Tidbits on April 14, 2015
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Set 1 of Maple Sugaring  Photographs
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Trees/MapleSugar/01/01.htm

 

Tidbits on April 14, 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

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Philosophy Animations on Ethics Narrated by Harry Shearer ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/how-can-i-know-right-from-wrong-watch-philosophy-animations-on-ethics.html

Edgar Allan Poe Animated: Watch Four Animations of Classic Poe Stories ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/edgar-allan-poe-animated-watch-four-animations-of-timeless-poe-stories.html

National Science Foundation YouTube Channel --- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRuCgmzhczsm89jzPtN2Wuw

What Ignited Richard Feynman’s Love of Science Revealed in an Animated Video ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/what-ignited-richard-feynmans-love-of-science-revealed-in-an-animated-video.html

All the World's Volcano Webcams ---
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/worlds-volcano-webcams/

Quentin Tarantino Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghetti Westerns, Starting with The Good, the Bad, the Ugly ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/quentin-tarantino-lists-his-20-favorite-spaghetti-westerns.html

The Dance of Flowers Opening Up --- http://player.vimeo.com/video/27920977?title=0&%3bbyline=0&%3bportrait=0href

Guernica: Alain Resnais’ Haunting Film on Picasso’s Painting & the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/guernica-alain-resnais-haunting-film-on-picassos-painting-the-crimes-of-the-spanish-civil-war.html

The History & Legacy of Magna Carta Explained in Animated Videos by Monty Python’s Terry Jones ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/an-animated-history-of-magna-carta.html

Many educators have a tough time imagining a world where academic issues are more important than athletic ones at institutions with big-time programs. "Saturday Night Live" this weekend created such a world (slow loading) ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/04/06/snl-imagines-academic-primacy-over-athletics


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

Little Girl Conducts Choir in Kyrgyzstan! --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5-CiG0XmoI

All of Bach Is Putting Videos of 1,080 Bach Performances Online: Watch the First 53 Recordings and the St. Matthew Passion ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/all-of-bach-putting-performances-of-1080-bachs-works-online.html

Anderson & Roe's Personalized Bach ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2015/02/17/384060300/anderson-roes-personalized-bach

Watch Four Iconic Live Performances by Billie Holiday on Her 100th Birthday on April 7, 2015 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/four-iconic-billie-holiday-performances-on-her-100th-birthday.html

The Touching Story Behind Paraguay’s Landfill Orchestra: Now Told in Film, and Soon a Book ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-touching-story-behind-paraguays-landfill-orchestra.html

Langston Hughes Presents the History of Jazz in an Illustrated Children’s Book (1955) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/langston-hughes-presents-the-history-of-jazz-i.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

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breathtaking Photos of Historic New York City ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/an-online-gallery-of-over-900000-breathtaking-photos-of-historic-new-york-city.html

Download 100,000 Art Images in High-Resolution from The Getty ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-100000-art-images-in-high-resolution-from-the-getty.html

Download 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-422-free-art-books-from-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html

Rijksmuseum Digitizes & Makes Free Online 210,000 Works of Art, Masterpieces Included! ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/rijksmuseum-digitizes-makes-free-online-210000-works-of-art-masterpieces-included.html

Visualising China --- http://visualisingchina.net

Norman Rockwell --- http://www.kingsacademy.com/mhodges/11_Western-Art/27_Popular_Modern-Realism/Rockwell/Rockwell.htm

The world's most dangerous pathway just reopened to the public after 15 years — and the views are dizzying ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-caminito-del-rey-2015-3

Grand Teton National Park --- http://www.grandtetonpark.org/

Artists Illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy Through the Ages: Doré, Dalí, Blake, Botticelli, Mœbius & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/artists-illustrate-dantes-divine-comedy-through-the-ages.html

Download 100,000 Art Images in High-Resolution from The Getty ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-100000-art-images-in-high-resolution-from-the-getty.html

Download 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-422-free-art-books-from-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html

Epically awesome photos of Mars --- http://www.businessinsider.com/hirise-photos-of-mars-2015-3

Images from the History of Medicine --- http://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/luna/servlet/view/al

Alaska's Digital Archives: Alaska Native & Culture Pathway --- http://vilda.alaska.edu/cdm/pathway

Hysterical Literature: Art & Sexuality Collide in Readings of Whitman, Emerson & Other Greats (NSFW) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/hysterical-literature.html

Photographing the World’s Vanishing Glaciers --- http://www.newsweek.com/photographing-worlds-vanishing-glaciers-317130

Place, Evolution, and Rock Art Heritage Unit (Australian Rock Art) ---
http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities/research/perahu

Enormous Smallness: The Sweet Illustrated Story of E. E. Cummings and His Creative Bravery ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/30/enormous-smallness-e-e-cummings-matthew-burgess/?mc_cid=eb6acb519f&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Langston Hughes Reveals the Rhythms in Art & Life in a Wonderful Illustrated Book for Kids (1954) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/langston-hughes-reveals-the-rhythms-in-art-life-in-a-wonderful-illustrated-book-for-kids-1954.html

On Broadway --- http://on-broadway.nyc

Download Images From Rad American Women A-Z: A New Picture Book on the History of Feminism ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-images-from-rad-american-women-a-z.html

Guernica: Alain Resnais’ Haunting Film on Picasso’s Painting & the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/guernica-alain-resnais-haunting-film-on-picassos-painting-the-crimes-of-the-spanish-civil-war.html

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

250+ Killer Digital Libraries and Archives --- http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/250-plus-killer-digital-libraries-and-archives/

Goodreads --- http://www.goodreads.com/

Langston Hughes Reveals the Rhythms in Art & Life in a Wonderful Illustrated Book for Kids (1954) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/langston-hughes-reveals-the-rhythms-in-art-life-in-a-wonderful-illustrated-book-for-kids-1954.html

Edgar Allan Poe Animated: Watch Four Animations of Classic Poe Stories ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/edgar-allan-poe-animated-watch-four-animations-of-timeless-poe-stories.html

Hysterical Literature: Art & Sexuality Collide in Readings of Whitman, Emerson & Other Greats (NSFW) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/hysterical-literature.html

Enormous Smallness: The Sweet Illustrated Story of E. E. Cummings and His Creative Bravery ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/30/enormous-smallness-e-e-cummings-matthew-burgess/?mc_cid=eb6acb519f&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Download the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/download-the-major-works-of-jane-austen-as-free-ebooks-audio-books.html

The Touching Story Behind Paraguay’s Landfill Orchestra: Now Told in Film, and Soon a Book ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-touching-story-behind-paraguays-landfill-orchestra.html

Consolation for Life's Darkest Hours: 7 Unusual and Wonderful Books that Help Children Grieve and Make Sense of Death ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/23/best-childrens-books-death-grief-mourning/?mc_cid=bb97b591d0&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Arabic Fiction --- http://www.arabicfiction.org

Artists Illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy Through the Ages: Doré, Dalí, Blake, Botticelli, Mœbius & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/artists-illustrate-dantes-divine-comedy-through-the-ages.html

Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/isaac-newton-creates-a-list-of-his-47-sins-circa-1662.html

Read An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments: A Fun Primer on How to Strengthen, Not Weaken, Your Arguments ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/an-illustrated-book-of-bad-arguments.html

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




Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on April 14, 2015
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2015/TidbitsQuotations041415.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




From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Search for Job Openings in Higher Education ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/job_search/new

Higher Education Recruitment Consortium --- http://www.hercjobs.org/


How to Quickly Search-and-Replace Text on Any Computer ---
http://www.howtogeek.com/213474/how-to-quickly-search-and-replace-text-on-any-computer/


Starbucks Free Online Courses to Employees Becomes More Like Walmart's Employee Benefits for College Credits

Starbucks and Arizona State University announced on Monday that they will expand the full benefits of their tuition-discounting partnership to include Starbucks employees who have not yet accrued 60 college credits.
http://chronicle.com/article/StarbucksArizona-State-U/229127/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's threads for online training and education degree programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


Misleading Statistics from the Government

"Obama Administration Exaggerates Enrollment In Critical Student Loan Plan As Borrowers Suffer," by Shahien Nasiripour, Huffington Post, April 7, 2015 ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/07/obama-student-loan-income-based-repayment_n_7010344.html?cmpid=BBWGP040815


Question
What makes Norway, Sweden, and Finland smell like rotten eggs?

Answer --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/536421/military-scientists-solve-the-mystery-of-the-foul-smelling-gas-that-enveloped-norway/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150408


Robot Wisdom and How Jorn Barger Invented Blogging --- http://firstsiteguide.com/robot-wisdom-and-jorn-barger/
http://firstsiteguide.com/robot-wisdom-and-jorn-barger/

"Blogging changes the nature of academic research, not just how it is communicated," by Patrick Dunleavy, London School of Economics, January 2015 ---
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/12/28/shorter-better-faster-free/

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


"Student Financial Savvy Lacking," by Dian Schaffhauser, T.H.E. Magazine, April 3, 2015 ---
http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/04/03/student-financial-savvy-eroding.aspx

College students aren't as good at handling their finances as they think they are. Although they're more likely to have a credit card and a checking account than they were in 2012, they're also less likely to pay their credit bills on time or in full or to follow a budget. On top of that, they're more likely to have more than a single credit card and to carry larger balances and less likely to review their bills or credit history, let alone to save or invest even five percent of what they earn.

Among four-year students, only 62 percent check their account balances; 12 percent don't because they're "too nervous." Additionally, 16 percent of student respondents live paycheck to paycheck and yet only 72 percent stop spending when their bank account balances were low.

This year's " Money Matters on Campus" survey questioned 43,000 college students across institutions in the United States about their money practices for the third year in a row, and the results were eye-popping. The financial attitudes of college students "displayed more materialism, more compulsion, less caution and less aversion to debt as time spent on campus increased," the report stated.

The survey asked students to answer six questions related to their financial literacy, such as, "As a general rule, how many months' expenses do financial planners recommend that you set aside in an emergency?" Those who had a checking account tended to show better results than those who didn't. Among two-year students, who did the best, those with bank accounts answered 2.54 questions correctly vs. 1.97 for those without bank accounts. That suggests, the report's authors said, that "increased experience with 'transactional' accounts for high school students would be of great benefit to promoting self-efficacy."

The issue of debt is a big one for this segment. Compared to three years ago, students reported that they were more likely to take out student loans, but less likely to plan for paying off their loans, making their payments on time or consolidating their loans.

The report was compiled by Higher One and EverFi, two companies that have a business interest in the topic of student finances. Higher One provides payment, refund disbursement and other services to colleges and universities, as well student debit cards. EverFi provides financial education programs for students and adults.

Currently, the researchers said, "more than half of those with student loans report being concerned about their ability to repay the debt." As the report pointed out, along with steady increases in tuition rates, new graduates "face an unstable job market." Those between 21 and 24 have an 8.5 percent unemployment rate and a 16.8 percent underemployment rate.

Continued in article

 


Take a look at what exactly student athletes will learn in the new personal finance course at Ole Miss

Jensen Comment
Given that ignorance of personal finance is the greatest stress in families and the biggest reason for divorce I think personal finance should be part of the common core in all colleges and universities.

"Teach Financial Literacy," by Steven Bahls, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/13/essay_on_responsibility_of_colleges_to_teach_financial_literacy

Most importantly take a look at some of the free training and education sites linked at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers

Wharton Professor Olivia Mitchell on Worldwide Financial Literacy
http://www.ssga.com/definedcontribution/docs/Olivia_Mitchell_GlobalFinancialLiteracy_SSgADC_The Participant02.pdf
Thank you Jim Mahar for the heads up.

21 Scams Used By Devious Car Dealers — And How To Avoid Them ---
 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-avoid-21-car-dealer-scams-tricks-2013-9

Education: Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City ---  http://www.kansascityfed.org/education/
Note the Financial Fables section --- http://www.kansascityfed.org/education/fables/index.cfm

Helpers in planning for retirement --- http://www.plan-for-retirement.com/

Personal Financial Helpers:  From the Virginia Society of CPAs --- http://www.vscpa.com/Financial_Fitness/

Video:  Investing for Inflation ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/janet-tavakoli-author-of-dear-mr-buffett-on-investing-for-inflation/

What five classic Disney movies can teach us about personal finance ---
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Saving-Money/2014/0904/What-five-classic-Disney-movies-can-teach-us-about-personal-finance

U.S. Social Security Retirement Benefit Calculators --- http://www.socialsecurity.gov/estimator/

Continued at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers

The following article is not specific enough for me to pass judgment on the content, but it has many of the correct headings. Because I am an accountant I would probably lean more toward some of the more technical aspects of personal finance such as income budgeting and grasp of the time value of money (which sadly is not what it used to be with today's miserable savings interest rates).

For example, I think college graduates should be able to make technical comparisons about whether to buy or lease a car and to verify the annual percentage rate of a loan contract. When is it a good or bad idea to buy a service contract? Why is it a terrible idea to only make what your credit card company calls the minimum payment? When should you buy used or refurbished items on Amazon versus new items? It's a good idea to look for the used options, but it's not always a good idea to order a used item like a computer.

Many of my colleagues would probably accuse me of being too technical in my vision of a personal finance class. I'm open to debate on this.

When is it advisable to become an Amazon Prime member versus when it it a waste of money? For me it's a tremendous idea here in the boondocks, but it may not be the best idea for everybody.

How necessary is your smart phone if you are paying for it on a tight budget? Bob Jensen only carries an old prepaid-time cell phone for calling out.

"Take a look at what exactly student athletes will learn in the new personal finance course at Ole Miss," by Libby Kane, Business Insider, April 6, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance-class-offered-to-student-athletes-at-ole-miss-2015-4


 

LinkedIn just bought online learning company Lynda for $1.5 billion ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-buys-lyndacom-for-15-billion-2015-4#ixzz3WofcdvHS

Lynda Weinman --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynda_Weinman

Linda.com --- http://www.lynda.com

We provide training to more than 4 million people, and our members tell us that lynda.com helps them stay ahead of software updates, pick up brand-new skills, switch careers, land promotions, and explore new hobbies. What can we help you do?

Our teachers are effective, passionate educators, who are also respected authorities in software, creative, and business fields. They're here to share their expertise in dozens of topics with you, with courses organized into these eight subject areas.

For example, view all of Linda's accounting courses at
http://www.lynda.com/Accounting-training-tutorials/30-0.html
There especially seems to be quite a lot on QuickBooks training.

PC Magazine Review --- http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385781,00.asp

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


"How ‘Elite’ Universities Are Using Online Education," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 10, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Elite-Universities/229233/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

After years of skepticism, higher education’s upper class has finally decided that online learning is going to play an important role in its future. But what will that role be?

Recently, conversations about "elite" online education has revolved around the free online courses, aka MOOCs, which Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and dozens of other top universities started offering several years ago. But it soon became clear that high marks in those courses would not translate to academic credit at the institutions offering them (or anywhere else).

So how exactly does online education figure into the future of elite higher education? Judging by what we’ve seen so far, the answer can be divided into three parts.

1. Free online courses for everyone.
 

MOOCs are the McMansions of online higher education — capacious, impressive-looking, and easy to supply to the masses once professors have drawn up the blueprints.

Families who want to work with the architects directly are not opting for a sequence of free online courses instead of an exclusive residential program that ends with a degree. Even if the MOOCs lose money, wealthier universities can afford to take a hit — especially if it means increasing their visibility in valuable overseas markets.

Despite their flagging hype, MOOCs remain very popular. Top institutions will probably continue to build them.


 

2. Paid online courses for professional graduate programs.

Yale University recently unveiled a new master’s program for aspiring physician’s assistants, offered through its medical school. The program will also involve a lot of fieldwork, but much of the academic coursework will be delivered online. It is the second program Yale has created along these lines; the other is a partially online doctoral degree in nursing, which the university announced in 2011.

Degrees in fields like health care and teaching are in high demand, and many lesser-known players have grabbed big chunks of that market online by assuring prospective students that they can go back to school without upending their lives. Yale is not alone in its effort to claim its slice of the pie; graduate schools at the Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and others have also started offering online versions of their professional master’s programs.

Online does not fundamentally threaten the appeal of professional programs, where the "student experience" is not as sacrosanct as it is at undergraduate colleges. Most people who enroll are working adults who already went through dorm life and student organizations and late-night philosophical chats with future members of their wedding parties. They are now mainly interested in learning a trade.

3. Online components in face-to-face undergraduate courses.
 

In November 2012, a consortium of 10 prestigious colleges announced that they would collaborate with 2U, an online "enabler" company, to build fully online courses that undergraduates could take for credit. The stigma on virtual learning had faded enough that administrators at those colleges — Duke University, Emory University, Washington University in St. Louis, and others — were willing to give it a shot.

A year and a half later, the consortium was kaput. The faculty at Duke nixed the partnership with 2U. Other colleges went ahead with the experiment, but quickly came to a verdict: Thanks, but no thanks.

That does not mean online education has no role to play in undergraduate courses. This spring, Bowdoin College is offering a partially online course in financial accounting, taught remotely by a professor at Dartmouth College’s business school. (The Maine college is supplementing those online sessions with weekly meetings on campus, led by a member its own faculty.) Selective outsourcing could become a trend at top colleges that want to add (or license) specialized courses without hiring new professors.

Continued in article

"Yale Announces ‘Blended’ Online Master’s Degree," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-announces-blended-online-masters-degree/56003?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
There may be a difference between the most prestigious highly endowed universities and other universities to the extent that distance education courses are used as cash cows. For example, at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee students pay more for an online section of a course than they do for an onsite section of that same course possibly taught by the same instructor. If the online course is taught by a low-paid adjunct instructor the online course may even cost less to deliver.

Thus online courses that are priced higher become cash cows as well as serving a wider set of prospective students. Pricing of goods and services generally takes demand functions and price elasticity into account. Often there is more demand from part-time students for online courses, and universities may fill online sections with higher prices (hence low elasticity).

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

Bob Jensen threads on free MOOCs from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Question about stationary series from a reader of Econometrics Blog by David Giles on April 7, 2015 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/04/question-from-reader.html

"I’ve a simple but not explicitly answered question within the text books on stationary series. I’m estimating a model with separate single equations (I don’t take into account the interactions among them ). I’ve only non-stationary series in some equations (type 1), only stationary in some (type 2), and a combination of the both in the others (type 3). For the first two cases I apply the usual procedures and for the last case the Pesaran (2011) test. I want to find the short term effects of some variables on the others. I’ve two questions: 
1) If the Pesaran test turns out inconclusive or rejects cointegration, what’s the next step ? Differencing  all the series and applying an OLS? Or differencing only the non-stationary ones? Or another method?
2) As I mentioned I’m looking for the short-run effects. In the type 2 equations, I guess running an OLS in levels gives the long-run effects. Therefore I run an OLS in differences. Some claim that differencing an already stationary series causes problems. I’m confused. What do you think?"
Let's start out by making sure what Ozan means by "the usual procedures" for his "Type 1" and "Type 2" equations.

I'm presuming he means:

Type 1
: All of the series are I(1). Then:

(i) If the variables are not cointegrated, estimate a model using the first-differences of the data (or, perhaps, the log-differences of the data), using OLS or IV.

(ii) If the variables are cointegrated:

(a) Estimate an error-correction model to determine the short-run effects.

(b) Estimate a model in the levels (or, perhaps, log-levels) of the variables to determine the long-run cointegrating relationship between them

Type 2
: All of the series are I(0). Then you can:

(i) Model the variables in the levels of the data (or, perhaps, the log-levels) of the data, using OLS or IV estimation.

(ii) Estimate the model using the first-differences (or, perhaps, the log-differences) of the variables. The transformed variables won't be I(0), but they will still be stationary. There is nothing wrong with this. However, one possible down-side is that you may have "over-differenced" the data, and this may show up in the form of an error term that follows an MA process, rather than being serially independent. On this point, see the discussion below.

Now, what about the "Type 3" equations?

In this case, Ozan uses the ARDL/Bounds testing methodology, which I've discussed in some detail
here, and in earlier posts. Now, in response to his two questions:

(1) In this case, you could apply either of the two approaches that you mention. However, I'd lean towards the option of differencing all of the variables. The reason for saying this is that if the tests that you've used to test for stationarity / non-stationarity have led you to a wrong conclusion, differencing everything is a conservative, but relatively safe way to proceed. You don't to unwittingly fail to difference a variable that is I(1). The "costs" of doing so are substantial. On the other hand, unnecessarily differencing a variable that is actually I(0) incurs a relatively low "cost". (See the comments for Type 2 (ii), above.)

(2) See the discussion for Type 2 (ii) above. However, to get at the short-run effects (and avoid the over-differencing issue), I'd be more inclined to explore some simple dynamic models of the old-fashioned ARDL type - not the Pesaran type. (See
here.) That is, consider models of the form:

           yt = α + β0xt + β1xt-1 + β2xt-2 + ..... + βkxt-k + γ1yt-1 + γ2yt-2 + ..... + γpyt-p + εt  .

I'd start with a fairly general specification (with large values for k and p), and then simplify the model using AIC or SIC, to get a parsimonious dynamic model.

Then, for instance, if I were to end up with a model of the form:

         yt = α + β0xt + γ1yt-1 + ut ,

the short-run marginal effect between x and y would be β0; while the long-run effect would be given by [β0 / (1 - γ1)], etc.

Article by two former presidents of the American Accounting Association that accuses accountics scientists of being naive regarding the use of non-stationary data in (usually) multivariate linear model empirical studies.

"Some Methodological Deficiencies in Empirical Research Articles in Accounting." by Thomas R. Dyckman and Stephen A. Zeff , Accounting Horizons: September 2014, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 695-712 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/acch-50818   (not free)

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

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

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

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

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


From Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog on
Significant Digits (in current news) on April 8, 2015 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/significant-digits-for-wednesday-april-8-2015/

What equals one millimeter cubed?


How to Share a Hotel’s Single Wi-Fi (WiFi, Wireless) Connection With All Your Devices ---
http://www.howtogeek.com/213761/how-to-share-a-hotels-single-wi-fi-connection-with-all-your-devices/

"Think twice before pulling up personal information online from a hotel room or coffee shop," by Cale Guthrie Weissman, Business Insider, March 27, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/public-wifi-think-twice-before-accessing-personal-info-2015-3  

"How to Keep Your Public Web Use Secure and Private with a VPN," by Brain Croxall, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-keep-your-public-web-use-secure-and-private-with-a-vpn/28257?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on April 9, 2015

Electric cars set for upgrades.
Tesla Motors Inc
. is upgrading the slower-selling version of its Model S electric sedan, equipping it with a more capable battery, all-wheel drive and a bigger price tag. Meanwhile, General Motors Co. next month will
halt production of the Chevrolet Volt for the summer to whittle down seven months of unsold inventory and smooth the way for the next generation of its plug-in hybrid sedan.

Tesla's Model Upgrade Is a Pure Profit Play ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-08/tesla-s-model-upgrade-is-a-pure-profit-play?cmpid=BBD040815

Jensen Comment
Tesla's upgrade is ripe for managerial accounting CPV research on margins and pricing.


 How to Mislead With Statistics:  The Consumer Price Index

Moral Hazard --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

Consumer Price Index --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_price_index

. . .

Confusion

It is apparent that much of the muddle in discussing the merits of the different approaches arises from the promiscuous mixing up of arguments about feasibility, about dislike or approval of the way the index would move under a particular approach and about principles of various, often incompatible, sorts. Feasibility is naturally important. The difficulty of dealing with site values is obvious.

Statisticians in a country lacking a good dwelling price index (which is required for all except the rental equivalent method) will go along with a proposal to use such an index only if they can obtain the necessary additional resources that will enable them to compile one. Even obtaining mortgage interest rate data can be a major task in a country with a multitude of mortgage lenders and many types of mortgage. Dislike of the effect upon the behaviour of the Consumer Price Index arising from the adoption of some methods can be a powerful, if sometimes unprincipled, argument.

Dwelling prices are volatile and so, therefore, would be an index incorporating the current value of a dwelling price sub-index which, in some countries, would have a large weight under the third approach. Furthermore, the weight for owner-occupied dwellings could be altered considerably when reweighting was undertaken. (It could even become negative under the alternative cost approach if weights were estimated for a year during which house prices had been rising steeply).

Then, there is the point that a rise in interest rates designed to halt inflation could paradoxically make inflation appear higher if current interest rates showed up in the index. Economists' principles are not acceptable to all; nor is insistence upon consistency between the treatment of owner-occupied dwellings and other durables.

Clarity

Much would be gained if two sets of problems were distinguished.*

What is the Consumer Price Index to measure? How can that be achieved?

Another way of putting this is to distinguish:

What is the question that should be answered? This is a matter for policy makers and other users of the Consumer Price Index. How can it best be answered? This is a matter for the statisticians.

The three approaches should not be regarded as rivals, they are different answers to different questions. One, or possibly more, should be chosen. The three questions can be formulated as follows:

Opportunity cost. What is the change through time in what would be the opportunity cost of the reference-period consumption of the services of owner-occupied dwellings? Spending. What is the change through time in the cash outlays that would correspond to the reference-period cash outlays in respect of owner-occupied dwellings? Transactions. What is the change through time in what would be the purchase value of the reference-period net acquisition of owner-occupied dwellings by consumers?

Which question is to be answered is, as just stated, a policy matter, depending upon the purposes the index is to serve. It is not an issue for statisticians to decide. Their job is the technical, professional one of compiling one or more indexes that answer the selected question or questions as well as possible, given the resources at their disposal. In a perfect world this is how the owner-occupied dwellings issue would be resolved. But the world is not perfect

Continued in Article

 

No one really denies that the CPI, as presently calculated, understates the rate of inflation
Why the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a Flawed Measure of Cost of Living
It's largely due to moral hazard caused by government's incentives to understate inflation and cash flow increases in things like Social Security

"Deconstructing ShadowStats. Why is it so Loved by its Followers but Scorned by Economists?" by Ed Dolan, Econ Monitor, March 31, 2015 ---
http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2015/03/31/deconstructing-shadowstats-why-is-it-so-loved-by-its-followers-but-scorned-by-economists/

It is hard to think of a website so loved by its followers and so scorned by economists as John Williams’ ShadowStats, a widely cited source of alternative economic data on inflation and other economic indicators. Any econ blogger who has ever written a line about inflation is familiar with ShadowStats. Time and again, readers cite it in comments, not infrequently paranoid in their tone and rude in their language. Brief replies that cast doubt on some of more extreme claims made by ShadowStats fans don’t seem to have much effect. After a recent round of comments, I promised the editor of one website to undertake a thorough deconstruction of ShadownStats. Here is the result.

What ShadowStats Gets Right: The CPI is a Flawed Measure of the Cost of Living

ShadowStats is Williams’ attempt to provide an alternative to the official consumer price index (CPI), which he views as a flawed measure of what members of the general public have in mind when they think of the cost of living. Let me start by saying that although I share the skepticism of many economists about the specific numbers published on ShadowStats, I agree that the official data do not tell the whole story. I support Williams’ attempt to provide an alternative to the official consumer price index that more closely reflects pubic perceptions of inflation.  Here, in his own words, is how Williams explains his undertaing:

In the last 30 years, a growing gap has been obvious between government reporting of inflation, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), and the perceptions of actual inflation held by the general public.  Anecdotal evidence and occasional surveys have indicated that the general public believes inflation is running well above official reporting . . .

Measurement of consumer inflation traditionally reflected assessing the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living, as measured by a fixed-basket of goods. Maintaining a constant standard of living, however, is a concept not popular in current economic literature, and certainly not within the thinking or the lexicon of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the government’s statistical agency that estimates and reports on consumer inflation. . . Individuals look to the government’s CPI as a measure of the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living, as well as measuring that cost of living in terms of out-of-pocket expenses.  Without meeting those parameters, an inflation measure has limited, if any, use for an individual.

Williams is right about the gap between public perceptions of inflation and official indicators. As a recent series of posts on inflation expectations on the Atlanta Fed’s Macroblog noted, “Inflation surveys of households reveal a remarkably wide range of opinion on future inflation compared to those of professional forecasters. Really, really wide.” According to Macroblog, household expectations of inflation for the coming year consistently average two percentage points higher than those of professional forecasters, and some 13 percent of household respondents report inflation expectations of 10 percent or higher even at a time when professional forecasts fall short of 2 percent.

In technical terminology, we refer to a cost of living index based on the changing cost of a fixed-proportion basket of goods that themselves remain unchanged over time as a Laspeyres index without quality adjustment. Williams is again correct when he says that the official CPI, following mainstream academic thinking, has gradually evolved away from the Laspeyres concept toward a measure of the cost of a changing basket of goods that gives equivalent satisfaction as the prices, quantities, and qualities of the goods that consumers buy change over time.

The substitution issue. One of Williams’ key objections to the CPI is that instead of holding the cost-of-living basket unchanged for long periods, the BLS allows for frequent changes in its composition. Some changes in the consumer market basket occur when goods like audio cassette players become technically obsolete and new goods like cell phones appear on the market, but those are not the ones that Williams takes issue with.

What he finds more objectionable are changes in composition of the market basket that stem directly from changes in prices, as, for example, when people eat more chicken because beef becomes unaffordably expensive. To many people, fiddling the market basket to give more weight to the goods whose prices increase least and less to those whose prices increase most sounds like cheating. They see it as if a teacher tried to impress a tenure committee with high test student scores by letting the smart kids take the test several times each while sending their slow-learning classmates home on testing day.

Mainstream economists have a standard response: If we did not account for changed consumption patterns in response to changed prices, they say, we would overstate the cost of maintaining a constant level of satisfaction. Consider an example. Last week you went to the supermarket and bought 5 pounds of chicken at $2 a pound and 5 pounds of steak at $5 a pound, $35 total. This week you go to the supermarket and find that chicken still costs $2 but steak has gone up to $10. There is no question that the new prices leave you worse off than you were the week before, but how do you react?

You would need $60 to buy the same basket of goods that you bought last week for $35. In reality, you might not have that $60 in your wallet or purse, but if I gave you a $60 coupon that you could spend only at the meat counter, you would probably not spend it on the same basket of goods you bought last week. Instead, you might buy, say, 10 pounds of chicken and 4 pounds of steak. However, since $60 would be enough to buy your previous selection if you wanted to, we could conclude that you would change the mix only if the new $60 selection gave you more satisfaction than the original one.

Experience shows that if you put a large number of consumers in this situation and average their behavior, they will shift their consumption toward chicken, even though some individuals might stick with the original mix. Those who did shift would be better off with $60 and the new prices than with $35 and the old prices, and the ones who don’t shift are no worse off. In that sense, $60 overstates the increase in income the average consumer would need to reach the same level of satisfaction as before the price change.

Your cost of living has gone up, and that hurts, but just how much has the increase in the price of steak raised your cost of living? By the ratio of 60/35, a 70 percent increase, or by less than that? It depends on what you mean by the cost of living. If you mean the cost of buying a fixed market basket (the popular conception), then the 70% is correct. If you mean the cost of maintaining a fixed level of satisfaction, then 70% is an overstatement.

The quality issue. In addition to adjusting the relative quantities of goods in the consumer market basket over time, the BLS adjusts the CPI for changes in the quality of goods. The rationale for doing so is that failure to account for quality improvements would cause a further overstatement of the increase in spending that needed to maintain a constant level of consumer satisfaction.

Consider tires for your car. In the old days, you were lucky if a set of bias-ply tires lasted 30,000 miles. Today, a decent set of radial tires will go 60,000 miles or more, and give you a better ride along the way. So, if the price of a set of tires has increased from $100 to $400, what has been the impact on your cost of living? If you calculate the cost per tire, without accounting for quality, tires are four times more expensive than they used to be. If you calculate the cost per mile, they are only twice as expensive.

Williams does not necessarily object to adjusting for quality changes when they are objectively measurable, like package size or the number of miles you get from a set of tires. However, he argues that the BLS exaggerates the importance of quality by making adjustments for changes that consumers don’t really care about. In one post, he uses the example of two computers, purchased ten years apart. Yes, the newer computer has many extra features—more memory, a faster processor, a sharper display, and so on, each of which is quantifiable. However, not all consumers care about the new features. If you just use your computer for e-mail and browsing the web, and not for running big financial spreadsheets or high-powered gaming, who cares about processor speed? The old model does the job just as well.

Other issues. Williams has a number of other criticisms of the CPI beyond the substitution and quality issues. In particular, he takes issue with the way the BLS measures housing prices and medical costs. Without going into detail, in both cases Williams favors an out-of-pocket approach to housing and medical costs as being more in tune with the general public’s concept of the cost of living. I think it is fair to say that mainstream economists agree that these two items, which loom large in household budgets, are particularly difficult to measure, although not everyone agrees with the way Williams would like to see them handled. I hope to deal with these issues in a future post, but this one will focus on the basics.

Where ShadowStats goes wrong: How great is the understatement?

No one really denies that the CPI, as presently calculated, understates the rate of inflation compared to a measure based on a fixed basket of unchanged goods. Rather, what many economists, myself included, find hard to accept is Williams’ estimate of the degree of understatement. The following chart, reproduced by permission and updated monthly on ShadowStats.com, claims that since the early 1980s, the CPI has been understating the true rate of inflation by an ever increasing margin that now amounts to some 7 percentage points.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
It's amazing that labor unions have not had more power in Washington DC to reduce the understatement of inflation. Understating inflation greatly decreases union negotiating power for raising wages in the public and private sectors.

Note that the moral hazard of understating inflation affected the Obama years in the presidency, but President Obama certainly did not invent the strategy that for many years preceded his term of office

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


Hayek on Mill: The (Stuart) Mill– (Harriet) Taylor Friendship and Other Writings
by Friedrich Hayek, edited by Sandra J. Peart University of Chicago Press, 373 pp., $65.00
Review by Cass R. Sunstein, April 2, 2015 ---
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/john-stuart-mill-harriet-taylor-hayek/

John Stuart Mill may well be the most important liberal thinker of the nineteenth century. In countless respects, his once-revolutionary arguments have become familiar, even part of the conventional wisdom. Certainly this is so for his great 1869 essay The Subjection of Women, which offered a systematic argument for sex equality at a time when the inferior status of women was widely taken for granted. It is also true for On Liberty, published in 1859, which famously argued that unless there is harm to others, people should have the freedom to do as they like. A strong advocate for freedom of speech, Mill offered enduring arguments against censorship. He also had a great deal to say about, and on behalf of, representative government.

Friedrich Hayek was the twentieth century’s greatest critic of socialism, and he won the Nobel Prize in economics. A lifelong defender of individual liberty, he argued that central planning is bound to fail, even if the planners are well motivated, because they cannot possibly assemble the information that is ultimately incorporated in the price system. Hayek described that system as a “marvel,” because it registers the knowledge, the preferences, and the values of countless people. Hayek used this insight as the foundation for a series of works on freedom and liberalism. Committed to free markets and deeply skeptical of the idea of “social justice,” he is a far more polarizing figure than Mill, beloved on the political right but regarded with ambivalence by many others. Nonetheless, Hayek belongs on any list of the most important liberal thinkers of the twentieth century.

Mill and Hayek help to define the liberal tradition, but in both temperament and orientation, they could not be further apart. Mill was a progressive, a social reformer, an optimist about change, in some ways a radical. He believed that, properly understood, liberalism calls for significant revisions in the existing economic order, which he saw as palpably unjust: “The most powerful of all the determining circumstances is birth. The great majority are what they were born to be.” Hayek was not exactly a conservative—in fact he was sharply critical of conservatism on the ground that it was largely oppositional and did not offer an affirmative position—but he generally venerated traditions and long-standing practices, seeing them as embodying the views and knowledge of countless people over long periods. Hayek admired Edmund Burke, who attacked the idea that self-styled reformers, equipped with an abstract theory, should feel free to override social practices that had stood the test of time. Mill had an abstract theory, one based on a conception of liberty from both government and oppressive social customs, and he thought that society could be evaluated by reference to it.

Against this background, there is every reason to be intrigued by a new book with the title Hayek on Mill. Hayek died in 1992, but the University of Chicago Press is continuing with a multivolume edition of his collected works. Readers are discovering essays by Hayek that were never published, were not easily available, or were not widely known. What would Hayek have to say about a great champion of liberty, in some ways his intellectual ancestor, who ended up embracing socialism?

How stunning, then, to find that the volume has only a few snippets on that question. Instead it largely consists of a book, first published in 1951, that grew out of an enormous, uncharacteristic, and somewhat obsessive undertaking by Hayek, which was to assemble what remains of the correspondence between Mill and his eventual wife, Harriet Taylor (one or the other destroyed numerous letters, probably including the most interesting), and to use it as the basis for a narrative account of their mysterious love affair.

The book raises mysteries of its own. For all his greatness, Hayek was a cold, abstract, and distant writer, celebrating the operations of free markets but without a lot of interest in the full range of human emotions. Some liberals (including Mill) have a romantic streak; Hayek is not among them. How was it, exactly, that Hayek, of all people, became captivated by the story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor? A possible answer is that he had to explain to himself and others why Mill—one of the few thinkers he had to regard as an intellectual equal or superior—moved away from what Hayek celebrated as classical liberalism, which for Hayek was focused on limited government and protection of free markets. But Hayek’s interest in the romance itself outpaced his interest in the evolution of Mill’s thinking (perhaps because of the beauty and great delicacy of the correspondence).

Does that romance have anything to do with liberalism and liberty? I think so. One of the lessons we can draw from Hayek’s work of excavation is that Mill’s distinctive form of liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom from the confining effect of social norms, had a great deal to do with his relationship with Taylor. As we shall see, Hayek himself missed the connection entirely, because his own preoccupations lay elsewhere.

Hayek begins the book with one of his central puzzles, and it involves Taylor rather than Mill: “The literary portrait which in the Autobiography John Stuart Mill has drawn for us of the woman who ultimately became his wife creates a strong wish to know more about her.” Mill’s own account suggests that she must have been “one of the most remarkable women who ever lived.” Hayek quotes a very long passage from Mill himself:

In general spiritual characteristics, as well as in temperament and organization, I have often compared her, as she was at this time, to Shelley: but in thought and intellect, Shelley, so far as his powers were developed in his short life, was but a child compared with what she ultimately became. Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter; always seizing the essential idea or principle.
The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as [well as] her mental faculties, would with her gifts of feeling and imagination have fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigourous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would in [the] times when such a carrière was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind.

Mill had a lot more to say about Harriet Taylor:

Were I [but] capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom.

One of Hayek’s projects is to discover whether Mill’s account was “sheer delusion.”

Mill and Taylor met at a dinner in 1830, when she was just twenty-two, a mother of two boys, and married for four years to John Taylor, eleven years older than she and a junior partner in a family firm of wholesale druggists. Thomas Carlyle called him “an innocent dull good man.” An acquaintance describes her, at the time, as “possessed of a beauty and grace quite unique of their kind,” with “large dark eyes, not soft or sleepy, but with a look of quiet command in them.” She wrote poetry and was soon to produce a number of essays on social usages and conventions, including one that prefigured Mill’s attacks on conformity, decades later, in On Liberty.

For his part, Mill was nothing like the dry, somewhat desiccated old man depicted in photographs. Twenty-four at the time, he must have cut a dashing figure, having been described by Carlyle as “a slender, rather tall and elegant youth,” who was “remarkably gifted with precision of utterance, enthusiastic, yet lucid, calm.” At the same time, his emotional state was not good. In a forlorn letter to a friend, written a year before meeting Taylor, he referred to “the comparative loneliness of my probable future lot,” and contended that there was “now no human being…who acknowledges a common object with me.”

In his autobiography, Mill insisted that it was not until years after meeting Taylor that their relationship “became at all intimate or confidential.” Hardly. Referring to an article published in mid-1831, Taylor’s closest friend pointedly wrote her, “Did you or Mill do it?” In the same year, a letter from a mutual friend, written to John Taylor, spoke mysteriously of the need for a “reconciliation” between Mr. Taylor and Mill. In 1832, Mrs. Taylor wrote Mill that they must not meet again, to which Mill responded in French: “Sa route et la mienne sont séparées, elle l’a dit: mais elles peuvent, elles doivent, se rencontrer. A quelqu’ époque, dans quelqu’ endroit, que ce puisse être, elle me trouvera toujours ce que j’ai été, ce que je suis encore.” (Her path and mine are separate, she said so: but they can, they must, come together. At whatever time, in whatever place that might be, she will find me forever as I was, as I am still.) A few weeks later, their relationship resumed.

By 1832, the two had embarked on some kind of love affair. Taylor wrote Mill: “Far from being unhappy or even low this morning, I feel as tho’ you had never loved me half so well as last night.” And later, in response to an apparent confession from Mill:

Continued in article


"59 amazing things you can do with baking soda," by Megan Willett, Business Insider, April 6, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/things-you-can-do-with-baking-soda-2015-4

Baking soda deodorizes everything.

Make laundry even more effective: Add half a cup to your liquid laundry detergent for the best deodorization, whiter whites, and brighter brights. You can also add 1/2 cup for the rinse cycle, too.
 

Get rid of stains pre-laundry: Make a stain solution with 6 tablespoons of baking soda and 1/3 cup of warm water. Stir together to make a paste and rub it onto the stained area before throwing your clothes into the wash.
 

Deodorize wastebaskets: Add some baking soda to wastebaskets in the bathrooms, kitchen, or diaper bins regularly as you fill the container. Wash container with a cup of baking soda and a gallon of water regularly after taking out the trash.
 

Fill nail holes: Mix baking soda with white toothpaste and rub into nail holes to fill. Allow to dry fully.
 

Get rid of water rings: Make a paste with water and baking soda (sometimes a little toothpaste helps, too). Dip a cloth in the paste and rub away any water rings and spots from wood.
 

Clean and deodorize drains: Pour a cup of baking soda down the drain and follow with a cup of white vinegar. Let it sit (covered, if possible) and then pour down a gallon of boiling water.
 

Clean all bathroom surfaces: Make a paste of baking soda and water and use a wet sponge to scrub the walls, sink, tile, and shower surfaces with the mixture. Rinse with warm water and wipe dry with a rag.
 

Deodorize your fridge: Keep your fridge smelling like, well, nothing by keeping an open box of baking soda in there. You can also do this in your freezer, too.
 

Clean your dirty dishwasher: Run a cleaning cycle on your dishwasher with a sprinkle of baking soda to remove any old odors. If there are some places that just aren't getting clean (like around the dishwasher door), dip an old toothbrush in hot water and some baking soda and scrub away before rinsing. Wipe dry.
 

Cut through grease on dishes and pans: Two tablespoons of baking soda with detergent in the dishwasher will zap grease. Or, if you're hand washing, let pans and dishes soak for 15 minutes with the solution and then clean as you normally would. It can even help with dirty, burned pots, too.
 

Clean your blender (fast): Instead of taking out the blades and having to scrub, fill your blender halfway with water and add a spoonful of baking soda and a drop of dish-washing liquid. Run it for a few seconds and swirl before rinsing. Those blades are clean! 
 

Clean your microwave: After awhile, microwaves can start to smell. Deodorize yours in a few seconds with two tablespoons of baking powder in a bowl of water, and microwave on high for three minutes. Remove the bowl and wipe the inside of the microwave with a cloth or sponge — all the food will come right off.

Clean your coffee maker: Add warm water to your coffee pot and 1/4 cup of baking soda. Swirl to dissolve and then pour into the water reserve tank. Allow the machine to run on a full cycle and repeat the process until the water is clean and clear.
 

Polish tarnished silver: Clean silver by adding baking soda, sea salt, and vinegar to a baking dish (one of those disposable aluminum ones is fine). Pour in boiling water slowly to mix with the dry ingredients in the dish and use tongs to add the tarnished silverware. Let sit for 30 seconds to a minute and then use tongs to remove and buff with a rag.
 

Clean the floor: Add a 1/2 cup of baking soda to a bucket of water and mop the floors with the mixture. Rinse clean. For any scuff marks or stains, put some baking soda on the stains and then scrub. Rinse with warm water and dry.

Clean suede: Blot any excess liquid from suede and sprinkle baking soda on the spot. Let it sit and then brush off with a suede brush.

Remove shoe odorWhether it’s gym shoes or your heels, sprinkle baking soda in your shoes between wearing to neutralize odor and absorb moisture. If you don’t want to clean up the mess in the morning, add sachets filled with baking soda to your shoes after wearing.
 

Eliminate pet odorsSprinkle baking soda on carpets and furniture evenly and wait 15 minutes before vacuuming up.
 

Deodorize plastic containers: Cleaning Tupperware can be the worst because it holds onto food smells for a long time. Soak plastic containers with four tablespoons of baking soda and then wash as usual. Smells will disappear like magic.
 

Clean kitchen surfaces: Just like in the bathroom, sprinkle baking soda on a clean damp sponge and wipe down surfaces. Rinse thoroughly and wipe dry. This works well for counter tops, stove tops, fridges, and more.
 

Clean your oven: Make a paste of baking soda and water and apply it to the inside of the oven with a wet sponge. Let it sit for 2-3 hours and then wipe off and rinse. 
 

Remove grime from shower curtains: Sprinkle baking soda on a damp sponge and scrub the shower curtain before rinsing clean. If that doesn’t do the trick, add the curtain with two bath towels to the washing machine on gentle with a 1/2 cup of baking soda and detergent. Add vinegar for the rinse cycle, and let drip-dry. 
 

Grout cleaner: Add three tablespoons of baking soda to a tablespoon of warm water and apply to old grout with an old toothbrush you no longer use. Dirt and grime will rub away effortlessly.
 

Remove crayon from walls: A paste of baking soda and warm water will remove those crayon stains without damaging your paint. Just dip a washcloth in soapy water, wring out and then dip in baking powder and gently scrub. 
 


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/things-you-can-do-with-baking-soda-2015-4#ixzz3WYcXzupj
 

Horrific charts show how fast California is losing its water ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/californias-drought-situation-is-worse-than-ever-2015-4#ixzz3WSEkUbRZ

California’s urban areas are responsible for only 10 percent of the state’s water use. Even as the cities have grown, urban per-capita consumption has declined, from 232 gallons per day in 1990 to 178 gallons per day in 2010. As a result, the cities’ total water use has been relatively stable. Instead, the thirstiest sector of the state is the agricultural industry, which makes up 40 percent of water usage. If you set aside the 50 percent of California’s water that’s reserved for environmental use (maintaining wetlands, rivers, and other parts of the state’s ecosystem), agriculture uses 80 percent of the remaining water dedicated directly or indirectly for human uses.
Leah Libresco, California Chases Easiest Water Savings, Not Biggest ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/california-chases-easiest-water-savings-not-biggest/

While droughts occur intermittently across the globe, other societies have learned better how to cope with water shortages. For instance, Israel (60% desert) has built massive desalination plants powered by cheap natural gas that helped the country weather the driest winter on record in 2014 and a seven-year drought between 2004 and 2010 ---
"California’s Green Drought How bad policies are compounding the state’s water shortage," The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-green-drought-1428271308?tesla=y
Jensen Comment
The powerful environmentalists in California would seemingly rather wreck their state's economy than allow cheap natural gas desalinization. In fairness, the cost of getting massive amounts of desalinized water to the agricultural regions are immense. Instead California voters approved $22 billion for water conservation measures that includes paying farmers not to plant crops. That, however, is a costly solution with no long-term future.

My Somewhat Personal Story About the Horrible Drought in California

The purpose of this tidbit is to write about one of California's initiatives to conserve water in agriculture.

Our son Mike is a tax accountant about 35 miles north of Sacramento in Yuba City. His beautiful wife Rene is the mother of their four children and part owner of a family farm along with her two sisters, four brothers, their widowed mother. The sons manage this 5,000+ farm/ranch that mainly produces rice. But there are some other crops like juicing tomatoes and safflower.

Nearby orchards include highly productive trees for such things as walnuts, almonds, apricots, oranges, lemons, etc. Not far away are the thirsty vineyards in the Napa Valley wine country. Incidentally, quite a few of the orchard owners are Sikh immigrants from India. Mike does a lot of tax accounting for these Sikhs.

Farms and orchards in this part of California are irrigated by wells and a network of canals that are usually abundantly replenished with snow melt in the Sierra Nevada mountain range ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Nevada_%28U.S.%29
This year and in several preceding years this snow melt is down over 75%.

Rene's family farm does not have orchards. Therefore, to conserve water for orchards the State of California is paying the family not to raise any crops this year. This policy does not work well for orchards because trees that take upwards of 30 years to mature will die if they are not irrigated. Hence, orchard owners are allowed to dig deeper and deeper wells until the wells eventually will probably grow dry. If and when this will happen is unknown by experts at this point in time.

To add to the tragedy of not growing crops on Rene's family farm there are serious externalities. Embedded in this huge farm is a small town (Robbins) made up of mostly Hispanic workers who both maintain and operate all of the equipment used on the farm such as Caterpillar tractors, 18-wheel tractor trailers, and over 20 enormous combines for the rice, tomatoes, and safflower. Most of those Hispanic families are now trying to get by on welfare since there is very little work left on the farm.

Our son David also lives near Yuba City with his wife and four children. He's employed by what I think is the largest multi-state Caterpillar dealer in the world. The dealership is hurting badly by the cutbacks in farming in California. There is not much in the way of farm equipment new sales and service revenues from idle farms. What saves David's job thus far are sales to companies that build and maintain roads and bridges. How long can this go on in a state where tax revenues will eventually dry up as well?

You can imagine that with the decline in employment on these farms that other businesses in the region will feel the adverse economic effects of idle farm workers and idle farms. Before she had children, Rene was the manager of an agricultural chemical dealership in Yuba City. This dealership and others like it are hit hard by idle farms.

Most of the rice in California is exported to Asia. Hence, the price of rice in our supermarkets may not be severe since most of our rice is grown elsewhere in the USA. But the cutback in California rice exports will adversely affect the USA balance of trade.

The enormous problem looming is that south of Sacramento over 60% of the USA's perishable fruits and vegetables are grown. In most instances these farmers are still allowed to dig deeper and deeper wells for irrigation water to make up for lost from reservoirs that are drying up. There's an unknown limit to how long deeper wells will survive. Eventually, some produce in our grocery stores may be much more expensive than our porterhouse steaks.

In anticipation of increasing demand for local organic farm produce up here in the New Hampshire mountains, the son, Alex, of one of our best friends up here quit his high tech computer job and is in Hawaii on an organic farm internship. In anticipation of the rising prices of fruits (think apples) and vegetables up here he hopes to start an organic farm in these White Mountains.  Last summer he worked on a rapidly growing organic farm called the Ski Hearth farm about four miles down the road from our cottage ---
https://www.skihearthfarm.com/winter/about/

It will be sad when Alex fills his first produce order to ship via FedEx to California.

If there is no drought relief soon for California it will be a game changer for the entire USA.

The real villain in the California drought isn't almonds — it's red meat ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/real-villain-in-the-california-drought-isnt-almonds--its-red-meat-2015-4#ixzz3XDQrSpP7 

As far as financial reporting goes drought risks for business firms are mostly covered by accounting rules for contingency liabilities and risks. This is one of the most important and most poorly covered parts of accountancy theory and practice. Bob Jensen's threads on contingencies in accountancy are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#TheoryDisputes


"Think twice before pulling up personal information online from a hotel room or coffee shop," by Cale Guthrie Weissman, Business Insider, March 27, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/public-wifi-think-twice-before-accessing-personal-info-2015-3 

Abundant Wi-Fi is one of the best 21st century conveniences. But while the ease of an open hotspot may be enticing, be careful: Hackers are constantly looking for vulnerable access points intercept data.

Earlier today we reported on a huge internet vulnerability plaguing the hospitality world. Networking equipment often used by hotel chains had a gaping security hole that allowed hackers to gain access into the network and monitor and tamper with any traffic that flowed through. Anyone who used the hotels' Wi-Fi stood the chance of having their traffic intercepted.

We asked the security expert behind this finding, Justin W Clarke, if he thought this meant that all hotel Wi-Fi networks are a hot-bed for nefarious cybercrime.

He wouldn’t go so far. Clarke is a researcher that sees vulnerabilities like these all the time. This week's discovery, while frightening, is an example of the need for security diligence, and for businesses to ensure their infrastructure is secure.

“The reality,” Clarke said, “is that there’s no perfect way to access the internet.” He added that personally he would think twice before checking his bank account at a hotel or cafe. This gets at a critical point most people overlook.

This week's finding isn't about hotels per se; it's about the freewheeling nature people have when they surf the web. People quite often share their data in potentially unsecure environments.

On the extreme opposite end, some individuals may use separate computers only to check their financial information.

There's a middle-point, where people are more mindful of if their data can get intercepted. It's probably wise to not log personal information unless you're absolutely sure about security. Unless you are in your own private network, it’s hard to be sure where your data is going. 

Additionally, there are safeguards users can adopt to further protect themselves. People can use a virtual private networks (VPNs) to encrypt their traffic. In fact, that’s what many security experts — including Clarke — do when using public hotspots. 

Use common sense. Just think: What am I accessing right now? Is it private? Is my network private? Would it be bad if a third-party could intercept this traffic? Then proceed.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/public-wifi-think-twice-before-accessing-personal-info-2015-3#ixzz3Vg58UJNq
 

"Hackers may have had access to hundreds of hotels without anyone knowing," by Cale Guthrie Weissman, Business Insider, March 27, 2015 --- 
http://www.businessinsider.com/hackers-hotels-wifi-2015-3#ixzz3Vg5Xakup

Jensen Comment
To date I have four different friends who commenced to send me suspicious promotional emails for questionable products. It turns out their email systems were probably hacked when they were using computers in hotels. I just came back from a three-day trip to Boston (sadly Erika will soon have yet another (her 16th) spine surgery). I just stayed away from our Boston hotel's Wi-Fi system. It was great for catching up on some reading.

If you use a hotel computer for email it is wise to change your password as soon as you get home, although that is no assurance the bad guys did not get into your mail before you got home. Better yet have a friend log in as you just to change your passwords while you are on the road.


"Answer 10 Questions to Become a Better Teacher," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog, April 6, 2015 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2015/04/answering-ten-questions-will-help-you.html


Read An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments: A Fun Primer on How to Strengthen, Not Weaken, Your Arguments --- http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/an-illustrated-book-of-bad-arguments.html 

Jensen Comment
Most arguments are likely to be weakened more by debatable underlying assumptions than fallacies of logic. In a debate think first about an attack on the opponent's underlying assumptions. The same is true for a critique of a mathematical analysis. If your opponent attacks your underlying assumptions counter by pointing out the robustness of your conclusions to departures from underlying assumptions.

A classic example is the Pythagorean Theorem equation for a 90 degree "right" triangle ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem

lengths of the sides a, b and c, often called the "Pythagorean equation":

a^2 + b^2 = c^2\!\, ,= squared of the length of the hypotenuse

The assumption is that the triangle is a perfect 90.00000... degrees or pi/2. Such a triangle probably never existed in the real world such as in the real world of using triangle supports for a bridge.

One factor in favor of robustness of the Pythagorean Theorem is hypotenuse error in the real world, such as a triangle having 90.00023 degrees, is reduced by the fact that the error's impact is reduced when taking the square root (1/2 power) of that error. Bridge builders would be in deeper trouble if the theorem stated that the length of the hypotenuse was c taken to the 100th power.

The error would be even smaller if the real world, such as a triangle having 90.00023 degrees, would be reduced even more if the error's impact was reduced when taking the square root (1/100 power) of that error.

Robustness gets more complicated in evaluating statistical models ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robust_statistics

For example, traditional parametric statistical tests are may not be robust when their underlying assumptions fail. For example, they F-tests and T-tests typically assume interval scaling (e.g., temperature) or ratio scaling (length and weight). Many empirical studies such as those employing a Likert scale collect data only on much weaker ordinal scales. Parametric tests are, therefore, not always robust.

Sometimes weaker statistical tests such as non-parametric tests are used for ordinal and binary data ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonparametric_statistics

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

 


I sent the following letter this week to the IRS:

April 7,2015

Dear Sir of Madam of the IRS

In all my years of life it has never taken so long to receive my tax refund. It's particularly important this year, because I discovered a hot babe in my nursing home who might soon grow cold --- if you catch my drift. Heh ... Heh

 

I have certified mail proof that the Kansas City Office of the IRS received my 2014 tax return on February 16, 2015.  I would be content with receiving my 12% interest for a delayed refund, but this year I particularly would like to get Erika some flowers and chocolates before she finds somebody else.

 

Robert E. Jensen, CPA
Whoopsie Daisy Nursing Home
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586

 

This is the letter I can only dream of receiving from the IRS

April 15,2015

Dear Mr. Jensen

We truly apologize for the delay in processing your tax return. Our stingy budget from Congress coupled with the legal expenses of the Lois Lerner scandal overwhelmed us this year.

Enclosed is your $19.38 refund plus an added $5 for pharmacy supplies. We do hope you're into Planned Parenthood during your remaining days with Erika in the Whoopsie Daisy Nursing Home.

Karen Smith
IRS, Kansas City, MO

Get some MO if you catch my drift. Heh ... Heh

 

PS
Since March 10 I've daily sought to track by tax refund using the following site:
http://www.irs.gov/Refunds

It appears that the IRS no longer wants to be contacted by taxpayers I can find no contact telephone numbers for refund complaints at
http://www.irs.gov/

There's no IRS office in this area, and it's just not worth my time and gasoline costs to travel 100 miles to an IRS office and shiver in a two-block line with others who have not received their tax refunds. They can donate my $19 to Lois Lerner's pending bonus.

If you know of any secret telephone number where I can call the IRS requesting my refund please send me that secret telephone number.


"Most Popular Browsers," by Jim Martin, MAAW's Blog, March 28, 2015 ---
http://maaw.blogspot.com/2015/03/browsers.html

Most popular Browsers:

Chrome: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/desktop/index.html

IE: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/ie-11-worldwide-languages

Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/

Opera: http://www.opera.com/computer

Other Browsers for gamers, media junkies, browser lovers, power users, security, and privacy:

CooWon: Designed to be a browser for gamers. http://coowon.com/

Torch: A browser for media junkies. http://www.torchbrowser.com/

Lunascape: A browser for browser lovers. http://www.lunascape.tv/

IceDragon: Promises enhanced security. https://www.comodo.com/home/browsers-toolbars/icedragon-browser.php

Vivaldi: For power users. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2875977/new-vivaldi-browser-aims-to-win-over-power-users.html

SeaMonkey: The old-school all-in-one internet suite. http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Midori: Lightweight browser. http://midori-browser.org/

Maxthon: For multi-device browsing and social. http://www.maxthon.com/

Epic Privacy Browser: Has privacy-enhancing features. https://www.epicbrowser.com/

Browzar: For browse privacy. http://www.browzar.com/


This is what the lucky student who got into all 8 Ivys has been doing for the past year
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-kwasi-enin-has-been-doing-since-he-started-yale-2015-3#ixzz3W3gmFHHi
I was not all that impressed with this essay.


"Ten Elite Schools Where Middle-Class Kids Don't Pay Tuition," by Akane Otani, Bloomberg News, April 1, 2015 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-01/ten-elite-schools-where-middle-class-kids-don-t-pay-tuition?cmpid=BBD040215

Students lucky enough to be accepted to some of the most competitive schools in the country can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on tuition.

In a trend that's bound to come as a relief to parents of high school seniors facing sticker prices that approach $63,000 a year, a growing number of Ivy League and elite colleges are making college more affordable for middle-class families.

Stanford University announced last week that, starting this fall, students whose families make less than $125,000 a year will not pay any tuition. Previously, the school had set the bar at $100,000. With the move, Stanford has made it possible for more middle-class students to get a degree for what they'd spend in tuition at an in-state, public university (students with a family income above $65,000 a year still have to cover room and board). That makes an admissions offer that's already among the most coveted in the country even more attractive.

Stanford is not the first elite school to slash tuition for middle-class and upper-middle-class students. (For reference, we're going by the Pew Research Center's definition, which calls a family of three in the U.S. middle class if they made between $40,667 and $122,000 in 2013.) While the wealthiest schools have long covered nearly all costs for their poorest students, Harvard since 2004 has steadily broadened the group of students to whom it gives financial aid, putting pressure on its peers to match its generous discounts. The aid programs have helped absorb some of the sticker shock from continuously rising tuition. Take a look at the top schools that students from a range of middle-class families can attend, tuition-free:

Continued in article

Summary

  1. Princeton

  2. Brown

  3. Cornell

  4. Columbia

  5. Duke

  6. Harvard

  7. Yale

  8. Stanford

  9. MIT

  10. Dartmouth

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


"Why Can't We Call the UVA Case a Hoax? Evidence of how extreme and irrational "rape culture" dogma has become," by Cathy Young, Reason Magazine, April 1. 2015 ---
http://reason.com/archives/2015/04/01/why-cant-we-call-the-uva-case-a-hoax

. . .

It is, of course, nearly impossible to prove a negative. Short of a surveillance tape documenting Jackie's every movement, one cannot know for certain that she was never sexually assaulted at UVA. But the evidence against her is damning. It's not simply that there was no party at Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity named by Jackie, anywhere near the time when she said she was attacked. It's not simply that her account changed from forced oral sex to vaginal rape and from five assailants to seven, or that her friends saw no sign of her injuries after the alleged assault. What clinches the case is the overwhelming proof that "Drew," Jackie's date who supposedly orchestrated her rape, was Jackie's own invention.

Back in the fall of 2012, Jackie's friends knew "Drew" as "Haven Monahan," an upperclassman who supposedly wanted to date her and with whom she encouraged them to exchange emails and text messages. However, an investigation by The Washington Post and other media last December found that "Haven's" messages were fake; the phone numbers he used were registered to online services that allow texting via the Internet and redirecting calls, while his photo matches a former high school classmate of Jackie's who lives in a different state. No "Haven Monahan" exists on the UVA campus or, apparently, anywhere in the United States (at least outside romance novels). The catfishing scheme seems to have been a ploy to get the attention of a male friend on whom Jackie had a crush—the same friend she called for help after the alleged assault.

Is it possible that someone sexually assaulted Jackie on the night when she claimed to be going out with her fictional suitor? Theoretically, yes. But it's also clear that her credibility is as non-existent as "Haven Monahan."

Moreover, the police investigation has debunked another one of Jackie's claims: that in spring 2014, when she was already an anti-rape activist, some men harassed her in the street off-campus and threw a bottle that hit her face and (improbably) broke. Jackie said that her roommate picked glass out of a cut on her face; but the roommate disputes this and describes the injury as a scrape, likely from a fall. Jackie also said she called her mother immediately after that attack, but phone records show no such call.

Despite all this, Chief Longo wouldn't call Jackie's story a false allegation and even referred to her as "this survivor" (though amending it to the more neutral "or this complaining party").

Meanwhile, in the CNN report on the March 23 press conference, anchor Brooke Baldwin, correspondent Sara Ganim and legal analyst Sunny Hostin were tripping over each other to assert that "we have to be very careful" not to brand Jackie a liar and that "she could have been sexually assaulted." Hostin argued that the idea that Jackie made it all up "flies in the face of statistics," because "only about 2 percent of rapes that are reported are false."

This is a bogus statistic, which Hostin misattributed to the FBI. (According to FBI data, 8 to 9 percent of police reports of sexual assault are dismissed as "unfounded"; the reality of false rape reports is far more complicated, and it's almost impossible to get a reliable estimate.) Even if it were true, it would say nothing about Jackie's specific case. What's more, statistics on false allegations generally refer to police reports or at least formal administrative complaints at a college—neither of which Jackie was willing to file.

CNN never mentioned the evidence that Jackie fabricated "Haven Monahan." Neither did the New York Times, which said only that "the police were unable to track Mr. Monahan down."

Jackie's defenders argue that rape victims often change their stories because their recall is affected by trauma. It is true that memory, not just of traumatic events, can be unreliable; a victim may at various points give somewhat different descriptions of the offender or the attack. It is also true that, as writer Jessica Valenti argues, someone who tells the truth about being raped may lie to cover up embarrassing details (such as going to the rapist's apartment to buy drugs).

None of that, however, requires us to suspend rational judgment and pretend that Jackie's story is anything other than a fabrication. While Jackie is probably more troubled than malevolent, she is not the victim here. If there's a victim, it's Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity branded a nest of rapists, suspended and targeted for vandalism—as well as UVA Dean Nicole Eramo, whom the Rolling Stone story painted as a callous bureaucrat indifferent to Jackie's plight.

In this case, at least, there were no specific accused men. But the extreme reluctance to close a rape investigation and call a lie a lie bodes ill for wrongly accused individuals, who may find themselves under a cloud of suspicion even after all the facts exonerate them.

Evading the facts does a disservice to Jackie, too. In a sane environment, she would face disciplinary charges and perhaps mandatory counseling. In a climate where saying that a woman is lying about rape is tantamount to "victim-blaming" and "rape culture"—and where some of Jackie's fellow students say that even if her story "wasn't completely true," it helped bring attention to important issues—she is likely to remain mired in self-destructive false victimhood.

For the rest of us, this episode shows how extreme and irrational "rape culture" dogma has become, and how urgent it is to break its hold on public discourse. The current moral panic may be an overreaction to real problems of failure to support victims of sexual violence. But when truth becomes heresy, the pendulum has swung too far, with disastrous consequences for civil rights and basic justice.

Jensen Comment
Rolling Stones Magazine promises to respond to a scathing investigation by the Columbia University School of Journalism that purportedly claims the Rolling Stone Magazine violated nearly all ethics and standards of professional journalism.


Thoughts While Afflicted With Cabin Fever in These Mountains

Jensen Comment
This has been the longest winter that I can remember up here in New Hampshire's White Mountains. Today on April 4 we're having yet another snow storm. That's not uncommon for early April. What's uncommon is the proportion of winter nights that were below 0F --- seemed like almost every night when I looked up at the temperature light above our bed. It also seemed like our furnace ran 90% of the time almost every day. I cringe at the thought of how much it will take to fill our big oil tank in May. The good news is that oil prices are down and will hopefully stay that way at least until May.

I would capture the low heating oil prices now, but the oil delivery company cannot get to our buried tank until more of the snow melts. I hope that is not in July.

But I prefer long winters to long hot and very humid summers like we had in Tallahassee and San Antonio. And the long winters do make us more appreciative of the short summers. I read that is why Moscow is a city of flowers in the summer. Long winters make me more appreciative of our own three flower gardens and our wildflower field.

Today I ordered 40 New Guinea Impatiens plants in 2.26 gallon pots for my gardens, but they will not be delivered until after June 1. I'm paranoid about delaying planting until after Memorial Day since three years ago --- when we had a heavy snow on Memorial Day.

A Different Kind of Red States Versus Blue States:  Divisional Average Temperature Ranks---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/record-temp.jpg

New Guinea Impatiens are beautiful, but they cannot take cold nights. And they also take a lot of water that's plentiful up here. They will bloom the entire summer until the first freeze, and bugs like Japanese beetles don't seem to bother these plants up here. Erika is constantly at war with bugs on her domestic roses. I plant her roses but refuse to pluck the bugs off every day. That's her tiresome job!

Impatiens --- My Favorite Annual

The Seasonal Life Cycle of Bob Jensen's Impatiens
Part 1:  June
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Impatiens/ImpatiensSet01/ImpatiensSet01.htm

Erika's Roses and the Seasonal Life Cycle of Bob Jensen's Impatiens
Part 2:  July-August
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Impatiens/ImpatiensSet02/ImpatiensSet02.htm 

My Favorite Annuals in My Gardens --- New Guinea Impatiens
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Impatiens/ImpatiensSet03/ImpatiensSet03.htm

Also see Summertime --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090702.htm

Summertime Favorites

Set 1 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/SummertimeFavorites/Set01/2010Set01.htm 

Set 2 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/SummertimeFavorites/Set02/2010Set02.htm 

Set 3 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/SummertimeFavorites/Set03/2013Set03.htm

Set 4 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/SummertimeFavorites/Set04/2014Set04.htm

Set 1 of Wild Roses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Roses/Wild/Set01/WildRosesSet01.htm
Also see  --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090807.htm

The Life Cycle of Our Peonies in 2012 ---  
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Peonies/Set02/PeoniesSet02.htm

Erika's Domestic Roses --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Roses/Domestic/Set01/DomesticRosesSet01.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Impatiens/ImpatiensSet02/ImpatiensSet02.htm


Also see Summertime --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2009/tidbits090702.htm


Jones International University --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_International_University

"For-Profit College, Online Since 1993, Will Close," by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/for-profit-college-online-since-1993-will-close?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Jones International University, a for-profit online college based in Colorado, will close because of declining enrollment, The Denver Post reports. From 2011 to 2014, enrollment at the institution dropped by more than 50 percent.

“We examined a number of operational strategies and determined that none would be sufficient to turn around the market dynamics,” the chief college’s operation officer, Bryan Wallace, told the Post.

College officials said the institution wouldn’t completely shut down until it had helped all of its roughly 2,000 students earn degrees or transfer.

The online college was founded in 1993 and was accredited in 1999, the first such institution to win recognition from a regional accreditor.

 

First Monday, 2001
With the arrival of Jones International University, higher education found its "first fully accredited online university" [17]. Jones International University was granted accreditation by the U.S. regional accreditation agency in March 1999, and is the first online university to become fully certified by the Global Alliance for Transnational Education. Courses at Jones International are taught over the Internet by part-time, free-lance teachers located in universities all over the U.S. The courses are highly modular and all involve business subjects. There is no regular faculty or participatory governance system, and no research is carried out. Critics of Jones International argue that although it has the term "university" in its title, it ought not be considered one. Altbach argues that Jones International is merely a credentialing service, "a degree delivery machine, providing tailored programs that appeal to specific markets"  T
he American Association of University Professors has fought to prevent accreditation of Jones University, along with similar online programs.

"The Work of Education in the Age of E-College," Chris Werry, First Monday, Volume 6, Number 5 - 7, May 2001 ---
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/858


The Economist: America's Flagging Higher Education System ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/04/the-economist-.html

The Economist,
More and More Money Is Being Spent on Higher Education. Too Little Is Known About Whether It Is Worth It:

America’s early and lasting enthusiasm for higher education has given it the biggest and best-funded system in the world. Hardly surprising, then, that other countries are emulating its model as they send ever more of their school-leavers to get a university education. But, as our special report argues, just as America’s system is spreading, there are growing concerns about whether it is really worth the vast sums spent on it.

Graphs not shown here

The modern research university, a marriage of the Oxbridge college and the German research institute, was invented in America, and has become the gold standard for the world. Mass higher education started in America in the 19th century, spread to Europe and East Asia in the 20th and is now happening pretty much everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. The global tertiary-enrolment ratio—the share of the student-age population at university—went up from 14% to 32% in the two decades to 2012; in that time, the number of countries with a ratio of more than half rose from five to 54. University enrolment is growing faster even than demand for that ultimate consumer good, the car. The hunger for degrees is understandable: these days they are a requirement for a decent job and an entry ticket to the middle class. . . .

If America were getting its money’s worth from higher education, that would be fine. On the research side, it probably is. In 2014, 19 of the 20 universities in the world that produced the most highly cited research papers were American. But on the educational side, the picture is less clear. American graduates score poorly in international numeracy and literacy rankings, and are slipping. In a recent study of academic achievement, 45% of American students made no gains in their first two years of university. Meanwhile, tuition fees have nearly doubled, in real terms, in 20 years. Student debt, at nearly $1.2 trillion, has surpassed credit-card debt and car loans.

None of this means that going to university is a bad investment for a student. A bachelor’s degree in America still yields, on average, a 15% return. But it is less clear whether the growing investment in tertiary education makes sense for society as a whole. If graduates earn more than non-graduates because their studies have made them more productive, then university education will boost economic growth and society should want more of it. Yet poor student scores suggest otherwise. So, too, does the testimony of employers. A recent study of recruitment by professional-services firms found that they took graduates from the most prestigious universities not because of what the candidates might have learned but because of those institutions’ tough selection procedures. In short, students could be paying vast sums merely to go through a very elaborate sorting mechanism.

If America’s universities are indeed poor value for money, why might that be? The main reason is that the market for higher education, like that for health care, does not work well. The government rewards universities for research, so that is what professors concentrate on. Students are looking for a degree from an institution that will impress employers; employers are interested primarily in the selectivity of the institution a candidate has attended. Since the value of a degree from a selective institution depends on its scarcity, good universities have little incentive to produce more graduates. And, in the absence of a clear measure of educational output, price becomes a proxy for quality. By charging more, good universities gain both revenue and prestige.

Continued in article

Our Compassless Colleges: What are students really not learning?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz


Does Professor Who Is Denied Tenure Have The Right To See Student Evaluations Of Her And Her Colleagues?
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/04/does-professor-who-is-denied-tenure-.html

Should the confidentiality shrouding students’ evaluations of college instructors always be protected, even if it might conceal violations of the law? A California state court was expected to take up that question last week in response to Pomona College’s refusal to grant access to such records to a former professor suing the college for discrimination.

Lawyers for Alma Martinez, to whom the private college denied tenure and who was dismissed as an assistant professor of theater in 2013, are seeking copies of students’ evaluations not only of Ms. Martinez but also of faculty members who, unlike her, received tenure at Pomona in recent years.

In asking a state Superior Court in Los Angeles to compel Pomona to hand over such documents, her lawyers argue that the court can-not fairly weigh her claim of being discriminated against as a His-panic woman without giving them access to the student evaluations that informed the college’s tenure decision.

They wish to know the identities of students who wrote the evaluations to determine whether those who characterized her negatively had some ulterior motive, such as retaliation for her giving them poor grades or denying them a lead role in some theater production.

Her lawyers, from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or Maldef, say they need copies of students’ evaluations of recently tenured faculty members to show that the college treat-ed Ms. Martinez differently than the others.

Pomona’s lawyers have respond-ed by calling the Maldef lawyers’ request “a poor attempt to gain access to private information with a long history of legal protection.” Pomona maintains that providing the requested evaluations to Ms. Martinez’s lawyers would violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law, known as Ferpa, that protects the privacy of student records.

Jensen Comment
I think most universities return teaching evaluations to each teacher being evaluated after they are archived. Most universities probably do not share teaching evaluations of other instructors with faculty or students, although some make those evaluations public or semi-public (available to students and faculty). Perhaps this is even required by legislatures of some state universities ---
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2010/05/should-teaching-evaluations-be-made-public.html

I think that grading distributions should accompany all course teaching evaluations to whomever has access to course evaluations. This might help deter grade inflation.

The real controversy when teaching evaluations are shared with faculty or students is whether such sharing should be limited to numerical ratings versus whether student comments should also be shared. Such comments can be very misleading and even cause for lawsuits such as when a student reveals unauthorized privacy information about a teacher or unsupported allegations like sexual advances.


Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)  --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course 

Question
Who's taking MOOCs?

Answer
K-12 teachers and college professors (39% among a sample of one million free MOOC students)
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/whos-taking-moocs-teachers/56305?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs and other free online learning materials from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
 


Marshall McLuhan --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

How Technology Changed the Medium
The Visionary Thought of Marshall McLuhan, Introduced and Demystified by Tom Wolfe ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/14c6fb9b32f00f0f

Marshall McLuhan’s Strange Reading Habit: “I Read Only the Right-Hand Page of Serious Books” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/marshall-mcluhans-strange-reading-habit.html


"U.S. 11 Former Atlanta Educators Convicted in Cheating Scandal," by Kate Brumback, Time Magazine, April 1, 2015 ---
http://time.com/3767734/atlanta-cheating-scandal/?xid=newsletter-brief

In one of the biggest cheating scandals of its kind in the U.S., 11 former Atlanta public school educators were convicted Wednesday of racketeering for their role in a scheme to inflate students’ scores on standardized exams. More 500 Unaccounted For After Dozens Shot at College in Kenya NBC NewsDiplomacy Until Dawn: Kerry, Zarif Burn Midnight Oil NBC NewsTornado Threat Looms in Hail-Lashed Midwest, Plains NBC NewsThese Are 20 Of The World's Best Photos Taken With Cell Phones Huffington PostRichard Paul Evans: How I Saved My Marriage Huffington Post

The defendants, including teachers, a principal and other administrators, were accused of falsifying test results to collect bonuses or keep their jobs in the 50,000-student Atlanta school system. A 12th defendant, a teacher, was acquitted of all charges by the jury. Popular Among Subscribers Star Track: Amy Schumer’s movie Trainwreck Amy Schumer: Class Clown of 2015 Subscribe Cuba Libre Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

The racketeering charges carry up to 20 years in prison. Most of the defendants will be sentenced April 8.

“This is a huge story and absolutely the biggest development in American education law since forever,” said University of Georgia law professor Ron Carlson. “It has to send a message to educators here and broadly across the nation. Playing with student test scores is very, very dangerous business.”

A state investigation found that as far back as 2005, educators fed answers to students or erased and changed answers on tests after they were turned in. Evidence of cheating was found in 44 schools with nearly 180 educators involved, and teachers who tried to report it were threatened with retaliation.

Similar cheating scandals have erupted in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Nevada and other public school systems around the country in recent years, as officials link scores to school funding and staff bonuses and vow to close schools that perform poorly.

Thirty-five Atlanta educators in all were indicted in 2013 on charges including racketeering, making false statements and theft. Many pleaded guilty, and some testified at the trial.

Former Atlanta School Superintendent Beverly Hall was among those charged but never went to trial, arguing she was too sick. She died a month ago of breast cancer.

Hall insisted she was innocent. But educators said she was among higher-ups pressuring them to inflate students’ scores to show gains in achievement and meet federal benchmarks that would unlock extra funding.

Over objections from the defendants’ attorneys, Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter ordered all but one of those convicted immediately jailed while they await sentencing. They were led out of court in handcuffs.

“They are convicted felons as far as I’m concerned,” Baxter said, later adding, “They have made their bed and they’re going to have to lie in it.”

The only one allowed to remain free on bail was teacher Shani Robinson, because she is expected to give birth soon.

Bob Rubin, the attorney for former elementary school principal Dana Evans, said he was shocked by the judge’s decision and called it “unnecessary and vindictive.”

Prosecutors said the 12 on trial were looking out for themselves rather than the children’s education. Defense attorneys accused prosecutors of overreaching in charging the educators under racketeering laws usually employed against organized crime.

"Dishonest Educators," by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, January 9, 2013 --- Click Here
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/01/09/dishonest-educators-n1482294?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Nearly two years ago, U.S. News & World Report came out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal." It reported that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history." More than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated had cheated on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, sometimes called the national report card. Cheating orders came from school administrators and included brazen acts such as teachers reading answers aloud during the test and erasing incorrect answers. One teacher told a colleague, "I had to give your kids, or your students, the answers because they're dumb as hell." Atlanta's not alone. There have been investigations, reports and charges of teacher-assisted cheating in other cities, such as Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Washington.

Recently, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's blog carried a story titled "A new cheating scandal: Aspiring teachers hiring ringers." According to the story, for at least 15 years, teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee paid Clarence Mumford, who's now under indictment, between $1,500 and $3,000 to send someone else to take their Praxis exam, which is used for K-12 teacher certification in 40 states. Sandra Stotsky, an education professor at the University of Arkansas, said, "(Praxis I) is an easy test for anyone who has completed high school but has nothing to do with college-level ability or scores." She added, "The test is far too undemanding for a prospective teacher. ... The fact that these people hired somebody to take an easy test of their skills suggests that these prospective teachers were probably so academically weak it is questionable whether they would have been suitable teachers."

Here's a practice Praxis I math question: Which of the following is equal to a quarter-million -- 40,000, 250,000, 2,500,000, 1/4,000,000 or 4/1,000,000? The test taker is asked to click on the correct answer. A practice writing skills question is to identify the error in the following sentence: "The club members agreed that each would contribute ten days of voluntary work annually each year at the local hospital." The test taker is supposed to point out that "annually each year" is redundant.

CNN broke this cheating story last July, but the story hasn't gotten much national press since then. In an article for NewsBusters, titled "Months-Old, Three-State Teacher Certification Test Cheating Scandal Gets Major AP Story -- on a Slow News Weekend" (11/25/12), Tom Blumer quotes speculation by the blog "educationrealist": "I will be extremely surprised if it does not turn out that most if not all of the teachers who bought themselves a test grade are black. (I am also betting that the actual testers are white, but am not as certain. It just seems that if black people were taking the test and guaranteeing passage, the fees would be higher.)"

There's some basis in fact for the speculation that it's mostly black teachers buying grades, and that includes former Steelers wide receiver Cedrick Wilson, who's been indicted for fraud. According to a study titled "Differences in Passing Rates on Praxis I Tests by Race/Ethnicity Group" (March 2011), the percentages of blacks who passed the Praxis I reading, writing and mathematics tests on their first try were 41, 44 and 37, respectively. For white test takers, the respective percentages were 82, 80 and 78.

Continued in article

Jensen Commentary
It should be noted that the author (Walter Williams) of this article is an African American economics professor at George Mason University..He's also conservative, which is rare for an African American who grew up in an urban ghetto. This makes him an endangered species in academe.

The cheating Atlanta Superintendent leader died two months ago from breast cancer.
The cheating hurt thousands of students by denying them access to remedial education while the cheating teachers and administrators got bigger bonuses.
Hundreds of other cheating teachers blamed administrators and plea bargained to stay out of jail and keep their jobs

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


How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Philosophy Animations on Ethics Narrated by Harry Shearer ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/how-can-i-know-right-from-wrong-watch-philosophy-animations-on-ethics.html

Moral Relativism --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

Although moral relativism focuses mostly on differences in morality among different people and cultures there is also an issue of moral relativism in terms of circumstances and situations --- situational relativity.

An interesting question is when murder is justified in the USA on the basis of law and ethics? There are no bright line distinctions but here are a few of the different situations. On the margin in courts of law sometimes judges or jurors have to determine how to punish a "murderer" that the prosecution brings to trial.

  1. Self Defense
    If a person shoots an armed intruder in the bedroom this shooting is usually justified. If a person shoots an armed home invader attempting to flee the premises the justification is more debatable. When the fleeing intruder reaches the outside much depends upon whether the intruder continues to flee or whether the intruder turns around with a gun in hand. Another gray zone is when a woman shoots her spouse who is attempting to beat her up with his fists.  Self defense is becoming an increased test of police shootings such as the recent shooting of an unarmed African American in Feguson, Missouri or in the now-famous Travon Martin killing.

    In the Travon Martin case there's the added ethics question of whether it was ethical for the killer to defy the 911 operator orders to not follow the suspcious Travon Martin/ Is it unethical to knowingly put yourself in compromising situations?

     
  2. Shooting a Person Committing a Crime at the Scene of the Crime
    Much depends upon the nature of the degree of threat and seriousness of the crime. If a robber has already shot somebody in a store and is still a threat to others in the store the courts will probably justify shooting the robber.If the robber is fleeing the scene much still depends upon the risk to others such as people outside the store who might be shot or taken hostage by the fleeing robber. For example, a bystander is about to write down the  license of car entered by a fleeing robber does this justify shooting the armed robber who might only hypothetically shoot a bystander?  If the armed robber has not yet hurt anybody we are deeply  in the gray zone of a jury verdict.
     
  3. Shooting a Person Fleeing the Scene of a Crime or Scene of an Arrest
    Much depends upon the seriousness of the crime. For example, a shooting a person seen planting a bomb that goes off in a crowd of people probably will be considered justifiable grounds for shooting the fleeing bomber. Shooting an escaping prisoner is more of a gray zone. For example, without knowing the danger to society of an escaping prisoner, should a prison guard in a tower be justified in shooting that running prisoner in the back? Should a policeman be justified in shooting a violent felon who flees while being arrested such as a long-sought criminal on the FBI 10 Most Wanted list?

    Recently in Boston an armed passenger in a car pulled over by a policeman shot that policeman in the head. Nobody seems to question whether other police officers were then justified in shooting the fleeing gunman?

    This is quite different from the recent instance where a South Carolina police officer shot an unarmed fleeing person multiple times in the back who was not suspected, even by that officer, of committing a serious crime. That officer is now in jail facing a murder charge ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/police-involved-death-of-walter-scott-2015-4

     
  4. Mental Illness
    Mental illness often justifies shooting or some other types of murder. In courts of law not knowing right from wrong usually has to established. But this is a rather extreme form of mental illness that leaves other types of mental illness murders in the gray zone. Offenders sometimes argue that even if they know murder is wrong sometimes drugs or alcohol lead to temporary unintended violence. This is usually frowned up by jurors.

    Another situation is where a severely paranoid person has an illegal concealed weapon. Should evidence of paranois be a defense for the crime of possession?
     
  5. Accidental Shootings and Other Types of Accidental Killings
    Much depends upon intent in these manslaughter situations.. For example, there is a now highly controversial situation on the streets of NYC where police officers wrestled a man to the ground who was only suspected of a minor crime (selling illegal cigarettes). The asthmatic man died in a supposed choke hold by a police officer. Choke holds are banned by police in NYC and most people feel the officer should be punished for using a choke hold. But this does not appear to be manslaughter since there's no reason to suspect the officer intended to kill  the asthmatic victim.

    There are highly variable degrees of "accidental" situations. For example, murder while handling guns often boils down to whether the guns are being handled in inappropriate circumstances such as just playing around or trying to scare somebody.

 

Added Comments
In a similar manner much less extreme ethics violations are somewhat situational. For example, a common situation is a "follow the herd ethics violation." In a recent Harvard University cheating scandal in a political science course some cheaters tried to justify their own plagiarism by arguing that most of the class was doing the same thing. In this instance, only half of the 120+ cheaters were expelled by Harvard. Why only half?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#UVA

Looters sometimes argue that during a riot everybody in the store was looting. This is another f"ollow the herd" defense. Another ethics situation is where money is strewn all over the roadway after an armored car is involved in an accident.

Another situation is where a mother or child shoplifts food for very hungry children in a household. This is probably a punishable violation that becomes a crime only in terms of repeat offenses. But is it an ethical violation in desperate circumstances?

Employees sometimes try to justify ethics violations because their supervisors either explicitly or implicitly condone the behavior. This is the defense of some of the guards in Nazi prison camps.

And the list goes on where it is virtually impossible to judge ethics outside of unique situations.

April 8 reply to Elliot and Marc from Bob Jensen

HI Elliot and Marc,

I think "The Unforgiven" movie is more about justifying revenge with murder. This is suggested in the perfectly-chosen title of the movie. The half-blind revenging kid pretending to be a gunslinger is filled with remorse after killing a bad guy in the crapper. The hero, Clint 'Eastwood, never seems to have a conscience regarding revenge killings at first for money and in the end for revenge for torture and murder of his friend.

I don't see that any of the bad guys in this movie are the "most moral" since they are all probably unethical in their thirst for revenge. The character "Bill" played by Gene Hackman is the least moral since he will kill unarmed persons in great numbers just for power and money even if there is no revenge killing per se. Moses in the bull rushes would be killed as a baby by Gene Hackman if the innocent baby was a long-term threat. The baby would not be killed in the bull rushes by Clint Eastwood since it is an innocent baby.

Note that I did not list revenge as one of the examples, because revenge is always controversial.

At one extreme we have the Cold War of the 1950s where Russia and the USA both promise to take revenge in a nuclear attack. It's the strategy of revenge that is intended to prevent nuclear holocaust. The problem with this reasoning is that a crazy leader, like Saddam Hussein or his sons,  having a temper tantrum might be willing to sacrifice everything and everybody  for revenge alone. Keep nukes away from the crazies!

At the other extreme we have the victim of an April Fools joke contemplating how to get back at a joker. That strategy will seldom prevent April Fools jokes.

I have a little trouble with applying Kant's reasoning to some of my examples. For instance, I would never be a rapist home invader such that I cannot judge whether I would want to be shot if I was a rapist home invader. Felons who do such things probably are mentally ill, although not mentally ill to lock up as a preventative measure.

Hence the "do as as you would have others do on to you" just does not fit in some situations --- hence relative morality.

Thanks,
Bob

PS
Sometimes there just is not enough evidence to make morality judgments. For example, I think the death penalty deters some crimes but not others, but there's no way of getting evidence on the number of heinous crimes that were actually prevented by a death penalty.  For example, the risk of the death penalty under the Lindbergh Law's death penalty at the Federal level  probably prevents a significant number of child kidnappings for ransom in the USA. But the death penalty may not do much to prevent domestic murders that are committed in the heat of anger and revenge motives.

The death penalty is an example where no amount of evidence for or against is going to convince some hardliners on this issue --- hardliners who rely on on their  logic and/or their own religion irrespective of evidence.


Ex-IRS Ethics Office Lawyer Disbarred For … Ethics Violations ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/04/ex-irs-ethics-office-lawyer-disbarred-for-.html

Jensen Comment
Her punishment sounds serious until you examine the IRS track record for hiring back fired employees.

"Report: IRS hiring back problem employees," by Kevin G. Hall, McClatcheyDC, February 5, 2015 ---
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/02/05/255697/report-irs-hiring-back-problem.html

More than one in 10 former employees rehired by the Internal Revenue Services had left the agency with performance and conduct issues, a special inspector general’s report concluded.

The report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration was actually released last Dec. 30 but its results were divulged Thursday by the new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch.

The IG’s report found that of the 7,000-plus former IRS employees hired back between January 2010 and September 2013, 824 of them had prior employment disciplinary issues. Of those 824, the inspector general said 141 had a prior tax issue and five of them were determined to have willfully failed to file a tax return.

Continued in article

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


Charles Darwin Creates a Handwritten List of Arguments for and Against Marriage (1838) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/charles-darwin-creates-a-handwritten-list-of-arguments-for-and-against-marriage-1838.html

Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/isaac-newton-creates-a-list-of-his-47-sins-circa-1662.html

Jensen Comment
If I took the time to create my own list the result would be a much longer list. One issue is sins of deed versus sins of thought such as when President Jimmy Carter admitted to lust in his heart.

Jimmy Carter: "I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1859513_1859526_1859518,00.html

Isaac Newton asserted that "craving worldly things" was a sin. Accordingly he would not have been a good capitalist.

In September of that year, Newton had a breakdown which included sending wild accusatory letters to his friends Pepys and Locke. His note to the latter included the charge that Locke "endeavoured to embroil me with woemen".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Personal_relations
Throughout his life Sir Isaac Newton never married and purportedly had no "scandals" such as those of sex and cheating. He built the first practical telescope for peering into the nighttime sky rather than bedrooms.


250+ Killer Digital Libraries and Archives --- http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/250-plus-killer-digital-libraries-and-archives/

Hundreds of libraries and archives exist online, from university-supported sites to accredited online schools to individual efforts. Each one has something to offer to researchers, students, and teachers. This list contains over 250 libraries and archives that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history, but it also includes larger collections, eText and eBook repositories, and a short list of directories to help you continue your research efforts.

The sites listed here are mainly open access, which means that the digital formats are viewable and usable by the general public. So, such sites as the Connecticut Digital Library (iCONN) are not listed, as they operate on the premise that the user has a Connecticut library card in his or her possession.

Efforts were made to go to the root source for these collections. In other words, if you’re seeking the American Memory Project, which was created and housed at the Library of Congress, then you’ll find the link for the Library of Congress rather than the link for American Memory (although we included that link in the description of the Library of Congress listing). The root sources, in most cases, will lead you to collections that are too numerous to list here. In fact, it would be impossible to list all sources and we know we may have missed some favorites.

As a warning, many states listed their collections as “archives” when, in reality, the sources contained secondary sources such as books and transcriptions rather than a digital image of the actual document. Still, these resources can be invaluable for the person who seeks sources on family histories or on regional histories. To that end, we offer links to localized collections first, categorized by state. Please note that the blog numbering is not meant to be a ranking, as each link list is ranked by alphabetical order within the following topics:

Localized Collections

The sites listed below focus on a certain state’s towns, cities, counties, or regions within a given state. If a state is missing from this list (such as Rhode Island), it’s because that state hasn’t begun to compile digital archives online. This does not mean that you cannot find information about Rhode Island on the Web. Try one of the multi-state collections following this category for your search. Or, you can look for a state’s physical archive Web site or local historical society online for more resources. RootsWeb also holds localized information, or you might try a directory like Cyndi’s List for more information.

Continued in article

Digital al Public Library --- http://dp.la/bookshelf?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Mystery#6528c50f9784d4792723b21aae169759

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 --

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


On Broadway --- http://on-broadway.nyc


Question
Among the subset of students where each student was accepted in 2015 to every Ivy League school, what does every one of these students have in common
?

Hints:
The answer is not each student is an all-state athlete  with s SAT score above 2,100.
The answer is not that each student is African American.

Answer
http://www.businessinsider.com/students-accepted-to-all-8-ivy-league-schools-have-one-specific-thing-in-common-2015-4

Here's the link to the admissions essay of one of these students admitted to every Ivy League school ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/college-essay-accepted-every-ivy-league-2015-3
I was not all that impressed that this was such an exceptional essay.

How to Mislead With Statistics
These 9 US colleges are more selective than some Ivy League schools ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-9-us-colleges-are-more-selective-than-some-ivy-league-schools-2015-3

Jensen Comment
There are various ways in which rejection rates  can be misleading. The first question to as is what proportion of the students who were accepted by these nine US colleges would be rejected by Ivy League schools. My opinion is that most would be rejected except for students admitted to exceedingly prestigious universities like MIT and Stanford.

The College of the Ozarks is a unique institution where students work to pay their tuition. Most students in the Ivy League schools can either afford those schools or have significant financial aid.  Rejection rates are high because millions of students would like to get a free college education.

Except for some of those selective 9 colleges like Stanford and MIT, the admission rates themselves are not comparable with Ivy League colleges and universities. Most top graduates do not even bother (and pay) to apply to the most prestigious universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT because they conclude ahead of time that probabilities of being rejected are so high that it's not worth the time, money, and stress to apply in the first place, particularly graduates who do not have very unique resumes in addition to nearly perfect SAT scores. White males and females who have not also done something remarkable other than ace the SAT examination generally know what it takes to be admitted to an Ivy League university.

An example of something unique might be to have gone to Haiti after a huge hurricane and helped to teach children of victims in tent camps. Ot it might help to have given piano lessons or math for three entire summers to children of mothers incarcerated in prison.

What it takes to be admitted to a very prestigious university ---
https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=66225

Also see

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part I: Grades

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part II: PSAT, SAT, and ACT

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part III: AP, IB, and SAT II Exams

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part IV: Extracurriculars

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part V: Essays

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part VI: Recommendations

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part VII: Application Strategy

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part VIII: Interviews

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part IX: Checklist

What does it really take to get into the Ivy League? Part X: Epilogue

 


The Muse (free job hunting site) --- https://www.themuse.com/

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


"County Attorney Sues to Stop the Closure of Sweet Briar College," by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 30, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/county-attorney-sues-to-stop-the-closure-of-sweet-briar-college/96435?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

A county attorney in Virginia sued on Monday to block the closure of Sweet Briar College. In a complaint filed against the college on behalf of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the attorney said she was seeking the following actions:

The lawsuit makes two central allegations: first, that Sweet Briar violated Virginia’s charitable-solicitation law because it accepted charitable donations intended to bolster its educational mission as it prepared to close, thereby violating the donors’ intentions; and second, that the college violated Virginia’s Uniform Trust Code by acting contrary to the will of its founding documents.

The suit was filed in the Circuit Court of Amherst County, Va., where the college is located, by Ellen Bowyer, the county attorney.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This is like suing the owner of a horse that is dying in agony to keep the horse from being put down until is dies of natural causes. Why make it suffer hopelessly?

By way of another analogy suppose the county donated development land and tax breaks for a business venture that builds a factory. When the business venture fails can the county sue to force it to continue operating hopelessly?  Probably not!  In this case the lawyers who wrote the contracts most likely put in clauses allowing the business venture to close down and contractual clauses that determine what happens to the donated land in case the venture fails.

Most likely the business venture is a separate corporation that has the option of declaring bankruptcy. In that case a court takes over the business. The court can allow the business to carry on in bankruptcy while debts are reorganized, but the court cannot force a hemorrhaging business to continue to operate. That would be like keeping a dying horse hopelessly alive in agony.

I doubt whether the county attorney has jurisdiction to force Sweet Briar to keep hemorrhaging cash in a losing operation. Sweet Briar should declare bankruptcy and let a bankruptcy judge, not the county attorney, make the decisions about operations and/or liquidation of assets.  The problem is that in bankruptcy the lawyers and accountants benefit the most like buzzards digging into a carcass of a dead horse.

Remember the movie entitled "They Shoot Horses Don't They?" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shoot_Horses,_Don%27t_They%3F_%28film%29
The title itself emphasizes that laws allow society to willfully end the suffering of animals but not people.

There's a gray zone of ethical and legal controversy when a hospital has a dying patient on life support that the family cannot afford. At the same time suppose the family refuses to allow removal of that life support. How long must the hospital continue to hemorrhaging its own cash keeping a charity patient alive? Eventually this becomes a matter for the courts to decide, but in the meantime the hospital may be losing an enormous amount of money.

Thoughts on Saving Sweet Briar
 

Administrators at Sweet Briar claim they tried various initiatives over the past few years, including various marketing strategies and curriculum changes. However, the Devil is in the details on this, and there is not much being reported about the details. I suspect that various financial-aid experiments were conducted given the size of the endowment.

 
Much of the endowment, however, is tied up in the land and campus buildings. Given this era of nearly-free interest  on loans, one thing I would have considered is taking on more long-term debt. For example, Trinity University, with close to a billion dollar endowment, considered it a good time to take on a relatively small amount of long-term debt --- something not tried when interest rates were much higher.


 
Sweet Briar might have considered leveraging more students with financial aid from low-cost borrowed funds. Of course this is a financial  risk when the business model on being only an onsite women's college is bit horse and buggy in modern times.
 


 
It's a mystery why more drastic changes were not attempted such as admitting males and expanding athletics participation attractions. Adding professional programs might also be a consideration, but typically these are expensive and not popular with liberal arts faculty because professional programs tend to draw away top majors from humanities and sciences.


 
Another drastic change might be to partner some programs with other universities, e.g., online programs in business, pharmacy, and criminology. In turn Sweet Briar might offer some of its most popular courses to online partners.


 
Given Sweet Briar's huge amount of unused land, consideration might also be given to real estate leases. Stanford University has an enormous amount of extremely valuable leased land. Cash flow from leases for to business firms, including a luxury shopping mall, medical offices, and tech firms became immensely profitable to Stanford, thereby giving rise to an enormous amount of financial aid and new buildings.

 

Consolation for Life's Darkest Hours: 7 Unusual and Wonderful Books that Help Children Grieve and Make Sense of Death ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/23/best-childrens-books-death-grief-mourning/?mc_cid=bb97b591d0&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Bob Jensen's links to free books for children ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Children


Remarkable Commencement Addresses by Nora Ephron, David Foster Wallace, Ira Glass, and More ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/25/way-more-than-luck-commencement/?mc_cid=bb97b591d0&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

We live in an era where religion is, thank "god," increasingly being displaced by culture and secular thought. And yet, secular education and the arts have a great deal to learn from religion as a mode of seeding values of good-personhood.

Continued in article


Question
What does a Boeing 787-10 cost and why is it such a high price?

Answer
In round numbers $300 million for reasons outlined at
http://247wallst.com/aerospace-defense/2015/03/28/why-a-boeing-787-10-costs-298-million/

March 29, 2015 reply from Tom Sellin

Bob, When I used to teach management accounting, which is now a long time ago, I used to begin the class discussion of cost allocation with the following question to the class: How would you measure the cost of the first Boeing 747 produced? (Attribution: John Shank used to ask this question in class also, and I took the idea from him.)

Nowadays, I teach accounting theory, and I will definitely use the article you have provided as the basis for a class discussion. I think we’ll be able to have a lively discussion about "program accounting.”

Thanks,
Tom

March 30m 2015 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Tom,

An interesting point to build on with students is that this airliner is made 50% "composites." Read that as meaning "rare earth composites." The US Department of Energy claims demand for rare earth materials increased over 60% since 2003.

Rare Earth Elements That Were Added to the Periodic Table --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element

 I really learned a lot from a recent CBS Sixty Minutes module on rare earth elements and their composites. Most of all I learned that rare earth elements in general are not all that rare. They can be found in a lot of places all over the world.

The problem is that they are usually embedded in only small amounts among other earth components such that it becomes both difficult and expensive to extract them with a lot of mining costs and environmental externalities. This has tended to give China a near-monopoly on their mining due to relatively low labor costs and low environmental regulations.

An enormous problem is that the USA military and airline industry are now highly dependent upon China --- a nation willing to exploit its monopolies for economic and political purposes. In times of dire emergencies such as WW III the USA could turn elsewhere for supply, but expanding mining operations elsewhere is both costly and subject to very long delays. There is at least on large mining operation in the USA but it is a drop in the bucket compared to output needs for both the USA and the rest of the world.

The outstanding Sixty Minutes link is at
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rare-earth-elements-not-so-rare-after-all/

A blog post by 60 Minutes' Kevin Livelli, one of the producers who reported on rare earth elements this week:

Not long ago, if you had stopped me on the street and told me there was an interesting 60 Minutes story to be told about the lanthanide series of rare earth elements, I would have said you're crazy.

To begin with, who's ever heard of them? And even if you did manage to find them on that obscure bottom rung of the Periodic Table, you'd hit another hurdle - how to pronounce them. They have names only Dr. Seuss might have dreamt up. There's terbium, dysprosium, ytterbium, and lutetium. Neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum. Not exactly the kind of thing that rolls off the tongue.

"...perhaps a little dose of pop culture might spark the imagination. After all, China's hold on rare earth elements is a running theme in 'House of Cards'..."

In this case, I stumbled on rare earths by accident. While doing some other reporting, I found that they were on the mind of the Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper. He mentioned them in congressional testimony, as part of an annual "Worldwide Threat Assessment" -- a litany of threats to national security.

Clapper told Congress that rare earths are "essential" to the 21st century global economy, including the burgeoning green tech industry, and he emphasized that they are "critical" to advanced defense systems. That was intriguing, I thought. But there was more. One country - China - has been holding a "commanding monopoly" over world supply, at the time about 95 percent of the market, and things weren't going to change soon.

The light bulb went off. Here was something that touched people's lives not just in their everyday use (televisions, smartphones, tablets, computers, stereos, cars), but also had implications for U.S. energy security (hybrids, wind turbines, energy efficient lighting) and national security as well (precision-guided missiles, radar, night-vision goggles, lasers, satellites, fighter jets, submarines).

A little more digging revealed that the U.S. had actually once led the world in the rare earth industry and pioneered many of its common applications before ceding that dominance to China. I wanted to know how that happened and what it all meant. Here were good questions for our 60 Minutes story. My colleague, Graham Messick, and I set out to find the answers.

In doing so, we quickly found reporting on rare earths to be especially challenging. To begin with, we had to learn how rare earths are different from other metals and minerals - like iron or copper. What makes them rare? Turns out, as Lesley Stahl explains in our story, the name is a bit of a misnomer. Rare earths occur naturally in lots of places, but only a few have concentrations high enough to mine. You might think, then, that if the U.S. had more rare earth mines, the problem would be solved. You'd be wrong.

Even if you were to luck out and find a mine like the one owned by Molycorp out in Mountain Pass, California, and get it up and running, your work isn't finished. Unlike other metals, rare earths don't go to market in raw form. They have to be separated from one another and many are turned into metals first, which means they must be processed to exact specifications (sometimes up to several "9's" as in 99.9999 percent purity) that take into consideration their intended end use. And that is very hard to do. So to be successful in the rare earth business, you need to have not just access to the right rocks, but also access to the right know-how that will allow you to turn those rocks into something useful. That complex combination is what makes them "rare."

Another challenge in reporting on rare earths is understanding the supply chain. Rare earths feed the high tech industry around the world, and supply chains from mine to manufacturer can include as many as 12 stops along the way. So, for example, if you were to follow the dozen or so different rare earths metals that experts say are in each iPhone all the way back to the mine, you'd have an extremely hard time doing so. Same goes for the rare earths used in the F-35. The lengthy supply chains get very complicated very quickly.

What's more, lasting success in the rare earth industry, I learned, only comes when the supply chain companies choose to operate close to the source of rare earths and cultivate a symbiotic relationship. Today, China is on top not only because it has the biggest mine and the most know-how, but also as a result of having drawn manufacturers from around the world that use rare earths (i.e. supply chain customers) to Asia.

To help us understand how rare earths impact our lives and to show us where they can actually be found inside our gadgets, we interviewed Ed Richardson, the president of the U.S. Magnetic Materials Association, a trade group that represents American rare earth magnet makers.

In the video player above, you'll see that Richardson came to the interview with what looked at first to be a bunch of electronic junk. It turns out it really was his old stuff - an old cell phone, ear buds, and a toy helicopter -- but then we watched him dissect each object to reveal the rare earth magnets inside.

Along the way, he taught us a few other cool facts about rare earths. For instance, they can hold a thousand times their own weight, and they are a key technology behind the miniaturization of modern gadgets, enabling them to be smaller and lighter.

If, after watching our 60 Minutes story, you still think rare earths bring up too many bad high school chemistry memories, perhaps a little dose of pop culture might spark the imagination.

After all, China's hold on rare earth elements is a running theme in "House of Cards" (think of Raymond Tusk's push for "Samarium 149"). And defending the only U.S. rare earth mine is Jason Bourne's mission in "The Bourne Dominion." There's even a way, if you like to take matters into your own hands, to fight for global control of the rare earth supply in the video game "Call of Duty: Black Ops II." I guess the Periodic Table isn't so boring after all.

Jensen Comment
Rare earth minerals accounting presents wide-ranging research opportunities in at least two dimensions. One is the dimension of financial risks to the buyers and produces of rare earth minerals. The other dimension is environmental accounting in general.

It would appear disclosure guidance to date leaves a lot to be desired.

Making Rare Earth Element Disclosure Transparent and Compliant ---
http://post.nyssa.org/nyssa-news/2011/10/making-rare-earth-element-disclosure-transparent-and-compliant.html

For some links on this matter go to the SEC homepage --- http://www.sec.gov/
Then conduct a search for "rare earth"
 


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on March 30, 2015

It’s really here: TV for babies
http://www.wsj.com/articles/tv-for-babies-born-of-a-reality-1427671277?mod=djemCFO_h
Most TV networks don’t target viewers any younger than four years old, but one channel is testing that boundary. BabyFirstTV aims its programming at children as young as six months, and it now reaches 50 million households.

Jensen Comment
Sounds like a diaper-filling idea to me.


"Stanford's Most Popular Class Isn't Computer Science—It's Something Much More Important: It's called "Designing Your Life," a course that's part throwback, part foreshadowing of higher education's future," by Ainsley O'Connell, Fast Company, March 2015 --- |
http://www.fastcompany.com/3044043/most-creative-people/stanfords-most-popular-class-isnt-computer-science-its-something-much-m

Before Kanyi Maqubela became an investment partner at the Collaborative Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on social enterprises, he was a typical Stanford student in need of career guidance. He was working with startups, studying philosophy, dating someone special—and feeling overwhelmed.

Enter "Designing Your Life," a new and wildly popular course for Stanford juniors and seniors that is grounded in design thinking concepts and techniques. The course’s lessons gave him the perspective he needed to navigate decisions about life and work post graduation.

"It really helped me understand what the concept of vocation was," he says. "I had thought of it either as a narrowly religious concept or for a specific job. But it’s this feeling that I have true agency over my work, because I know what I stand for and I have tools to fix the things that I encounter in my life."

He felt liberated, he says, by how the course positioned the idea of career success: "Take your work personally, but it’s not your person."

At the time, "Designing Your Life" was still an experiment, spearheaded by Bill Burnett, executive director of Stanford's design program, and Dave Evans, who led the design of Apple's first mouse and co-founded Electronic Arts before embarking on a second career in the classroom. They launched the course in spring 2010.

"It took off in just about a heartbeat," says Evans, who oversees instruction with help from guest lecturers and a small army of student volunteers, who lead discussion groups. Today, 17% of seniors enroll in "Designing Your Life," and many more vie for the limited seats in each section. "We’ve had students literally teach the class on the side to their friends who weren’t enrolled," he says.

Evans divides the course into two parts: first, he says, "We reframe the problem. That’s where dysfunctional beliefs get blown-up. Then we give them a set of tools and ideas to take steps to start building the way forward." Each course section convenes for one quarter, two hours per week.

Here's what they learn: gratitude; generosity; self-awareness; adaptability. All reinforced by design thinking-based tools, from a daily gratitude journal to a deck of cards featuring problem-solving techniques. In lieu of a final exam—the class is pass/fail—students present three radically different five-year plans to their peers. Alumni say they still refer back their "odyssey plans"—a term that Evans coined—and revise them as their lives and careers progress.

Maqubela eventually found out that he had played a role in his now-wife's odyssey plan—but at the time, "she wouldn’t show it to me." Today, they still reference "Designing Your Life" when making decisions together. "Building your life around somebody else, and orienting around love as part of one’s career, is part of the class," he says.

For years, students have resisted this kind of overlap between university-sponsored programs and their private lives. After the Civil War, mandatory chapel disappeared, academics rather than ministers became university presidents, and courses like "Evidences of Christianity" vanished from the required curriculum.

"Universities didn’t think they would necessarily be abandoning the moral aspects of students’ education," says Julie Reuben, a Harvard professor who studies the history of American higher education. "Instead, they believed that freely chosen activities were more powerful than externally forced activities."

But, to the chagrin of university leaders, many students abandoned religion and instead embraced extracurricular outlets like athletics and fraternities, which in their own way took on the function of character-formation. In the mid-20th century, the university’s role as authority figure became even more problematic and contested, as protesters dismantled the Ivory Tower’s paternalistic structures and paved the way for increasingly diverse and inclusive institutions. The success of "Designing Your Life" suggests that students may be ready to revisit that earlier university model, with conditions—conditions that design thinking is perhaps well-suited to address.

"In the early academy it was all about moral formation. These days you can’t do that," Burnett says. "Design doesn’t speak to ethics and spirituality and all those things, but they work within its frameworks. Our only bias is, hey, we can make the future better."

The goal of "Designing Your Life," he says, is to change higher education—not by returning to religion, but by reintroducing methods of "forming you into the person that will go out into the world, effect change, and be a leader."

That message resonates with Stanford students. They are filled with a sense of purpose and determined to solve the world's problems—but ill-equipped, in our secular society, to make sense of what they value.

Karen Wright, a management science major with a wry sense of humor, says the odyssey plan exercise better prepared her to live out her commitment to making a difference in the world. "I felt a lot of pressure before the odyssey plan: I need to pick a career," says the California native. At the course end, she presented three starkly divergent scenarios to Evans and her classmates: working in health care and going to business school; joining the Peace Corps; and competing on American Ninja Warrior (surely an odyssey-plan first). "Your eyes light up when you talk about the Peace Corps," her classmates said—so for now, she's focused on door number 2.

What's more, her parents are more supportive than they were before; Wright presented her odyssey plan to them, too. "My family is all from one area," she says. "Ultimately, after graduation, I plan on not being around. I think I was able to convey to my parents more effectively why I want to travel and what I want to get out of it."

As Burnett sees it, the course is also a neat fit for the mercurial economy that students are graduating into. "The thing that’s true about design problems is that you don’t know what the solution is going to look like. You don’t start with the problem; you start with people," he says. "You create a point of view about what a better consumer experience would be. Then you prototype, you test, and you constantly change your point of view. That’s perfect for your 'Designing Your Life.' You can’t know the future, but you can know what’s available and you can prototype different versions of the you that you might become."

Continued in article


"Enrollment Woes Continue for U. of Phoenix," Inside Higher Ed, March 26, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/03/26/enrollment-woes-continue-u-phoenix

Jensen Comment
An enormous problem for all online programs from for-profit university is the rise in the popularity and quality of online degree programs from major state-supported universities. Search for over 1,200 online programs at
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
This is my recommended search engine for online degree programs.
Note the links to US News rankings of these online programs at the above site.

Don't trust those online search programs sponsored by for-profit universities because they exclude the affordable and higher quality online programs from major non-profit universities. Almost daily I get requests to link to one of these misleading search programs. I think people get paid if they can get Webmasters like me to link to these search programs (generally it is the same misleading search program under a different name).

Bob Jensen's threads for online education and training programs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm


"Stanford Reports ‘Troubling’ Increase in Cheating," by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/stanford-reports-troubling-increase-in-cheating?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Stanford University is investigating a “troubling” increase in cheating by students, Bloomberg News reports. The college’s provost, John W. Etchemendy, wrote in a letter to the faculty that the Office of Community Standards had recently received an uncommonly high number of reports of academic dishonesty. “With the ease of technology and widespread sharing that is now part of a collaborative culture,” he wrote, “students need to recognize and be reminded that it is dishonest to appropriate the work of others.” Mr. Etchemendy asked faculty members to more clearly define collaboration to their students.

Jensen Comment
There are various complicated reason academic cheating in on the rise before college and during college. The main cause is most likely the importance of grade point averages for admission to college, admission to graduate school, and landing job interviews. In 1940 the average grade at Harvard was a C grade, and a graduate with 2.50 gpa was slightly above average. In the 21st Century 80% of Harvard students graduate cum laude. A graduate with a 2.50 gpa is probably the dumbest guy in the class ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor

Grade inflation is one of the causes of cheating. Over 120 students in a political science class at Harvard University were caught plagiarizing in a course where the instructor gave A grades for the course to any student made an honest effort, any effort. There is no incentive to do quality work when there's no reward for quality work. In fact, why why not just cut and paste an assignment and turn it in for a A grade? When evidence of cheating leaked our Harvard expelled over half the cheaters. Why the other half of the cheaters were allowed to remain at Harvard is still a mystery ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

My point is that the main cause of cheating is grade inflation.

Average students who might otherwise get a B grade are desperate for a higher grade in the 21st Century where 3.00 gpa performance is well below average. Students who are assured of an A grade with minimal effort are motivated to cheat in order to free up more time for their harder courses.

The key to getting students to work harder in a course is to limit the percentage of students who get top grades. But this kills teaching evaluations, and teaching evaluations these days affects performance evaluations and even tenure.


"Major publisher retracts 43 scientific papers amid wider fake peer-review scandal," by Fred Barbash, Washington Post, March 27, 2015 --- Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/27/fabricated-peer-reviews-prompt-scientific-journal-to-retract-43-papers-systematic-scheme-may-affect-other-journals/

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications.

The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals. A partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China, including China Medical University, Sichuan University, Shandong University and Jiaotong University Medical School. But Jigisha Patel, associate editorial director for research integrity at BioMed Central, said it’s not “a China problem. We get a lot of robust research of China. We see this as a broader problem of how scientists are judged.”

Meanwhile, the Committee on Publication Ethics, a multidisciplinary group that includes more than 9,000 journal editors, issued a statement suggesting a much broader potential problem. The committee, it said, “has become aware of systematic, inappropriate attempts to manipulate the peer review processes of several journals across different publishers.” Those journals are now reviewing manuscripts to determine how many may need to be retracted, it said.

Peer review is the vetting process designed to guarantee the integrity of scholarly articles by having experts read them and approve or disapprove them for publication. With researchers increasingly desperate for recognition, citations and professional advancement, the whole peer-review system has come under scrutiny in recent years for a host of flaws and irregularities, ranging from lackadaisical reviewing to cronyism to outright fraud.

Last year, in one of the most publicized scandals, the Journal of Vibration and Control, in the field of acoustics, retracted 60 articles at one time due to what it called a “peer review and citation ring” in which the reviews, mostly from scholars in Taiwan, were submitted by people using fake names.

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


Journalism Ethics and Standards --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards

The upcoming Columbia UniversityJournalism School review "offered a blunt indictment of Rolling Stone's reporting (UVA Phony Rape Scandal) and its violation of journalism ethics," according to Byers. He reports that Rolling Stone will publish a significant portion of the external review next month.
http://www.businessinsider.com/review-of-controversial-uva-rape-article-reportedly-skewers-rolling-stone-2015-3#ixzz3VchOzyyh


Jensen Comment
This is stinking bull poop. Sure stimulating the economy is more important than having retirees and future retirees earn safe interest returns on their savings, but Bernankie should not lie outright to seniors. He did indeed throw them under the bus in favor of economic stimulus and Quantitative Easing ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

Ben Bernankie should not lie to us when we're looking up at the bottom of the bus while the capital saved for retirement in confiscated just trying to stay alive before our ticket is punched. I was lucky! In 2006 near my retirement date I negotiated a relatively high lifetime fixed interest rate on my TIAA lifetime annuities.

University employees today are screwed when trying to negotiate safe fixed-rate lifetime annuities under the Bernanke bus with no relief in sight for earning decent retirement returns on their savings balances. The only alternative from under the Bernanke bus is for retirees to take on variable returns based upon fluctuating stock market or real estate values with much higher financial risk and variability than a lifetime of guaranteed monthly lifetime returns.

Bernankie says seniors should just lie there and enjoy QE's miserable low-risk returns on their savings.

Bull Poop
"BERNANKE: We didn't throw seniors under the bus," by Ben Bernanke, The Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/ben-bernanke-heres-why-interest-rates-are-so-low-2015-3

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


"How Chicago has used Financial Engineering to Paper over its Massive Budget Gap," by Kristi Culpepper, Medium, March 26, 2015 ---
https://medium.com/@munilass/how-chicago-has-used-financial-engineering-to-paper-over-its-massive-budget-gap-872d911dd363

Chicago made headlines at the end of February after Moody’s downgraded the city’s general obligation bond rating to Baa2. Moody’s has cut Chicago’s rating five notches in less than two years. This downgrade, however, placed the city’s credit below the termination triggers on some of its outstanding interest rate swaps. The city has been working to renegotiate the terms of those contracts with its counterparties.

If Chicago’s general obligation rating falls below investment grade, the city’s credit deterioration will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. The city risks nearly $400 million of swap termination payments and the acceleration of its $294 million of outstanding short-term debt.

Unsurprisingly, some of Chicago’s bonds are already trading at junk levels. Chicago CUSIPs are listed here.

That said, the rating agencies and most other market participants still appear to be light years away from understanding the true scope of Chicago’s financial problems. The city has a very — well, let’s just call it unconventional — approach to borrowing money and probably should not be considered investment grade.

Some budget history

In order for you to follow my discussion of Chicago’s borrowing shenanigans, it is necessary to understand the fiscal machinery behind its bond issues. Please be patient with me here. This story will blow your mind shortly.

Chicago’s budget is divided into seven different fund classifications, but only three funds are relevant to our narrative: the Corporate Fund, Property Tax Fund, and Reserve Funds.

The Corporate Fund is Chicago’s general operating fund. This fund is used to pay for essential government services and activities (e.g. public safety and trash collection). Corporate Fund revenues are derived from a wide variety of sources, including: (1) local tax revenue from utility, transaction, transportation, recreation, and business taxes; (2) intergovernmental tax revenue, which represents the city’s share of the state’s sales and use taxes, income tax, and personal property replacement tax; and (3) non-tax revenue from fees, fines, asset sales, and leases.

Chicago’s property tax revenues do not go into its general operating fund. These revenues go into a Property Tax Fund, which is used to make debt service payments on the city’s general obligation bonds; make required employee pension contributions; and (to a minor extent) fund the library system. The fund also includes tax increment financing revenues that flow to projects in designated TIF districts.

The city used some of the proceeds from long-term leases of city assets to establish Reserve Funds. The Chicago Skyway reserve funds were established in 2005 in the amount of $975 million. The Metered Parking System reserve funds were established in 2009 in the amount of $1.15 billion. Of these funds, $475 million of the Skyway reserves were designated for budgetary uses. What remained was $500 million for the Skyway; $400 million for the Metered Parking System; and $326 million for a budget stabilization fund.

There has been a structural gap in Chicago’s Corporate Fund budget since at least 2003. Although most governments are required to balance their budgets on a cash flow basis each fiscal year, a structural budget gap can arise when recurring expenditures are greater than recurring revenues. Some of the city’s offering documents suggest that this gap is a legacy of the last economic downturn, but in reality the gap pre-dates the economic downturn by several years. The impact of economic downturns on tax collections tends to have a considerable lag anyway.

So, Chicago’s structural budget gap is a political, not economic, creature. Rather than cut expenditures to a level that could be supported by recurring revenues, the city mostly used non-recurring resources to fill the gap from one fiscal year to the next. This is not surprising. Most of Chicago’s Corporate Fund budget goes to salaries and benefits for its employees, and 90% of the city’s employees belong to around 40 different unions. Attempts to adjust expenditures tend to have well organized opposition.

Between fund transfers and drawing down its reserves, the city blew through its financial cushioning quickly. The $326 million budget stabilization fund was exhausted by 2010. From 2009 to 2011, the city used $320 million from the Metered Parking Reserves. The city’s budget gap was at its widest in the wake of the last economic downturn, at over $600 million.

Chicago’s dysfunctional debt program

Now things start to get interesting. Transfers from reserves and other funds have not been the only means Chicago officials (across administrations) have devised to subsidize the city’s Corporate Fund. The city has effectively been using its general obligation bond offerings and interest rate derivatives to accomplish the same thing.

State and local governments typically use the proceeds from their bond offerings to construct or renovate public buildings and infrastructure. These are projects that have long useful lives and will benefit residents for generations.

Dating back to at least 2003, however, Chicago has been issuing long-term tax-exempt and taxable bonds to:

(1) Roll over short-term debt used as working capital;

(2) Pay for maintenance activities that would otherwise be paid from the Corporate Fund;

(3) Pay for judgments and settlements that would otherwise be paid from the Corporate Fund, including wage increases and retroactive pension contributions for its employees; and

(4) Provide discretionary funds to each of the city’s 50 aldermen to pay for activities in their own districts.

The magnitude of tax-exempt bond proceeds used for judgments and settlements over this period is staggering. The Chicago Tribune estimated it at approximately $400 million:

In 2002, for example, the city used tax-exempt bonds to pay an arbitration award involving the Fraternal Order of Police. Rank-and-file officers rejected a city contract offer in 2001, but an arbitrator ruled in favor of the city’s wage proposal a year later.
The deal included raises of 2 to 4 percent a year, to be applied retroactively. In bond documents, city officials deemed the back pay the city owed an extraordinary expense and paid $164 million of it with tax-exempt bonds.
The city ultimately will need to pay bondholders $280 million to cover the loan …
Bonds also ended up covering the $28 million a jury awarded to Joseph Regaldo in 1999. The jury found that, years earlier, a Chicago police officer had beaten him in the back of the head and neck with a blunt object, which ripped apart an artery and cut off the blood supply to his brain. The injuries left Regaldo unable to walk, talk or care for himself.
The judgment won’t be paid off until 2019 at the earliest; by then, the total cost will have grown to $53 million.
City officials eventually switched to paying judgments with taxable bonds, which are even more costly in the long run.

That is, until 2012:

About $54 million from a tax-exempt bond helped cover a legal judgment awarded to African-Americans who were denied a chance to become firefighters by a 1990s entrance exam that favored white applicants. An additional $8 million in tax-exempt bond money went to pay legal fees related to the case, records show.
By using bond money, the city created an irony for many of those awarded damages, as their future property taxes will help pay interest on the debt. In 2033, when the city starts paying down the $54 million, interest will have more than doubled the total cost.

Stop and let that sink in for a moment. That police brutality case? Wage increases negotiated with labor unions? Not just financed, but financed with long-term debt.

So why haven’t the city’s 50 aldermen protested the use of bond proceeds for these purposes? It probably has something to do with the “Aldermen’s Menu,” which allows the aldermen to use a portion of the proceeds from the city’s general obligation bond issues to pay for whatever they want for their district.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of governmental accounting and auditing ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting




From the Scout Report on March 27, 2015

Tails --- https://tails.boum.org/

For those readers concerned with Internet privacy, Tails will be a welcome innovation. The free, open-source, live operating system can be used from almost any computer. It runs through Tor, an anonymity network of over 6,000 users from around the world, so that readers can surf the web anonymously without sites picking up their IP addresses or other revealing information. The service makes sure sites leave no trace on your computer, and can also be used to encrypt files, emails, and instant messaging. Downloading the program is as easy as clicking a button.


Mailpile --- https://www.mailpile.is/ 

Mailpile provides a "secure way to read, write, and organize piles and piles of email." The service is free and easily downloadable to any computer. Searching is quick and easy; the platform is designed to be fast, even on slow computers. All of your mail is encrypted on your computer so you control your information. The encryption is built in, rather than an afterthought like some other email platforms. In addition, unlike web based email companies, there are no ads.


The Risks of Being Lonely
Loneliness and social isolation linked to early mortality
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/290934.php

Loneliness Can Be Deadly, Study Says
http://www.youthhealthmag.com/articles/11844/20150317/loneliness-can-be-deadly-study-says.htm

Why Loneliness Is A Growing Public Health Concern — And What We Can Do
About It
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/21/science-loneliness_n_6864066.html?utm_hp_ref=science

You Asked: How Many Friends Do I Need?
http://time.com/3748090/friends-social-health/?iid=time_speed

Researchers Study "Super Seniors" for Clues to their Longevity
http://canadajournal.net/health/researchers-study-super-seniors-clues-longevity-23991-2015/

Feeling Lonely Tonight? 7 Strategies to Combat Loneliness
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/11/08/feeling-lonely-tonight-7-strategies-to-combat-loneliness/


From the Scout Report on April 3, 2015

ownCloud --- https://owncloud.org/ 

For readers who know about Dropbox, ownCloud will be an intuitive find. The services are similar. They both provide online storage space for documents, graphics, mp3s, and other files. They both make sharing files with friends and coworkers simple and allow access from mobile devices and multiple desktops. However, more sophisticated users may prefer ownCloud for at least two reasons. First, as an open-source system, it is more flexible, so that users can adjust the services to their needs. Second, while Dropbox charges for extra storage, users can store huge amounts of data on ownCloud for free. The only catch is that users will need to run and install ownCloud on their own server. This is relatively simple for those who have a website and a little knowledge of hosting.


Threadable --- https://threadable.com/ 

Anyone who has engaged in group conversations by email knows how unmanageable the threads can become. Threadable seeks to help contain the sprawl of back-and-forth messaging while maintaing the convenience of the traditional mailing list. Sign up for the service is free and easy. Readers simply enter their email address and a password. Then they enter the email addresses of those colleagues and friends they wish to include in their mailing lists. Threadable then opens to a refreshingly simple platform, where users may start conversations and respond to the conversations of others. There are several clever functions that make Threadable helpful. First, users can subdivide discussions, so that some members may have side conversations without filling up the inboxes of others. Second, users may "mute" conversations that don't involve them, allowing for future messages from that thread to skip their inbox. Third, email threads can be turned into actionable tasks that can be efficiently checked off upon completion. For boards, classes, work assignments, or other other groups Threadable is a free, workable list management solution


A STEM Tradition in the Making: White House Hosts its Fifth-Ever
Science Fair Supergirls Conquer Obama at White House Science Fair
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/supergirls-conquer-obama-white-house-science-fair-n328661

The coolest inventions in this year's White House science fair
http://qz.com/368958/the-coolest-inventions-in-this-years-white-house-science-fair/

White House Science Fair celebrates student research
http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2015/03/white-house-science-fair-celebrates-student-research

The 2015 White House Science Fair
https://www.whitehouse.gov/science-fair

This Day in History: Celebrating Women in STEM at The White House Science
Fair
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/03/23/day-history-celebrating-women-stem-white-house-science-fair

Videos & Photos: Obama Tours Students' Projects at the Science Fair
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/03/23/obama-tours-students-projects-at-science-fair/

 

 




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


Education Tutorials

From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Search for Job Openings in Higher Education ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/job_search/new

Higher Education Recruitment Consortium --- http://www.hercjobs.org/

"Stanford's Most Popular Class Isn't Computer Science—It's Something Much More Important: It's called "Designing Your Life," a course that's part throwback, part foreshadowing of higher education's future," by Ainsley O'Connell, Fast Company, March 2015 --- |
http://www.fastcompany.com/3044043/most-creative-people/stanfords-most-popular-class-isnt-computer-science-its-something-much-m

250+ Killer Digital Libraries and Archives --- http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/250-plus-killer-digital-libraries-and-archives/

Common Core State Standards Initiative --- http://www.corestandards.org

National Science Foundation YouTube Channel --- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRuCgmzhczsm89jzPtN2Wuw

Society for the Teaching of Psychology --- http://teachpsych.org

On Broadway --- http://on-broadway.nyc

Consolation for Life's Darkest Hours: 7 Unusual and Wonderful Books that Help Children Grieve and Make Sense of Death ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/23/best-childrens-books-death-grief-mourning/?mc_cid=bb97b591d0&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/isaac-newton-creates-a-list-of-his-47-sins-circa-1662.html

Bob Jensen's links to free books for children ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Children

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

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


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

What Ignited Richard Feynman’s Love of Science Revealed in an Animated Video ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/what-ignited-richard-feynmans-love-of-science-revealed-in-an-animated-video.html

The Big Snoop: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists (Brookings Institution papers on national security and terrorism) ---
http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/big-snoop

Recent Science News --- http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/index.shtml

Physics of the Universe --- http://www.bnl.gov/science/physics.php

The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space --- http://www.iss-casis.org/

Echo (history of science and technology) --- http://echo.gmu.edu

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory --- http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu

Windows to the Universe: The Sun --- http://www.windows2universe.org/sun/sun.html

Mars for Educators --- http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/participate/marsforeducators/  

Epically awesome photos of Mars ---http://www.businessinsider.com/hirise-photos-of-mars-2015-3

National Science Foundation YouTube Channel --- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRuCgmzhczsm89jzPtN2Wuw

Texas Tech University: National Wind Institute --- http://www.depts.ttu.edu/nwi/

Photographing the World’s Vanishing Glaciers ---
http://www.newsweek.com/photographing-worlds-vanishing-glaciers-317130

Moorea Coral Reef LTER --- http://mcr.lternet.edu

All the World's Volcano Webcams ---
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/worlds-volcano-webcams/

Landscape Architecture Magazine --- http://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/

From the Scout Report on April 3, 2015

A STEM Tradition in the Making: White House Hosts its Fifth-Ever
Science Fair Supergirls Conquer Obama at White House Science Fair
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/supergirls-conquer-obama-white-house-science-fair-n328661

The coolest inventions in this year's White House science fair
http://qz.com/368958/the-coolest-inventions-in-this-years-white-house-science-fair/

White House Science Fair celebrates student research
http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2015/03/white-house-science-fair-celebrates-student-research

The 2015 White House Science Fair
https://www.whitehouse.gov/science-fair

This Day in History: Celebrating Women in STEM at The White House Science
Fair
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/03/23/day-history-celebrating-women-stem-white-house-science-fair

Videos & Photos: Obama Tours Students' Projects at the Science Fair
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/03/23/obama-tours-students-projects-at-science-fair/

 

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

Frontiers of Psychology --- http://www.frontiersin.org/Psychology

Burnout Research --- http://www.journals.elsevier.com/burnout-research/

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

Visualising China --- http://visualisingchina.net

Council of Canadian Academies --- http://scienceadvice.ca

The Visionary Thought of Marshall McLuhan, Introduced and Demystified by Tom Wolfe ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/14c6fb9b32f00f0f

Consolation for Life's Darkest Hours: 7 Unusual and Wonderful Books that Help Children Grieve and Make Sense of Death ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/23/best-childrens-books-death-grief-mourning/?mc_cid=bb97b591d0&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Society for the Teaching of Psychology --- http://teachpsych.org

Eurasia Outlook - Carnegie Moscow Center --- http://carnegie.ru/eurasiaoutlook/

Cato Policy Report --- http://www.cato.org/policy-report

The Muse (free job hunting site) --- https://www.themuse.com/

PandoDaily (liberalism in Silicon Valley, including environment and feminism) --- http://pando.com/

Syriaca.org: The Syriac Gazetteer (geography) --- http://syriaca.org/geo/index.html

Download Images From Rad American Women A-Z: A New Picture Book on the History of Feminism ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-images-from-rad-american-women-a-z.html

From the Scout Report on March 27, 2015

The Risks of Being Lonely
Loneliness and social isolation linked to early mortality
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/290934.php

Loneliness Can Be Deadly, Study Says
http://www.youthhealthmag.com/articles/11844/20150317/loneliness-can-be-deadly-study-says.htm

Why Loneliness Is A Growing Public Health Concern — And What We Can Do
About It
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/21/science-loneliness_n_6864066.html?utm_hp_ref=science

You Asked: How Many Friends Do I Need?
http://time.com/3748090/friends-social-health/?iid=time_speed

Researchers Study "Super Seniors" for Clues to their Longevity
http://canadajournal.net/health/researchers-study-super-seniors-clues-longevity-23991-2015/

Feeling Lonely Tonight? 7 Strategies to Combat Loneliness
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/11/08/feeling-lonely-tonight-7-strategies-to-combat-loneliness/

 

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

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Philosophy Animations on Ethics Narrated by Harry Shearer ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/how-can-i-know-right-from-wrong-watch-philosophy-animations-on-ethics.html

The Supreme Court Database --- http://scdb.wustl.edu/index.php

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

Download 100,000 Art Images in High-Resolution from The Getty ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-100000-art-images-in-high-resolution-from-the-getty.html

Hysterical Literature: Art & Sexuality Collide in Readings of Whitman, Emerson & Other Greats (NSFW) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/hysterical-literature.html

Circulating Now (history of medicine) --- http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/

Images from the History of Medicine --- http://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/luna/servlet/view/al

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (funding for humanities) --- http://www.mellon.org

Alaska's Digital Archives: Alaska Native & Culture Pathway --- http://vilda.alaska.edu/cdm/pathway

Arabic Fiction --- http://www.arabicfiction.org

Grand Teton National Park --- http://www.grandtetonpark.org/

Eurasia Outlook - Carnegie Moscow Center --- http://carnegie.ru/eurasiaoutlook/

Visualising China --- http://visualisingchina.net

Syriaca.org: The Syriac Gazetteer (geography) --- http://syriaca.org/geo/index.html

National Geographic: Maps --- http://maps.nationalgeographic.com/maps

National Geographic-Adventure --- http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/

Place, Evolution, and Rock Art Heritage Unit (Australian Rock Art) ---
http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities/research/perahu

Guernica: Alain Resnais’ Haunting Film on Picasso’s Painting & the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/guernica-alain-resnais-haunting-film-on-picassos-painting-the-crimes-of-the-spanish-civil-war.html

Alabama History Online --- http://www.archives.alabama.gov/aho.html

Download Images From Rad American Women A-Z: A New Picture Book on the History of Feminism ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-images-from-rad-american-women-a-z.html

Langston Hughes Presents the History of Jazz in an Illustrated Children’s Book (1955) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/langston-hughes-presents-the-history-of-jazz-i.html

Remarkable Commencement Addresses by Nora Ephron, David Foster Wallace, Ira Glass, and More ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/25/way-more-than-luck-commencement/?mc_cid=bb97b591d0&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

We live in an era where religion is, thank "god," increasingly being displaced by culture and secular thought. And yet, secular education and the arts have a great deal to learn from religion as a mode of seeding values of good-personhood.

Continued in article

On Broadway --- http://on-broadway.nyc

The History & Legacy of Magna Carta Explained in Animated Videos by Monty Python’s Terry Jones ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/an-animated-history-of-magna-carta.html

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breathtaking Photos of Historic New York City ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/an-online-gallery-of-over-900000-breathtaking-photos-of-historic-new-york-city.html

Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm  


Language Tutorials

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


Music Tutorials

On Broadway --- http://on-broadway.nyc

All of Bach Is Putting Videos of 1,080 Bach Performances Online: Watch the First 53 Recordings and the St. Matthew Passion ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/all-of-bach-putting-performances-of-1080-bachs-works-online.html

Anderson & Roe's Personalized Bach ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2015/02/17/384060300/anderson-roes-personalized-bach

Langston Hughes Presents the History of Jazz in an Illustrated Children’s Book (1955) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/langston-hughes-presents-the-history-of-jazz-i.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

ENGL Professional Writing Program (University of Maryland) --- http://lib.guides.umd.edu/content.php?pid=379848&sid=3112046

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



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

March 26, 2015

March 28, 2015

March 30, 2015

March 31, 2015

April 2, 2015

April 3, 2015

April 4, 2013

April 6, 2015

April 7, 2015

April 8, 2015

April 9, 2015

April 10, 2015

April 13, 2015

 


Powassan Virus --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powassan_virus
A Virus Spread by Ticks Could Be More Dangerous Than Lyme Disease
---
http://time.com/3817208/powassan-virus-ticks-lyme-disease/?xid=newsletter-brief
But not yet in great numbers relative to Lyme disease


Illustrations of Biased, Potentially Biased, and Probably Unbiased Medical Research (in this case for prostate swelling or BPH)

Probably Unbiased --- http://www.webmd.com/men/prostate-enlargement-bph/enlarged-prostate-supplements-remedies

Probably Biased But Useful in Referencing Frauds --- http://best-prostate-formulas.com/

Probably Highly Biased and Almost Certainly Misleading --- See any of  the Fake Review Sites Listed at
http://best-prostate-formulas.com/

Fake Prostate Pill Review Site       Product they rate number one
NEW Prostate Pill Reviews   NEW Prostavol
NEW Prostate Health Reviews   NEW Prostavox
NEW Prostate Health Reviews   NEW EverlastingP
NEW Prostate Health Supplements   NEW Prostavox
NEW Prostate Health Supplements   NEW EverlastingP
NEW Prostate Health Journal   NEW ProstaNew
     
NEW Prostate Supplement Guide   NEW Prostacet
NEW Consumer Health Digest   NEW Prostacet
     
NEW Prostate Health Buyers Guide   NEW True Prostate Flow
ConsumersGuides   Ultra Prostate Support Formula
Ask Men Answers   Ultra Prostate Support Formula
     
ConsumerHealthShop   ViProsta
     
Prostate Product Review   Prostate Plus
Prostate Pill Reviews   Prostate Plus
Prostate Reviews   Prostate Plus
Prostate Pills Overview   Prostate Plus
     
Fischer Urology   ProstaNew
     
Prostate Pill Report   ProstaVar
Stigwood Research Institute   ProstaVar
Prostate Pill Insider   ProstaVar
M.D. Health Reports   ProstaVar

Jensen Comment
I don't trust Amazon reviews for most drug items unless they are consistent with respected reviews such as those from WebMD. Reviews are even more risky for drug items on Amazon because, unlike reviews of books, the sellers are more apt to place negative reviews of the products of their competitors.

This, however, is only my opinion  about Amazon reviews not backed by fact.  I do, however, frequently use Amazon reviews for some things like clothing, electronics, and other hardware. Mostly I focus on the negative reviews.

If you are considering purchasing a drug item at least take the time to search for a review at WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/

Don't trust the Dr. Oz Show ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dr._Oz_Show#Criticism 

Also don't trust Angie's List ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angie%27s_List#Criticism

If you are looking for reviews of most any product or service go to a trusted review source like Consumer Reports (the reviews are not usually free) ---
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/index.htm
For example enter "BPH" into the search box.

One problem is that global or national reputation may differ from local reputation. For example, McDonald's has a pretty good international reputation for cleanliness and sanitation, particularly in restrooms, but the manager of a particular local franchise may be careless about such things.




A Bit of Humor for April 1-14, 2015

Many educators have a tough time imagining a world where academic issues are more important than athletic ones at institutions with big-time programs. "Saturday Night Live" this weekend created such a world (slow loading) ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/04/06/snl-imagines-academic-primacy-over-athletics

The Horrific April Fools Pranks of the 19th Century ---
http://factually.gizmodo.com/the-horrific-april-fools-pranks-of-the-19th-century-1694834642

How Trevor Noah will transform the Daily Show, explained in 7 of his funniest clips ---
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/30/7344873/trevor-noah-daily-show

Hunter S. Thompson’s Ballsy & Hilarious Job Application Letter (1958) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/hunter-s-thompsons-ballsy-hilarious-job-application-letter-1958.html 

There is No Nobel Prize in Economics:  Dilbert Cartoon
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/04/nobel-prize-for-economics/#comments
Read the comments

MIT researchers have discovered the ultimate tongue twister ---
http://modernnotion.com/worlds-hardest-tongue-twisters/#ixzz3WLYfNlrW

The Story of Hillary’s ‘First Presidency’ in Song, Starring 'William Jefferson' and 'Bill ---
http://www.newsweek.com/story-hillarys-first-presidency-song-starring-william-jefferson-and-billy-319610

She's Ready (Hillary Dances) --- Click here: 2008


Forwarded by Gene and Joan

On my way home one day, I stopped to watch a Little League base ball game that was being played in a park near my home. As I sat down behind the bench on the first- base line, I asked one of the boys what the score was 'We're behind 14 to nothing,' he answered With a smile.

'Really,' I said. 'I have to say you don't look very discouraged.'

'Discouraged?', the boy asked with a Puzzled look on his face...

'Why should we be discouraged? We haven't Been up to bat yet.'


Forwarded by Gene and Joan

Whenever I'm disappointed with my spot in life, I stop and think about little Jamie Scott.

Jamie was trying out for a part in the school play. His mother told me that he'd set his heart on being in it, though she feared he would not be chosen..

On the day the parts were awarded, I went with her to collect him after school. Jamie rushed up to her, eyes shining with pride and excitement.. 'Guess what, Mom,' he shouted, and then said those words that will remain a lesson to me....'I've been chosen to clap and cheer.'

 




Humor Between March 1-31, 2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q1.htm#Humor033115

Humor Between February 1-28, 2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q1.htm#Humor022815

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 




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

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

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

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

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

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

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