Tidbits on May 28, 2015
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Photographs: Springtime Finally Arrived
(very late) in the White Mountains
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Lilacs/Set01/LilacsSet02.htm
Tidbits on May 28, 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
MIT Video (150 channels and over 12,000 videos) ---
http://video.mit.edu/
DPLA: The Golden Age of Radio in the US ---
http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/radio-golden-age
Mesmerizing Timelapse Film Captures the Wonder of Bees Being
Born ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/mesmerizing-timelapse-film-captures-the-wonder-of-bees-being-born.html
Snap Judgment (radio story telling) ---
http://snapjudgment.org/
This animated map shows how humans migrated across the globe
http://www.businessinsider.com/prehistoric-human-migration-from-africa-animated-map-2015-5#ixzz3acENRsBT
Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty
Python-Style Animations by The School of Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/nietzsche-wittgenstein-sartre-explained-with-monty-python-style-animations-by-the-school-of-life.html
Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That
It Helps You Live with Uncertainty ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/bertrand-russell-the-practical-purpose-of-philosophy-is-that-it-lets-you-live-with-uncertainty.html
Merrill Markoe: My Favorite Moments of Late Night With David
Letterman ---
http://time.com/3860269/late-night-with-david-letterman-merrill-markoe/?xid=newsletter-brief
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
B.B. King Plays and Tells His Story in Two
Electric Live Performances and a 1972 Documentary ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/b-b-king-plays-and-tells-his-story-in-two-electric-live-performances.html
The Music of Avant-Garde Composer John Cage Now
Available in a Free Online Archive ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/the-music-of-avant-garde-composer-john-cage-now-available-in-a-free-online-archive.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
National Geographic just reached one billion likes on
Instagram — here are its most spectacular photos ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/national-geographics-best-natgeo-instagram-photos-2015-5?op=1#ixzz3aJJrQ82L
3D Printed Zoetrope Animates Rubens’ Famous
Painting, “The Massacre of the Innocents” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/3d-printed-zoetrope-animates-rubens-famous-painting-the-massacre-of-the-innocents.html
The Aspen Art Museum ---
https://www.aspenartmuseum.org/
Whitney Museum of American Art: For Teachers ---
http://whitney.org/Education/ForTeachers
Northern Arizona University: Colorado Plateau
Archives ---
http://archive.library.nau.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/cpa/
Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The
Raven, in a French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/edouard-manet-illustrates-edgar-allan-poes-the-raven.html
Astronomy Picture of the Day ---
http://apod.nasa.gov/
40 maps that explain outer space ---
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/9/8144825/space-maps
DPLA: The Golden Age of Radio in the US ---
http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/radio-golden-age
Incredible before-and-after photos show how much New York City
has changed since the 1800s ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-before-and-after-photos-from-the-1800s-2015-5?op=1#ixzz3axcrYAkf
16 amazing photos of the most extreme penguins on earth ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/penguin-photos-tom-hart-2015-5?op=1#ixzz3axe0PNG5
Norman Rockwell Illustrates Mark Twain’s Tom
Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn (1936-1940) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/norman-rockwell-illustrates-mark-twains-tom-sawyer-huckleberry-finn.html
The Art of Collotype: See a Near Extinct Printing
Technique, as Lovingly Practiced by a Japanese Master Craftsman ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/the-art-of-collotype.html
Spineless: Susan Middleton’s Mesmerizing
Photographs of Marine Invertebrates ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/22/spineless-susan-middleton/?mc_cid=4cd0784a5f&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
The Great War: A Visual History ---
http://www.abmc.gov/sites/default/files/interactive/interactive_files/WW1/index.html
World War I Photographic History in a French Village
Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt ---
http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/remember-me/
World War One: The British Library
http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one
Centenary of the First World War, 1914-1918 ---
http://www.awm.gov.au/1914-1918/
World War (I &II) Propaganda Posters ---
http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/23520
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
Longform ---
http://longform.org/
A University of Pittsburgh writing program connects readers to works of
non-fiction.
Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/franz-kafkas-kafkaesque-love-letters.html
Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me
Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/mark-twain-helen-kellers-special-friendship.html
Hear Jack Nicholson Read Rudyard Kipling’s “The Elephant’s
Child,” With Music by Bobby McFerrin ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/jack-nicholson-reads-rudyard-kiplings-the-elephants-child.html
Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a
French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/edouard-manet-illustrates-edgar-allan-poes-the-raven.html
Watch Sherlock Hound: Hayao Miyazaki’s Animated, Steampunk
Take on Sherlock Holmes ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/hayao-miyazakis-sherlock-hound.html
Norman Rockwell Illustrates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer &
Huckleberry Finn (1936-1940) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/norman-rockwell-illustrates-mark-twains-tom-sawyer-huckleberry-finn.html
Six Books (and One Blog) Bill Gates Wants You to Read This
Summer ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/six-books-and-one-blog-bill-gates-wants-you-to-read-this-summer.html
Free Electronic Literature ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on May 28, 2015
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2015/TidbitsQuotations052815.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
Cluster Analysis ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis
Synonym in the Biological Sciences --- Numerical Taxonomy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_taxonomy
Jensen Comment
To an old cluster analysis researcher this article is exciting.
"The Machine Vision Algorithm Beating Art Historians at Their Own Game,"
MIT's Technology Review, May 11, 2015 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537366/the-machine-vision-algorithm-beating-art-historians-at-their-own-game/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150512
Classifying a painting by artist and style is
tricky for humans; spotting the links between different artists and styles
is harder still. So it should be impossible for machines, right?
Few areas of academic inquiry have escaped the
influence of computer science and machine learning. But one of them is the
history of art. The challenge of analyzing paintings, recognizing their
artists, and identifying their style and content has always been beyond the
capability of even the most advanced algorithms.
That is now changing thanks to recent advances in
machine learning based on approaches such as deep convolutional neural
networks. In just a few years, computer scientists have created machines
capable of matching and sometimes outperforming humans in all kinds of
pattern recognition tasks.
Continued in article
Some of my published papers on cluster analysis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm#Published
The research world using advances in machine learning moved well beyond this old
stuff.
Bob Jensen's threads on visualization of multivariate data
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm
The Edublogger ---
http://www.theedublogger.com
The Edublogger has been set up by
Edublogs —
“the largest education community on the Internet”
where you can sign up for
a free
WordPress-powered blog — and is dedicated
to helping educational bloggers with emerging technologies in education,
share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium.
It’s purpose is to share tips, tricks, ideas and
provide help to the educational blogging community.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This site also is great for education technology news.
"Blogging changes the nature of academic research, not just how it is
communicated," by Patrick Dunleavy, London School of Economics, January 2015
---
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/12/28/shorter-better-faster-free/
Bob Jensen's threads on listservs and blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
"Why Using an ATM Is More Dangerous Than Ever," by Daniel Roberts,
Time Magazine, May 20, 2015 ---
http://time.com/3890473/bank-atm-hack/?xid=newsletter-brief
Jensen Comment
Before I retired I used a campus ATM. Since then I won't go near an ATM.
Submitted by
Blake on May 20, 2015 - 9:49am
Table of
Contents
Feature Articles
Producing Tutorials With Digital
Professionals: Primary Sources, Pirates, and
Partners PDF
Shelley Arlen, Missy Clapp, Cindy Craig 1-21
Academic Libraries and Innovation: A
Literature Review PDF
Curtis Brundy 22-39
Dissertation to Book: Successful Open Access
Outreach to Graduate Students PDF
Diane Gurman, Marta Brunner
According to Librarians
E-books soar, traditional books sag in annual library statistics ---
http://lisnews.org/node/43467/
Jensen Comment
Although I have a Kindle reader, I first look to see if any cheap used hard
copies are available from Amazon. Often the used copies are available for less
then $5.
I'm having more of a problem with NetFlix movies.
Less and less of the older movies and the newest movies are available for
streaming online. For example, some years back we watched the wonderful
Touch of Frost series online. Now I notice that this series is only
available in mailed disks. The mail up here is slower than it was a few years
ago. What used to take two days now takes four days via a six-horse hitch on a
US Post Office stagecoach.
Worse many of the older movie disks have to back ordered and are not
available for immediate mailing. NetFlix is agonizingly slow filling back
orders.
Wharton Book Advertisement
The Gamification Toolkit: Dynamics, Mechanics, and Components for the
Win ---
http://wdp.wharton.upenn.edu/book/gamification-toolkit/
Amazon Link ---
http://www.amazon.com/Gamification-Toolkit-Dynamics-Mechanics-Components-ebook/dp/B00VIH1ZOO/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432377984&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Gamification+Toolkit
The Kindle Edition is Only $3.82
Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment and gamification ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
John Forbes Nash, Jr. ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.
The 27 Page Dissertation of and the Famous One-Page Article by John Nash
From David Giles on the Econometrics Beat, May 24, 2015
Ferdinando is
referring to Nash's Ph.D.
dissertation, "Non-Cooperative Games",
completed at Princeton University in May of 1950. Yes, it was just 27
pages long. One of the only two references was to von Neumann and
Morgenstern's classic 1944 book, Theory
of Games and Economic Behavior. The other
was to Nash's own
paper, published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences in 1950. It spanned just two pages, but
was actually less than one page long!
Yes, sometimes it really is
the case that, "Less is more". (Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe)
"Why John Nash Matters," by Benjamin Morris, Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog,
May 25, 2015 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/why-john-nash-matters/
. . .
Similar questions and scenarios come up in
baseball, hockey, tennis and virtually every other sport. Indeed, once you
get in this mode of thinking, you start seeing it everywhere (much
like with Bayesian
inference, or
Tetris).
In 1994, for his contributions to the field of game
theory,
Nash
received the Nobel Prize in economics. But his
greatest accomplishment may be the role he played in the emergence of a
whole new and important way of thinking about the world and the things that
happen in it.
A Beautiful Mind' mathematician John Nash killed in car crash ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-beautiful-mind-mathematician-john-nash-killed-in-car-crash-2015-5#ixzz3b4xnr2H6
Inflation versus P/E Ratios (1965 to Present)
Barry Ritholtz, May 26, 2015 ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/
Inflation:The level of inflation
also matters, and historically has had a strong relationship with PE
multiples. Chart 2 below indicates that the relationship may not be linear,
but many have simplified this relationship to the “Rule of 21” which
suggests that the sum of the PE multiple and CPI inflation should equal 21.
Given that the latest inflation data are slightly negative (-0.2%) and the
trailing PE ratio of 17.6x, the Rule suggests valuations should jump 3-4
points, or that inflation should be 3-4% (or some meeting in the middle).
And the chart below indicates that P/E multiples could be far higher than
they are today without breaching the historical relationship between
multiples and inflation.
Graph ---
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/inflation-vs-pe-model.png
Source:
Episode I: High valuations
Savita Subramanian, Equity & Quant Strategist
MLPF&S
Equity and Quant Strategy | United States 26 May 2015
Governor Brown Exempts University Of California Law Students From $1,500
Fee Increase Imposed On All Other Grad Students ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/05/governor-brown-exempts-university-of-california-law-students.html
May 26, 2015 message from Joe Hoyle
I just wanted to let a couple of people know that I
recently posted a new entry on my teaching blog. The posting is "Prime the
Pump--What Does It Take to Become a Great Student?" and can be found at the
URL below. It is my 211th posting on this blog.
Hope your summer is off to a great start!!
Joe
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2015/05/prime-pump-what-does-it-take-to-become.htm
May 26 reply from Bob Jensen
To study and not think is a waste
Confucius
Hi Joe,
I think what we must realize is that for a student to be great in one
class is not necessarily a recipe to be followed in another class. Teachers
had different pedagogies and demands. A top student adapts to different
teachers to maximize the benefits of taking their courses.
Greatness is something that cannot be achieved on your own. You have to
have help and a whole lot of luck. For example, most good courses entail
interactions with other students as well as the instructor. For example,
suppose the teacher assigns team projects. Sometimes a student excels in one
team but not another team.
The hardest courses are those that demand creative thinking. For example,
ask students why they think long-term purchase contracts should or should
not be booked as liabilities and at what amounts. Or ask an even harder
question as to why they think the historical cost double-entry accounting
model (with accruals) survived the evolution of accountancy for well over
six centuries?
Thanks for making me think,
Bob
"The Robots Are Winning!" by Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York
Review of Books, June 4, 2015 ---
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/robots-are-winning/
. . .
But as I watched the final moments, in which, as in
a reverse striptease, Ava slowly hides away her mechanical nakedness,
covering up the titanium and the cables, it occurred to me that there might
be another anxiety lurking in Garland’s shrewd film. Could this remarkably
quiet film be a parable about the desire for a return to “reality” in
science-fiction filmmaking—about the desire for humanizing a genre whose
technology has evolved so greatly that it often eschews human actors, to say
nothing of human feeling, altogether?
Ex Machina, like Her and all their predecessors
going back to 2001, is about machines that develop human qualities:
emotions, sneakiness, a higher consciousness, the ability to love, and so
forth. But by this point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of
narrative reaction formation—whether the real concern, one that’s been
growing in the four decades since the advent of the personal computer, is
that we are the ones who have undergone an evolutionary change, that in our
lives and, more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our
humanity, of becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.
"Firefox Maker Battles to Save the Internet—and Itself," by George
Anders, MIT's Technology Review, May 22, 2015 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/537661/firefox-maker-battles-to-save-the-internet-and-itself/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150522
In Silicon Valley, most pioneers
pursue big ideas and giant personal fortunes with equal zeal. Then there’s
Mozilla, an innovation dynamo that refuses to get rich.
More than 500 million people worldwide use Mozilla
products. The company’s Firefox Internet browser is the top choice in
countries ranging from Germany to Indonesia. But the company has no venture
capital backing, no stock options, no publicly traded shares. It hardly ever
patents its breakthroughs. Instead, Mozilla has a business model that’s as
open and sprawling as the World Wide Web itself, where everything is free
and in the public domain.
For a long time, it seemed as if Mozilla’s
idealistic engineers understood the future better than anyone. By building
the Firefox browser with open-source software, Mozilla made it easy for all
kinds of people to cook up improvements that the whole world could use.
Independent developers in dozens of countries pitched in, creating add-ons
that speeded up downloads, blocked unwanted ads, and performed other useful
services. Firefox rapidly became the browser in which state-of-the-art
development took place–on shoestring budgets.
Suddenly, though, the Internet looks nightmarish to
Mozilla. Most of the world now gets online on mobile devices, and about 96
percent of smartphones run on either the Apple iOS or Google Android
operating systems. Both of these are tightly controlled worlds. Buy an
iPhone, and you’ll almost certainly end up using Apple’s Web browser,
Apple’s maps, and Apple’s speech recognition software. You will select your
applications from an Apple-curated app store. Buy an Android phone, and you
will be steered into a parallel world run by Team Google. The
public-spirited, ad hoc approaches that defined Mozilla’s success in the
Internet browser wars have now been marginalized. Developers don’t stay up
late working on open-source platforms anymore; instead, they sweat over the
details needed to win a spot in Apple’s and Google’s digital stores. Rival
operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows have largely
fallen by the wayside as well.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Computer scientists in the 1990s by-in-large hated Microsoft but not Apple. When
it came to fighting Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer browser there
seemingly was no shortage of very tech-savvy men and women willing to
provide volunteer open source Firefox labor for free. Now that the war is more
with Apple and Google it's no longer so easy to find soldiers for open source
battles.
"Teacher assails practice of giving passing grades to failing students,"
by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post, May 17, 2014 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/teacher-assails-practice-of-giving-passing-grades-to-failing-students/2015/05/17/f38f88ae-f9ab-11e4-9030-b4732caefe81_story.html
Caleb Stewart Rossiter, a college professor and
policy analyst, decided to try teaching math in the D.C. schools. He was
given a pre-calculus class with 38 seniors at H.D. Woodson High School. When
he discovered that half of them could not handle even second-grade problems,
he sought out the teachers who had awarded the passing grades of D in
Algebra II, a course that they needed to take his high-level class.
There are many bewildering stories like this in
Rossiter’s new book, “Ain’t
Nobody Be Learnin’ Nothin’: The Fraud and the Fix for High-Poverty Schools,”
the best account of public education in the nation’s
capital I have ever read. It will take me three columns to do justice to his
revelations about what is being done to the District’s most distracted and
least productive students.
Teachers will tell you it is a no-no to ask other
teachers why they committed grading malpractice. Rossiter didn’t care. Three
of the five teachers he sought had left the high-turnover D.C. system, but
the two he found were so candid I still can’t get their words out of my
mind.
The first, an African immigrant who had taught
special education, was stunned to see one student’s name on Rossiter’s list.
“Huh!” Rossiter quoted the teacher as saying. “That boy can’t add two plus
two and doesn’t care! What’s he doing in pre-calculus? Yes of course I
passed him — that’s a gentleman’s D. Everybody knows that a D for a special
education student means nothing but that he came in once in a while.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
How to mislead with statistics
"More than half of Harvard's most recent graduates had an A- GPA or better,"
by Peter Jacobs, Business Insider, May 27, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/more-than-half-of-harvards-most-recent-graduates-had-an-a-gpa-or-better-2015-5
Jensen Comment
This is misleading in a sense that the GPA is not a normal distribution. Grades
are truncated more above A- (since no grades higher than A are awarded) whereas
grades below A- are less truncated (with possibilities of B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-,
D+,D, D-, and F). This means that a whole lot of students probably got A grades
to bring the mean clear up the A-.
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
"What Caused Capitalism? Assessing the Roles of the West and the Rest,"
by Jeremy Adelman, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2015 ---
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2015-04-20/what-caused-capitalism
If it weren't for their good looks, pandas would be complete losers ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/05/20/giant-pandas-somehow-exist-despite-having-guts-that-can-barely-process-the-only-food-they-eat/
Norway ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway
"Seven uncomfortable truths about
living in Norway," by Matador Network," by Kenneth Haug, Business Insider,
May 20, 2015 ---
http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/7-uncomfortable-truths-living-norway/#ixzz3am8UXFar
Jensen Comment
The one that surprised me is: "Most of us are
head over heels in debt." This isn't supposed to happen in an
oil-rich social welfare state where everything is free, including health care
and college education.
Why are prices, including housing prices, restaurant prices, and
automobile prices, in Norway the highest in the world?
Three guesses and the first two don't count.
"As A Major Retraction Shows, We’re All Vulnerable To Faked Data," by
Carl Bialik, Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog, May 20, 2015 ---
https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/as-a-major-retraction-shows-were-all-vulnerable-to-faked-data/
A political scientist on Tuesday said he was
retracting a paper he’d co-authored — one with wide influence on how
campaigns can change public opinion — when faced with evidence that the
paper’s central finding was based on polling that probably never happened.
The
article, published last December in Science
Magazine by UCLA graduate student
Michael J.
LaCour and Columbia University political scientist
Donald P. Green, appeared to show that an
in-person conversation with an openly gay person made voters feel much more
positively about same-sex marriage, an effect that persisted and even spread
to the people those voters lived with, who weren’t part of the conversation.
The result of that purported effect was an affirmation of the power of human
contact to overcome disagreement.
Continued in article
Professors and Soon-to-Be Professors Who Cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Jensen's Comment
When faked data can influence political outcomes the losers still win. When
Harry Reid was confronted in the USA Senate for lying his response was:
"Se won the election,"
"Teacher assails practice of giving passing grades to failing students,"
by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post, May 17, 2014 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/teacher-assails-practice-of-giving-passing-grades-to-failing-students/2015/05/17/f38f88ae-f9ab-11e4-9030-b4732caefe81_story.html
Caleb Stewart Rossiter, a college professor and
policy analyst, decided to try teaching math in the D.C. schools. He was
given a pre-calculus class with 38 seniors at H.D. Woodson High School. When
he discovered that half of them could not handle even second-grade problems,
he sought out the teachers who had awarded the passing grades of D in
Algebra II, a course that they needed to take his high-level class.
There are many bewildering stories like this in
Rossiter’s new book, “Ain’t
Nobody Be Learnin’ Nothin’: The Fraud and the Fix for High-Poverty Schools,”
the best account of public education in the nation’s
capital I have ever read. It will take me three columns to do justice to his
revelations about what is being done to the District’s most distracted and
least productive students.
Teachers will tell you it is a no-no to ask other
teachers why they committed grading malpractice. Rossiter didn’t care. Three
of the five teachers he sought had left the high-turnover D.C. system, but
the two he found were so candid I still can’t get their words out of my
mind.
The first, an African immigrant who had taught
special education, was stunned to see one student’s name on Rossiter’s list.
“Huh!” Rossiter quoted the teacher as saying. “That boy can’t add two plus
two and doesn’t care! What’s he doing in pre-calculus? Yes of course I
passed him — that’s a gentleman’s D. Everybody knows that a D for a special
education student means nothing but that he came in once in a while.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Why on earth did good science take so long to
arrive? Weinberg’s answer, the book’s main theme, is that it was so immensely
difficult to learn what there was to explain, and how to set about explaining
it. Explanation by bringing a wide range of facts under a single theory; the
need, often, to state theories mathematically; which principles (looking for
simplicity, for instance) were sometimes helpful in arriving at theories – all
such things had to be painfully learned. Other principles (such as seeking
purpose and the good) called for painful unlearning. At first, even the need to
submit theories to observational tests was not grasped by the world’s best
brains. For, Weinberg comments, people “had never seen it done”.
"Never-ending universe," by John Leslie, The Times Literary
Supplement, May 6, 2015 ---
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1552675.ece
Denmark Preparing to be the First to Eliminate Cash ---
http://armstrongeconomics.com/archives/30671
Jensen Comment
What a marvelous weapon for the war on drugs and crime in general. However,
don't hold your breath for cash to be eliminated in the USA. There are two many
vested interest in cash, including parties on both sides of transactions in the
$2 trillion annual underground economy where nothing gets reported to
government, including those cash wages to maids cleaning houses and newly
disclosed cash payments to people to riot in Ferguson ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/TaxNoTax.htm
Wal-Mart challenges Amazon with unlimited shipping service for $50 per
year ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/13/us-wal-mart-stores-shipping-idUSKBN0NY2NK20150513
Jensen Comment
But Wal-Mart has a much more limited range of online products. Amazon's limited
free shipping is called Amazon Prime for $99 ---
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_5?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=amazon+prime&sprefix=Prime%2Caps%2C373
I save lots of shipping costs with Amazon Prime. Hardly a day goes by when I
don't order something from Amazon.
Question
Is free shipping being environmentally responsible?
Answer
In the past I used to consolidate orders. For example, in the past I would have
ordered three new summer shirts in one order to save on shipping costs. The
other day I ordered one shirt just to be sure I liked the shirt and the size
because ordering one shirt at a time with free shipping costs no more more than
ordering all three at once.
When my order arrived for one shirt I really liked the shirt. Then I ordered
two more shirts with free shipping.
The net result was that UPS had to climb Sunset Hill on two trips to deliver
my three new shirts. In the old days when I paid shipping UPS would only have to
climb Sunset Hill one time to deliver my three new shirts.
The bottom line is that from a societal standpoint it took twice as much fuel
and caused twice as much air pollution because I could get free shipping on the
three shirts.
Yeah I know I could still be environmentally responsible by consolidating my
Amazon orders even if there is free shipping. But it is now possible to be less
environmentally responsible at now added expense to me. I suppose you could say
that I might send less stuff back to Amazon when I can try out products arriving
in smaller orders. But I rarely sent anything back to Amazon before or after
free shipping. Air pollution is not a problem up here in the White Mountains,
but this could be more of a problem if I lived in Los Angeles.
Massive International Operation to Sell Fake Degrees ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/05/18/massive-international-operation-sell-fake-degrees
Question
Why won't there be much of a market for Google's self-driving bubble car in
Texas?
Answer
Soon after it's parked in a mall two guys in a pickup will lift it into the back
of a pickup truck and have it in Mexico before the owner knows it's gone.
Accordingly, the theft insurance rates will soar through the roof.
"Why Google’s Self-Driving Bubble Cars Might Catch On," by Mark
Harris, MIT's Technology Review, May 18, 2015 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537556/why-googles-self-driving-bubble-cars-might-catch-on/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150519
"NY Times: The Declining Role Of Professors As Mentors," by Paul
Caron, TaxProf Blog, May 14, 2015 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/05/ny-times-the-declining-role-.html
New York Times Sunday Review Essay:
What’s the Point of a Professor?, by
Mark Bauerlein (Emory, Department of English):
In the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor’s degree and
either join the work force or head to graduate school. They will be joyous
that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as
this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one
primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful
contacts: the professors. ...
[W]hile they’re content with teachers, students aren’t
much interested in them as thinkers and mentors. They enroll in courses and
complete assignments, but further engagement is minimal. ... For a majority
of undergraduates, beyond the two and a half hours per week in class,
contact ranges from negligible to nonexistent. In their first year, 33
percent of students report that they never talk with professors outside of
class, while 42 percent do so only sometimes. Seniors lower that
disengagement rate only a bit, with
25 percent never talking to professors, and 40
percent sometimes. ...
When college is more about career than ideas, when paycheck matters more
than wisdom, the role of professors changes. We may be 50-year-olds at the
front of the room with decades of reading, writing, travel, archives or labs
under our belts, with 80 courses taught, but students don’t lie in bed
mulling over what we said. They have no urge to become disciples.
Sadly, professors pressed for research
time don’t want them, either. As a result, most undergraduates never know
that stage of development when a learned mind enthralled them and they
progressed toward a fuller identity through admiration of and struggle with
a role model. ...
Continued in article
Jensen Comment About Being Guilty as Charged
I became enamored with Camtasia as a tool for making videos of computer
screen-solving of problems (usually in Excel or MS Access) with my voice
narrations on those videos. I captured hundreds of such videos to help my
students learn very technical solutions to things I'd previously explained over
and over during office hours. The Camtasia videos were better than having to
come see Professor Jensen in his office ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm
- Students did not have to take the time and trouble to come to my office.
They could view the videos from any networked computer on or off campus.
- Students could learn better from the videos. At confusing moments they
could stop and replay the videos over and over and over until the light went
on in their brains such as how to derive the value of an interest rate swap
from a yield curve derived from a bond's yield curve ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/133swapvalue.htm#Example5
- Students who had troubles with multiple problems did not have prioritize
which problems to take up with Professor Jensen. They could view the videos
of all the assigned problems.
As a result fewer students came to my office hours. At the time it seemed
great, because students were learning better and taking up less and less of my
time when learning from my videos. But as I look back, there was
considerable loss of serendipity for students in my office. After getting
answers to their technical questions the conversations often moved, before my
Camtasia videos, to random questions that were raised about careers and
life in general.
The bottom line is that when I flipped my classrooms using Camtasia videos
my role as a mentor diminished. In theory, taking the technical
explanations out of my office hours created free time to deal with other
mentoring issues.
But the is little mentoring if students stop coming around.
My main role as a teacher after that was in creatively designing technical
problems and solutions that helped students learn much better than they could
learn from textbooks (which in most instances had not yet even caught up with
rapidly changing accounting theory and accounting information systems
topics). That is a very important role since both accounting theory and AIS
mostly involve very technical issues. But the mentoring role of my academic life
imploded shortly before I retired.
I would certainly do some things differently if I came out of retirement.
"How to prevent death by PowerPoint," by Samanta White, CGMA
Magazine, May 13, 2015 ---
http://www.cgma.org/Magazine/News/Pages/powerpoint-secrets-201512307.aspx?TestCookiesEnabled=redirect
Bob Jensen's threads on improved use of PowerPoint and related teaching
helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#PowerPointHelpers
4 Ways Digital Tech Has Changed K-12 Learning ---
http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/05/20/4-ways-digital-tech-has-changed-k12-learning.aspx
- Collaboration
- Information Gathering
- Remote Learning
- Teacher Prep
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology: The Bright Side and
the Dark Side ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
That
some bankers have ended up in prison is not a matter of scandal, but what is
outrageous is the fact that all the others are free.
Honoré de Balzac
Bankers bet with their bank's capital, not their own. If the bet goes right,
they get a huge bonus; if it misfires, that's the shareholders' problem.
Sebastian Mallaby. Council on Foreign Relations, as quoted by
Avital Louria Hahn, "Missing: How Poor Risk-Management Techniques Contributed
to the Subprime Mess," CFO Magazine, March 2008, Page 53 ---
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10755469/c_10788146?f=magazine_featured
Now that the Fed is going to
bail out these crooks with taxpayer funds makes it all the worse.
Wall Street
Remains Congress to the Core
The boom in corporate mergers
is creating concern that illicit trading ahead of deal announcements is becoming
a systemic problem. It is against the law to trade on inside information about
an imminent merger, of course. But an analysis of the nation’s biggest mergers
over the last 12 months indicates that the securities of 41 percent of the
companies receiving buyout bids exhibited abnormal and suspicious trading in the
days and weeks before those deals became public. For those who bought shares
during these periods of unusual trading, quick gains of as much as 40 percent
were possible.
Gretchen Morgenson, "Whispers of Mergers Set Off Suspicious Trading," The New
York Times, August 27, 2006 ---
Click Here
"Why Are Some Sectors (Ahem, Finance) So Scandal-Plagued?"
by Ben W. Heineman, Jr., Harvard Business Review Blog, January 10, 2013
---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/scandals_plague_sectors_not_ju.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Jensen Comment
The Big Banks and Wall Street in general will not learn until people are sent to
jail. Until then the fines are just company money.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on May 21, 2015
Banks to pay $5.6 billion in probes
http://www.wsj.com/articles/global-banks-to-pay-5-6-billion-in-penalties-in-fx-libor-probe-1432130400?mod=djemCFO_h
The five big banks will plead guilty to criminal
charges to resolve a U.S. investigation into whether traders colluded to
move foreign-currency rates for their own benefit. Four of the banks, Barclays PLC, Citigroup
Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Royal
Bank of Scotland Group PLC, pleaded guilty
on
Wednesday to conspiring to manipulate prices in the $500
billion-a-day market for U.S. dollars and euros, authorities said. The fifth
bank, UBS AG, received immunity in the antitrust case but
pleaded guilty to manipulating the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.
It will pay a fine for violating an earlier accord meant to resolve those
allegations of misconduct.\
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on May 21, 2015
Barclays fined for alleged manipulation of ISDAfix.
Barclays PLC was
fined $115 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which said
in a statement that Barclays’s U.S. traders attempted to manipulate the U.S.
dollar iteration of ISDAfix, or the International Swaps and Derivatives
Association Fix, between 2007 and 2012. A group of other financial
institutions including interdealer broker ICAP PLC have
said they are under investigation for alleged manipulation of the ISDAfix
rate.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on May
21, 2015
SEC votes to propose new asset-manager reporting
rules
http://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-votes-to-propose-new-mutual-fund-reporting-requirements-1432136458?mod=djemCFO_h
The Securities and Exchange Commission voted 5-0
to significantly boost the volume of data the agency collects from the $60
trillion asset-management industry. The proposal includes requirements that
funds report on their use of complex and potentially risky derivatives
products, data that aren’t frequently or consistently captured by the SEC.
Timeline of Derivatives Instruments Frauds ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
Rotten to the Core ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
How to Mislead With Statistics,
"Federal Error Rates Criticized," by Michael Stratford, Inside Higher
Ed, May 20, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/20/education-department-inspector-general-slams-agency%E2%80%99s-estimates-erroneous-pell-grant
The U.S. Department of Education last fall switched
its approach to estimating how much it improperly paid out in Pell Grants
and student loans after officials learned their initial methodology would
have shown large jumps in erroneous payments, the department’s watchdog unit
said in a
report issued Tuesday.
The revised methodology, which the department
retroactively received permission from the White House’s Office of
Management and Budget to use, produced far lower estimates of improper
payments than the department’s original methodology, according to the Office
of Inspector General’s report.
The Education Department, like other federal
agencies, is required to estimate each year the rate at which some of its
programs improperly dole out federal dollars. Such erroneous payments
include, for example, a student receiving a Pell Grant that is above or
below the amount for which he qualifies. It would also include a college not
properly returning federal loan money after a student withdraws from
classes.
Continued in article
In Wake of 35% Enrollment Decline, Pace Law School Dean Cuts Faculty Pay
10%, Eliminates Research Stipends And Sabbaticals, And Warns Faculty Not To
Speak To Press ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/05/in-wake-of-35-enrollment-decline-pace-law-school-dean-cuts-faculty-pay-10.html
Jensen Comment
Percentage losses of losses of law school students in the range 30%-40% seem to
be commonly reported from Maine to California and most states in between. How
these law schools deal with the crises varies. It's not common to cut faculty
pay. It is common to buy our tenured faculty enabling them to go into early
retirement whether they like it or not.
Bob Jensen's threads on the decline of law schools in the USA are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools
Ironically my earlier versions of this module focused on overstuffed law schools
that were cash cows their universities. Now they've become cash losers in their
universities. How times have changed in USA legal education!
"Keeping it on the company campus: As more firms have set up their
own “corporate universities”, they have become less willing to pay for their
managers to go to business school," The Economist, May 16, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21651217-more-firms-have-set-up-their-own-corporate-universities-they-have-become-less-willing-pay
“DON’T ask the barber if you need a haircut—and
don’t ask an academic if what he does is relevant.” So wrote Nassim Nicholas
Taleb in his 2007 book, “The Black Swan”. The trouble for academics,
particularly those who teach business, is that companies seem to be posing
that awkward question more and more; and then coming up with an even more
discomfiting answer.
Firms looking to put their managers through
development programmes are increasingly creating their own, rather than
relying on business schools, consulting firms and the like. Companies are
not only spending more of their training budgets in-house but are setting up
their own “corporate universities”.
The idea is not new. General Electric is considered
to have opened the first corporate university, in 1956. Perhaps the most
famous is McDonald’s “Hamburger University”. Since 1961 around 275,000
people have passed through one of its seven campuses worldwide. However,
such in-house academies have become a lot more common in recent years. A
survey by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that the number of formal
corporate universities in America doubled between 1997 and 2007, to around
2,000. Since then, it reckons, they have continued to spread, and now more
than 4,000 companies around the world have them.
The numbers are vague because the definition of
what qualifies as a corporate university is slippery. Unlike conventional
universities, they tend to focus more on practice than theory, and they
rarely hand out degrees. But they are about more than just slapping a grand
title on companies’ hotch-potch of ad hoc training courses. Corporate
universities have two distinguishing features: the first is a dedicated
facility, whether built of bricks or housed online; the second is a
curriculum tailored to the company’s overarching strategy.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Companies would not send their CPAs and CMAs to universities for advanced
accounitng training because in virtually all instances universities have zero to
offer in accountancy beyond studying for the CPA
and CMA examinations. Companies might send accounting employees to
universities for advanced training in computer science, information technology,
and information systems.
Thus it is not surprising that there is a Deloitte University and other
comparable advanced training courses given by firms to provide more technical
and leadership skills to CPAs and CMAs.
Some accounting firms have set up their own assurance services programs for
employees inside selected universities like Georgia and Notre Dame, but these
programs are mostly for non-accountants like engineering and computer
science graduates who were not accounting or business majors.
Corporate MBA programs are more problematic.
Firstly, these programs cannot get AACSB accreditation --- mostly because
business school deans running the AACSB protect their own turfs. Secondly, what
prestigious universities do best is run MBA programs that are much better than
most anything corporations can run for MBA students. MBA programs generally
provide companies with what they want the most --- filters that separate the
wheat from the chaff in identifying the stop MBA graduates. Read that as meaning
that what prestigious MBA programs do is attract top talent that companies are
seeking after the universities find that top talent.
Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College Will Go Fully Coeducational ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/saint-mary-of-the-woods-college-will-go-fully-coeducational/99259?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Chilton & Posner Present An Empirical Study Of Political Bias In Legal
Scholarship At Today's ALEA Annual Meeting at Columbia ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/05/chilton-posner-present-an-empirical-study-.html
Adam S. Chilton (Chicago) &
Eric A. Posner (Chicago) present
An Empirical Study of Political Bias in Legal Scholarship at the
American Law & Economics Association Annual Meeting today at Columbia:
Law professors routinely accuse each other of making politically biased
arguments in their scholarship. They have also helped produce a large
empirical literature on judicial behavior that has found that judicial
opinions sometimes reflect the ideological biases of the judges who join
them. Yet no one has used statistical methods to test the parallel
hypothesis that legal scholarship reflects the political biases of law
professors. This paper provides the results of such a test. We find that, at
a statistically significant level, law professors at elite law schools who
make donations to Democratic political candidates write liberal scholarship,
and law professors who make donations to Republican political candidates
write conservative scholarship. These findings raise questions about
standards of objectivity in legal scholarship.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on liberal bias in the academy and in the media ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
"Seven Must-Read Stories (Week Ending May 16, 2015)," by MIT's
Technology Review, May 15, 2015 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537431/seven-must-read-stories-week-ending-may-16-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150515
"Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending May 16, 2015)," by MIT's
Technology Review, May 15, 2015 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537426/recommended-from-around-the-web-week-ending-may-16-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150515
Disruptive in a Good Way
"10 Ways the World’s First Open Server Architecture Is Disruptive," by
Bradley McCredie, Wired Science, May 16, 2015 ---
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/10-ways-worlds-first-open-server-architecture-disruptive/
Moore’s Law, which
holds that processor advancement is derived from transistor scaling,
is commonly believed to be dying as semiconductor design bumps up against
the limits of physics. It’s debatable whether this is indeed true, but one
thing is certain: Major computing shifts such as
big data and
cloud are placing heavy new demands on computing
systems, and the tech industry’s traditional “tick tock” approach of moving
to a new chip technology every couple of years is failing to keep up.
What’s needed is a new wave of post-silicon
innovation to scale the servers in data centers so they can handle today’s
unprecedented workloads.
That’s much of the rationale for the creation of
the OpenPOWER Foundation, a technology movement started by Google, IBM,
NVIDIA, Mellanox and Tyan in 2013 and now backed by 111 companies and other
organizations in 22 countries.
Members gathered in San Jose this week for the
first
OpenPOWER Summit and
unveiled 10 hardware advances that demonstrate
OpenPOWER’s impact as a breeding ground for new technology, These include
the first commercially available OpenPOWER server, the world’s first custom
POWER chip and a new high-performance server initiating a roadmap that will
culminate in the worlds most powerful systems to be delivered to the U.S.
government.
It’s time to move beyond processor-centric design
to a new paradigm that takes into account software, post-silicon materials
and most importantly, the benefits of an open, collaborative ecosystem.
No one company alone can tackle the new types of
systems the world will need for the growing number of hyper-scale data
centers. That’s why the OpenPOWER initiative makes IBM’s POWER hardware and
software available to open development and allows POWER intellectual
property to be licensed to others.
Here’s a top-10 list of ways OpenPOWER is
disrupting the data center:
Continued in article
A Database of 2,600 Serial Killers ---
Here's a surprising look at the average serial killer ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-surprising-look-at-the-average-serial-killer-2015-5#ixzz3aOBlKJHy
Jensen Comment
Of course this is a possibly misleading sample. The database only includes those
serial killers who got caught. We don't know much of anything about those who
escaped detection completely. Some others may even be in prison for
murder. We just don't know that they were serial killers.
Television usually portrays serial killers as sexually-driven monsters.
However, many others, especially those that go undetected, may have other
motives. For example, some may feel they are doing a victims a service by
killing off dementia cases in nursing homes or prematurely terminating
terminally-ill patients in heavy pain and suffering.
I recall a rogue cop named Smith in San Antonio who thought he was doing
society a service by killing off what he thought were really bad guys who would
get away with their crimes or get overly-lenient sentences. Sometimes cop
killers or pedophiles released from prison don't live long enough to enjoy their
freedom because of a serial killer obsessed with killing these types of bad
guys.
Sometimes serial killers are dispassionate hit men just doing their jobs for
money. Hit men and women that eventually got caught often went undetected for
most of their lives.
The $5 Million Sprained Ankle: The
Sharpton's are Sharp
"Al Sharpton's Daughter Sues The City of New York For $5 Million After She
Fell In The Street," by Steelfish, Daily Mail, May 17, 2015 ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3085287/Al-Sharpton-s-daughter-sues-New-York-5-million-sprained-ankle.html
The eldest daughter of civil rights activist Al
Sharpton has launched a bid to sue the city of New York for $5 million after
she fell in the street and sprained her ankle.
Dominique Sharpton, 29, said she was 'severely
injured, bruised and wounded' when she stumbled over uneven pavement at the
corner of Broome Street and Broadway downtown last year.
According to the lawsuit obtained by The New York
Post, Sharpton now wants millions of tax payer money to compensate her for
the fall which occurred on October 2, 2014.
Continued in article
From the New York Post on May 17,
2015 ---
http://nypost.com/2015/05/17/al-sharptons-daughter-sues-city-for-5m-after-spraining-ankle/
. . .
The legal shakedown is right out of her dad’s
pay-to-playbook.
Al Sharpton has used threats of protests and
boycotts against large companies as a way to generate huge corporate
donations, his critics charge.
Everyone from McDonald’s, Verizon, Macy’s, General
Motors, Chrysler and Pfizer have forked over cash to the elder Sharpton.
The Rev on Saturday said he didn’t know the status
of his daughter’s legal claim. “She’s 29 years old. Why would she have to
talk to me about that?” he said of Dominique, whose mother is Sharpton’s
ex-wife, Kathy. “I just know that she was hurt and that she got a lawyer and
she’s a grown woman. [Where] she goes from there, I have no idea.”
Broken sidewalks and rough pavement can be a
windfall for pedestrians. One plaintiff, Denise Giles, snagged a cool $2.25
million settlement seven years after suing the city’s Health and Hospitals
Corp. for failing to fix a broken sidewalk outside one of its clinics. Giles
claimed she needed ankle surgery as a result of her fall.
Her payout was one of 885, or $60 million worth,
that the city made over 22 months for defective sidewalks.
Dominique Sharpton claims she fell in a crosswalk,
which would make hers a “defective roadway” claim. The city received 774
such claims in the 2014 fiscal year alone.
She was left with “internal and external injuries
to the whole body, lower and upper limbs, the full extent of which are
unknown, permanent pain and mental anguish,” she alleges.
The younger Sharpton is seeking the damages for
“loss of quality of life, future pain and suffering, future medical bills,
[and] future diminution of income,” according to court papers.
Sharpton’s lawyer, John Elefterakis, said she had
“multiple ligament and tendon tears” and “has not had any involvement in
selecting a figure that would be fair and adequate compensation for her pain
and suffering. The number was selected by my firm and is meant as a
safeguard for Ms. Sharpton in a worst-case scenario.”
If she scores her legal windfall, she might want to
give her dad a handout; he reportedly owes $4.5 million in unpaid taxes.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Winning this lawsuit could make similar lawsuits explode into the millions in
cities across the USA. The good news is that she could then help her father pay
his back income taxes.
This is probably only the first stop in
claiming lifetime Social Security Disability and Medicare Benefits.
This lawsuit reminds me of a case in which
a woman broke her leg in her apartment. She called a taxi, crawled by herself
down to the curb, and had the taxi driver help her into the cab. She directed
him to let her out in front of a supermarket where she then dialed 911 and her
lawyer. She lost the case, however, when the store's insurance company managed
to locate the cab driver.
States Differ on Retiree Tax Burden ---
http://www.kiplinger.com/article/retirement/T037-C000-S004-states-differ-on-retiree-tax-burden.html
Especially note the graph
Questions in Terms of Retiree Taxation
- Among the three Pacific states of the west, what are the two worst
states to retire?
(California and Oregon)
- Among the non-Pacific western states, what is the worst state to retire?
(Montana)
- Among the mid-western states, what are the two worst states to retire?
(South Dakota and Minnesota)
- Aomong the eastern states, what are the four worst states to retire?
(New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey)
About 15 percent of the 561,000 pensioners in the
California Public Employees’ Retirement System live their golden years outside
the Golden State, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis of fund data by The
Sacramento Bee. The vast majority have flocked to low-tax or no-tax states,
creating a veritable river of cash that flows out of California and into cities
such as Las Vegas; Reno; Tucson, Ariz.; and Grants Pass, Ore.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article20702106.html#storylink=cpy
California is one of the five least friendly retirement states in terms of
taxation
Among the 41 states with a broad - based income tax, 3
6 offer exclusions for some or all specifically identified state or federal
pension income or both , a retirement income exclusion , or a tax credit
targeted at the elderly. The District of Columbia provides an exclusion for
District and federal pension income . The five states that offer none of these
are California,
Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Vermont. Practice
regarding Social Security income varies somewhat from these generalizations.
Federal law preempts t he ability of states to tax income from Railroad
Retirement.
http://www.ncsl.org/documents/fiscal/StateTaxOnPensions2015update.pdf
Bob Jensen's tax helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
"Dilemma at Columbia: Will a Symbolic Mattress Be Allowed at Commencement?"
by Charles Huckabee," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/dilemma-at-columbia-will-a-symbolic-mattress-be-allowed-at-commencement/98827?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
Maybe the mattress should be stuffed with money for the lawyers.
"Mattress Girl Lawsuit: Can Paul Nungesser Beat Columbia in Court? Experts
Weigh In," by Robby Soave, Reason Magazine, April 30, 2015 ---
http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/30/mattress-girl-lawsuit-can-paul-nungesser#.03jwkv:zVtj
. . .
Dillon: Columbia’s treatment of Paul Nungesser
shows everything that is wrong with the current system. Here is a man who
was found innocent of all charges but whose primary accuser has actually
been given course credit for continuing to call him a rapist—and making
national news in the process. He is living every innocent person’s worst
nightmare. Some of his legal claims are stronger than others, but it seems
clear that Columbia should have to pay a price for how it’s treated him. If
this case goes to trial, I look forward to seeing how Columbia justifies
what it did and how Ms. Sulkowicz performs under cross-examination.
"We test-drove the Toyota ‘future’ car that Elon Musk hates," by Drew
Harwell, The Washington Post, May 11, 2015 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/05/11/we-test-drove-the-toyota-future-car-that-elon-musk-hates/
You expect a certain sort of magic from a car like
Toyota's Mirai, the world's first mass-market, hydrogen-powered all-electric
named after the Japanese word for "future." It maxes out at 300 miles,
refuels in five minutes and spits out zero emissions except for water, all
for tens of thousands of dollars less than Tesla's electric Model S.
But behind the wheel of the four-door Mirai, which
California drivers can buy in October for around $50,000, what you get is
something much more, well, boring: a smooth, quiet, mid-size sedan you
wouldn't find out of place in a school pick-up circle. And that's what makes
it so fascinating.
Toyota let us test-drive one of its prototypes this
week, and it became clear why one of the world's biggest automakers is
making a huge bet on hydrogen as a future fuel for the world's roads. The
Mirai is responsive, futuristic, fully featured and fun to drive, the kind
of car you can see beating gas guzzlers at their own game.
Continued in article
Question
To what extent should universities and individual professors accommodate
disabled students?
Student Sues University after Failing Course Twice ---
http://thepunditpress.com/2015/05/13/student-sues-university-after-failing-course-twice/
Jensen Comment
I recall giving extra examination time and extra help to students with
disabilities. However, I required that the student be classified as disabled by
administrators of my university such that I could not be accused of making my
own medical diagnosis. Having said this, I firmly believe there are limits if
academic standards and professionalism are to be maintained.
The underlying question is whether some students with disabilities might be
misled by too much accommodation. For example, should a student who cannot
tolerate stress be led down the path to graduation when its not at all likely
that the student will ever pass the stressful licensing examinations for some
careers, e.g., nurses, medical doctors, engineers, accountants, lawyers,
etc.
At what point does accommodation become fraud?
In the example cited above, what if Misericordia University accommodates
Jennifer Burbella to such an extent that she earns her nursing degree. If she
later fails her licensing examination will she sue Misericordia for misleading
her into thinking she could become a licensed nurse? My guess is yes!
Perhaps disabled persons should enter into more formal contracts of
accommodation. For example, if a professor should be available to a student
during an examination perhaps that should be in a contract entered into when the
student is admitted to the university. If the student is to have extra
examination time or extra course assignment time, perhaps the amount of time
should be contractual. A lot of potential lawsuits are avoided by anticipating
issues that are likely to be future issues in lawsuits.
In my own opinion, it would appear that Jennifer Burbella should not have
been admitted into the nursing program in the first place. It would appear that
she's highly unlikely to become a licensed nurse after graduating from any
nursing program unless her disabilities are not a serious as described in the
article.
"New Consortium’s Mission: Improve Liberal-Arts Teaching Online," by
Jeffrey B. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-consortiums-mission-improve-liberal-arts-teaching-online/56621?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Four liberal-arts colleges on Monday formed a
consortium to share information about their experiments with online
education, and more members may soon join in.
The focus is not on bringing down the cost of
education, but on improving online-teaching projects — whether all-online or
hybrid courses — by sharing experiences and collaborating.
The premise is that liberal-arts institutions have
goals and methods for going online that are different from those of research
institutions. “There’s a steep learning curve to figuring out how to use
this technology with our students, and with our teaching style,” said
Douglas Johnson, an associate professor of psychology and director of the
Center for Learning, Teaching, and Research at Colgate University, a
founding member of the group. By working together, he said, “we can save
each other from reinventing wheels.”
The other colleges involved are Davidson College,
Hamilton College, and Wellesley College. All of the initial partners are
also members of edX, the online MOOC provider started by Harvard University
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but the group is open to
other institutions even if they aren’t part of that organization, said Kevin
P. Lynch, chief information officer at Colgate.
Ann M. Fox, a professor of English at Davidson, has
taught a MOOC,
“Representations of HIV/AIDS,” on edX with several
colleagues at Davidson. Now she imagines co-teaching a course online with a
colleague from elsewhere in the consortium. “Very often in our small
campuses we’re the only person who does what we do,” she said. “We can pool
our resources more greatly.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
"Sometimes Learning Is Dull," by David Gooblar, Chronicle of
Higher Education, May 13, 2015 ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1003-sometimes-learning-is-dull?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
In the
quest to motivate our students, there is one approach to definitely avoid.
We shouldn’t bend over backward to make sure every single bit of the work
they do is fascinating and entertaining. First, that’s not our job. And
second, a certain amount of dullness is inevitable in learning any complex
subject.
In last month’s column on
student motivation, I
noted that faculty tend to rely too much on extrinsic forms of motivation
that aren’t nearly as effective as the intrinsic types we usually ignore or
take for granted. Extrinsic motivation — like the pursuit of good grades, or
the fear of getting bad ones — tends to disappear as soon as the reward or
punishment goes away. By contrast, students who are motivated out of genuine
interest in a subject are much better learners.
Our
task, I concluded in that column, must be to sell our subjects. From the
syllabus to the assignments to our manner in the classroom, I noted, we
could make our jobs a lot easier if we thought about how to spark students’
interest. But of course there are limits to that approach.
Different students are going to find different tasks more or less
interesting depending on, well, their interests. Even more important, the
learning process is not uniform. Mastering a subject requires students to
engage in a variety of learning tasks, and it's natural that some of those
tasks will be more interesting than others. Some may be — in fact, almost
certainly will be — boring, tedious, and without any apparent payoff. What
then? Are there conditions that make it more likely that students will
persist through those necessary but tedious tasks? What separates the
students who stick with something even when it’s less-than-interesting from
those who quickly lose motivation?
Those were exactly the questions asked by a group of
scholars — led by David S. Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin — who
published the results of their research last year in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. Their paper,
“Boring but Important: A Self-Transcendent Purpose
for Learning Fosters Academic Self-Regulation,”
details the four studies they designed, involving
nearly 2,000 high school and college students, which attempted to zero in on
the causes of student persistence at uninteresting skill-building tasks.
Their
conclusions are surprising, at least to me. They found that giving students
a “self-transcendent purpose for learning” made it much more likely that
they would persist through tasks. By “self-transcendent” they mean a purpose
not motivated strictly by self-interest. Students who saw their learning as
ultimately beneficial to others, to an important cause, or to the world at
large stayed with uninteresting schoolwork much longer than those students
who saw their learning as only beneficial to themselves.
-
See more at:
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1003-sometimes-learning-is-dull?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en#sthash.ZnIpLBy3.dpuf
Jensen Comment
Two examples from my life are accounting versus auditing courses. I found most
of my accounting courses to be exciting while by auditing courses seemed
inherently dull. I think accounting was more like mathematics courses in that
there were numerical problems that were like puzzles to be solved to derive
correct answers. Auditing seemed to have more verbiage and rules memorization
without the fun puzzles.
Course projects seemed to go on and on and soon became dull whether they were
worked individually or in teams. My point is that frequent and short tasks for
me comprised a less-dull and less-agonizing way to learn. However, tasks with
more verbiage and larger in scope are probably more like real life.
I guess this is why I prefer to write blog modules and journal articles
relative to books.
"ADVICE FROM KEN BAIN (on how to be a great teacher)," by Joe Hoyle,
Teaching Blog, May 3, 2015 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2015/05/advice-from-ken-bain.html
. . .
As a true southerner, I try to have one story about
everything. Here is my one story about Ken Bain (which I have repeated
countless times). That evening, he spoke to about 50-70 faculty members.
About halfway through his talk, someone in the back asked: “How can a person
become a great teacher?” Bain stopped immediately and responded: “Oh, is
that what you want to know? Well, that is an easy question to answer.
I can tell anyone how to become a great teacher in
just one sentence. All you have to do is get
your students to care about what you are trying to teach them.” I continue
to believe that is one of the most fabulous pieces of teaching advice that I
have ever heard.
Here is what he had to say recently on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/05/08/404960905/what-the-best-college-teachers-do
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think there are two quite different challenges facing teachers.
At one extreme there's the challenge of inspiring students to want to
learn the content of a course, especially those who have little interest in the
course at the beginning of the term.
At the other extreme there's the challenge of being a value added teacher to
students who are already gung ho to learn the subject matter. The analogy here
would be teaching Jimmy Garoppolo (Tom Brady's
understudy for quarterback of the New England Patriots) how to be a top
quarterback in the NFL. Garoppolo was the 62nd pick of the 2014 NFL draft.
There's little doubt that he's talented and gung ho. The challenge for the Tom
Brady and the coaching staff on the New England Patriots over the past year has
been to perfect what he knows and does when the ball reaches his hands in a real
game against a real opposing team.
Two weeks ago Erika and I were in the office of her spine surgeon in Boston.
He always has one or two advanced Harvard School of Medicine residents in both
his consulting rooms and in his operating rooms. His challenge is not inspiring
these residents to want to learn to be spine surgeons. The challenge is to be of
value added to the considerable amount they already know about spine surgery.
These residents are already spine surgeons. What they are learning from Dr.
Stephen Parazin is the advance procedure of breaking a bent spine into
pieces and reassembling a straightened spine without killing or paralyzing the
patient. Now that takes more painstaking skill than being an NFL quarterback.
And the game is longer. One of my wife's surgeries took 14 hours.
The trick for Dr. Parazin and Tom Brady is not just
being good at what they do but to be value-added teachers of what they do to
extremely motivated apprentices.
Causality ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality
From Econometrics Beat Blog on May 11, 2015 by David Giles ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/05/teaching-causality.html
Teaching Causality
Arguably, Judea
Pearl is the most influential "Causality Specialist" of our
time. (My term, not his!)
Judea also has
several very informative video interviews that may interest you,
For example:
Jensen Comment
My favorite illustration of the discovery of the high correlation between stork
nests and human births, thereby proving that storks deliver babies .---
http://nobabies.net/A stork and baby correlation.html
From Econometrics Beat Blog on May 12, 2015 by David Giles ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/05/mark-thoma-interviews-koen-jochmans.html
Pairwise-Comparison Estimation With
Non-parametric Controls
. . .
This year, the Sargan
Prize for papers published during 2013 was awarded to
Koen Jochmans
(Sciences Po, Paris) for his
paper, "Pairwise-Comparison Estimation With
Non-parametric Controls". The
announcement and
award took place at the
125th
Meeting of the Society, held in Manchester a few
weeks ago.
Continued in article
Jensen Question
Do you think we will ever get an accountics scientist who blogs something like
David Giles blogs for econometrics?
From Econometrics Beat Blog on May 12, 2015 by David Giles ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/05/alternative-tests-for-serial.html
Alternative Tests for Serial Independence
The following question arose in a
(fairly) recent email from Daumantas:
"I wonder if you could give any
references -- or perhaps make a new blog post -- about
testing for serial correlation: Breusch-Godfrey versus Ljung-Box
test. I have no problem finding material on the two tests
(separately), but I am interested in a comparison of
the two. Under what conditions should one test be favoured
over the other? What pitfalls should one be aware of before
choosing one or the other test? Or perhaps both of them
should be put to rest in favour of some new, more general,
more robust or more powerful test?"
Daumantas apparently raised the
same question on
stackexchange, and got some sensible responses.
If this interests you, the response there that refers to Chapter
2 of Fumio Hayashi's,
Econometrics,
is right on target. There's no point in me repeating it here.
Rob Hyndman also had an interesting and
useful post about the L-B test.
My recommendation - stick with the Breusch-Godfrey test if
you're testing regression residuals.
From Econometrics Beat Blog on May 22, 2015 by David Giles ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/05/maximum-likelihood-estimation.html#more
Maximum Likelihood
Estimation & Inequality Constraints
his post is prompted by a
question raised by Irfan, one of this blog's readers, in some email
correspondence with me a while back.
The question was to do with
imposing inequality constraints on the parameter estimates when applying
maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). This is something that I always
discuss briefly in my graduate econometrics course, and I thought that
it might be of interest to a wider audience.
Here's the issue.
Most econometrics/statistics packages that allow you to set up an
arbitrary likelihood function, and then maximize it, don't allow
you to constrain the signs or magnitudes of the resulting point
estimates. For instance, suppose that the likelihood function is L(ψ |
y), where ψ is a p-element vector of parameters, and y is the n-element
vector of random data. We may have reason to believe that a particular
element of ψ, say ψi, should lie between zero and one in
value. However, when we obtain the MLE of this parameter, say ψi*,
the latter turns out to have the value 1.1.
There are several thoughts that might/should go through your head if
this happens. For instance:
- Is my model (and
hence the likelihood function) correctly specified?
- MLE is a consistent
estimator, but in general it may be biased in small samples. Is my
sample size, n, large enough for my results to be "reliable"?
- Even though the
point estimate of ψi exceeds one in value, is it
significantly greater than one, based on the standard error for
ψi*?
- Can I somehow
"trick" the optimization routine that's being used to obtain the
(unconstrained) MLE, ψ*, into giving me a result such that my
estimate lies between zero and one?
I'm not saying that you
should respond to the fact that ψi* > 1 by trying to
constrain the MLE of the parameter. But you might decide to do so in
order to get "economically sensible" results - especially if all else
fails.
Continued in article
Jensen Question
Why are their no accountics scientist bloggers?
$100 Million Gift for UCLA Business School ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/05/14/100-million-gift-ucla-business-school
Jensen Comment
It makes sense that 60% of the income from this gift will to toward financial
aid. The timing could not be better since UCLA severed itself from taxpayer
funding and now operates more like a private college within the university.
Perhaps the business school saw this gift coming when it elected to go private.
Why Wall Street investors and Chinese firms are buying farmland all over
the world ---
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254883/farmland-trade-land-grab
As the world's population soars past 7 billion,
farmland and freshwater are becoming increasingly valuable resources.
And, in response, a growing number of companies and
investors — Wall Street traders, Chinese state corporations, Gulf sheiks —
have been buying up farmland abroad. The trade has been booming since 2007,
when a spike in grain prices got everyone fretting about shortages. The
purchases help countries like China and Saudi Arabia secure food supplies
and conserve water domestically. But critics worry that the trade has also
spurred a rise in "land grabs" — when sellers in countries like Ethiopia or
Cambodia forcibly acquire the farmland from locals in the first place.
So how big is the trade? A 2014 study in
Environmental Research Letters found that at least 126 countries are now
involved in purchasing or selling global farmland. The most active buyers
are investors in the United States, China, Britain, Germany, India, and the
Netherlands. They're typically seeking out land in South America, Africa,
and Asia — particularly Brazil, Ethiopia, Philippines, Sudan, Madagascar,
Mozambique, and Tanzania. The trading map looks like this:
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This does not mean that farmland is the best investment for your long-term
savings portfolio. I sold the farm I inherited in Iowa because I grew weary of
being a landlord and dealing with the complicated Iowa state taxation rules for
farms.
- Farming entails much more than an investment in the land. In many
instances farm owners have more invested in machinery than in the land.
- It's expensive to pay really good farmers to farm rental land.
- Distant landowners generally have to pay farm managers (often law firms)
to manage the farms locally. Farm managers are expensive if they are good at
their jobs.
- Farming is expensive in terms of investments in hybrid seed,
fertilizers, and herbicides.
- Farming is expensive in terms of insurance, various types of insurance
such as liability insurance, hail insurance, flood insurance, drought
insurance, etc. If the risks are really great such as crop insurance in
California the costs of the insurance become prohibitive
.
- Farming is subject to heavy crop price risk and volatility. This price
risk can be hedged, but hedging creates risks in terms of opportunity
losses. There is also a problem of hedge effectiveness when the local
products are hedged at distant such as Chicago CBOT prices.
- The long term values of high quality farmland are already factored into
current markets. Many local farmers shake their heads when they discover
what naive investors are sometimes willing to bid on farms at auction.
- Farm investment returns are subject to the uncertainties of state and
federal legislation. For example, new EPA rules on chemical spraying may
throw profitable farms into long-term losers.
- Real estate is considered a relatively good inflation hedge. But
inflation risks are increasingly way out in the distant future due heavily
to world economic turmoil. But there is long-term inflation risk due to $100
trillion in unfunded USA entitlements down the road.
The bottom line is that it may seem that Wall Street and China are investing
for the long haul in farmland, but in reality they may just be speculating in
farm values for the relatively short term.
From the Scout Report on May 15, 2015
doubleTwist ---
https://www.doubletwist.com/
doubleTwist is a sleek and user-friendly music
player. Available as a free desktop installation or as an Android app,
doubleTwist automatically locates and organizes music, photos, and videos
stored on your hard drive. It then syncs these files with Android devices,
making for a seamless experience that rivals Apple for usability.
Installation is easy, and reviews from users and critics alike are very
positive.
Toodledo ---
http://www.toodledo.com
Toodledo is more than just a simple to-do list.
It's a way to organize your life, meet deadlines, and stay productive at
work and at home. The service integrates a number of tools, including ways
to store notes, lists, and outlines; ways to share with friends, family, and
coworkers; and ways to safely sync data across devices. It's also adaptable.
For users who want a few tools to keep them on track, there are packages
that keep it simple. For expert users that want to customize work flow with
whole teams of colleagues, there are various upgrades that allow that kind
of tech-driven collaboration. Users might like to start with a few to-do
lists and get to know the service before beginning. But learning the program
is easy, and it automatically syncs across devices, including desktops, iOS
and Android.
Amazon's Drone Delivery Dream
Amazon details drone delivery plans
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32653269
Amazon's Delivery Drones Could Find You Wherever You Are
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/08/amazons-delivery-drones-could-find-you-wherever-you-are/
Amazon Drone Delivery Update: Drones Will Talk To Each Other, Locate
Customers By Phone
http://www.ibtimes.com/amazon-drone-delivery-update-drones-will-talk-each-other-locate-customers-phone-1916207
Senators Unveil Temporary Drone Laws That May Bode Well For Amazon And
Google
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/05/12/commercial-drone-laws-cory-booker-john-hoeven-faa-google-amazon/
FAA's Relaxed Drone Rules Could Mean Big Changes for Industry
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246074
Amazon drone patent application imagines delivery that comes to you with
one click
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/12/politics/amazon-patent-drone-delivery/
From the Scout Report on May 22, 2015
Plotly ---
https://plot.ly/
Plotly, an online service for creating and sharing
data visualizations, wants to make graphics easy. Users can import data from
Excel, CSV, TSV, MATLAB, ACCESS, and Goggle Drive spreadsheets. From there,
they can easily visualize data as a line graph, scatter plot, area chart,
bar chart, histogram, box plot, or heat map. Personalization is also largely
intuitive, including changing colors, moving X and Y axes, and many other
possibilities. Since the service is online, sharing with other team members
is as simple as clicking a tab. Interestingly, Plotly also provides some
relatively powerful statistical analysis software that allows readers to do
everything from descriptive statistics up to ANOVAs, T-tests, and
Chi-squared tests. Sign up for the site is free and easy. For readers who
are looking for new, simple, beautiful ways to visualize data, Plotly might
be just the thing.
Wix.com ---
http://www.wix.com/
These days, almost anyone can use a template
service to put up an attractive, if relatively basic, website for their
business, educational project, or personal use. Wix.com is one of the most
popular website builders on the market. Its basic service is free, unless
users need professional features such as their own domain name (in which
case they can choose from one of five premium plans). There are a number of
beautiful templates offered here; layouts are modern, animations are
impressive, and it's easy to add photo galleries and other extras. To get
started, simply click Start Now, enter your email address and a password,
and then Wix.com will lead you through a customization process in order to
select and personalize the ideal template for your particular needs.
Remembering B.B. King, the King of Blues
B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/arts/music/b-b-king-blues-singer-dies-at-89.html?_r=0
B.B. King And The Majesty Of The Blues
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/05/15/406969376/b-b-king-and-the-majesty-of-the-blues
B.B. King Dead at 89: How He Defined the Blues
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/the-legend-of-bb-king/393383/
BB King, the King of Blues, dies at 89
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32747861
Blues is King: A Tribute to B.B. King
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=bbking&pageid=icb.page319966
The Official Website of the King of the Blues, B.B. King
http://www.bbking.com
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
The Library As Incubator Project (the changing library) ---
http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/
Longform ---
http://longform.org/
A University of Pittsburgh writing program connects readers to works of
non-fiction.
MIT Video (150 channels and over 12,000 videos) ---
http://video.mit.edu/
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math: Education for Global Leadership
--- http://www.ed.gov/stem
Pew Research Center: Web IQ Quiz ---
http://www.pewinternet.org/quiz/web-iq-quiz/
Exploratorium: Geometry Playground: Activities and Links ---
http://www.exploratorium.edu/geometryplayground/resources.php
Free Comic Books Turns Kids Onto Physics: Start With the Adventures of
Nikola Tesla ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/free-physics-comic-books.html
Mesmerizing Timelapse Film Captures the Wonder of Bees Being Born ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/mesmerizing-timelapse-film-captures-the-wonder-of-bees-being-born.html
Whitney Museum of American Art: For Teachers ---
http://whitney.org/Education/ForTeachers
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Genetic/Genome Lesson Plans ---
http://www.kumc.edu/gec/lessons.html
Genomics in Education ---
http://www.nslc.wustl.edu/elgin/genomics/gscmaterials.html
Diversity: A Nature & Scientific American Special Issue ---
http://www.nature.com/news/diversity-1.15913
Structures and Functions of Genomes ---
http://www.bioedonline.org/slides/slide01.cfm?tk=33
Build a DNA Molecule ---
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/dna/builddna/
Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You
Live with Uncertainty ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/bertrand-russell-the-practical-purpose-of-philosophy-is-that-it-lets-you-live-with-uncertainty.html
The Edublogger ---
http://www.theedublogger.com
BBC World Service: The Fifth Floor (stories about current events around the
world) --- http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00mt9k
Freakonomics Radio ---
http://freakonomics.com/radio/
Bob Jensen's bookmarks for multiple disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Free Comic Books Turns Kids Onto Physics: Start With the Adventures of
Nikola Tesla ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/free-physics-comic-books.html
iWASwondering.org (women in science) ---
http://www.iwaswondering.org/
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math: Education for Global Leadership
--- http://www.ed.gov/stem
Astronomy Picture of the Day ---
http://apod.nasa.gov/
40 maps that explain outer space ---
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/9/8144825/space-maps
Diversity: A Nature & Scientific American Special Issue ---
http://www.nature.com/news/diversity-1.15913
Mesmerizing Timelapse Film Captures the Wonder of Bees Being Born ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/mesmerizing-timelapse-film-captures-the-wonder-of-bees-being-born.html
USGS: Volcano Hazards Program ---
https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/
EDN Network (Engineering News) ---
http://www.edn.com/
Dolphin Deaths: A Case Study in Environmental Toxicology ---
http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/collection/detail.asp?case_id=767&id=767
Whale and Dolphin Conservation ---
http://us.whales.org
National Science Foundation: The Secret Lives of Wild Animals ---
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/animals
Darwin Manuscripts Project---
http://www.amnh.org/our-research/darwin-manuscripts-project
16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writing on Evolution Now Digitized and
Available Online ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/6px2DY_zYXs/16000-pages-of-charles-darwins-writing-on-evolution-now-available-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
Northern Arizona University: Colorado Plateau Archives ---
http://archive.library.nau.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/cpa/
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
Marxism
PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements ---
http://palmm.fcla.edu/prism/index.shtml
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ---
http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/intro/intro_b.php
WASwondering.org (women in science) ---
http://www.iwaswondering.org/
The Hamilton Project (Brookings studies of economic growth) ---
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/
Brookings Institution YouTube ---
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi7jxgIOxcRaF4Q54U7lF3g
Tulane Digital Library: Baby Boom America Collection ---
http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/collection/id/38
DPLA: The Golden Age of Radio in the US ---
http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/radio-golden-age
EPA: Environmental Justice ---
http://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/
This animated map shows how humans migrated across the globe
http://www.businessinsider.com/prehistoric-human-migration-from-africa-animated-map-2015-5#ixzz3acENRsBT
Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You
Live with Uncertainty ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/bertrand-russell-the-practical-purpose-of-philosophy-is-that-it-lets-you-live-with-uncertainty.html
Freakonomics Radio ---
http://freakonomics.com/radio/
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Law and Legal Studies
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Math Tutorials
Exploratorium: Geometry Playground: Activities and Links ---
http://www.exploratorium.edu/geometryplayground/resources.php
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: Principles to
Actions ---
http://www.nctm.org/PrinciplestoActions/
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
History Tutorials
This animated map shows how humans migrated across the globe
http://www.businessinsider.com/prehistoric-human-migration-from-africa-animated-map-2015-5#ixzz3acENRsBT
6,000 Years of History Visualized in a 23-Foot-Long Timeline of World History
Chart, Created in 1871 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/6000-years-of-history-visualized-in-a-23-foot-long-timeline-of-world-history-chart.html
Marxism
PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements ---
http://palmm.fcla.edu/prism/index.shtml
Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/franz-kafkas-kafkaesque-love-letters.html
MIT Video (150 channels and over 12,000 videos) ---
http://video.mit.edu/
Journal of the American Revolution ---
http://allthingsliberty.com/
Northern Arizona University: Colorado Plateau Archives ---
http://archive.library.nau.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/cpa/
Tulane Digital Library: Baby Boom America Collection ---
http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/collection/id/38
DPLA: The Golden Age of Radio in the US ---
http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/radio-golden-age
Snap Judgment (radio story telling) ---
http://snapjudgment.org/
MCNY Blog: New York Stories ---
http://blog.mcny.org/
Columbia Spectator (History of Columbia University) ---
http://spectatorarchive.library.columbia.edu/
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ---
http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/intro/intro_b.php
Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty Python-Style Animations
by The School of Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/nietzsche-wittgenstein-sartre-explained-with-monty-python-style-animations-by-the-school-of-life.html
Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak,
But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/mark-twain-helen-kellers-special-friendship.html
Smithsonian National Postal Museum ---
http://postalmuseum.si.edu/
The Great War: A Visual History ---
http://www.abmc.gov/sites/default/files/interactive/interactive_files/WW1/index.html
World War I Photographic History in a French Village
Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt ---
http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/remember-me/
World War One: The British Library
http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one
Centenary of the First World War, 1914-1918 ---
http://www.awm.gov.au/1914-1918/
World War (I &II) Propaganda Posters ---
http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/23520
American Revolutionary War Era Maps ---
http://maps.bpl.org/highlights/ar/american-revolutionary-war-era
The Aspen Art Museum ---
https://www.aspenartmuseum.org/
Whitney Museum of American Art: For Teachers ---
http://whitney.org/Education/ForTeachers
The Art of Collotype: See a Near Extinct Printing Technique, as Lovingly
Practiced by a Japanese Master Craftsman ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/the-art-of-collotype.html
Norman Rockwell Illustrates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn
(1936-1940) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/norman-rockwell-illustrates-mark-twains-tom-sawyer-huckleberry-finn.html
Library of Congress: The Chattanooga Daily Rebel (USA Civil War) ---
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015209/
Civil War Studies ---
http://civilwarstudies.org
Pew Research Center: Web IQ Quiz ---
http://www.pewinternet.org/quiz/web-iq-quiz/
Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You
Live with Uncertainty ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/bertrand-russell-the-practical-purpose-of-philosophy-is-that-it-lets-you-live-with-uncertainty.html
Darwin Manuscripts Project---
http://www.amnh.org/our-research/darwin-manuscripts-project
16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writing on Evolution Now Digitized and
Available Online ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/6px2DY_zYXs/16000-pages-of-charles-darwins-writing-on-evolution-now-available-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Music Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
Learn to Write Through a Video Game Inspired by the Romantic Poets: Shelley,
Byron, Keats ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/learn-to-write-through-a-video-game-inspired-by-the-romantic-poets.html
10 Writing Tips from Legendary Writing Teacher William Zinsser ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/10-writing-tips-from-legendary-writing-teacher-william-zinsser.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/
May 15, 2015
May 16, 2015
May 18, 2015
May 19, 2015
May 20, 2015
May 21, 2015
May 22, 2015
May 23, 2015
May 25, 2015
May 26, 2015
May 27, 2015
Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You
Live with Uncertainty ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/bertrand-russell-the-practical-purpose-of-philosophy-is-that-it-lets-you-live-with-uncertainty.html
Cuba Has a Lung Cancer Vaccine—And America Wants It ---
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/cimavax-roswell-park-cancer-institute/
A doctor argues psychiatric drugs do more harm than good
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/12/psychiatric-drugs-more-harm-than-good-expert##ixzz3aDJci7jw
That does not mean all psychiatric drugs some of which prevent patients from
being dangerous on the streets
"These Charts Show the Baby Boomers’ Coming Health Crisis," by Dave
Johnson, Time Magazine, May 11, 2015 ---
http://time.com/3852306/baby-boomer-health-charts/?xid=newsletter-brief
Despite increasing life expectancy, the aging
cohort is less healthy than the previous generation
American Baby Boomers are more stressed, less
healthy and have slightly less health care coverage than people in the same
age group did a decade ago, according to data from
a new report released by the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Exacerbating the potential for a crisis, those aged
55 to 64—the core of the Boomers—are living longer than their predecessors
did 10 years ago. The charts below show that though Boomers are living
longer, but aren’t necessarily living healthier lives.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This is the worst possible news for both Medicare and Medicaid struggling for
survival. Increased life expectancy is bad news from the standpoint of actuarial
estimates of cost. And poor health adds pain to financial misery of these two
entitlements that pay for medical care and medications.
Bob Jensen's threads on entitlements ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
A Bit of Humor
Merrill Markoe: My Favorite Moments of Late Night With David Letterman ---
http://time.com/3860269/late-night-with-david-letterman-merrill-markoe/?xid=newsletter-brief
23 Things That David Letterman Invented ---
http://mentalfloss.com/us/go/63979
Forwarded by Paula
Dad Jokes That Are So Bad They’re Actually Good ---
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikespohr/29-dad-jokes-that-are-so-bad-their-actually-good
Forwarded by Paula
Counting Bears in Alaska ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vJRDpTUIrJI&vq=medium
GRANDPA" takes the Kids to a Movie
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