ireland.
It seems that some centuries ago, many Norwegians came to Ireland to escape the bitterness of the Norwegian winter. Ireland was having a famine at the time, and food was scarce. The Norwegians were eating almost all the fish caught in the area, leaving the Irish with nothing to eat but potatoes.

St. Patrick, taking matters into his own hands, as most Irishmen do, decided the Norwegians had to go. Secretly, he organized the Irish IRATRION (Irish Republican Army to Rid Ireland of Norwegians) Irish members of IRATRION passed a law in Ireland that prohibited merchants from selling ice boxes or ice to the Norwegians, in hopes that their fish would spoil. This would force the Norwegians to flee to a colder climate where their fish would keep.

Well, the fish spoiled, all right, but the Norwegians, as everyone knows today, thrive on spoiled fish.

So, faced with failure, the desperate Irishmen sneaked into the Norwegian fish storage caves in the dead of night and sprinkled the rotten fish with lye, hoping to poison the Norwegian invaders. But, as everyone knows, the Norwegians thought this only added to the flavor of the fish, and they liked it so much they decided to call it "lutefisk", which is Norwegian for "luscious fish".
Matters became even worse for the Irishmen when the Norwegians started taking over the Irish potato crop and making something called "lefse".

Poor St. Patrick was at his wit's end, and finally on March 17th, he blew his top and told all the Norwegians to "GO TO HELL". So they all got in their boats and emigrated to Minnesota, the only other place on earth where smelly fish, old potatoes and plenty of cold weather can be found in abundance.
The End.

 


Forwarded by Maureen
A RETIREE'S LAST TRIP TO COSTCO
Yesterday I was at Costco buying a large bag of Purina dog chow for my loyal pet, Necco, the Wonder Dog, which weighs 191 lbs. I was in the check-out line when a woman behind me asked if I had a dog. What did she think I had an elephant?

So because I'm retired and have little to do, on impulse I told her that no, I didn't have a dog, I was starting the Purina Diet again. I added that I probably shouldn't, because I ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a Perfect Diet and that the way that it works is, to load your jacket pockets with Purina Nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete so it works well and I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in line was now enthralled with my story.)

Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care, because the dog food poisoned me. I told her no, I stopped to Pee on a Fire Hydrant and a car hit me I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard.

Costco won't let me shop there anymore. Better watch what you ask retired people. They have all the time in the World to think of crazy things to say.


Forwarded by Paula

Little Thelma comes home from first grade and tells her father that they learned about the history of Valentine's Day. And, "Since Valentine's Day is for a Christian saint and we're Jewish," she asks, "Will God get mad at me for giving someone a valentine?

Thelma's father thinks a bit then says "No, I don't think God would get mad. Who do you want to give a valentine to?”

"The Isis group," she says.

"Why them?" her father asks in shock.

"Well," she says, "I thought that if a little American Jewish girl could have enough love to give them a valentine, they might start to think that maybe we're not all bad, and maybe start loving people a little bit. And if other kids saw what I did and then they sent valentines to them, they'd love everyone a lot. And then they'd start going all over the place telling everyone how much they loved them and how they didn't hate anyone anymore.”

Her father's heart swells and he looks at his daughter with newfound pride. "Thelma, that's the most wonderful thing I've ever heard.”

"I know," Thelma says, "and once that gets them out in the open, the Marines could blow the shit out of them."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

I found another listserve that is exceptional -

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

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

Scott

Scott forwarded the following message from Jim Counts

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

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

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

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

Please encourage your members to join our listserve.

If any questions let me know.

Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

Some Accounting History Sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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