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.


Journal of Library Innovation Vol 6, No 1 (2015) ---
http://www.libraryinnovation.org/issue/view/33

Topic: 

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 

  1. 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.

     
  2. 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

     
  3. 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

  1. Collaboration
  2. Information Gathering
  3. Remote Learning
  4. 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 PLCCitigroup 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

  1. Among the three Pacific states of the west, what are the two worst states to retire?
    (California and Oregon)
     
  2. Among the non-Pacific western states, what is the worst state to retire?
    (Montana)
     
  3. Among the mid-western states, what are the two worst states to retire?
    (South Dakota and Minnesota)
     
  4. 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!)

 
If you don't subscribe to his blog (Causal Analysis in Theory and Practice) and newsletter already, I'd suggest that you do so.

 
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
 
The Denis Sargan Econometrics Prize is awarded annually by the Royal Economic Society for "the best (unsolicited) article published in The Econometrics Journal in a given year by anyone who is within five years of being awarded their doctorate."
 

. . .

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:
 
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.

  1. Farming entails much more than an investment in the land. In many instances farm owners have more invested in machinery than in the land.
     
  2. It's expensive to pay really good farmers to farm rental land.
     
  3. 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.
     
  4. Farming is expensive in terms of investments in hybrid seed, fertilizers, and herbicides.
     
  5. 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
    .
  6. 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.
     
  7. 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.
     
  8. 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.
     
     
  9. 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

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