Tidbits on May 15, 2015
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Photographs of the
Pemigewasset (Pemi) River
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Rivers/PemigewassetRiver/01.htm
Tidbits on May 15, 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
John Green’s Crash Course in U.S. History: From Colonialism to
Obama in 47 Videos ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/crash-course-u-s-history.html
TED Talks: Mental health for all by involving all ---
http://www.ted.com/talks/vikram_patel_mental_health_for_all_by_involving_all?language=en
YouTube seems like it's been available forever, but it's only
ten years old ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
Brookings Institution YouTube ---
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi7jxgIOxcRaF4Q54U7lF3g
Watch a Timelapse Video Showing the Creation of New York
City’s Skyline: 1500 to Present ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/timelapse-video-showing-the-creation-new-york-citys-skyline.html
Hōshi: A Short Film on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same
(Japanese) Family for 46 Generations ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/hoshi-a-short-film-on-the-1300-year-old-hotel-run-by-the-same-family-for-46-generations.html
The Oldest Known Footage of London (1890-1920) Shows the
City’s Great Landmarks ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/the-oldest-known-footage-of-london.html
The Poetry of the Cherry Blossoms Comes to Life in a One
Minute Time Lapse Video ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/cherry-blossoms-comes-to-life-in-a-one-minute-time-lapse-video.html
The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 358 Filmmakers
---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/the-10-greatest-films-of-all-time-according-to-358-filmmakers.html
Dramatic Color Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After
Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/dramatic-color-footage-shows-a-bombed-out-berlin-a-month-after-germanys-wwii-defeat-1945.html
How to Live a Good Life? Watch Philosophy Animations Narrated
by Stephen Fry on Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Max Weber & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/how-to-live-a-good-life-philosophy-animations-narrated-by-stephen-fry.html
An English Country Garden ---
https://www.youtube.com/embed/9H9IojB9iYY
Hear Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talking Dolls: An Invention That
Scared Kids & Flopped on the Market ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/hear-thomas-edisons-creepy-talking-dolls.html
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Lost in the 1950s ---
http://safeshare.tv/w/FEDEwZHZXu
Johnny Cash Machines: Johnny Cash Stars in 1980s
Commercials for ATM Machines ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/johnny-cash-machines.html
Hear What is Jazz?: Leonard Bernstein’s
Introduction to the Great American Art Form (1956) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/leonard-bernsteins-introduction-to-jazz.html
Listen to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Aloud & Set to Music
(31 Hours, Unabridged) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/listen-to-james-joyces-finnegans-wake-read-aloud-set-to-music-31-hours-unabridged.html
Watch Miles Davis Improvise Music for Elevator to
the Gallows, Louis Malle’s New Wave Thriller (1958) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/watch-miles-davis-improvise-the-soundtrack-for-elevator-to-the-gallows.html
Music for a String Quartet Made from Global
Warming Data: Hear “Planetary Bands, Warming World” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/music-for-a-string-quartet-made-from-global-warming-data.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
See the First Known Photograph Ever Taken (1826)
---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/see-the-first-known-photograph-ever-taken-1826.html
Harvard Art Museums ---
http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/
Devastating photos of California show how bad the drought
really is ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-california-drought-2015-5?op=1#ixzz3ZaNrN8Rg
Elusive Siberian Tigers Captured in Brilliant Images ---
http://news.yahoo.com/elusive-siberian-tigers-captured-brilliant-images-photos-203214261.html
Lake Michigan is So Clear Right Now its Shipwrecks Are Visible
From the Air ---
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sunken-ships-lake-michigan-are-visible-ghostly-blue-180955108/?no-ist
Beastly Verse: From Lewis
Carroll to William Blake, Beloved Poems About Animals in Vibrant and Unusual
Illustrations ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/22/beastly-verse-joohee-yoon/?mc_cid=3d5725806e&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
See the 50 Best Images Taken by the Hubble Space
Telescope ---
http://time.com/3772495/see-hubble-best-photos-25th-anniversary/?xid=newsletter-brief
National Geographic: The Ocean ---
http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/
The 20 Best Photographs of Obama's Travels Across
America ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/photo-essays/2015-05-08/photos-obama-s-u-s-travel-highlights?cmpid=BBD050815
Winners of the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards
---
http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/04/winners-of-the-2015-sony-world-photography-awards/391826/
Milan ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-to-do-in-milan-2015-4
An English Country Garden ---
https://www.youtube.com/embed/9H9IojB9iYY
The Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 ---
http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/breadandroses
May Day During the Cold War ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-photos-show-how-crazy-may-day-used-to-be-during-the-cold-war-2015-5
The Poetry of the Cherry Blossoms Comes to Life
in a One Minute Time Lapse Video ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/cherry-blossoms-comes-to-life-in-a-one-minute-time-lapse-video.html
Fashion in Time ---
http://www.fashionintime.org/
32 powerful pictures of the US Marines through history ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/32-powerful-pictures-of-the-us-marines-through-history-2015-5
Art Nerd City Guides (art news) ---
http://art-nerd.com/
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
35 books everyone should read at least once in their lifetime
---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-books-to-read-2015-4?op=1#ixzz3YAfxPKGH
Shakespearean Actor Brian Cox Teaches Hamlet’s Soliloquy to a
2-Year-Old Child ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/shakespearean-actor-brian-cox-teaches-hamlets-soliloquy-to-a-2-year-old-child.html
1810 edition of Little Red Riding Hood ---
http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/1810-edition-of-little-red-riding-hood
Listen to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Aloud & Set to
Music (31 Hours, Unabridged) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/listen-to-james-joyces-finnegans-wake-read-aloud-set-to-music-31-hours-unabridged.html
Listen to Playwright August Wilson’s American Century Cycle in
Its Entirety: 10 Free Plays ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/Qmy4CxEqluI/listen-to-playwright-august-wilsons-american-century-cycle-in-its-entirety-10-free-plays.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
The Internet Poetry Archive ---
http://ibiblio.org/ipa/
Beastly Verse: From Lewis Carroll to
William Blake, Beloved Poems About Animals in Vibrant and Unusual Illustrations
---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/22/beastly-verse-joohee-yoon/?mc_cid=3d5725806e&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
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 May 15, 2015
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2015/TidbitsQuotations051515.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
Question
What is the easiest way to create a Website?
Answer from David Pogue
"Adobe Slate: New App for Creating Beautiful Sites Is Almost Too Simple,"
by David A. Pogue, Yahoo Tech, April 23, 2015 ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/adobe-slate-new-app-for-creating-beautiful-sites-117146091149.html
. . .
So it’s eye-popping to see Adobe unveiling apps that
are free and aimed at normal people: students, teachers,
photographers, small business owners, just folks of every kind.
A few months back, Adobe’s first stab in this
direction was a free iPad app called Adobe Voice. It’s a clean, lovely,
incredibly easy-to-use program that lets you make “explainer videos” — a
popular kind of online narrated persuasion videos.
Here’s my review and video demonstration.
Now there’s a second app in this line:
Adobe Slate. Once again, the company has observed
a hot trend in online media and brought amateurs the tools to get onboard.
This time, the trend is parallax-scrolling websites.
Continued in article
Doctoral Studies Fellowships and Assistantships
"The Ph.D. Pay Gap How unequal stipends foster an unequal education," by
Vimal Patel, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 11, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-PhD-Pay-Gap/230041/?cid=at
For Ksenia Krylova, the years she has spent earning
her Ph.D. have been largely worry free, at least when it comes to money.
As a doctoral student at the University of
Houston’s C.T. Bauer College of Business, she receives $33,000 a year in
stipend support. The assistance, which also includes a free laptop while
she’s in the program, has helped her to focus on her coursework and
dissertation. She is set to complete her program in the summer after five
years and has a job offer for a tenure-track position at a university in
Paris.
"We’re provided the environment and the equipment
necessary to go through our program without any burdens," says Ms. Krylova.
Across campus, Tracy Butler doesn’t feel the same.
When she began working toward her Ph.D. in history
in 2010, Ms. Butler received a stipend of roughly $11,000 a year. It forced
her to work as a part-time nanny, which distracted her from her Ph.D.
studies, she says.
"If I didn’t have to work outside," says Ms.
Butler, "I would have had more time to focus on my dissertation and my
comprehensive exams. I probably would have been finished with my Ph.D. by
now."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In accountancy doctoral students in most instances are heavily funded by
accounting alumni professionals and the matching contributions from their
employers. The larger firms also have funding programs such as the KPMG minority
doctoral student funding foundation that gives full-ride funding to minority
doctoral students ---
http://www.phdproject.org/
The article points out that equally-generous funding in medicine and science
come from research grants and other sources, including revenue from medical
practice of the medical schools in university hospitals and clinics. In these
instances the university's general fund also benefits from overhead portions of
grants and profit sharing of the practice of medicine.
It seems to me that virtually all doctoral programs should rely somewhat on fund
raising. Should a successful fund raising department be forced to share the
fruits of this doctoral program fund raising with less-successful fundraising
departments? This becomes very difficult when the external funds are
restricted by donors. Virtually all fellowships funded by accounting firms for
doctoral programs are restricted by donors to go to accounting doctoral
students. The KPMG Foundation does not raise minority fellowships for history
majors.
Similarly, in health sciences I assume that government grants are restricted to
health science programs.
The Era of Coddled Students
"A Plague of Hypersensitivity," by Todd Girlin, Chronicle of Higher
Education's Chronicle Review, May 11, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Plague-of-Hypersensitivity/229963/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Are we living through a plague of hypersensitivity?
Most readers will be aware of campaigns to dampen
hateful speech, to stop "microaggressions," and to get professors to supply
students with "trigger warnings" — verbal trailers or coming attractions —
when anticipating visual and verbal disturbances. It’s as if we need the
equivalent of G, PG, PG-13, R, and X ratings for both texts and talk. Those
who want mandatory warnings believe they are straightforward remedies for a
straightforward problem: Vulnerable people need to be protected from upset.
If the demand for comfort collides with the need for truth, or with the
needs of an atmosphere of intellectual give and take, the truth must be more
prettily wrapped. At my own university, advocates of trigger warnings
counted "roughly 80 instances of assault" in Ovid’s Metamorphoses alone.
Though Metamorphoses is neither a Sadean revelry nor a snuff movie, some
students find it deplorable that they’re required to read the book without a
prior alert.
The counterargument is not hard to make. No one
ever promised that the truth would be comforting. History, Western and
otherwise, is (among other things) a slaughterhouse. The record of
civilization is a record of murder, rape, and sundry other brutalities. As
for the discomfort that may be occasioned by the discovery — even the shock
— of this record, discomfort is the crucible of learning. The world is
disconcerting. The proper way to begin understanding it is to accept the
unwritten contract of university education: I am here to be disturbed.
Excesses of censorial zeal are easy to recognize,
and pseudosolutions that require tiptoeing through minefields are easy to
decry. The more deeply interesting question is: Why are we having this
discussion at all? Deploring is simple, but grasping is hard.
The closer you look, the higher the questions pile
up. Are more students arriving at college already feeling rattled? Is sexual
assault on campus more common than ever, requiring new levels of preventive
intervention? Or is the fear of rape, surely realistic up to a point,
inordinate?
Does a troubling curriculum suggest an abundance of
troubled minds? Is there an epidemic of fragility? Of the fear of fragility?
Or both? (Are they the same thing?) Maybe more traumas — more date rapes,
more racial "microaggressions" — lie in wait for unsuspecting students
nowadays. Does the clamor for the right to be undisturbed emanate from a
particular set of students, or does it reflect a more sweeping incidence of
disturbance? Is there a climate of contagion? Is fragility the new normal?
It is, of course, conceivable that sensitivity in
the face of ugliness is on the upswing even if presumably objective measures
of the ugliness are not. In other words, if we are living through an
epidemic of thin-skinnedness, the problem of explanation is only kicked
backward into the mists of obscure causation. Why should so many skins be so
thin nowadays?
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Entitlements Actuarial Lies
A trillion lie here and a trillion lie there and pretty soon you're talking
about an unsustainable future covered up by lying in politics.
Social Security is Going to Be Insolvent
Before Anybody Thinks.
New studies from Harvard and Dartmouth researchers find that the SSA's actuarial
forecasts have been consistently overstating the financial health of the
program's trust funds since 2000.
"Social Security May Be in Worse Shape
Than We Thought: Study," by Tom Anderson, NBC News, May 12, 2015 ---
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/retirement/social-security-may-be-worse-shape-we-thought-study-n355956
The Social Security Administration projects that
its trust funds will be depleted by 2033—not an optimistic forecast. But it
may be even bleaker than that.
New studies from Harvard and Dartmouth researchers
find that the SSA's actuarial forecasts have been consistently overstating
the financial health of the program's trust funds since 2000.
"These biases are getting bigger and they are
substantial," said Gary King, co-author of the studies and director of
Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. "[Social Security] is
going to be insolvent before everyone thinks."
The Social Security and Medicare Trustees' 2014
report to Congress last year found trust fund reserves for both its combined
retirement and disability programs will grow until 2019. Program costs are
projected to exceed income in 2020 and the trust funds will be depleted by
2033 if Congress doesn't act. Once the trust funds are drained, annual
revenues from payroll tax would be projected to cover only three-quarters of
scheduled Social Security benefits through 2088.
Continued in article
Entitlements ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement
Harvard, Dartmouth: Social
Security forecasts have been too optimistic — and increasingly biased ---
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/09/harvard-dartmouth-social-security-forecasts-have-been-too-optimistic-and-increasingly-biased/
Republicans have
tried a decade ago to reform the Social Security system, warning that the
program would tip over into the red earlier than expected and the trust fund
would entirely dissipate while some current recipients were still alive to
see it.
Democrats led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi claimed the crisis didn’t exist when
George W. Bush proposed limited privatization options, and the 2008
financial-sector crash
put an end to further GOP reform efforts. Studies
from Harvard and Dartmouth this week corroborate Bush’s warnings on Social
Security, and further accuse the SSA of
increasing bias in its analyses in order to
maintain the illusion of a slower decline:
New studies from
Harvard and Dartmouth researchers find that the SSA’s actuarial
forecasts have been consistently overstating the financial health of
the program’s trust funds since 2000.
“These biases are
getting bigger and they are substantial,” said Gary King, co-author
of the studies and director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative
Social Science. “[Social Security] is going to be insolvent before
everyone thinks.” …
Researchers examined
forecasts published in the annual trustees’ reports from 1978, when
the reports began to consistently disclose projected financial
indicators, until 2013. Then, they compared the forecasts the agency
made on such variables as mortality and labor force participation
rates to the actual observed data. Forecasts from trustees reports
from 1978 to 2000 were roughly unbiased, researchers found. In that
time, the administration made overestimates and underestimates, but
the forecast errors appeared to be random in their direction.
“After 2000,
forecast errors became increasingly biased, and in the same
direction. Trustees Reports after 2000 all overestimated the assets
in the program and overestimated solvency of the Trust Funds,” wrote
the researchers, who include Dartmouth professor Samir Soneji and
Harvard doctoral candidate Konstantin Kashin.
How bad is
it? Barron’s notes that the estimates are
off by $1 trillion, maybe more.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
If Tom Brady had cheated like that he'd be expelled for good. There will,
however, be no punishments for the liars who gave false estimates of the
entitlements liabilities of the future. That type of deflation goes unpunished
in Washington DC.
Bob Jensen's threads on the
"Entitlements Crisis" ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Infotopia (search engine for homeschoolers) ---
http://www.infotopia.info/
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE_%28search_engine%29
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is a
multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by
Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on search
technology provided by Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a Norwegian company.
It harvests OAI metadata from scientific digital repositories that implement
the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and
are indexed using FAST's software. In addition to OAI metadata, the library
indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be
searched via a single search interface.
It allows those who use the search engine to search
metadata, when available, as well as conducting full text searches. It
contrasts with commercial search engines in multiple ways, including in the
types and kinds of resources it searches and the information it offers about
the results it finds. Where available, bibliographic data is provided, and
the results may be sorted by multiple fields, such as by author or year of
publication.
Conduct a BASE Search ---
http://www.base-search.net/
For example, conduct a search in "Interest Rate Swaps"
Jensen Comment
This could be useful for searches of international academic literature.
Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
"Microsoft Making Fast Progress with HoloLens," by Rachel Metz, MIT's
Technology Review, May 1, 2015 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537196/microsoft-making-fast-progress-with-hololens/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150506
In just a few months, the Microsoft wearable device
that blends virtual reality with the real world seems to have gotten closer
to becoming a commercial product.
Jensen Comment
Rumors are flying about that Google Glass will be revived by Google. Of course
this is not VR.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Computing History
"This is the first news article ever written about Apple," by Jim
Edwards, Business Insider, May 5, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/first-article-ever-written-about-apple-kilobaud-sheila-clarke-craven-2015-5#ixzz3ZlTTePNs
Numbers...Easy for the Machine ---
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/sgahistory/clips/numbers-easy-for-the-machine
In this clip from Who's Got the Action, a mafia boss
describes his UNIVAC mainframe and how it keeps the records of his gambling
business.
Critical Commons (tutorials on varied topics) ---
http://www.criticalcommons.org/
How to Mislead With Statistics
"How much you have to save every year if you want to put your kids through
college," by Libby Kane, Business Insider, April 27, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-to-save-every-year-for-college-2015-4
Customized cost and savings calculators.
Jensen Comment
I've repeated elsewhere over and over that there are many factors that make the
cost of college education variable and uncertain. For example, the cost of
getting an online degree (even from a high quality university) while living at
home is a whole lot different than paying full tuition, room, and board for an
onsite degree at either a public or private university or college.
Also financial aid is common and very serious for a majority of students. The
tuition cost is now zero in many USA
prestigious (e.g., Ivy League) universities for students from families earning
less than $125,000 per year. In addition, President Obama is now forgiving all
or parts of student loans for a relatively small number of graduates.
The problem when the kids are very young lies in choosing a college savings
plan without knowing what lies ahead in terms of future tuition costs, living
costs, financial aid, etc. Colleges may be funded quite differently 20 years
from now, and we really don't know what kind of deals will be available way out
in the future. For example, it's entirely possible that the most prestigious
universities in the USA will be totally free to all students, albeit a highly
restricted number of students qualifying for admissions. It's entirely possible
that the first two years of college will eventually be free in most
state-supported universities.
Parents and especially grandparents currently contribute a great deal of
financial support from tax-advantages 529 Plans ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverdell_Education_Savings_Account
Who knows if and how long those plans will survive?
These plans are currently clobbered by the Fed's "quantitative easing" (QE)
interest rates that through savers under the bus by paying virtually negligible
interest rates.
Bob Jensen's personal finance helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
How to Mislead With Statistics
The 25 college majors that will lead to the lowest-paying jobs ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/college-majors-that-lead-to-the-lowest-paying-jobs-2015-5#ixzz3ZaIQmfD3
Jensen Comment
Such rankings on "pay" typically are misleading. Firstly, these are medians such
that half the people are earning more in each category and half the people are
learning less in each category. We need to know more about variances and reasons
for those variances --- often the variances are due to variances in living
costs.
Secondly, many of the low paying jobs are in education. But most of those low
paying jobs only entail working eight or less nine per year and can hardly be
compared with jobs that are nearly 12 months per year. Many parents are willing
to sacrifice pay for more opportunity to share time with their own families.
Many others take advantage of opportunities to earn more money in the off season
by writing books, working on organic farms, etc.
Some job categories are too vague to be compared. For example, what does a
job in "music" or "neuroscience" or "drama" entail? Typically music and "drama"
careers are highly variable in terms of time commitment. Performers may average
only a few hours or less per month in actual performance with highly variable
hours in practice and preparation. Music teachers, like other educators, are not
likely to have 12-month job commitments. Drama performers may not be so lucky.
Also majors do not necessarily translate to jobs requiring those majors. For
example about half of the law school graduates are now working in jobs that do
not require law degrees.
Lastly, it does not make much sense to compare "pay" without comparing
benefits. For example, teachers working for school systems typically get fairly
generous benefits in terms of medical insurance for 12 months while working less
than eight months on the job.
Nate Silver Has Egg on His Face (again)
Nate Silver ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver
How to Mislead With Statistics
Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election:
In his pre-election forecast, he gave 278 seats to Conservatives and 267 to
Labour. Shortly after midnight, he was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives
and 271 for Labour. But when the sun rose in London on Friday, Conservatives had
an expected 329 seats, against Labour's 233.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/nate-silver-polls-are-failing-us-206799.html
GIGO ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out
What We Got Wrong In Our 2015 U.K. General Election Model ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/what-we-got-wrong-in-our-2015-uk-general-election-model/
No calculations are necessary to see that we missed
badly in our forecast of the U.K. election.
Our final forecast was for the Conservatives to win
an expected 278 seats (or somewhere in the range of 252-305 seats), Labour
to win 267 (240-293), the Scottish National Party 53 (47-57), and the
Liberal Democrats 27 (21-33). The actual final results are 330 seats for the
Conservatives, 232 for Labour, 56 for the SNP and just eight for the Lib
Dems. Even though we took (or at least tried to take) into account the scale
of historical poll misses in the U.K., our prediction intervals fell short
of including the result for all of these parties except the SNP.
The only thing we can say on our behalf is that in
comparative terms, our forecast was middle of the pack, as no one had a good
pre-election forecast. Of course
the national exit poll, while not as close to the
target as in 2010, was far better than any pre-election forecast.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Although the Nate Silver team this time mostly blames bad polling data, in
previous election failures (such as when Scott Brown soared in late voting
decisions of the public when winning the Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy) to
nonstationarity of voting preferences as the election gets under way.
Accountics scientists similarly assume stationarity in questionable
circumstances. This point was recently driven home very forcefully by former AAA
Presidents Tom Dyckman and Steve Zeff ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsScienceStatisticalMistakes.htm
Goodbye to Philosophy, Engineering Management, and Science Management Low
Demand Programs
Alaska-Fairbanks to Cut Several Academic Programs ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/04/23/alaska-fairbanks-cut-several-academic-programs
Details are at
http://www.newsminer.com/news/local_news/university-of-alaska-fairbanks-announces-program-cuts/article_a2da5062-e946-11e4-8de1-bf06696e789a.html
MacArthur Foundation: What We're Learning (learning, aging, and learning
disorders) ---
http://www.macfound.org/learning/
HASTAC: Blogs (interdisciplinary ideas for higher education and learning)
---
http://www.hastac.org/blogs
Bob Jensen's on education and learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
What is the most commonly misspelled word?
"A Kontest for Speling," by Lucy Ferriss, Chronicle of Higher
Education, May 7, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/05/07/a-kontest-for-speling/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
When I was in college I was told that one of the most commonly misspelled words
was "business." This apparently is no longer such a huge problem. My problem
these days is more one of choice of the wrong word when I know better but get
careless when typing on the fly such as using "to" in place of "too" too
often. Is too much Fonix an old age addiction? Also spell checkers fail to make
corrections for use of the wrong words.
Question
Is this the first multimedia flop?
Hear Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talking Dolls: An Invention That Scared Kids &
Flopped on the Market ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/hear-thomas-edisons-creepy-talking-dolls.html
Under pressure, India's students turn to cheating ---
http://news.yahoo.com/under-pressure-indias-students-turn-cheating-033928469.html
"JFK on Poetry, Power, and the Artist's Role in Society: His Eulogy for
Robert Frost, One of the Greatest Speeches of All Time," by Maria Popova,
Brain Pickings, May 1, 2015 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/01/jfk-amherst-speech/?mc_cid=8eacedb40c&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Bob Jensen's threads (with a photograph of JFK and Jackie) on Robert Frost
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/FrostMuseum/FrostMuseum01.htm
From Econometrics Beat by David Giles ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/04/introductory-statistics-for-data-science.html
The
latest issue of
Chance contains
a
very timely article
by Nicholas Horton, Benjamin
Baumer, and Hadley Wickham.
It's titled, "Setting the
Stage for Data Science:
Integration of Data
Management Skills in
Introductory and Second
Courses in Statistics".
Ask yourself - "Is the
traditional way that we
teach introductory and
second-level statistics
courses really suited for
preparing students for
future work in modern data
science?"
More specifically, do our
undergraduate courses
provide the data-related
skills that are increasingly
needed? The same question
could be asked of
undergraduate training in
econometrics.
Horton et al. itemize five
things which, in their
opinion, deserve more
attention in this context:
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I wonder if we should be asking the same types of questions about the first year
of accounting in this new era of data science.
Has two semesters of Principles of Accounting in higher education changed
much is the last 50 years?
While you're dancing around the Maypole
(or whatever else it is that you get up to), my recommendations are:
-
Claeskens, G., J.
Magnus, A. Vasnev, and W. Wang, 2014. The forecast
combination puzzle: A simple theoretical explanation. Tinbergen
Institute Discussion Paper TI 2014 - 127/III.
-
de Jong, R. M. and M. Sakarya, 2013. The econometrics of the
Hodrick-Prescott filter. Forthcoming in Review of Economics
and Statistics.
-
Honoré, B. E. and L. Hu, 2015. Poor (wo)man’s bootstrap.
Working Paper 2015-01, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
-
King, M. L. and S. Sriananthakumar, 2015. Point optimal
testing: A survey of the post 1987 literature. Working Paper
05/15, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics,
Monash University.
-
Meintanis, S. G. and E. Tsionas, 2015. Approximately
distribution-free diagnostic tests for regressions with survival
data. Statistical Theory and Practice, 9, 479-488.
-
Piironen, J. and A.
Vehtari, 2015. Comparison of Bayesian predictive methods for
model selection. Mimeo.
-
Yu, P., 2015. Consistency of the least squares estimator in
threshold regression with endogeneity. Economics Letters,
131, 41-46.
Report: Harvard Faculty Supports Democrats a Whopping 96% of the Time
---
Click Here
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2015/05/03/harvard-faculty-backs-democrats-96-of-the-time-says-school-paper-n1993834?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Bob Jensen's threads on Liberal Bias Among Higher Education Faculty ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
Population ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population
List of Countries by Population ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population
Malthusian Exponential Growth Model ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_growth_model
Earth Day Special
"The Biggest Threat to the Earth? We Have Too Many Kids," Wired
Science, April 22, 2015 ---
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/biggest-threat-earth-many-kids/
Today
is Earth Day. For 45 years, the secular holiday has brought people—along
with their ideas and enthusiasm—together to confront the world’s
environmental challenges. There will be speeches about sustainability,
discussions about air quality, and pamphlets on how to reduce your carbon
footprint. You might even learn
how to help save some sub-Saharan elephants, but nobody will be addressing
the elephant in the room. That’s the fact that every single environmental
solution is addressing the same, ugly problem: The world has to support a
lot of hungry, thirsty, fertile people.
“No question, the human population is the core of
every single environmental issue that we have,” says Corey Bradshaw, an
ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. There are seven
billion of us and counting. And though people are developing technologies,
regulations, and policies to make humanity less of a strain on the Earth, a
number of environmentalists believe that these fixes will never catch up to
the population as long as it continues to grow. The only way to save the
world is to stop making more (and more, and more, and more) humans.
This is not a new idea—but it has been driven
underground for a time. Built on Malthusian foundations, and bolstered by
books like The Population Bomb, reining in human reproduction was a major
talking point at the first Earth Day, in 1970. The idea almost went
mainstream in America, but extremists advocating for government regulation
of fertility gave it a bad reputation. China’s one-child policy, in 1980,
didn’t help.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Climate change that reduces food and water exacerbates the problem. Aside from
the dire restraints of
Thomas Malthus, our our hope mostly depends upon technology such as low-cost
desalinization of sea water for crop irrigation and newer technologies for
energy such as fusion and hydrogen. There are two outlier scenarios. One is
learning to live like ants piled on top of each other. The other is having a few
tribes learning to live on an earth that is virtually destroyed.
"Chinese Anti-Corruption Campaign Targets M.B.A. Programs," by Laura
Farrar, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 27, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Chinese-Anti-Corruption/229677/?cid=at
A recent decision by the Chinese government to
limit who can enroll in executive M.B.A. courses threatens a lucrative set
of partnerships operated by top American business schools here.
The new rules bar government officials and managers
of state-owned enterprises, known as SOEs, from attending expensive courses
"or other training programs, which seemingly for study, are actually for
networking and making friends." The rules explicitly mention executive
M.B.A. programs.
The ban is part of a sweeping campaign by Xi
Jinping, China’s president, to stamp out corruption and extravagant spending
by government officials. While the anti-graft effort has previously focused
on a handful of Chinese university officials, education experts say the new
ban represents the first time Western university programs have been
affected, if indirectly.
The ban affects only certain American programs, but
the sweep and unexpected nature of the edict show the risks foreign
universities face operating in China, where regulations can change quickly
for unclear reasons.
"The education sector is not immune from all of the
roller-coaster rides of cultural differences and government interventions
and regulatory issues that don’t make sense from a Western perspective,"
says Ira Cohen, executive vice president of Universal Ideas, an education
consulting company in China, and former executive director of Rutgers’s
executive-education programs there.
During the last 10 years or so, there has been an
explosion of executive-education and management programs in China, some run
by business schools of prestigious American universities, including Harvard,
Northwestern, Duke, and the University of Maryland. The schools have been
trying to take advantage of a huge market where an affiliation with a
top-notch global university is highly coveted.
So far, China’s own programs have been hit the
hardest by the rule;
The Wall Street Journal reports that
enrollment is down 15 to 30 percent for programs at some of China’s top
business schools.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Daft on graft," The Economist, May 8, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21650547-hard-line-commercial-bribery-right-system-becoming-ridiculous-daft-graft
A hard line on commercial bribery is right. But the
system is becoming ridiculous.
IN 2008 Siemens, a German conglomerate, was
fingered for handing out bribes in emerging markets. It has since spent a
staggering $3 billion on fines and internal investigations to atone for its
sins. Half of that has gone to advisers of one sort or another. Walmart, an
American retailer, will soon have spent $800m on fees and compliance
stemming from a bribery investigation in Mexico. The most complex bribery
probes used to take three years. Now they last an average of seven.
In recent years lots of big economies, from Britain
to Brazil, have followed America’s lead in tightening anti-bribery
enforcement (see article). Offences that once drew a slap on the wrist now
attract fines in the hundreds of millions of dollars as well as prison terms
for palm-greasing managers. It is right that bribery should be punished. The
economic effects of graft are insidious. Bribery distorts competition and
diverts national resources into crooked officials’ offshore accounts. But
the cost and complexity of investigations are spiralling beyond what is
reasonable, fed by a ravenous “compliance industry” of lawyers and forensic
accountants who have never seen a local bribery issue that did not call for
an exhaustive global review; and by competing prosecutors, who increasingly
run overlapping probes in different countries. In this section
The dawn of artificial intelligence Jokowi’s to-do
list Fixing America’s inner cities The fintech revolution Daft on graft
To stop a descent into investigative madness,
enforcement needs to be reformed in four ways. First, regulators should rein
in the excesses of the compliance industry and take into account the cost to
firms of sprawling investigations. When firms admit to having uncovered
bribery among their managers, regulators expect them to investigate
themselves. The authorities should tell them what level of investigation
they want so that companies are not overzealous out of fear of seeming
evasive. This is slowly starting to happen, with officials telling firms
they should not. “aimlessly boil the ocean”.
. . .
As corrosive as bribery is, the response must be
proportionate. Investigations that drag on are a waste of management and
public resources. The starting-point for up to half of all cases is a firm’s
voluntary disclosure, but if costs continue to rise then firms may be more
tempted to bury their bad news. Anti-corruption campaigners would have
nothing to cheer if the cure ended up being more harmful than the disease.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Former Homes of Whites Became Affordable to Blacks
"A silver lining to white flight? White suburbanization and African–American
homeownership, 1940–1980," by Leah P. Boustan and Robert A Margo,
Abstract
Between 1940 and 1980, the homeownership rate among metropolitan
African–American households increased by 27 percentage points.
Nearly three-quarters of this increase occurred in central cities.
We show that rising black homeownership in central cities was
facilitated by the movement of white households to the suburban
ring, which reduced the price of urban housing units conducive to
owner-occupancy. Our OLS and IV estimates imply that 26 percent of
the national increase in black homeownership over the period is
explained by white suburbanization.
Jensen Comment
This is silver lining is tarnished, however, if property taxes supporting school
districts and other community services are greatly reduced due to declines in
home values. Another worry is that more affluent minorities also fled, thereby,
adding to declines in the highly motivated minority (e.g., Asian) students
in the school systems. Still another worry is that many of the best teachers
will also leave the schools.
Actually many central cities like NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco recovered a
great deal in value since the 1980s, but the residents moving back are more
often than not childless such that many problems with declining public schools
remain in spite of recoveries of property taxes. For example, few minorities
with children can afford to move back into the recovered San Francisco or
Manhattan due to soaring housing ownership and rental prices.
For the Week Ending April 25, 2015
Seven Must Read Stories Chosen by MIT's Technology Review ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/536926/seven-must-read-stories-week-ending-april-25-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150424
"A Major Trial Lawyer Defeat: The ‘innovator liability’ theory goes
down in Alabama," The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-major-trial-lawyer-defeat-1430350050?tesla=y
Kudos to Alabama, which this week shot down a
dangerous theory of “innovator liability” that would have let companies be
sued over products they didn’t make. On Tuesday the state House voted 86-14
to prevent this latest threat to the American economy.
In January 2013, the Alabama supreme court had a
senior moment when it said plaintiff Danny Weeks (Wyeth v. Weeks) could sue
Wyeth (since bought by Pfizer ) over side effects from the acid-reflux drug
Reglan. Mr. Weeks never took Reglan, opting for the generic version,
metoclopramide. Wyeth had sold the rights to Reglan long before Mr. Weeks
used the generic medication between 2007 and 2009.
Product liability claims typically require evidence
that the company being sued designed, made or sold the product alleged to
have done harm. In this case the lawyers tried an end-run by arguing it as a
fraud case. On rehearing in August 2014, the Alabama court again bought the
snake oil, 6-3, finding liability because the brand-name manufacturer
controlled the warning label that doctors and patients say they rely on.
That decision broke with more than 100 courts in 30 states and seven federal
courts of appeal that have rejected theories of innovator liability.
Continued in article
Down in the USA, but Up in Brazil
"Changes for DeVry University," Inside Higher Ed, April 24,
2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/04/24/changes-devry-university
DeVry Education Group, a major publicly traded
for-profit, on Thursday announced consolidations and a rebranding for its
DeVry University. The company announced that it would close 14 campus
locations, converting academic programs at those locations to online-only
offerings.
Like most for-profits, DeVry's flagship brand has
struggled with sagging enrollments and revenue. This quarter it reported
declines of almost 16 percent in revenue and 15 percent in total
undergraduate enrollment. However, the broader holding company has fared
better of late -- its overall enrollment is up 18 percent. In Brazil, for
example, DeVry enrolls roughly 40,000 degree-seeking students, company
officials said.
Continued in article
From the CPA Newsletter on April 25, 2015
Rethinking the 4% rule
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102605878
Financial
advisers once told retirees that they could use 4% of their savings a year.
But lower interest rates have affected investment returns, and life
expectancy is climbing. "Retirement readiness is too complex to be codified
by a simple rule of thumb," a recent PwC study found.
CNBC
(4/22)
From the CPA Newsletter on April 25, 2015
The high cost of using credit cards
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/against-credit-cards/390846/
Research has
found that people are willing to spend up to double amount for the same item
when using a credit card as opposed to cash. Credit card debt climbed 1,500%
per capita from 1980 to 2010.
The Atlantic online
(4/23
From the CPA Newsletter on April 25, 2015
IRS commissioner responds to report about customer service
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/04/22/gop-report-irs-budget-move-plagued-tax-filing-season/
The Internal
Revenue Service diverted $134 million away from its customer-service
activities this year, causing trouble for taxpayers, according to a report
by House Republicans. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said the cutbacks were
necessary to pay for other activities at the agency, which had its funding
reduced by $346 million this year.
The Wall Street Journal (tiered subscription model)/Washington Wire
(4/22)
From the CPA Newsletter on April 25, 2015
Seeking a solution to the IRS service problem
http://blog.aicpa.org/2015/04/help-us-improve-the-service-in-the-internal-revenue-service-.html#sthash.D6PQsg1C.68jmeAMM.dpbs
Long hold times,
delayed responses and other frustrations with the IRS have mounted as a
result of declining resources. The AICPA is asking members to weigh in to
bolster advocacy efforts to address the problem.
AICPA Insights
(4/23)
From the CPA Newsletter on April 25, 2015
Diversity is truly about seeing everyone’s uniqueness as a beautiful gift to be
nurtured and developed, not changed to conform to some arbitrary standard.
---
Mary-Frances Winters, president and
founder of The Winters Group
Jensen Comment
This is a big deal in so far as it's an MBA degree from one of the top MBA
programs in the USA and "might" eventually have no admission standards and
no limit on the number of students who can enroll worldwide. Although non-credit
MOOCs are generally open to all and free, this diploma-granting MBA program is
not free.
I hesitate to call this a for-credit MOOC since it is not truly open-sourced
to the masses for diplomas/badges. It is an open source MOOC for non-credit.
One question that remains in my mind is whether the transcript of graduating
students will distinguish between onsite graduates versus unline MOOC graduates
who complete the full online MBA program.
There will be endless debates among faculty about competency-based academic
standards versus academic standards that add some additional criteria to grades
such as class participation (online or site) and case method courses that are
popular in nearly all MBA programs, particularly business policy capstone
courses.
"U. of Illinois to Offer a Lower-Cost M.B.A., Thanks to MOOC," by
Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 4, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Illinois-to-Offer-a-Lower-Cost/229921/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
. . .
The program is the latest in a string of
high-profile experiments in using free MOOCs as part of cut-rate degree
programs. Just last month Arizona State University announced a MOOC-based
equivalent of the first year of a bachelor’s degree for about $6,000. And
Illinois modeled its program on a $7,000 computer-science master’s degree
offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology in partnership with Udacity,
another MOOC provider.
One unusual aspect of the Illinois plan is that
students would be able to earn smaller certifications each time they
finished three courses, an idea leaders call "stackable credentials." In
that way, if students stopped early, they might still have a lighter-weight
credential to show potential employers.
"Unlike a degree, which is this binary, zero-one
thing, students are getting benefit at every step along the way," said
Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera.
Students taking one-off courses would not be
eligible for federal financial aid, though, unless they were officially
enrolled in the degree program, because of a quirk of federal student-aid
rules. Essentially the rules do not allow students to receive aid for prior
knowledge, so courses taken before officially enrolling would not be
eligible.
The program is starting small — only 200 students
will be admitted in its pilot phase.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The ultimate test will be the reaction of potential employers to this and other
for-credit MOOC programs. My guess is that there will be no distinction between
high gpa achievers. It would be entirely self-defeating if Coursera allows the
online credits to have lower academic standards. My hunch is that A grades will
be very tough to achieve in this online degree/badge program.
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs and other open-sourced learning materials
available from prestigious universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Arizona State's Freshman Year MOOCs Open to All With Final Examinations for
Inexpensive Credits
"Arizona State and edX Will Offer an Online Freshman Year, Open to All,"
by Charles Huckabee, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 24, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/arizona-state-and-edx-will-offer-an-online-freshman-year-open-to-all/97685?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Arizona State University is joining with the MOOC
provider edX in a project that it says “reimagines the freshman year” and
opens a new low-cost, low-risk path to a college degree for students
anywhere in the world.
The project, called the
Global Freshman Academy,
will offer a set of eight courses designed to fulfill
the general-education requirements of a freshman year at Arizona State at a
fraction of the cost students typically pay, and students can begin taking
courses without going through the traditional application process, the
university said in a news release on Wednesday. Because the classes are
offered as
massive open online courses, or
MOOCs, there is no limit on how many students can
enroll.
. . .
The courses to be offered through the Global
Freshman Academy are being designed and will be taught by leading scholars
at Arizona State. “These courses are developed to their rigorous standards,”
Adrian Sannier, chief academic officer for
EdPlus at ASU,
said in the release. “Course faculty are committed to ensuring their
students understand college-level material so that they can be prepared to
successfully complete college.”
Students who pass a final examination in a course
will have the option of paying a fee of no more than $200 per credit hour to
get college credit for it.
Mr. Agarwal and Mr. Crow are scheduled to formally
announce the project at a conference in Washington on Thursday.
Jensen Comments and Questions
The real test is how well these credits are accepted by other universities for
transfer credit. It probably will not be an issue for graduate school admission
since there are three more years of more traditional onsite or online credits.
But it could be a huge issue for example when a student takes the first year of
ASU MOOC credits and then tries to have these credits accepted by other
universities (such as TCU) that still resist accepting any online courses for
transfer credit.
Question
What are the main differences between MOOC online credits and traditional online
credits such as those documented at the following site?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm
For example, at many universities these days there are multiple sections of a
course where some sections are onsite and some are online. Often they are taught
by the same instructor. The online sections are usually as small or even smaller
than the onsite sections because online instructors often have more student
interactions such as in instant messaging not available to onsite students ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging
Answer
These are the following obvious differences between MOOC online credits and
traditional online credits.
- The huge difference between the ASU MOOC year of courses and the
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School MOOC year of courses is that the
Wharton School MOOC courses are not
available for credit (and therefore are free). The ASU MOOC courses are
available for credits that will not be totally free, although they will be
available at greatly discounted prices.
- MOOC courses are open to everybody in the world and have no admission
standards.
- These are not intended to be equivalent to advanced placement (AP)
credits where students eventually fill in course requirements with
other more advanced courses. The ASU MOOC courses have no requirements to
earn substitute credits. Universities do vary with respect to substitution
requirements for AP credit, and many do not require taking added replacement
courses ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement
I suspect that at some universities the ASU MOOCs will be similar to AP
credits except that the competency-examination process is different.
- MOOC courses generally have no limits to class size.
- MOOC courses do not have prerequisites such as a MOOC calculus course or
linear algebra that has no prerequisites.
- MOOC courses are generally very large such that student interactions
online with instructors and/or other students are virtually non-existent.
- MOOC courses generally do not have graded writing assignments such as
term papers.
- MOOC courses do not have graded homework.
- MOOC courses do not have graded team projects, whereas team projects are
common in smaller traditional online courses.
- MOOC courses generally do not have class attendance requirements or
class participation requirements even though they generally do have
classes. The first MOOC course ever offered was an artificial intelligence
course at Stanford University where students enrolled in the course on
campus has the option of not attending class. Some faculty feel like some
course courses should have required course attendance and course
participation.
The bottom line is that it appears that the ASU freshman year MOOC course
credits will be little more than competency-based
credits. This will be controversial since many faculty in higher
education feel like credits in general education core courses should
entail class participation, including first-year core courses. For example, at
Trinity University there is a first-year seminar that all new students take in
very small classes that require a lot of class participation in discussions of
assigned readings and the writing of term papers. I think some sections of this
seminar don't even have examinations. I did not have examinations when I taught
a section of this seminar for two years.
In traditional large lectures courses on campus students typically are broken
out into accompanying recitation sections intended for class participation and
interactions with a recitation instructor.
Jensen Note
I never anticipated competency-based credits in the first-year of college. I
think these will be wildly popular in advanced-level training courses such as a
CPA examination review course in the final (fifth) year of an accounting
program. Using competency-based courses for first-year general education courses
is more controversial.
After I made a comment following this article at the Chronicle's Website,
somebody else (from Colorado) made the following comment:
Inside HigherEd has an article on this subject that
reports ASU does not intend to indicate if a course was taken via MOOC on
the transcript. Other institutions will have no way of knowing the delivery
modality, and although ASU offers assurances that the courses will be the
same, they haven't figured out how they will assess learning outcomes in the
MOOC courses.
One worry for ASU is that its accrediting body has not yet reviewed this
proposal ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/14cea9c0236a6a75
This is a very good article on the major issues of competency-based
assessment of learning
"Performance-Based Assessment," by Steven Mintz, Inside Higher
Ed, April 29, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-beta/performance-based-assessment
. . .
In contrast, classroom discussions, debates, and
case studies tend to emphasize analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Students
are typically asked to offer a critique or assessment, identify bias,
present a judgment, or advance a novel interpretation.
Performance-based assessment offers a valuable
alternative (or supplement) to the standard forms of student
evaluation. Performance-based assessment requires students to solve a
real-world problem or to create perform, or produce something with
real-world application. It allows an instructor to assess how well students
are able to use essential skills and knowledge, think critically and
analytically, or develop a project. It also offers a measure of the depth
and breadth of a student’s proficiencies.
Performance-based assessment can, in certain
instances, simply be an example of what Bloom’s Taxonomy calls
application. Thus, a student or a team might be asked to apply knowledge and
skills to a particular task or problem.
But performance-based assessment can move beyond
Bloom’s Taxonomy when students are engaged in a project that requires them
to display creativity and that results in an outcome, project, or
performance that is genuinely new. The more sophisticated performance
assessments involve research, planning, design, development, implementation,
presentation, and, in the case of team-based projects, collaboration.
If performance-based assessments are to be fair,
valid, and reliable, it is essential that there is an explicit rubric that
lays out the criteria for evaluation in advance. It is also helpful to ask
students to keep a log or journal to document the project’s development and
record their reflections on the developmental process.
The most commonly used assessments – the midterm
and final or the term paper – have an unpleasant consequence. Reliance on a
small number of high stakes assessments encourages too many students to
coast through the semester and to pull all-nighters when their grade is on
the line. This may inadvertently encourage a party culture.
In stark contrast, performance-based assessment
offers a way to ensure that evaluation is truly a learning experience, one
that engages students and that measures the full range of their knowledge
and proficiencies.
Steven Mintz is Executive Director of the University of Texas System's
Institute for Transformational Learning and Professor of History at the
University of Texas at Austin. Harvard University Press will publish his
latest book, The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood, next
month.
Bob Jensen's threads on competency-based credits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge
Vintage Wine in our Collection of 1100 Free Online Courses ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/vintage-wine-in-our-collection-of-1100-free-online-courses.html
Rummage through our collection of
1100 Free Online Courses, and you’ll find many
recently-recorded courses from great universities, covering topics like “How
Hannibal Crossed the Alps,” “Existentialism in Literature & Film,” and
“Introduction to Computer Coding.” But you’ll also find on our list of
Free Online Courses
some vintage lectures recorded during generations past.
Take for example
Walter Kaufmann’s Classic Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960),
which sit nicely alongside Michel Foucault’s UC Berkeley Lectures
on Truth, Discourse & The Self (circa 1980). Or
perhaps even Leo
Strauss’ numerous political philosophy courses recorded
at
The University of Chicago between 1959 and 1973.
You can also dig into “Quantum
Physics Made Relatively Simple,” a Mini Course
from Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist
Hans Bethe. Endearingly, Bethe presented the
course at a retirement home in 1999 when he, himself, was pretty long in the
tooth.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of more current MOOCs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Take this test to see if you can answer history questions that stumped
America's 8th graders ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/quiz-are-you-smarter-than-an-8th-grader-2015-4#ixzz3YnX7Fw00
New Results Show Eighth-Graders' Knowledge of U.S. History, Geography, and
Civics ---
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/04/student_achievement_in_us_hist.html
I recommend that you read the comments following the article.
"What the Dalai Lama Taught Daniel Goleman About Emotional Intelligence,"
by Andrea Ovans, Harvard Business Review Blog, May 4, 2015 ---
Click Here
https://hbr.org/2015/05/what-the-dalai-lama-taught-daniel-goleman-about-emotional-intelligence?utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date&cm_lm=rjensen%40trinity.edu&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&referral=00563&cm_ven=Spop-Email&cm_ite=DailyAlert-050515+%281%29
This Is the Worst Retirement Solution Ever ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-21/this-is-the-worst-retirement-solution-ever?cmpid=BBD042115
Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
Political Correctness ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
Slavoj Žižek Calls Political
Correctness a Form of “Modern Totalitarianism” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/slavoj-zizek-calls-political-correctness-a-form-of-modern-totalitarianism.html
Bob Jensen's threads on political
correctness ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
April 23, 2015 message from Joe Hoyle
Greetings!!!
Hope you are having a great semester. I recently added my 209th
posting to my teaching blog (Joe Hoyle: Teaching - Getting the Most from
Your Students). It is entitled “Fourteen Characteristics of Great
Teaching” and can be found at:
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2015/04/fourteen-characteristics-of-great.html
I hope you will take a moment to read over my list and decide whether you
agree or disagree with the characteristics that I selected.
The weather in Richmond today is absolutely wonderful and I hope it is the
same where you are.
Teach great -- make a difference.
Joe Hoyle
Robins School of Business
University of Richmond
April 23, 2015 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Joe,
I tend to agree with most of your points, although
your first point that great teachers are "ambitious" is too vague and can be
taken in widely different contexts. Most of the teachers I know that became
exceptional in giving one-on-one time to undergraduate and masters students
virtually gave up attempts to conduct research and publish new knowledge.
Time and time again these great teachers either
used teaching as a reason or an excuse to no longer do research. Some were
promising researchers at least until they became tenured. Others struggled
to get tenure. One of those who struggled to get tenure was the terrific
intermediate accounting teacher at Florida State named Alice Nichols who
spend 40+ hours with students in her office each week. However, it took a
special edict from the President of FSU to get her tenured quite late in the
game.
My point is that you could say Alice was
"ambitious," but certainly not ambitious in the usual sense of being
ambitious for her own resume or salary. She was independently wealthy such
that salary did not matter in her case. I can name other tremendous
teachers, particularly in basic accounting, that were like Alice.
There also was a terrific intermediate accounting
teacher at the University of Florida and later the University of Georgia who
had a great start as a researcher but shifted all attention to students
after earning tenure.
There are of course some very ambitious researchers
who are also terrific teachers. It's not hard to find role models here, many
of which are already in the Accounting Hall of Fame --- http://fisher.osu.edu/departments/accounting-and-mis/the-accounting-hall-of-fame
There are also some I will not name in the
Accounting Hall of Fame that had or still have lousy teaching reputations.
Thanks,
Bob
Benford's Law ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
"I've Got Your Number How a mathematical phenomenon can help CPAs uncover fraud and other irregularities,"
Journal of Accountancy, May 1999, ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/Issues/1999/May/nigrini.htm
"How Benford's Law Reveals Suspicious Activity on Twitter," MIT's
Technology Review, April 21, 2015 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/536906/how-benfords-law-reveals-suspicious-activity-on-twitter/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150422
Say What?
John Deere (and GM) Says You Don't Really Own Any Vehicles Bought From Them,
You Only Have "An Implied License for the Life of the Vehicle to Operate the
Vehicle --- Click
Here
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/nicksorrentino/2015/04/22/john-deere-and-gm-says-you-dont-really-own-any-vehicles-bought-from-them-you-only-have-an-implied-license-for-the-life-of-the-vehicle-to-operate-the-vehicle-n1988534?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
Jensen Comment
Some of these allegations may have to be resolved by the courts.
Just what is "ownership?"
From the Scout Report on April 24, 2015
Ello ---
https://ello.co/beta-public-profiles
Most social networking sites are built and
sustained by selling their users' personal information to advertisers. In
addition, Facebook and other platforms provide nearly as much space to
flashy ads as they do to the work of helping people connect to their friends
and family. Ello, which was created by designer and entrepreneur Paul
Budnitz and was released in August 2014, seeks to be the antithesis of all
that. The social media site does not sell its users' info or host ads. While
one wonders how the company will ever make money, the resulting production
is refreshingly simple and unflashy, with an artsy emphasis on beauty over
profit. Sign up takes only minutes and the only requirement is a working
email address.
Frame.io ---
http://frame.io/
For anyone working with teams of people on
multimedia projects, Frame.io provides a way to co-create and co-edit video,
photos, audio, documents, and other modalities all in one place. Recently
launched, Frame.io operates on the premise that more and more people are
working with more complex media programs but are forced to use different
platforms for different parts of the same project. So, for example, teams
use Vimeo for their video, email for communication, and Dropbox to share
files. Frame.io wraps all of the functionalities of those various services
into a single well-designed platform. It's fast too - 5x faster than Dropbox.
So when users are uploading and sharing large files, there's less lag, which
leads to greater productivity. The company offers 2GB of free file storage
on a single project that can include up to five collaborators. For larger
projects, the paid tiers start at $15 per month.
Is it Time to Put a Woman on the $20 Bill?
Lawmakers Push Bills Campaign to Put a Woman on the Twenty
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lawmakers-get-behind-campaign-put-woman-twenty-n345851
Congressman Proposes Putting a Woman's Face on the $20 Bill
http://time.com/3830613/congressman-illinois-woman-american-currency/
Should a woman replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill?
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-woman-20-bill-html-20150417-htmlstory.html
US Senator Says It's Time to Put a Woman on the $20 Bill
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/us-senator-time-put-woman-20-bill-30388939
Behind the Viral Campaign to Put a Woman on the $20 Bill
http://www.nationaljournal.com/domesticpolicy/behind-the-viral-campaign-to-put-a-woman-on-the-20-bill-20150327
Women On 20s
http://www.womenon20s.org/
From the Scout Report on May 1, 2015
Scalar ---
http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/
For many users, Scalar is the next step in digital,
online, open source writing. It combines the functionality of a blog with
the focus and length of an e-book. It also enables authors - even relatively
un-techy authors - to assemble videos, infographics, music, and other media
from around the web, easily, conveniently, and seamlessly. While the service
seeks to strike a balance between standardization and flexibility, most
beginners will find the templates and platforms easy to approach (more
experienced developers may wish to move on to truly open source sites where
they can design to their hearts' content). To understand what Scalar is
capable of, readers might like to scroll through the featured projects on
the homepage. In addition, selecting Learn More navigates to a four-minute
video that explains the intricacies of the platform. Registering an account
with Scalar is simple; all that is required is an email address. So, for
readers who are looking for fresh ways to publish web-based content, Scalar
is definitely worth checking out.
U.N. Ranks Happiest Countries
This Country Is the Happiest in the World
http://www.livescience.com/50622-happiest-countries-report.html
These Are the Happiest Countries in the World
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/these-are-the-happiest-countries-in-the-world
Get Happy in the world’s happiest countries
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/23/travel/feat-world-happiest-countries-2015/
The Path to Happiness: Lessons From the 2015 World Happiness Report
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/the-path-to-happiness-les_b_7127124.html
Money really does buy happiness, in one map
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/27/8503237/happiest-countries-happiness-map
World Happiness Report 2015
http://worldhappiness.report/
From the Scout Report on May 8, 2015
metaflop ---
http://www.metaflop.com
Created by Swiss designers Marco Muller and Alexis
Reigel, Metaflop is an online tool that allows users to create their own
fonts. While this may sound daunting, the platform makes the process easy
and fun, allowing readers to familiarize themselves with typeface terms like
"ascenders," "cap heights," "overshoot," "descenders," and "contrasts" in a
playful, low-pressure environment. One easy way to begin is to select "metafonts,"
which draws up a list of preexisting letter designs. Selecting any of these
navigates to the "modulator." From there, readers may play at will,
adjusting unit width, pen width, glyph angle, and other variables. The
program is approachable - and the best way to learn is to simply jump in and
start making changes! Once you're happy with your results, you can download
your webfont for embedding on your website or as an opentype postscript font
(.oft) that can be used in applications supporting otf.
DownThemAll ---
http://www.downthemall.net/
For readers who download movies, audio files, large
PDFs, and other big files, one of the frustrations of the Internet
experience can be waiting around while a browser figures out what to do with
the abundance of information. This powerful, easy-to-use Mozilla Firefox
extension takes care of that problem, allowing users to download multiple
media all at once - and fast. As a download manager, it gives users the
power to pick and choose what content from a page they would like
(including, if desired, everything). As a download accelerator it can make
the process up to 400 percent faster. This add-on is free and works with
Windows, Linux, and Mac, however, users must have already installed Firefox
to use
Tesla Unveils New Lithium-Ion Battery to Power Homes
Tesla unveils batteries to power homes
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32545081
Will Tesla's battery change the energy market?
http://www.nature.com/news/will-tesla-s-battery-change-the-energy-market-1.17469
Tesla Battery Economics: On the Path to Disruption
http://gizmodo.com/tesla-battery-economics-on-the-path-to-disruption-1701854536
Tesla's New Battery Will Make Lithium Ion the Next AA
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/tesla-powerwall-will-make-batteries-commodities/
Who Is Tesla's Home Battery For?
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/who-is-teslas-home-battery-for/
What backing up your home with Tesla's battery might be like
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/05/01/what-backing-up-your-home-with-teslas-battery-might-be-like/
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education and Learning Tutorials
Reuters: Technology News ---
http://www.reuters.com/news/technology
Art Nerd City Guides (art news) ---
http://art-nerd.com/
Critical Commons (tutorials on varied topics) ---
http://www.criticalcommons.org/
NPR Ed: How Learning Happens ---
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed
The Space Place ---
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/
Digital Commonwealth: Academy Publications - Phillips Academy Andover ---
https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/collections/commonwealth-oai:n009wb01q
Multimedia Studios: The Physics Classroom ---
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia
MacArthur Foundation: What We're Learning (learning, aging, and learning
disorders) ---
http://www.macfound.org/learning/
HASTAC: Blogs (interdisciplinary ideas for higher education and learning) ---
http://www.hastac.org/blogs
AACC: 21st Century Center (community college helpers, including practice
examinations) ---
http://www.aacc21stcenturycenter.org/
For example search on the term "accounting"
SparkNotes: Math Study Guides ---
http://www.sparknotes.com/math/
Women in Science ---
http://www.womeninscience.org/
PBS: SciGirls ---
http://pbskids.org/scigirls/
Bagheera (endangered species) ---
http://www.bagheera.com
The Untold History of Women in Science and Technology ---
http://www.whitehouse.gov/women-in-stem
John Green’s Crash Course in U.S. History: From Colonialism to Obama in 47
Videos ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/crash-course-u-s-history.html
Zinn Education Project (progressive American history) ---
http://zinnedproject.org/
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
Multimedia Studios: The Physics Classroom ---
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia
Arkive: Birds ---
http://www.arkive.org/explore/species/birds
Bagheera (endangered species) ---
http://www.bagheera.com
Entomology and Nematology: Featured Creatures ---
http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/
The Space Place ---
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/
European Space Agency: Planck ---
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Planck
2014: The Year in Science ---
http://www.nature.com/news/2014-1.16547
Faultline: Earthquake History and Science | Exploratorium ---
http://www.exploratorium.edu/faultline/
National Geographic: The Ocean ---
http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/
Women in Science ---
http://www.womeninscience.org/
PBS: SciGirls ---
http://pbskids.org/scigirls/
The Untold History of Women in Science and Technology ---
http://www.whitehouse.gov/women-in-stem
"Advantage Women,," by Colleen Flaherty," National Academy of
Sciences via Inside Higher Ed, April 14, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/14/study-suggests-stem-faculty-hiring-favors-women-over-men
The Magazine Nature
Nature Outlook: Cancer ---
http://www.nature.com/nature/outlook/cancer/
TED Talks: Mental health for all by involving all ---
http://www.ted.com/talks/vikram_patel_mental_health_for_all_by_involving_all?language=en
World Meteorological Organization: Weather ---
https://www.wmo.int/pages/themes/weather/index_en.html
Nature's Fury: The Science of Natural Disasters ---
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/nature-s-fury-the-science-of-natural-disasters
Reuters: Technology News ---
http://www.reuters.com/news/technology
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
On Being with Krista Tippett (society and social relationship futures) ---
http://onbeing.org/
The Atlantic: Health: Family ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/category/family/
MIT Center for Civic Media ---
https://civic.mit.edu/
It’s Our Environment: EPA’s Blog About Our World ---
http://blog.epa.gov/blog/
Brookings Institution YouTube ---
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi7jxgIOxcRaF4Q54U7lF3g
The Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 ---
http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/breadandroses
The Magazine Nature
Nature Outlook: Cancer ---
http://www.nature.com/nature/outlook/cancer/
TED Talks: Mental health for all by involving all ---
http://www.ted.com/talks/vikram_patel_mental_health_for_all_by_involving_all?language=en
MacArthur Foundation: What We're Learning (learning, aging, and
learning disorders) ---
http://www.macfound.org/learning/
Women in Science ---
http://www.womeninscience.org/
PBS: SciGirls ---
http://pbskids.org/scigirls/
The Untold History of Women in Science and Technology ---
http://www.whitehouse.gov/women-in-stem
"Advantage Women,," by Colleen Flaherty," National Academy of
Sciences via Inside Higher Ed, April 14, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/14/study-suggests-stem-faculty-hiring-favors-women-over-men
U.S. Supreme Court Media ---
http://www.oyez.org/
Urban Land: The Magazine of the Urban Land Institute ---
http://urbanland.uli.org/
Urbanology: BMW Guggenheim Lab (study of people living in cities) ---
http://www.bmwguggenheimlab.org/urbanology-online
Wine and Food Society of Baltimore - Enoch Pratt Free Library ---
http://collections.digitalmaryland.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/scwf
Discover the Oldest Beer Recipe in History Dating Back to 1800 BC, and
Then Maybe Brew Your Own Batch ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-oldest-beer-recipe-in-history.html
Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts ---
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cookbooks/
Critical Commons (tutorials on varied topics) ---
http://www.criticalcommons.org/
Digital Commonwealth: Academy Publications - Phillips Academy Andover ---
https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/collections/commonwealth-oai:n009wb01q
Reuters: Technology News ---
http://www.reuters.com/news/technology
From the Scout Report on May 1, 2015
U.N. Ranks Happiest Countries
This Country Is the Happiest in the World
http://www.livescience.com/50622-happiest-countries-report.html
These Are the Happiest Countries in the World
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/these-are-the-happiest-countries-in-the-world
Get Happy in the world’s happiest countries
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/23/travel/feat-world-happiest-countries-2015/
The Path to Happiness: Lessons From the 2015 World Happiness Report
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/the-path-to-happiness-les_b_7127124.html
Money really does buy happiness, in one map
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/27/8503237/happiest-countries-happiness-map
World Happiness Report 2015
http://worldhappiness.report/
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
U.S. Supreme Court Media ---
http://www.oyez.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Math Tutorials
SparkNotes: Math Study Guides ---
http://www.sparknotes.com/math/
NRICH: enriching mathematics ---
http://nrich.maths.org
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
History Tutorials
Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter Alan Turing Wrote in “Distress” Before
His Conviction For “Gross Indecency” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/benedict-cumberbatch-reads-a-letter-by-alan-turing.html
Jensen Comment
The Imitation Game is my favorite movie of all time ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game
How to Live a Good Life? Watch Philosophy Animations Narrated by Stephen Fry
on Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Max Weber & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/how-to-live-a-good-life-philosophy-animations-narrated-by-stephen-fry.html
History Channel: Ask History ---
http://www.history.com/news/ask-history
The Internet Poetry Archive ---
http://ibiblio.org/ipa/
John Green’s Crash Course in U.S. History: From Colonialism to Obama in 47
Videos ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/crash-course-u-s-history.html
Harvard Art Museums ---
http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/
Latah County Oral History Collection (Idaho) ---
http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/digital/lcoh/
See the First Known Photograph Ever Taken (1826) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/see-the-first-known-photograph-ever-taken-1826.html
Watch a Timelapse Video Showing the Creation of New York
City’s Skyline: 1500 to Present ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/timelapse-video-showing-the-creation-new-york-citys-skyline.html
Hōshi: A Short Film on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same (Japanese)
Family for 46 Generations ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/hoshi-a-short-film-on-the-1300-year-old-hotel-run-by-the-same-family-for-46-generations.html
The Oldest Known Footage of London (1890-1920) Shows the City’s Great
Landmarks ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/the-oldest-known-footage-of-london.html
Zinn Education Project (progressive American history) ---
http://zinnedproject.org/
The Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 ---
http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/breadandroses
1810 edition of Little Red Riding Hood ---
http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/1810-edition-of-little-red-riding-hood
Van Gogh Museum ---
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en
Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night ---
http://moma.org/exhibitions/2008/vangoghnight/
Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters ---
http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/
The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 358 Filmmakers ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/the-10-greatest-films-of-all-time-according-to-358-filmmakers.html
Australia’s National Portrait Gallery ---
http://www.portrait.gov.au/index.php
Simon Schama Presents Van Gogh and the Beginning of Modern Art ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/simon_schama_presents_vincent_van_gogh_and_the_beginning_of_modern_art.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise (art history) ---
http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/gauguin/
Fashion in Time ---
http://www.fashionintime.org/
Listen to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Aloud & Set to Music (31 Hours,
Unabridged) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/listen-to-james-joyces-finnegans-wake-read-aloud-set-to-music-31-hours-unabridged.html
Gauguin: Metamorphoses (art history) ---
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/gauguin/
Faultline: Earthquake History and Science | Exploratorium ---
http://www.exploratorium.edu/faultline/
The official website of the British Monarchy ---
http://www.royal.gov.uk/
Wine and Food Society of Baltimore - Enoch Pratt Free Library ---
http://collections.digitalmaryland.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/scwf
Discover the Oldest Beer Recipe in History Dating Back to 1800 BC, and
Then Maybe Brew Your Own Batch ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-oldest-beer-recipe-in-history.html
Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts ---
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cookbooks/
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
Listen to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Aloud & Set to Music (31 Hours,
Unabridged) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/listen-to-james-joyces-finnegans-wake-read-aloud-set-to-music-31-hours-unabridged.html
Learn to Play Guitar for Free: Intro Courses Take You From The Very Basics to
Playings Songs In No Time ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/free-introductory-guitar-courses-take-you-from-the-very-basics-to-playings-songs-in-no-time.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
Grammar Girl: Quick and Dirty Tips ---
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl
David Ogilvy’s 1982 Memo “How to Write” Offers 10 Pieces of Timeless Advice
---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/david-ogilvys-1982-memo-how-to-write-offers-10-pieces-of-timeless-advice.html
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Bob Jensen's threads on medicine ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#Medicine
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
April 23, 2015
April 24, 2015
April 25, 2015
April 27, 2015
April 29, 2015
April 30, 2015
May 1, 2015
May 2, 2015
May 4, 2015
May 6, 2015
May 7, 2015
May 8, 2015
May 9, 2015
May 11, 2015
May 12, 2015
May 13, 2015
May 14, 2015
"Overkill An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients
physically and financially. What can we do about it?" by Atul Gawande,
The New Yorker, May 11, 2015 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande
It was lunchtime before my afternoon surgery
clinic, which meant that I was at my desk, eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich
and clicking through medical articles. Among those which caught my eye: a
British case report on the first 3-D-printed hip implanted in a human being,
a Canadian analysis of the rising volume of emergency-room visits by
children who have ingested magnets, and a Colorado study finding that the
percentage of fatal motor-vehicle accidents involving marijuana had doubled
since its commercial distribution became legal. The one that got me
thinking, however, was a study of more than a million Medicare patients. It
suggested that a huge proportion had received care that was simply a waste.
The researchers called it “low-value care.” But,
really, it was no-value care. They studied how often people received one of
twenty-six tests or treatments that scientific and professional
organizations have consistently determined to have no benefit or to be
outright harmful. Their list included doing an EEG for an uncomplicated
headache (EEGs are for diagnosing seizure disorders, not headaches), or
doing a CT or MRI scan for low-back pain in patients without any signs of a
neurological problem (studies consistently show that scanning such patients
adds nothing except cost), or putting a coronary-artery stent in patients
with stable cardiac disease (the likelihood of a heart attack or death after
five years is unaffected by the stent). In just a single year, the
researchers reported, twenty-five to forty-two per cent of Medicare patients
received at least one of the twenty-six useless tests and treatments.
Could pointless medical care really be that
widespread? Six years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine, titled “The
Cost Conundrum,” which explored the problem of unnecessary care in McAllen,
Texas, a community with some of the highest per-capita costs for Medicare in
the nation. But was McAllen an anomaly or did it represent an emerging norm?
In 2010, the Institute of Medicine issued a report stating that waste
accounted for thirty per cent of health-care spending, or some seven hundred
and fifty billion dollars a year, which was more than our nation’s entire
budget for K-12 education. The report found that higher prices,
administrative expenses, and fraud accounted for almost half of this waste.
Bigger than any of those, however, was the amount spent on unnecessary
health-care services. Now a far more detailed study confirmed that such
waste was pervasive.
I decided to do a crude check. I am a general
surgeon with a specialty in tumors of the thyroid and other endocrine
organs. In my clinic that afternoon, I saw eight new patients with records
complete enough that I could review their past medical history in detail.
One saw me about a hernia, one about a fatty lump growing in her arm, one
about a hormone-secreting mass in her chest, and five about thyroid cancer.
To my surprise, it appeared that seven of those
eight had received unnecessary care. Two of the patients had been given
high-cost diagnostic tests of no value. One was sent for an MRI after an
ultrasound and a biopsy of a neck lump proved suspicious for thyroid cancer.
(An MRI does not image thyroid cancer nearly as well as the ultrasound the
patient had already had.) The other received a new, expensive, and, in her
circumstances, irrelevant type of genetic testing. A third patient had
undergone surgery for a lump that was bothering him, but whatever the
surgeon removed it wasn’t the lump—the patient still had it after the
operation. Four patients had undergone inappropriate arthroscopic knee
surgery for chronic joint damage. (Arthroscopy can repair certain types of
acute tears to the cartilage of the knee. But years of research, including
randomized trials, have shown that the operation is of no help for chronic
arthritis- or age-related damage.)
Continued in a very long article
Jensen Comment
Twice my wife was sent from the ER to a night in intensive care when my own
suspicions were that she really did not have to spend one night in the hospital
let alone the ICU unit. I think that sometimes ER doctors in small hospitals
support the ICU units and the CAT Scan or MRI units beyond what is called for in
the ethics of medicine. It might be argued that such expensive prescriptions are
shields against ambulance-chasing lawyers, but I think in many cases the small
hospitals just need more revenues to support unused capacity.
Harvard Economist
Sugar is Enemy Number One ---
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-08/m-m-maker-mars-takes-a-side-in-coming-war-on-sugar
Jensen Comment
Professor Fox does not mention Cuba, but sugar trade is obviously lurking in the
background of our new trade relations with Cuba.
The
1991 dissolution of the Soviet state forced the
closure of most of Cuba's sugar industry.---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane
Sugarcane declined somewhat in importance in Hawaii, but still remains an
important part of the economy as it competes with sugar beet production in
various parts of the mainland.
Khan Academy: What is Coronary artery disease ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine/circulatory-system-diseases/coronary-artery-disease/v/what-is-coronary-artery-disease
"Why Nothing, Especially Chicken, Tastes Like it Used To," by Mark
Schatzker, New York Post, April 24, 2015 ---
http://nypost.com/2015/04/26/why-nothing-especially-chicken-tastes-like-it-used-to/
. . .
Chicken is cheap. The bird that was selling for 60¢
a pound in 1948 was down to 39¢ in 1968. In 1948, a 5-pound chicken cost $3
— which might sound inexpensive, but in today’s dollars it works out to $30
for a single bird. In 2015, a supermarket chicken will run you $7. Chicken
today costs less than a quarter of what it did during the Chicken of
Tomorrow contest.
They are all broilers now. Words like “fryer” and
“roaster” still appear in cookbooks, but they don’t exist anymore.
We eat gigantic babies.
As a paper in the journal Poultry Science puts it,
if humans grew as fast as broilers, “a 6.6 lbs.
newborn baby would weigh 660 lbs. after 2 months.”
. . .
Why do consumers put up with chicken that tastes
like…nothing? You can thank what the food industry refers to as “flavor
solutions.”
When you stop to consider that nearly half of all
chicken sold is “further processed” — chicken nuggets, chicken sausage,
chicken patties, chicken burgers, chicken strips, chicken cutlets, chicken
Kiev — that adds up to a lot of “preflavoring.”
If this makes you imagine, as I did, a man wearing
a chef’s hat sampling a nugget and then sprinting to the other end of the
factory while shouting, “More oregano! More oregano!” think again.
Seasoning arrives by the truckload to chicken factories and is stored in big
paper sacks in a kind of flavor warehouse alongside sacks of powdered
marinade, breading and batter. Just tear open a bag and dump it in.
Because however complicated it may be to breed and
grow chickens, that’s actually the easy part. Making a modern chicken taste
good requires a flavor solution that calls for three rounds of seasoning
that includes recognizable substances like garlic and oregano,
unrecognizable substances like MSG or hydrolyzed yeast, and unknowable,
secret substances called “natural flavors” or “artificial flavors.”
Making flavor solutions requires a cluster of
scientific know-how that brings together advanced organic, analytic and
synthetic chemistry with engineering, neuroscience, psychography,
psychophysics, ethnography, demography, molecular biology, finance, botany,
economics and physiology — even feelings.
If you are wondering why you’ve never noticed this
thing called the dilution effect, why all that supposedly bland food we now
grow tastes delicious — why people still want it despite its nutritional and
flavor diminishment — it is thanks to flavor solutions.
So much of the food we now eat is not only a lie,
it is a very good lie. Modern food may be the most compelling lie humans
have ever told.
Excerpted from “The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About
Food and Flavor” by Mark Schatzker, out now, published by Simon & Schuster.
Back When Chickens Really Tasted Wonderful
An excerpt form "A Glimpse of Heaven: What
I Learned From Max and Gwen" a story by Bob Jensen about growing up"
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/max01.htm#Swea
. . .
I think back to my earliest days in Swea City with my grandparents
---back to when I was a small boy in the magnificent “town farm” built by a
wheeler-dealing, horse-trading landowner named Christian Granville (Grant)
Dourte. My Grandfather Dourte built a splendid house and barn in Swea City.
In 1940, Swea City had 47 people and 168 Swedes. Fewer hobos passed through
town during the war years, but one or two passing through each day stepped
down from the boxcars and proceeded directly to Swea City’s well-known
Dourte town farm. My Grandmother Mayme Kerr Dourte never allowed us to use
the words “hobo,” “beggar,” “bum,” or “drunken sot.” She called these
itinerants our friends in need. Their skin color never mattered two hoots.
My grandmother selected a chicken in the yard and with one flick of her
wrist that chicken was bloody headless chicken flipping about on the ground.
She usually killed and clean several for noon and evening meals on certain
days of the week. Those freshly-killed chickens tasted so much better than
the bland chicken meat today.
When a whiskered man in rags rapped lightly on the unlatched screen door,
there was sometimes a frightened toddler hiding behind my grandmother’s
dress. She greeted the strangers in Methodist benevolence with hot coffee
and apple cider. Because of their lice and body odors, she never invited
them into the house --- Methodist benevolence had its limits.
But while they sipped on their coffee and cider on the back porch, she
loaded up china plates heaped with mashed potatoes, pickled beets, string
beans, and baked chicken or pot roast depending on whether it was an even or
odd day of the week. Afterwards, each “unfortunate friend” on
the back porch got a generous wedge of apple pie that must’ve been nearly
three inches thick in the center. The only thing my grandmother ever asked
in return is that each recipient bow in a personal, silent prayer before
leaving.
Fear of theft or bodily harm just did not seem to exist for Grandmother
Dourte. She held a deep and abiding faith. The town of Swea City did not
have a single constable in those years. There were hunting guns on the
place, but Grandma never allowed guns and cigars in the house. Whiskey was
not allowed anywhere on the property. She never learned about the bottles of
Old Crow that my Grandfather Dourte always hid in the side pocket of that
old Franklin automobile stored in the big barn behind the orchard. Being a
snoop, I discovered where the whiskey was hid, but I never revealed my
kindly grandfather’s pint-sized secrets.
When a small pox epidemic hit Swea City, the Dourte house became a
quarantined town hospital. My grandmother, who was immune to small pox,
treated every case day and night. She also helped the town prostitute up in
the East Bedroom when the woman became racked with syphilis.
The barn was never closed, and the house was never locked. There were
locks on the house doors, but the keys got lost in 1900 when the house was
built and were never replaced. My mother had new keys cut for the locks when
they carted my grandmother off to a nursing home in 1962.
Grandmother Dourte never attended church in the last 42 years of her long
life. She fretted that some stranger in need of Sunday dinner would lightly
rap on the back door.
Continued in my short story about growing up
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/max01.htm#Swea
There are a lot of bad things about aspartame in diet sodas and
those pink packets of Sweet & Low ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame
"The company will begin to replace aspartame with a
blend of sucralose and acesulfame potassium in Diet Pepsi, Caffeine Free Diet
Pepsi and Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi sold in the US in August," reports Duane
Stanford at Bloomberg ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/diet-pepsi-removes-aspartame-2015-4#ixzz3YFT9STGW
Why bedbugs are about to become even more horrifying ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/bedbugs-are-evolving-into-nightmare-insects-2015-4#ixzz3Z6DVsdIe
Meet the World’s First Baby Born With an Assist from Stem Cells ---
http://time.com/3849127/baby-stem-cells-augment-ivf/?xid=newsletter-brief
A Bit of Humor May 1-15, 2014
I have something that rhymes with "bucket list."
Barack Obama ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-correspondents-association-dinner-2015-2015-4
Watch the Funniest Jokes From the White House Correspondents’ Dinner ---
http://time.com/3835776/white-house-correspondents-dinner-president-obama-cecily-strong-whcd/?xid=newsletter-brief
Tina Fey gave David Letterman an incredible send-off ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/tina-fey-undressed-on-david-letterman-send-off-2015-5#ixzz3ZaOWA6MD
From LISnews on May 5, 2015
-A Hearty
Laugh for Work Weary Librarians
http://lisnews.org/node/43436/
After a long day of answering questions and serving up
information to the public (students, etc), a librarian could use a laugh. So
pick up a copy of Roz Warren's OUR BODIES, OUR SHELVES: A COLLECTION OF
LIBRARY HUMOR (HOPress, 2015) and see what might be between the covers that
tickles your funnybone. Here's an excerpt from one story: Freeze! It's the
Library Police [a librarian's fantasy of recovering stolen books] "Open up
bitch! It's LIBRARY SQUAD! Library Squad! A group of enraged middle-aged
librarians. We're brainy, we're relentless. We'll hunt you down. We'll never
give up. We know the Dewey Decimal Sysytem and we're not afraid to use it.
And we always get our book. And if you resist? We'll shush you.
Permanently." In addition to her library duties at the Bala Cynwyd Library
right outside Philadelphia, Roz Warren writes forThe New York Times, The
Funny Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Jewish Forward and The
Huffington Post. And she‘s been featured on the Today Show. Our Bodies, Our
Shelves is her thirteenth humor book. Years ago, Roz left the practice of
law to take a job at her local public library “because I was tired of making
so damn much money.” She doesn't regret it. Our Bodies, Our Shelves, ISBN
9780692406465
Forwarded by Paula
A joke that’s going around Ukraine:
Vladimir Putin, wanting to get on the good side of voters, goes to visit a
school in Moscow to have a chat with the kids. He talks to them about how Russia
is a powerful nation and how he wants the best for the people. At the end of the
talk, there is a section for questions.
Little Sasha puts her hand up and says "I have two questions. Why did the
Russians take Crimea? And why are we sending troops to Ukraine?"
Putin says "Good questions..." But just as he is about to answer, the bell
rings, and the kids go to lunch.
When they come back, they sit back down and there is room for some more
questions.
Another girl, Misha, puts her hand up and says "I have four questions. My
Questions are - Why did the Russians invade Crimea? Why are we sending troops to
Ukraine? Why did the bell go 20 minutes early? And Where is Sasha?"
Humor Between April 30, 2015
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q2.htm#Humor043015
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
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
The Cult of Statistical Significance:
How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
How Accountics Scientists Should Change:
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review
I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accounting and Taxation News Sites ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for
free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM
(Educators)
http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.
Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for
accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting
education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial
accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing,
doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics)
research, publication, replication, and validity testing.
|
CPAS-L
(Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ (Closed
Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo (Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB
and the International Accounting
Standards Board on this financial
reporting blog from Financial Executives
International. The site, updated daily,
compiles regulatory news, rulings and
statements, comment letters on
standards, and hot topics from the Web’s
largest business and accounting
publications and organizations. Look for
continuing coverage of SOX requirements,
fair value reporting and the Alternative
Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such
as the subprime mortgage crisis,
international convergence, and rules for
tax return preparers. |
|
|
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker
[lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as
well as a practicing CPA)
I found another listserve
that is exceptional -
CalCPA maintains
http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/
and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.
There are several highly
capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and
the answers are often in depth.
Scott
Scott forwarded the following message from Jim
Counts
Yes you may mention info on
your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any
CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is
possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not
have access to the files and other items posted.
Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in
top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and
in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I
will get the request to join.
Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage
people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then
via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in
your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the
inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.
We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in
California.... ]
Please encourage your members
to join our listserve.
If any questions let me know.
Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk
|
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's
Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
All
my online pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu