Tidbits on September 11, 2015
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Set 3 of My All Time Favorite Photographs
http://cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Favorites/Set03/FavoritesSet03.htm 
 

 

Tidbits on September 11, 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

Updates from WebMD --- Click Here




Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio

TED-Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing --- http://ed.ted.com/

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

Hamas just released a video showing off their rebuilt Gaza tunnels ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/hamas-show-video-of-rebuilt-tunnels-2015-8

How to Age Gracefully: No Matter What Your Age, You Can Get Life Advice from Your Elders ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/how-to-age-gracefully-no-matter-what-your-age-you-can-get-life-advice-from-your-elders.html

Rare color footage of Japan's surrender 70 years ago ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/rare-color-footage-of-japans-surrender-70-years-ago-2015-9

Watch The Half Hour Hegel: A Long, Guided Tour Through Hegel’s Phenomenology, Passage by Passage ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-half-hour-hegel.html

IKE'S PLANE-----WHO KNEW? --- https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=ehwvZXVKmPU 


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

Bob Jensen's not interested
Stream 36 Recordings of Legendary Grateful Dead Concerts Free Online (aka Dick’s Picks) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/stream-36-recordings-of-legendary-grateful-dead-concerts-free-online.html

See Very Early Concert Footage of the B-52s, When New Wave Music Was Actually New (1978) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/see-very-early-concert-footage-of-the-b-52s-when-new-wave-music-was-actually-new-1978.html

Oliver Sacks’ Last Tweet Shows Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Movingly Flashmobbed in Spain ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/oliver-sacks-last-tweet-shows-beethovens-ode-to-joy-movingly-flashmobbed-in-spain.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

How to Age Gracefully: No Matter What Your Age, You Can Get Life Advice from Your Elders ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/how-to-age-gracefully-no-matter-what-your-age-you-can-get-life-advice-from-your-elders.html

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

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Public Domain: A Deeper Dive Into the Collection ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/the-british-library-puts-over-1000000-images-in-the-public-domain-a-deeper-dive-into-the-collection.html

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Galleries --- http://www.metmuseum.org/visit/museum-map/galleries

A Nerd’s Guide To The 2,229 Paintings At MoMA ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-nerds-guide-to-the-2229-paintings-at-moma/

This 30-million-year-old cave in New Zealand has a beautiful phenomenon that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world ---  
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-new-zealand-has-glowing-luminosity-caves-glow-worm-photos-2015-7

Stunning photos of one of the last vestiges of old New York ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-old-new-york-2015-8

Scientists have found a massive stone monument buried underground that could be even bigger than Stonehenge ---
http://uk.businessinsider.com/stone-monument-found-near-stonehenge-2015-9#ixzz3l4CbTEO3

Smithsonian Photo Contest
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/12th-annual-smithsonian-photo-contest-finalists-180954445/?no-ist

14 photos that show the full and awesome scope of Instagram's new feature ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-now-allows-horizontal-images-2015-8

A New Orleans photographer spent 10 years shooting haunting images of the city after Katrina ---
http://www.techinsider.io/photographer-david-spielman-shot-new-orleans-after-katrina-2015-8

The 1982 DC Comics Style Guide Is Online: A Blueprint for Superman, Batman & Your Other Favorite Superheroes ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-1982-dc-comics-style-guide-is-online.html

Take a 360° Virtual Tour of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Personal Home & Studio ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/take-a-360-virtual-tour-of-taliesin-frank-lloyd-wrights-personal-home-studio.html

A photographer traveled to 70 countries — here are some of the best pictures from his journey around the world ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/photographer-traveled-to-70-countries-2015-8

Bob Jensen's threads on art history ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#ArtHistory

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

Bob Jensen's threads on libraries --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#---Libraries

3 Million Judgements of Books by their Covers ---
https://medium.com/@deancasalena/3-million-judgements-of-books-by-their-covers-f2b89004c201

British Library: Virtual books --- http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/virtualbooks/index.html

The Poetry Society: Poetryclass --- http://www.poetryclass.poetrysociety.org.uk/

The 1982 DC Comics Style Guide Is Online: A Blueprint for Superman, Batman & Your Other Favorite Superheroes ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-1982-dc-comics-style-guide-is-online.html

Kickstart a Documentary on Emily Dickinson, Narrated by Cynthia Nixon ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/kickstart-a-documentary-on-emily-dickinson-narrated-by-cynthia-nixon.html

Tolstoy and Gandhi Exchange Letters: Two Thinkers’ Quest for Gentleness, Humility & Love (1909) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/tolstoy-and-gandhi-exchange-letters.html

Hear Kurt Vonnegut Read Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle & Other Novels ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/hear-kurt-vonnegut-read-slaughterhouse-five-cats-cradle-other-novels.html

William Faulkner Rocked Fourth Grade (1907-1908) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/william-faulkner-rocked-fourth-grade-1907-1908.html

Audio Books (both free and fee) ---
http://www.tryaudiobooks.com/business.php?ref=AA8004A333DB&utm_source=PRH_Audio&utm_medium=Advertising&utm_content=&utm_term=business&utm_campaign=RH_Audio_Summer_Promotion_WSJ

Stephen Colbert Reads Flannery O’Connor’s Darkly Comedic Story, “The Enduring Chill” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/stephen-colbert-reads-flannery-oconnors-darkly-comedic-story-the-enduring-chill.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 September 11, 2015
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2015/TidbitsQuotations091115.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




As they look for crowd-pleasing solutions to the college debt "crisis," the Democratic candidates aren't making the right distinctions.
Democratic candidates are actually off-target on student debt
, Editorial Board of The Washington Post ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/democratic-candidates-are-actually-off-target-on-student-debt-2015-8 

Jensen Comment
Bernie Sanders is somewhat realistic. He realizes that when everybody has a college diploma it will be even harder for them to find a job commensurate with their education. So he leans toward the (former) Greek solution. Put them to work doing almost nothing on the government payrolls (but not in the military). And how do we pay for that? The Greek solution was to borrow more and more until the Greek government could borrow no more with Paul Krugman applauding all the way to economic Hell.


Researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a new form of cheating for MOOC credits
"Multiple Personalities, Disorder," by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, August 26, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/26/harvard-mit-researchers-find-mooc-learners-using-multiple-accounts-cheat?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=e257aae0b9-DNU20150826&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-e257aae0b9-197565045

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, SMOCS, Future Learn, iversity, and OKI Free Learning Alternatives Around the World ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 


Encyclopedia Size Comparisons --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons

Jensen Comment
Open source encyclopedias that let the people of the world write and edit modules are more likely to have errors if for no reason other than they have so many more modules. Allowing the world to make edits is both an advantage and a disadvantage in terms or error and bias. It's a disadvantage in that the paid and volunteer editors of these encyclopedias cannot possible find and correct all errors and egregious bias. They do their best on controversial topics like hot political topics and biographies.

The advantage of open sharing and editing is that errors on popular topics (those topics having the most hits) are likely to be corrected quickly by experts. The disadvantage is that the least popular topics (those having almost no hits) are may go uncorrected for decades such as in the biography of John Doe who is only of interest to his two friends in life. Fortunately millions of experts are willing to examine and correct popular topics very quickly.

"Is Wikipedia More Biased Than Encyclopædia Britannica?" by Michael Blanding, Harvard Business School, August 31, 2015 ---
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7689?item=7689.html

Jensen Comment
The finding that Wikipedia is more "left leaning" is hardly surprising. Professors and students worldwide are overwhelmingly left leaning and they tend to write a lot of the modules in Wikipedia and edit modules in that enormous encyclopedia.
Liberal Bias in Academe --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias

However, academe also saves Wikipedia in many respects. For example, the above article does not mention that some medical schools deem it a public service to to have professors and students update and correct Wikipedia modules on diseases, treatments, medications, etc. This makes Wikipedia more likely rather than less likely to be of great service to users.

September 4, 2015 message from Scott Bonacker

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that sponsors but does not operate Wikipedia, announced Monday that at least 381 accounts 
have been suspended for “black hat” editing, in which editors charge and accept money for “to promote external interests.”
Continued --- https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/08/31/wikipedia-accounts-blocked-paid-advocacy/ 
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates --- 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm 

How the New American Dream Works ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-i-went-from-underemployed-waitress-to-the-top-1-of-millennials-in-3-months-2015-7


240 MOOCs Getting Started at Prestigious Universities in September 2015 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/240-moocs-getting-started-in-september-enroll-today.html

See the list at http://www.openculture.com/free_certificate_courses 


Plagiarism Detection
"My Love-Hate Relationship With TurnItIn," by Marcattilio-McCracken, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/My-Love-Hate-Relationship-With/232887/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

I ’ve fully embraced the benefits and strictures of being a professor in the digital age. In both my online courses and live ones, I have come to rely upon our online classroom portal to disseminate course information, post reminders, log grades, and to serve as the primary method by which students turn in their papers. I don’t know if it is necessarily sounder to do everything electronically, but it’s a system that’s been honed course after course and seems to work well for both sides of the lectern. Still, there are aspects of it that trouble me.

Every paper turned in to my class Dropbox gets automatically run against TurnItIn’s plagiarism-detection tool. I detest plagiarists; they are the bane of my professional existence. I’ve done my best to stamp out plagiarism with antiformulaic assignment prompts, rotating exams, and gentle reminders through the semester that committing plagiarism invites the devil into your soul. Still, I get students who, either from Machiavellian overconfidence or through abject laziness, plagiarize.

And so if asked, I’ll not pretend otherwise — I love TurnItIn. It’s painless, effective, and just as important, already there for me to use. It saves me some relatively significant number of hours each term, agonizingly Google-searching the paper of an unremarkable student who has suddenly turned into David Foster Wallace on the final exam. And when I am forced to pursue an instance of academic dishonesty, it provides a nice, tidy, official-looking report that tends to convince students of the authority and weight behind the meeting we are currently having. So I use it, happily.

But recently I got an email from a student concerned about TurnItIn on dual grounds. The student was nontraditional, and this was his first college course in some years. He was concerned first about accidentally plagiarizing, and wondered (naïvely, but completely understandably) if TurnItIn let students run their work through free to make sure this didn’t happen. Second, the student didn’t like the idea of being forced to surrender his work to a company that would make money from it. He was articulate, respectful, and tentative.

My knee-jerk reaction, which thankfully lasted only a minute or so, was to throw up shields. Tell the student that such antiplagiarism tools were clearly spelled out on our syllabus and that by staying in the course each student was assenting to such measure in the name of academic integrity. But in typing this into Outlook I decided I should probably be sure this was actually the case, and so I called our university’s academic-integrity coordinator, who said she had never gotten a question like this before, but confirmed: So long as it was in my syllabus, I could do what I wanted.

I went back to click "send," and discovered I was ambivalent about it. It must have taken some guts from the student to send that email to his professor, and at the very beginning of the semester no less. Plus, the fact that there was no standing university policy pertaining to what was a potentially explosive issue made the "it’s in the syllabus" argument seem astoundingly soft. Its reliance on student ignorance rather than legal standing made me curious if anyone had challenged it.

Continued in article

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


"College Calculus:  What’s the real value of higher education?" by John Cassidy, The New Yorker, September 7, 2015 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/college-calculus

Jensen Comment
John Cassidy is one of my favorite writers, and this is a good summary article. There are many things of value in a college education, and most of them do not entail careers or lifetime income. However, one misleading aspect of the media hype about college diplomas is that students with low aptitudes for college benefit greatly from college. I have acquaintances (husband and wife with four children) who went deeply into debt to get college diplomas by mostly taking distance education courses.

He graduated in business, and she graduated in criminology. But they really did not have high aptitudes to benefit from college learning. Now they still have their same blue collar jobs that they had before they plunged deeply in debt for diplomas on the wall. Yeah they went through the motions of taking relatively easy courses from a relatively easy university. But they were constantly distracted while still working at their jobs and raising a young family. This is not quite the same as going full time at a flagship university and plunging into really learning from courses.

September 7, 2015 reply from Steve Markoff

I'm not sure that the lesser aptitude students benefit even from complete immersion.

I see tons and tons of these types semester after semester. I'm not sure what the value added is for most of these. I feel strongly that they should be in vocational school which will measurably benefit them.

Steve


"Lawyers Are Just As Likely To Lose Their Jobs To Robots As Truck Drivers And Factory Workers," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, August 30, 2015 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/08/lawyers-are-just-as-likely-to-lose-their-jobs-to-robots-as-truck-drivers-and-factory-workers.html

Jensen Comment
The same is true for accountants. Just think of how intimidating it will be when those eight-foot tall auditors wearing green eyeshades and sleeve garters file into the client's office.


"SAT Scores Drop," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, September 3, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/03/sat-scores-drop-and-racial-gaps-remain-large?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=512fde5bd3-DNU20150902&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-512fde5bd3-197565045

SAT scores dropped significantly for the class of college-bound seniors this year. All three sections saw declines -- and the numbers were down for male and female students alike.

At the same time, SAT scores showed continued patterns in which white and Asian students, on average, receive higher scores than do black and Latino students. And, as has been the case for years, students from wealthier families score better than do those from disadvantaged families. These and other figures -- including new data on Advanced Placement participation -- are being released today by the College Board.

Over all, scores dropped two points on critical reading, two points on mathematics and three points on writing. The seven-point decline across all three sections compares to a one-point decline the prior year, and no change the year before that.

Here are the figures for the last five years:

SAT Averages

Year Critical Reading Mathematics Writing
2011 497 514 489
2012 496 514 488
2013 496 514 488
2014 497 513 487
2015 495 511 484

The reading score has not been so low as far back as the College Board's annual report, which dates to 1972. The mathematics score hasn't been this low since 1999. And the writing score is the lowest since that portion of the test was created in 2006.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The drops may not seem so significant but it should be remembered that the sample sizes each year are huge. More importantly the high school students who opt out of taking the SAT and ACT tests (because so many colleges no longer require these standardized tests) are most likely the students who would further draw down the scores.

 However, my speculation above runs counter to data that shows SAT test takers are becoming more diverse ---
http://www.vox.com/2015/9/3/9257121/sat-scores-2015


Coffee --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

7 unusual ways coffee is made around the world ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/unusual-ways-coffee-is-made-around-the-world-2015-8

There's a right and wrong way to eat this 'superfood' (chia) that Taylor Swift swears by ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/should-i-eat-chia-seeds-2015-8 


11 bizarre college courses offered across the US ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/11-bizarre-college-courses-offered-across-the-us-2015-8 

Jensen Comment
Makes governmental accounting courses sound pretty dull.


The 27 most controversial people on Wikipedia — featuring Britney Spears, Bill Clinton, and Adolf Hitler ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-27-most-controversial-people-on-wikipedia-featuring-britney-spears-bill-clinton-and-adolf-hitler-2015-8

Jensen Question
Note the ranking criteria.


This brilliant world map shows countries scaled to the size of their stock markets ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/map-countries-scaled-to-equity-market-capitalization-2015-8


Four Mistakes That Could Ruin Your Retirement ---
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/03/4-mistakes-that-could-ruin-your-retirement.html

Jensen Comments

Mistake: Boosting bond allocations at retirement
It used to be a good ideal to shift from CREF to TIAA before retirement. Thanks to the Fed's virtually zero interest rate policies this may no longer be a good idea. Times change, however, so everything should be reconsidered if you won't be retiring soon.

Mistake: Counting on Medicare to cover all health care costs
Medicare is being torn apart by fraud and explosion of medical costs. Drastic revisions in the future almost certainly will entail making middle and upper income retirees bear much more of their medical costs than they currently are paying out when on Medicare.

Mistake: Moving to a state for the low income taxes
There are usually more important variables for choosing where to live in retirement than state income taxes. However, if plans include moving to another state both income and inheritance taxes should be considered. We have two grown children living in California and Maine. Taxes were a consideration when we chose New Hampshire with good tax deals relative to Maine and California, and New Hampshire is very close to Maine.

Mistake: Not saving enough for retirement.
This is a bigger problem since the Fed's zero interest rate policy destroyed most safe investment alternatives like certificates of deposit and low-risk bonds. Now investments for retirement must take on more risk like choosing all CREF versus having some TIAA. Of course taking on more financial risk entails taking more chances. Dah! Some investors take chances in real estate, but the real estate in my portfolio was only in the house I lived in and the land surrounding this house. I do not generally like rental property because of the headaches of being a landlord (including owning a farm). I do not like idle land investments because of the annual property taxes and insurance cash going out and no cash coming in.

More of Bob Jensen's personal finance helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers

 

This is the research you should do before picking a credit card ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/sc/pick-the-right-credit-card-2015-8 

AICPA:  Back-to-School: How to Pay for College ---
http://blog.aicpa.org/2015/08/back-to-school-how-to-pay-for-college.html#sthash.gcYpuxSm.PSkI9cqt.dpbs

The Upshot: Is It Better to Rent or Buy? (real estate calculator) ---  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html
Jensen Comment
My general advice for new faculty is not to buy a home until tenure is achieved except in hot markets where fast turnover profits are probable provided too much is paid initially. After tenure achievement the above calculator can be helpful.

My priors were to invest as much as possible in long-term ownership of a house and the least possible in the long-term ownership of a very reliable car. 

However, be careful where you buy real estate. Up in the White Mountains I advise mountain or lake views even though New Hampshire has a view tax.  There really aren't any gated neighborhoods up here, and nothing would be gained by having gated neighborhoods. In San Antonio I would not put big money into a house that's not in a gated neighborhood. Even if you're opposed philosophically to that concept, the fact is that expensive homes do not sell very well in San Antonio unless they are in gated neighborhoods with armed guards at the gates. I would have had much more capital gain on my big San Antonio house if it had been in a gated neighborhood. Sigh!

 

The Upshot:  Is It better to Lease or Buy a Car? --- http://money.howstuffworks.com/business/getting-a-job/buy-vs-lease-car.htm
Jensen Comment
Leasing became much more attractive when the Federal Reserve drove commercial interest rates toward zero. But that does not mean "more attractive" than buying in all instances. Much depends on the amount you drive and the terms of the lease in the context of  the amount you drive. It also depends a lot upon your willingness to drive older cars. When I worked in San Antonio where newish cars are stolen in unbelievable numbers daily my wife's car was a newish tiny Honda Civic, and I drove a very reliable battered up ancient Ford station wagon that had a newish engine and transmission under the hood. This ghetto-like car looked so bad that nobody would think of stealing it and driving it across the border to Mexico.

In general, even in retirement, my wife and I do not mind driving well-maintained older cars. Our main car in the White Mountains (where car theft would be headline news) is a very reliable Subaru Forrester that we will probably drive until it is at least 20 years old (it's now five years old) or has over 100,000 miles.  The Subaru will probably be the last car we ever own. After that its car leasing for us unless we're in a nursing home. I also keep an unreliable old Jeep Cherokee in the barn that's used mostly for hauling brush to the dump. That will be in our barn on the day I die.

My point is that leasing would probably not be the best choice for us until we're very old. However, leasing is the best choice for most of our children except for one son who puts a lot of miles on a car commuting a long distance to work in California.

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


TED --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_%28conference%29
Also note the Criticism section

TED-Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing --- http://ed.ted.com/

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

Bob Jensen's threads on open shared (free) learning ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Pictochart --- http://piktochart.com/v2/
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piktochart (an important feature of Piktochart is its HTML scripting)

"Designing Engaging Course Documents with Piktochart" by Julie Platt, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/designing-engaging-course-documents-with-piktochart/60851?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

It’s sometimes a struggle to get students to carefully read course documents. Many student questions, especially at this time of year, can be answered with “Please check the syllabus!” However, when I check the syllabus myself (even my own!), I’m sometimes pretty underwhelmed. As I prepared to teach our Technical Writing and Communication course this fall, I decided I wanted to emphasize document design and economy of language, two areas in which I felt my previous classes could improve. Around the same time, I discovered Piktochart. 

Piktochart is a web-based app that allows you to design infographics and other image-heavy documents and publications. It offers inspiration in a number of customizable templates, and sizable, searchable libraries of fonts, graphics, and icons; you can also drop your own images into any document. You can publish finished projects on the web or download them as PNG files; you can also share them on social media and export them to Evernote. If you want more options, you can purchase a Pro account, which allows you to download your document in a number of page formats and file types and publish it to SlideShare. If you’re an educator, Piktochart offers a 12-month individual license which is regularly $39.99, and now on sale for $15. 

Bob Jensen's threads on course authoring tools ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Also see Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


Robots Read and Learn from Text Instructions
"Robots Learn to Make Pancakes from WikiHow Articles," by Will Knight, MIT's Technology Review, August 24, 2015 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540781/robots-learn-to-make-pancakes-from-wikihow-articles/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-weekly-robotics&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150826

Researchers at a European project are teaching robots to use written text to learn how to perform tasks.

Jensen Comment
I have a new Dell laptop on its way. I wish I also had a robot to read and explain the instruction manual to me --- especially for Windows 10 that I've never used before. I suspect, however, that there's already a lot of YouTube video help for making the leap from Windows 7 tp Windows 10.  The problem with video help in general, however, is that a lot of time can be wasted watching parts of the video that you really don't need to learn or relearn.

Since I'm getting a Windows 10 laptop I was interested in the following tip from David Pogue
How to Find Windows 10's Secret Search Feature ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/how-to-find-windows-10s-secret-search-feature-127597396134.html


Auburn's  Political Science Department Weaves Unique Baskets
"Auburn Reversed Course on Cutting a Major Favored by Athletes," by Charles Huckabee, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 27, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/auburn-reversed-course-on-cutting-a-major-favored-by-athletes/103695?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
The major is is considered pre-professional. What was left unmentioned is that it most likely is pre-professional football, basketball, baseball, etc.


Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel

Watch The Half Hour Hegel: A Long, Guided Tour Through Hegel’s Phenomenology, Passage by Passage ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-half-hour-hegel.html

Hegel on Knowledge, Impatience, the Peril of Fixed Opinions, and the True Task of the Human Mind ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/27/hegel-knowledge-phenomenology-of-mind/?mc_cid=32c8c0dfcd&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

 


"These Videos Could Change How You Think About Teaching," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 27, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/These-Videos-Could-Change-How/232645/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

"The Gifts of a Teacher," by Brett Stephens, The Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gifts-of-a-teacher-1440457951?mod=djemMER

Amy Kass gave her students the chance to know themselves.

Why teach? More than once in recent years I’ve heard from teachers, nearing or past retirement, who wondered whether they had chosen the right profession. One thought that maybe she would have done better as an architect. “That way,” she said, “at least I could point to something I made.”

I suspect that many teachers harbor these sorts of doubts—the wiser the teacher, the graver the doubt. Teaching at its best is less in the business of imparting knowledge than it is of shaping souls. But who can tell what, if anything, has been shaped, much less how well? How much can any single teacher do, in the space of a semester or two, to form the interior spaces of her students’ intellectual and emotional lives?

Amy Kass, one of the best teachers I ever had (along with her husband, Leon, also at Chicago), was not immune to these sorts of doubts. She knew that even in the best classrooms at the University of Chicago, with the brightest students in the country, there was a limit to what she could accomplish.

Clever students in her humanities classes could disappoint her, in the way that clever people are often disappointing. A semester’s course on Homer’s “Odyssey” or Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” would probably not long stay in the minds of students aiming at careers in law or finance. Even students destined for academic careers of their own were bound to get caught up in everything she disliked about university life: the need to publish, the intellectual faddishness, the petty careerism, the higher cynicism.

Yet for nearly 40 years Mrs. Kass persevered, taking the extravagant gamble that every now and then she would find students whose minds would alight with recognition in, say, Levin’s feelings for Kitty in “ Anna Karenina,” or in Malcolm X’s reading of the dictionary in prison, or in Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife on the eve of the first Battle of Bull Run. These were the students, and such were the texts, that redeemed the enterprise of teaching. They ennobled the profession not because the compensations were many, but because they were few. What’s rare is also precious.

What was it like to sit in Mrs. Kass’s classroom? The tone was set by the way in which we addressed one another. She was Mrs. Kass (not Dr. Kass, never Amy) to us; we were Mr. Stephens, Ms. Lehman, Mr. Lohse and so on to her. It was anachronistically formal but radically egalitarian: Whatever our other differences, teacher and student were on an equal footing when it came to discussing the book at hand. We came to class not to be instructed on the meaning of a text (much less Mrs. Kass’s views of it), but to read it afresh, without preconceptions. And we read not for the sake of knowledge, but for self-knowledge: to understand ourselves, through stories told by others, as we hadn’t fully (or vaguely) understood ourselves before.

Though I never once heard Mrs. Kass utter a political opinion, at the core of her teaching was the belief that, while it’s never easy to really know oneself, modern life makes doing so much more difficult. The benefits of emancipation from the old conventions regarding status, sex, manners and morals may be vast. But they come with hidden costs, notably in the form of aimlessness.

We can satisfy our desires, but we have trouble recognizing our longings. We can do as we please but find it difficult to figure out what truly pleases us, or what we really ought to do. Limitless choice dissipates the possibility of fully realizing the choices we make, whether in our careers or communities or marriages. There’s always the chance that something (or someplace, or someone) better is lurking around the corner.

Mrs. Kass believed that at least one aim of a higher education is to provide students with a sextant of sorts, by which they might better discover what it is they should know about life, what they might hope for it, and how they might go about getting it. Not that this belief made her censorious or doctrinaire: You cannot love literature the way she did without also knowing that it is the untidiness of life that makes it interesting. But she cared enough for her students to let them know that the steering aids offered by the modern world might not be enough. Jane Austen still offers the best advice on dating. Aristotle still has the last word on friendship.

Continued in article

Joe Hoyle, an award winning teacher at the University of Richmond, has been searching for and writing about what it takes to be a great teacher. I keep reminding Joe that great teachers are like ice cream --- they come in many flavors ranging from those gifted at not teaching to those gifted at lecturing. Search Joe's archives at
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/ 

By gifted in not teaching I mean those great teachers who are best at contributing to metacognition such as great case method teachers and BAM teachers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm

One of the biggest challenges for any teacher is learning the art and science of distilling essentials out of  the vast material on virtually any topic. The greatest success is in  generating students who passionately want to learn more and more details about the material a teacher covers in a course. Sometimes the best learning entails discovery of where to find answers rather than memorization of the answers.


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

Marshall McLuhan’s 1969 Deck of Cards, Designed For Out-of-the-Box Thinking ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/marshall-mcluhans-1969-deck-of-cards-designed-for-out-of-the-box-thinking.html

Jensen Comment
For example, the four of clubs reads "affluence creates poverty." In many instances "affluence reduces poverty." One way of looking at it is when one of our AECM professors declared there are no poor in the USA. Poverty is relative, and this makes Gini coefficients virtually impossible to compare between nations ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

. . .

Different income distributions with the same Gini coefficient

Even when the total income of a population is the same, in certain situations two countries with different income distributions can have the same Gini index (e.g. cases when income Lorenz Curves cross).[52] Table A illustrates one such situation. Both countries have a Gini index of 0.2, but the average income distributions for household groups are different. As another example, in a population where the lowest 50% of individuals have no income and the other 50% have equal income, the Gini coefficient is 0.5; whereas for another population where the lowest 75% of people have 25% of income and the top 25% have 75% of the income, the Gini index is also 0.5. Economies with similar incomes and Gini coefficients can have very different income distributions. Bellù and Liberati claim that to rank income inequality between two different populations based on their Gini indices is sometimes not possible, or misleading.[61]

Extreme wealth inequality, yet low income Gini coefficient

A Gini index does not contain information about absolute national or personal incomes. Populations can have very low income Gini indices, yet simultaneously very high wealth Gini index. By measuring inequality in income, the Gini ignores the differential efficiency of use of household income. By ignoring wealth (except as it contributes to income) the Gini can create the appearance of inequality when the people compared are at different stages in their life. Wealthy countries such as Sweden can show a low Gini coefficient for disposable income of 0.31 thereby appearing equal, yet have very high Gini coefficient for wealth of 0.79 to 0.86 thereby suggesting an extremely unequal wealth distribution in its society.[62][63] These factors are not assessed in income-based Gini.

Continued in article

"Why some billionaires are bad for growth, and others aren’t," by Ana Swanson, The Washington Post, August 20, 2015 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/20/why-some-billionaires-are-bad-for-growth-and-others-arent/

Jensen Comment
My point is that one sentence declaratives can be highly  misleading even when they were produced by Marshall McLuhan. There are usually exceptions and counter examples for most any simplistic declarative. That's what makes the Academy so exciting. Only ignorant people have all the  simple answers. Unfortunately, there are quite of few of them seeking to become President of the USA in 2016. There are tens of millions more who will be voting for them in 2016.


Philosophy Explained (minimally) With Donuts --- http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/philosophy-explained-with-donuts.html


"The Economic Guide To Picking A College Major," by Ben Casselman, Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog, September 12, 2014 (slightly dated) ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economic-guide-to-picking-a-college-major/

Jensen Comment
This is a better-than-most article article on this topic, although virtually all such articles are misleading in terms of long-term versus short term reasons for choosing a major. For example, some of the highest paying careers at the point of graduation are not great careers in terms of long-term opportunities for professional growth or lifetime income. Accounting and finance, for example, are typically ranked low in terms of average starting salaries but rank high in terms of economic opportunities. In part this is because accounting and finance graduates are neophytes who have minimal expertise that comes with experience and post-graduate learning (usually on the job). They have a lot of learning to do before they can earn their keep.

One strong point of the article is that it lists number of majors in each discipline broken down into quartiles. This is important because numbers reflect the fact that there are both opportunities and job competition due to high versus few numbers of majors. For example, there are over 200,000 nursing majors and nearly 200,000 accounting majors. This suggests that demand for these majors must be relatively widespread with considerable  choices of location both in urban and rural settings across the USA. Those disciplines having less than 1,000 majors perhaps have much less choice with respect to number of employers and geographic locations.

The article is weak in terms of showing the incremental advantages of getting advanced degrees. For example, the physical sciences are not usually great undergraduate majors without going into some type of graduate study. Some majors require at least masters degrees for taking the licensing examinations for a career. Thus comparing these majors with majors that only require undergraduate degrees is a little like comparing apples and oranges.

Also some majors that used to be great in terms of income and opportunity have fallen onto hard times. Law schools, for example, are now graduating twice and many majors relative to career opportunities in law.

Also some majors are much less specific in terms of job skills. For example, graduates in business management have wide ranging skills (or lack thereof) relative to accounting, pharmacy, and engineering majors that require many more specialized courses in a curriculum --- partly due to the way certification examinations dominate curricula for some majors like accounting, pharmacy, and engineering but not business management. My point is that the subset of business management majors is such a heterogeneous subset I'm not certain what starting salary averages really mean in this diverse population.

My main recommendation is that starting salaries should be given much less consideration than other factors going into a career. For example, I personally would never have considered physical therapy as a major, because I think physical therapy over the course of 50 years on the job must be terribly boring and generally lacks growth opportunity. Some careers like K-12 teaching lack growth opportunities buy offer considerable independence in terms of free time with summer vacations and holidays that add up to a lot of free time in a lifetime career. free time for example to raise children.

For me, being a professor in a university turned into what I think has to be the best of all careers as long as becoming wealthy is not a priority in life. The main advantage is independence choosing how to spend your time on and off the job. There are of course other types of non-monetary rewards in helping students learn and develop their own lives. My research and scholarship had great variety over the years and was not nearly as dull as you might think when the word "accountancy" is mentioned as an academic discipline.

The 10 Best and Worst Undergraduate Majors for Getting Jobs (without getting additional credentials) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-college-majors-2014-6

Top students in the "worst majors" in the past often went on to law school. They are still doing so but in fewer numbers and greatly dampened prospects for working in law firms after law school graduation. Law school losses of students are often MBA program gains. Options in accounting, engineering, nursing, pharmacy are not so great due to all the undergraduate prerequisites that must be satisfied before going to graduate school in those specialties.

Because there are so many graduates in business, neither an undergraduate degree nor an MBA degree is a very good path to a career without extremely high grades or specialties in demand like accounting. Sometimes a combination of degrees greatly improves job prospects such as an undergraduate engineering or computer science degree topped off with an MBA from a top school.

Students planning to get MD or science Ph.D. degrees need to carefully plan their undergraduate studies in advance of going to graduate school. Unfortunately, graduate studies in those fields, especially medicine, can be quite long and expensive. For example, most MD or science Ph.D. graduates must also plan for low-paying post-graduate residency or post-doc years before they can make significant progress in paying down their student loans.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Search for the Latest Job Openings in any Discipline of Interest ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/job_search/new?cid=VTECHNJOBSL1

Jensen Comment
When I search for "Accounting" and "Faculty & Research" today there are 256 jobs posted in the past 30 days. However, not all of these jobs seem property classified as both "Accounting" and "Faculty & Research." Also I know of some job openings for accounting professors that are not listed for major universities.

For persons seeking jobs as accounting faculty in the USA perhaps a better place to look might be the American Accounting Association Career Center ---
http://aaahq.org/Career-Center
Job seekers may also post their resumes at this center.

Since there are so many faculty vacancies in accountancy, job seekers with Ph.D. degrees from AACSB-accredited universities are advised to contact colleges and universities where they would most like to be employed.

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

Bob Jensen's threads on the higher education faculty job market ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#AccountingFaculty


"The Distribution of a Ratio of Correlated Normals," by David Giles, Econometrics Beat, August 26, 2015 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-distribution-of-ratio-of-correlated.html#more

Jensen Comment
We know via the Central Limit Theorem that sample means of a variable are distributed normally. If there are two such variables that are independent it can also be shown that the distribution of their ratios follows a Cauchy Distribution ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_distribution

David's blog posting shows what can happen when the two variables are not independent.


"Admire the Beauty of a Well-Time Covered Call Program," by Bryan Perry, Townhall, August 26, 2015 ---
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/bryanperry/2015/08/26/admire-the-beauty-of-a-welltime-covered-call-program-n2043807?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Jensen Comment
Among the various alternatives in derivatives markets, selling covered calls are among the least risky alternatives for investors wealthy enough to own the covering shares. Selling covered calls is not as risky or as speculative as many other alternatives ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covered_call

However, very few alternatives in investing are risk free. Covered call options run the risk of sacrificing the opportunity value of value increases in owned shares between the date of sale of the covered call options and the date they are exercised (if they are exercised) by the purchaser. Secondly, there's still the risk of stock ownership when the call options expire unless the owner of those shares also sells those shares and pays the transactions fees of the sale. This is because in the options markets for puts and calls are normally "net settled" for cash such that the owner of the shares really does not necessarily "sell" those shares to meet option contract obligations.

Selling covered calls does not provide the leverage that derivatives speculators often are looking for when they are willing to take high risks such as investing in futures or forward or swap contracts (swaps are usually a portfolio of forward contracts). Of course without leverage there is lower risk, which is why risk averse wealthy investors are more inclined to sell covered calls than purchase naked options ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_%28finance%29

Business students really should graduate understanding more about financial leverage, net settlements, transactions costs, and other contracting features of investments.

For example, do your students know how to calculate the profit earned on an expired covered call option?
Hint: Start with the premium received by the call option seller?

For example, do your students know the enormous difference between selling a covered call versus selling a naked call?

It gets even more complicated for accounting students who want to learn about accounting for derivative contracts under FAS 133 in the USA and IFRS 9 internationally ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm


September 2015 Readung List from David Giles, Econometrics Beat ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2015/09/september-reading-list.html

September Reading List

 
  • Abeln, B. and J. P. A. M. Jacobs, 2015. Seasonal adjustment with and without revisions: A comparison of X-13ARIMA-SEATS and CAMPLET. CAMA Working Paper 25/2015, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University.
  • Chan, J. C. C. and A. L. Grant, 2015. A Bayesian model comparison for trend-cycle decompositions of output. CAMA Working Paper 31/2015, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University.
  • Chen, K. and K-S. Chan, 2015. A note on rank reduction in sparse multivariate regression. Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice, in press.
  • Fan, Y., S. Pastorello, and E. Renault, 2015. Maximization by parts in extremum estimation. Econometrics Journal, 18, 147-171.
  • Horowitz, J., 2014. Variable selection and estimation in high-dimensional models. Cemmap Working Paper CWP35/15, Institute of Fiscal Studies, Department of Economics, University College London.
  • Larson, W., 2015. Forecasting an aggregate in the presence of structural breaks in the disaggregates. RPF Working Paper No. 2015-002, Research Program on Forecasting, Center of Economic Research, George Washington Univer

MIT: Seven Must-Read Stories (Week ending September 5, 2015) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/541021/seven-must-read-stories-week-ending-september-5-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150907

MIT:  Recommended from Around the Web (Week ending September 5, 2015) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/541011/recommended-from-around-the-web-week-ending-september-5-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150904

MIT:  Seven Must-Read Stories (Week ending August 29, 2015) --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/540876/seven-must-read-stories-week-ending-august-29-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150828

MIT:  Recommended from Around the Web (Week ending August 29, 2015) --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/540871/recommended-from-around-the-web-week-ending-august-29-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150828


MIT:  The 20 Most Infamous Cyberattacks of the 21st Century (Part I) --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/540786/the-20-most-infamous-cyberattacks-of-the-21st-century-part-i/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150825


From MIT's 2015 Acknowledgements of Innovators Under 35 Years of Age


"The Student-Loan Siphon:  New evidence that the college debt bomb is hurting the economy," The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-student-loan-siphon-1440803595?mod=djemMER

For years we’ve warned readers about the burgeoning calamity known as student loans, and the latest news is that the debt bomb is hurting the economy as well as the federal fisc. New evidence from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia illustrates how subsidized student loans sap small business creation.

Student loans have ballooned tenfold since 1999 to more than $1 trillion, the authors note in a July report. Other consumer debt—mortgages, car loans, credit cards—dipped during the 2008 financial crisis, but student debt doubled from $547 billion in 2007, nearly all of it on Education Department books. The Philly Fed is the first to examine how mortgaging an education influences entrepreneurship.

Here’s the connection: Entrepreneurs borrow money to get rolling. But the average student-loan customer owes $28,000 and so some enterprising adults are loaded up with debt, even decades after graduation. Nascent business (with no employees) report capital of about $44,000, according to a recent survey; half comes from loans and lines of credit. Debt-financing, the Fed points out, is critical for expanding a business in the years following its founding.

Yet graduates have sunk too far into the red to amass more liabilities, and not even bankruptcy can liberate them. The Fed found that new firms with roughly five employees dropped 17% on average between 2000 and 2010 in counties where relative student debt grew by 2.7%. Pockets of the Midwest seem hardest hit, and much of this debt is saddled on middle-class students and families. The authors call the correlation “significant” and “economically meaningful,” which in academic publishing means “huge.”

One result is that students choose different careers, flocking to existing companies—if they manage to find a job in an economy in which more than half of parking lot attendants report some college experience. There’s no longer an incentive to plunge into the risk-taking that produces valuable and innovative companies. It’s fashionable to treat college as an Elysium promising higher earnings and eternal happiness, but the Fed research is the latest clue that many students would be better off without a degree. The 17% delinquency rate is another hint.

Less obvious is the damage to the economy. The report notes that small businesses create six in 10 new jobs, and make up about half of the private economy and 99% of businesses. This could slow as small business creation wanes, and there’s other evidence this is happening among young people. The Kauffman Foundation has reported that new entrepreneurs ages 20 to 34 fell to 23% of self-starters in 2013. That’s down from 35% in 1996.

Continued in article


"Automation in the Newsroom:  How algorithms are helping reporters expand coverage, engage audiences, and respond to breaking news," by Celeste LeCompte, Nieman Reports, September 1, 2015 ---
http://niemanreports.org/articles/automation-in-the-newsroom/

Philana Patterson, assistant business editor for the Associated Press, has been covering business since the mid-1990s. Before joining the AP, she worked as a business reporter for both local newspapers and Dow Jones Newswires and as a producer at Bloomberg. “I’ve written thousands of earnings stories, and I’ve edited even more,” she says. “I’m very familiar with earnings.” Patterson manages more than a dozen staffers on the business news desk, and her expertise landed her on an AP stylebook committee that sets the guidelines for AP’s earnings stories. So last year, when the AP needed someone to train its newest newsroom member on how to write an earnings story, Patterson was an obvious choice.

The trainee wasn’t a fresh-faced j-school graduate, responsible for covering a dozen companies a quarter, however. It was a piece of software called Wordsmith, and by the end of its first year on the job, it would write more stories than Patterson had in her entire career. Patterson’s job was to get it up to speed.

Patterson’s task is becoming increasingly common in newsrooms. Journalists at ProPublica, Forbes, The New York Times, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Yahoo, and others are using algorithms to help them tell stories about business and sports as well as education, inequality, public safety, and more. For most organizations, automating parts of reporting and publishing efforts is a way to both reduce reporters’ workloads and to take advantage of new data resources. In the process, automation is raising new questions about what it means to encode news judgment in algorithms, how to customize stories to target specific audiences without making ethical missteps, and how to communicate these new efforts to audiences.

Automation is also opening up new opportunities for journalists to do what they do best: tell stories that matter. With new tools for discovering and understanding massive amounts of information, journalists and publishers alike are finding new ways to identify and report important, very human tales embedded in big data.

Years of experience, industry standards, and the AP’s own stylebook all help Patterson and her business desk colleagues know how to tell an earnings story. But how does a computer know? It needs sets of rules, known as algorithms, to help it.

An algorithm is designed to accomplish a particular task. Google’s search algorithm orders your page of results. Facebook’s News Feed determines which posts you see, and a navigation algorithm determines how you’ll get to the beach. Wordsmith’s algorithms write stories.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries


"Are Lawyers Getting Dumber? Yes Says a Woman Who Runs the Bar Exam"
Bloomberg, August 20, 2015 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-08-20/are-lawyers-getting-dumber-?cmpid=BBWGP082615_BIZ

When answer sheets for the July 2014 bar exam flooded in, the results were unusually bad. Scores on the multiple-choice portion hit a record low. Amid the alarm, the National Conference of Bar Examiners had a simple message for law schools: It's not us, it's you.

Indeed, American legal education seems to be in crisis. In 2015, fewer people applied to law school than at any point in the past 30 years. With enrollments down, law schools are lowering the standards for admittance. Many fear that will affect the legal profession for years to come, as law schools produce less-qualified lawyers or deeply indebted law school graduates with no chance of ever becoming attorneys.


"Too Many Law Students, Too Few Legal Jobs." by Steven J. Harpe,  The New York Times, August 25, 2015 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/too-many-law-students-too-few-legal-jobs.html?_r=0

. . .

Amazingly (and perversely), law schools have been able to continue to raise tuition while producing nearly twice as many graduates as the job market has been able to absorb. How is this possible? Why hasn’t the market corrected itself? The answer is that, for a given school, the availability of federal loans for law students has no connection to their poor post-graduation employment outcomes.

Students now amass law school loans averaging $127,000 for private schools and $88,000 for public ones. Since 2006 alone, law student debt has surged at inflation-adjusted rates of 25 percent for private schools and 34 percent for public schools.

In May 2014, the A.B.A. created a task force to tackle this problem. According to its recent report, 25 percent of law schools obtain at least 88 percent of their total revenues from tuition. The average for all law schools is 69 percent. So law schools have a powerful incentive to maintain or increase enrollment, even if the employment outcomes are dismal for their graduates, especially at marginal schools.

The underlying difficulty is that once students pay their tuition bills, law schools have no responsibility for the debt their students have taken on. In other words, law schools whose graduates have the greatest difficulty finding jobs that require bar passage are operating without financial accountability and free of the constraints that characterize a functioning market. The current subsidy system is keeping some schools in business. But the long-term price for students and taxpayers is steep and increasing.

Paradoxically, the task force chairman was Dennis W. Archer, the former mayor of Detroit, who is also head of the national policy board of Infilaw, a private equity-owned consortium of three for-profit law schools — Arizona Summit, Charlotte and Florida Coastal. These schools are examples of the larger problem. Most Infilaw 2014 graduates didn’t find jobs that required their expensive degrees. Excluding positions funded by the law school, only 39.9 percent of Arizona Summit graduates found full-time jobs lasting at least a year and requiring bar passage. Florida Coastal’s rate was 34.5 percent. At Charlotte, it was 34.1 percent.

Yet as the demand for new lawyers continued to languish from 2011 to 2014, the size of Infilaw’s graduating classes almost doubled, to 1,223. These schools are also among the leaders in creating law student debt. Arizona Summit’s 2014 graduates had average law school debt of $187,792. At Florida Coastal, the average was $162,785. Charlotte’s average was $140,528.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the tough time for law schools and law graduates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools


"Gender and Accounting in Historical Perspective,"

SSRN, August 31, 2015

Author

Amah Kalu Ogbonnaya. Michael Okpara University of Agriculture

Link
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2649066

Abstract:

The work looks at Gender and Accounting in Historical perspective, it to identifies the women that have made impact in accounting profession in the World such as Jennie M. Palen and Lene E Mandelnolin and many others. It also talks about the importance of gender in accounting both in the lower level of management and higher level. Conclusively, there is evidence that issues of gender may be embedded in the functions, practices and process of accounting. It would seem that an organizational practice, accounting could well be impacted by gender effect and that gender research in accounting has a potential role in identifying and investigating those gender affect that influence accounting.

Bob Jensen's historical threads about women in accounting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#Women


Can you do anything to prevent crabby, verbose full professors from dominating faculty meetings? ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1102-the-professor-is-in-stopping-the-senior-snipers?cid=VTEVPMSED1

Jensen Comment
My experience over 40 years of being on the full-time faculties of four universities is that speaking times in faculty meetings, especially large faculty meetings, bifurcates heavily into those senior faculty who rarely speak up versus those who always speak up. It becomes quite predictable over the years regarding what both types of faculty will say when they do speak up. I tended to be the quiet type usually because I was impatient for adjournment.

Often those that speak the most at meetings were also considered to be pretty good teachers and advisers who published the least among their peers. However, I never saw a study of my impressions about that aspect of faculty meetings.


"Islam and Slavery:  The Persistence of History," The Economist, August 22, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21661812-islamic-states-revival-slavery-extreme-though-it-finds-disquieting-echoes-across


If you want to start your own blog you might want to take a look at http://firstsiteguide.com/
Competition for eyeballs is fierce.

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


Career Education Corporation --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Career_Education_Corporation
Note the module on Controversy and Federal Scrutiny

Career Education was investigated by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission[ for various issues of non-compliance in 2005. On February 15, 2005, the company announced an adjustment related to an increase in the estimate for its allowance for doubtful accounts and a restatement for a change in revenue recognition method for its Culinary and Healthcare externships.[11] In January 2008, CEC reported that the SEC has closed its investigation and will take no action against the company. A Department of Justice investigation began in 1994[15] and was terminated in April 2007, with the DOJ declining prosecution.

In June 2005, the U.S. Department of Education prohibited CEC from expanding until it had resolved issues with financial statements and program reviews connected with Collins College and Brooks College two CEC schools. In January 2007, the U.S. Department of Education lifted its restrictions on the company opening new schools or acquiring existing ones.

Career Education's American InterContinental University was placed on probation in December 2005 with its accrediting agency, SACS. The probation status was reviewed after one year, in December 2006, and extended an additional 12 months. On December 11, 2007, CEC announced that SACS has removed AIU's probation and that the university's accreditation remains in good standing.

Brooks College, a Career Education owned school, was the subject of an unfavorable examination of for-profit trade schools in the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes which focused on alleged misrepresentations by admission representatives to prospective students. A CBS producer with a hidden camera visited several Career Education schools in the New York area, including the Katharine Gibbs School.  In June 2007, Career Education announced its plan to close both campuses of Brooks College.

In January 2007, the New York State Education Department reported deficiencies at the Katharine Gibbs School's New York campus. The problems related to faculty qualifications and remedial course offerings. Career Education has since closed Katharine Gibbs School's New York campus.

Continued in article

"FTC Will Investigate Career Education Corporation," Inside Higher Ed, August 25, 2015 --- Click Here
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/08/25/ftc-will-investigate-career-ed?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=df921ff721-DNU20150825&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-df921ff721-197565045


"How Literary Fame Happens," by Carlin Romano, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 24, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Literary-Fame-Happens/232537/?cid=at

. . .

Jackson makes it abundantly clear, all told, that an appetite for literary immortality, like the desire to read one’s obituary, poses sufficient challenge that a writer should concentrate on other goals. If you don’t have time to read her iconoclastic book, at least enjoy a limerick by William S. Baring-Gould, foisted on Jackson by a mischievous friend, that sums up much of it:

A goddess capricious is Fame.
You may strive to make noted your name.
But she either neglects you
Or coolly selects you
For laurels distinct from your aim.

 


"Ashley Madison Faces $578 Million clAss Action Lawsuit," by Tanya Basu, Time Magazine, August 23, 2015 ---
http://time.com/4007374/ashley-madison-578-million-lawsuit-canada

Two Canadian firms filed the suit on Thursday

Two Canadian law firms filed a $578 million class-action lawsuit against the companies that run extramarital-affairs website Ashley Madison over a recent hack that exposed the personal information of about 39 million users.

Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg LLP—two Canadian law firms—filed the suit on Thursday on behalf of Canadians whose personal information was breached in a company hack. The Toronto-based Avid Dating Life and Avid Life Media, which run the company, are named in the suit.

The lawsuit’s class-action status remains to be certified by the court.

“Numerous former users of AshleyMadison.com have approached the law firms to inquire about their privacy rights under Canadian law,” the firms said in a statement. “They are outraged that AshleyMadison.com failed to protect its users’ information. In many cases, the users paid an additional fee for the website to remove all of their user data, only to discover that the information was left intact and exposed.”

The statement went on to say that the class action lawsuit will not seek damages from the hackers who leaked the information.

Continued in article




From the Scout Report on August 28, 2015

RebelMouse --- https://www.rebelmouse.com/ 

RebelMouse is a social media aggregator. In other words, the links, updates, tweets, photos, and other content that readers post on their various social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.) can now all appear in one place - and that place happens to be beautifully designed, convenient, and free. Readers may sign up with their existing Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ accounts, or they can use the simple email/password function. From there, provide the service with your sign in information for your social media accounts and it will start pulling your updates and blending them into a visually satisfying arrangement. You'll also have more editorial control than on other social media sites with the magazine-like format. The only potential downfall is that, predictably, others will have to also sign up for RebelMouse before they can view your content.


MeetingBurner --- https://www.meetingburner.com/ 

For readers looking for a free online platform for small meetings and webinars, MeetingBurner is a good choice. The free service can host up to ten participants, and includes screen sharing, group chat, audio and video conferencing, and some mobile tools. This can be especially helpful for small organizations with a limited budget, since few web conferencing providers offer free plans. However, to access more of MeetingBurner's advanced features (such as the ability to host up to 50 or 250 attendees and recording options), users must pay a monthly fee. In a nutshell, this basic service is one of the few free web conferencing services available and it is perfect for small business owners or non-profits on a budget.


A Corpse Flower Blooms in Denver
Foul-smelling 'corpse flower' blossoms in Denver (+video)
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0823/Foul-smelling-corpse-flower-blossoms-in-Denver

Corpse Flower: Facts About the Smelly Plant
http://www.livescience.com/51947-corpse-flower-facts-about-the-smelly-plant.html

Why Insects Are Drawn to Corpse Flower's Stench
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/07/150728-stinky-corpse-flower-university-of-california-blooms/

Amorphophallus titanum History & Statistics
http://www.virtualherbarium.org/amorph/amorphophallus-history.html

'Tabitha the Titan' begins making seeds
http://news.ucdavis.edu/special_reports/titan/default.lasso

How do we smell?
http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-do-we-smell-rose-eveleth

Bob and Erika have a foul experience with a "corpse plant" (the photographs) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/DeathBlossoms/StarFlowers.htm  


From the Scout Report September 4, 2015

Todoist --- https://en.todoist.com/ 

Todoist is one of the best online productivity apps on the market, and the basic version, which will satisfy most readers, is free. To use Todoist, readers must go through a simple sign up process. From there, they can create their first project, then add tasks and subtasks, set due dates, and manage priorities. The idea is that Todoist helps users track their projects by helping them prioritize their tasks. Once a task is completed, you simply click the small box to the left, and move on to the next task. There is also an inbox where readers can quickly add to-do items without attaching them to any particular project. For readers who would like something more, there are also options to add notes, set up filters, sync calendars, upload files, and share projects, among other possibilities. Todoist provides a simple and effective platform for staying organized and productive.

Jotti's malware scan --- https://virusscan.jotti.org/ 

Jotti's malware scan does one thing and one thing only: it scans files for viruses and then tells you what it finds. The process is fast and easy. Simply upload any file using the site's Submit Files option. From there, Jotti will scan the file with over 20 different online scanners, including such popular services as Avast! and ESET. About a minute later it will return your results in an easy-to-read format. The service is free. Up to five files can be scanned simultaneously, with a 50MB limit. For readers who need to know about the safety of individual files, Jotti is one of the best services around.


Burning Man, Past and Present
Voices: At Burning Man, pretty much anything goes
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/31/voices-scene--burning-man/71453610/

Burning Man's Fashion Is Wild, but There Are Rules
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/style/at-burning-man-a-counterculture-festival-the-fashion-police-walk-the-beat.html

Timeline: Burning Man
http://burningman.org/timeline/

The Huffington Post: Burning Man
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/burning-man/

My first Burning Man: confessions of a conservative from Washington
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/my-first-burning-man-grover-norquist

Commercializing the Counterculture: How the Summer Music Festival Went
Mainstream
http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/commercializing-counterculture-summer-music-festival-went-mainstream-86334
 

 




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


Education Tutorials

TED-Ed: Lessons Worth Sharing --- http://ed.ted.com/

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

Mindfulness in the Classroom --- http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/contemplative-pedagogy/

CBC Digital Archives: For Teachers (Canada, News) --- http://www.cbc.ca/archives/teachers/lesson-plan

How Courts Work --- http://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/resources/law_related_education_network/how_courts_work.html

Renewable Energy Projects for the Classroom (PDF) ---
http://www2.ivcc.edu/mimic/nsf/Resources for Teachers/Renewable Energy Projects - Handbook.pdf

PBS Learning Media: Teen Maps Contaminants from a Coal Plant
http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/envh10.health.coalmap/teen-maps-contaminants-from-a-coal-plant/

The Week In Congress --- http://theweekincongress.com/

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

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

How Astronauts Dock at the Space Station --- http://time.com/4008222/soyuz-space-station/?xid=newsletter-brief

Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

 


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Learn About Nuclear Weapons --- http://laromkarnvapen.se/en/

ChemIDplus (chemical database) --- http://chem2.sis.nlm.nih.gov/chemidplus/chemidlite.jsp

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Medicine Prize Related Educational Productions http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/

PLOS: Computational Biology --- http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/

Go Botany: Discover thousands of New England plants --- https://gobotany.newenglandwild.org/teaching/

Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology: Macaulay Library (audio of birds and other animals) --- http://macaulaylibrary.org/

Renewable Energy Projects for the Classroom (PDF) ---
http://www2.ivcc.edu/mimic/nsf/Resources for Teachers/Renewable Energy Projects - Handbook.pdf

Modules: Free Ag Energy Curriculum for Teachers --- http://agenergyia.org/modules/

PBS Learning Media: Teen Maps Contaminants from a Coal Plant
http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/envh10.health.coalmap/teen-maps-contaminants-from-a-coal-plant/

Scientists have found a massive stone monument buried underground that could be even bigger than Stonehenge ---
http://uk.businessinsider.com/stone-monument-found-near-stonehenge-2015-9#ixzz3l4CbTEO3

Typographica (typeface design) --- http://typographica.org/

Data Snapshots: Reusable Climate Maps --- http://www.climate.gov/maps-data

"Meltdown-Proof Nuclear Reactors Get a Safety Check in Europe," by Richard Martin, MIT's Technology Review, September 4, 2015 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540991/meltdown-proof-nuclear-reactors-get-a-safety-check-in-europe/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20150908

Researchers say they could build a prototype of a molten salt reactor, a safer, cleaner nuclear power option, in 10 years.

Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Social Science and Economics Tutorials

America By The Numbers (PBS analysis of changing demographics in the USA) ---  http://www.americabythenumbers.org/

America By The Numbers (PBS analysis of changing demographics in the USA) ---  http://www.americabythenumbers.org/

Office of National Drug Control Policy --- https://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp

The Week In Congress --- http://theweekincongress.com/

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: Tax --- http://www.oecd.org/tax/

The Poetry Society: Poetryclass --- http://www.poetryclass.poetrysociety.org.uk/

Explore America's history the 21st century way with: 700 digital maps --- http://dailym.ai/1kEvKnB

FlackCheck.org --- http://www.flackcheck.org
Headquartered at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, FlackCheck.org offers resources that help students "recognize flaws in arguments in general and political ads in particular"

Bloggingheads.tv (political commentary --- http://bloggingheads.tv/

Embargo Watch (news censorship) ---  https://embargowatch.wordpress.com/

Student Press Law Center --- http://www.splc.org/

National Archives: Records of Rights --- http://recordsofrights.org/

Rights in America --- http://www.docsteach.org/home/rights 

Renewable Energy Projects for the Classroom (PDF) ---
http://www2.ivcc.edu/mimic/nsf/Resources for Teachers/Renewable Energy Projects - Handbook.pdf

Museum of the City of New York: Reginald Marsh  --- http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MNY_11_VForm

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

Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Law and Legal Studies

How Courts Work --- http://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/resources/law_related_education_network/how_courts_work.html

National Archives: Records of Rights --- http://recordsofrights.org/

Rights in America --- http://www.docsteach.org/home/rights 

Embargo Watch (news censorship) ---  https://embargowatch.wordpress.com

Student Press Law Center --- http://www.splc.org/

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


Math Tutorials

PLOS: Computational Biology --- http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/

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

Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


History Tutorials

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Public Domain: A Deeper Dive Into the Collection ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/the-british-library-puts-over-1000000-images-in-the-public-domain-a-deeper-dive-into-the-collection.html

Everything to Know About Ebay on Its 20th Birthday ---
http://time.com/4020222/ebay-20-anniversary-birthday/?xid=newsletter-brief

Scientists have found a massive stone monument buried underground that could be even bigger than Stonehenge ---
http://uk.businessinsider.com/stone-monument-found-near-stonehenge-2015-9#ixzz3l4CbTEO3

Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler incident ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brown_and_Franz_Stigler_incident

The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Now Free Online  ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/the-history-of-cartography-the-most-ambitious-overview-of-map-making-ever-now-free-online.html
Bob Jensen's threads on cartography --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#MapCollections

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Galleries --- http://www.metmuseum.org/visit/museum-map/galleries

The Poetry Society: Poetryclass --- http://www.poetryclass.poetrysociety.org.uk/

British Library: Virtual books --- http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/virtualbooks/index.html

Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections: Project REVEAL (English & American Books) ---  http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/reveal#nav_top

William Faulkner Rocked Fourth Grade (1907-1908) ---
h
ttp://www.openculture.com/2015/09/william-faulkner-rocked-fourth-grade-1907-1908.html

3 Million Judgements of Books by their Covers ---
https://medium.com/@deancasalena/3-million-judgements-of-books-by-their-covers-f2b89004c201

Tolstoy and Gandhi Exchange Letters: Two Thinkers’ Quest for Gentleness, Humility & Love (1909) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/tolstoy-and-gandhi-exchange-letters.html

A Nerd’s Guide To The 2,229 Paintings At MoMA ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-nerds-guide-to-the-2229-paintings-at-moma/

America By The Numbers (PBS analysis of changing demographics in the USA) ---  http://www.americabythenumbers.org/

Explore America's history the 21st century way with: 700 digital maps --- http://dailym.ai/1kEvKnB

Tulane Digital Library: Baby Boom America Collection --- http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/collection/id/38

Watch The Half Hour Hegel: A Long, Guided Tour Through Hegel’s Phenomenology, Passage by Passage ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-half-hour-hegel.html

Hegel on Knowledge, Impatience, the Peril of Fixed Opinions, and the True Task of the Human Mind ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/27/hegel-knowledge-phenomenology-of-mind/?mc_cid=32c8c0dfcd&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Typographica (typeface design) --- http://typographica.org/

The 1982 DC Comics Style Guide Is Online: A Blueprint for Superman, Batman & Your Other Favorite Superheroes ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/the-1982-dc-comics-style-guide-is-online.html

Bombsight: Mapping the WW2 Bomb Census (bombing sites of London) --- http://bombsight.org

WW II Airplanes --- http://pippaettore.com/Horrific_WWII_Statistics.html

Museum of the City of New York: Reginald Marsh  --- http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MNY_11_VForm

The Frying Pan and the Fire
Why did 99% of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Denmark survive while 99% of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Estonia were murdered? ---

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-frying-pan-and-the-fire-1441402937?mod=djemMER

Such questions lie in the background of the Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s remarkable “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” a book that extends his gripping, somber “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (2010). In that volume’s account of purges, massacres, shootings, starvations, executions and incinerations in Germany, the Soviet Union and the contested lands in between, the Holocaust is but a subset of 14 million gratuitous yet calculated murders. In “Black Earth,” the Holocaust is the focus of attention, but we are never allowed to forget the surrounding charnel house. Mr. Snyder said that in “Bloodlands” he wanted to write a “transnational” history, taking a broad look at events from without rather than from within the world of a particular nation. “Black Earth” takes a similarly broad approach: He does not see the Holocaust as a “war against the Jews”—as the historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—for which Hitler was prepared to sacrifice ordinary military strategy, but as an extreme example of Hitler’s wide-ranging racial obsessions.

Continued in article

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  

Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Language Tutorials

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#Languages


Music Tutorials

New Research Shows How Music Lessons During Childhood Benefits the Brain for a Lifetime ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/new-research-shows-how-music-lessons-during-childhood-benefits-the-brain-for-a-lifetime.html

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

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


Writing Tutorials

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/

August 24, 2015

August 25, 2015

August 26, 2015

August 27, 2015

August 28, 2015

August 29, 2015

August 30, 2015

August 31, 2015

 

September 1, 2015

September 3, 2015

September 4, 2015

September 5, 2015

September 8, 2015

September 9, 2015

September 10, 2015

 

 


Grace Paley on the Art of Growing Older ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/03/grace-paley-aging/?mc_cid=a06f2bb48a&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

How to Age Gracefully: No Matter What Your Age, You Can Get Life Advice from Your Elders ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/how-to-age-gracefully-no-matter-what-your-age-you-can-get-life-advice-from-your-elders.html


New Research Shows How Music Lessons During Childhood Benefits the Brain for a Lifetime ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/new-research-shows-how-music-lessons-during-childhood-benefits-the-brain-for-a-lifetime.html


Marilyn Monroe Recounts Her Harrowing Experience in a Psychiatric Ward in a 1961 Letter ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/marilyn-monroe-recounts-her-harrowing-experience-in-a-psychiatric-ward-in-a-1961-letter.html


Mental Health --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health

"An Epidemic of Anguish:  Overwhelmed by demand for mental-health care, colleges face conflicts in choosing how to respond," by Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/An-Epidemic-of-Anguish/232721/?cid=at 

Cassie Smith-Christmas and Margaret Go have something terrible in common: Both have family members who killed themselves while attending prestigious universities. In both cases, the students went to the campus counseling center before taking their own lives. But that’s where the similarity ends.

When her younger brother, Ian, told a counselor at the College of William & Mary that he was feeling suicidal, says Ms. Smith-Christmas, the response was quick and decisive: An administrator called their parents that day and forced her brother to leave and seek professional help. After five days in a mental hospital and a couple of weeks on academic leave, he returned to the campus and tried to catch up on his work. He felt rejected, fragile, and overwhelmed, his sister says. Just a few days after he returned, in April 2010, his body was discovered in his parked car.

At the California Institute of Technology, where Ms. Go’s son Brian was a junior, the reaction to his suicidal thoughts was very different. After he wrote an email message to a counselor questioning whether he had the "will to go on," the counselor told him she couldn't meet with him for a few days. And although university administrators knew that a week after he wrote the email he had gone to the roof of a campus building and told a friend he planned to hurt himself, the university never informed his parents or sent him to a hospital, says Ms. Go. On his third attempt, she says, in May 2009, he killed himself.

Ian and Brian’s stories demonstrate two different campus responses to troubled students. College officials won’t comment on specific cases, citing privacy laws. But R. Kelly Crace, associate vice president for health and wellness at William & Mary, says the college typically asks students to withdraw if the campus environment is deemed "too toxic" for them. Before they can return, the students must prove that they've received the help they needed, he says.

The Go family sued Caltech and its counseling staff for malpractice and wrongful death — and while they settled with the counseling staff, a judge dismissed their suit against the university and its administrators. "We had stars in our eyes," acknowledges Ms. Go, who had suggested that her son visit the campus counseling center after he became devastated over a breakup with his girlfriend. "I thought: elite school, elite everything."

Continued in article

"How One University Uses a ‘Mental Health Kiosk’ to Reach Students," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Video-How-One-University-Uses/232195/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

"A College Wish List for My (bipolar) Son," by Max's Mom, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-College-Wish-List-for-My-Son/232715/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
Distance education programs face different problems with respect to student mental health and some other medical disabilities. In some ways it's easier not having to provide on-campus medical services. In other respects it's more difficult accommodating some of these students with such things as added time for projects, examinations, and learning materials for disabled students ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped




Humor September 1-11, 2015

Philosophy Explained With Donuts --- http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/philosophy-explained-with-donuts.html


Woody Allen Tells a Classic Joke About Hemingway, Fitzgerald & Gertrude Stein in 1965: A Precursor to Midnight in Paris ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/woody-allen-tells-a-classic-joke-about-hemingway-fitzgerald-gertrude-stein.html


Gene Autry's Cowboy Code

1. The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.

2. He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.

3. He must always tell the truth.

4. He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.

5. He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.

6. He must help people in distress.

7. He must be a good worker.

8. He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits.

9. He must respect women, parents, and his nations laws.

10. The Cowboy is a patriot.

http://courses.cs.vt.edu/professionalism/WorldCodes/Cowboy.Code.html


From the Washington Star-News

Friday, President Obama visited Mason Crest elementary school in Annandale, Virginia to announce major progress on his ConnectED initiative. Before his remarks, however, he stopped by one of the school’s 2nd Grade classes to chat with students.

In his informal meeting with the young students the President asked them to “Define the word “tragedy”.

One unidentified girl replied, “If my mommy ran over my dog, Bailey, that would be a tragedy!”

The President smiled at the little girl and said, “No, sweetie. That would be an accident! Would anyone else like to give it a try?”

A little boy sitting across the room raised his hand and said, “I know! I know! If our bus driver ran off of a cliff and killed everyone!”

The President shook his head and said, “No son, that would be a great loss! Doesn’t anyone know of a good example of a tragedy?”

Then 7 year old Francine Upton, raised her hand and said, “Well, Mr. President, if you and Michelle were in Air Force One and it was hit by a missile and blown to smithereens, most people would think that that was a tragedy!”

“Very good” he said, “And what was your reason for that answer?”

“Well” she answered, “It would not be an accident and it sure would be no great loss!” - See more at: http://www.washingtonstarnews.com/satire/7-year-old-just-put-obama-in-his-place-with-this-answer-to-his-question/#sthash.vuHDDNvL.dpuf

 


Forwarded by Paula

John was sitting outside his local pub one day, enjoying a quiet pint and generally feeling good about himself, when a nun suddenly appears at his table and starts decrying the evils of drink.
"You should be ashamed of yourself young man! Drinking is a Sin! Alcohol is the blood of the devil!"
Now John gets pretty annoyed about this, and goes on the offensive.
"How do you know this, Sister?"
"My Mother Superior told me so."
"But have you ever had a drink yourself? How can you be sure that what you are saying is right?"
"Don't be ridiculous--of course I have never taken alcohol myself"
"Then let me buy you a drink - if you still believe afterwards that it is evil I will give up drink for life"
"How could I, a Nun, sit outside this public house drinking?!"
"I'll get the barman to put it in a teacup for you, then no one will ever know."
The Nun reluctantly agrees, so John goes inside to the bar.
"Another pint for me, and a triple vodka on the rocks", then he lowers his voice and says to the barman "and could you put the vodka in a teacup?"
"Oh no! It's not that Nun again is it?"

 




Humor August 1-31,  2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q3.htm#Humor081115

Humor July 1-31,  2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q3.htm#Humor073115

Humor June 1-30,  2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q2.htm#Humor043015

Humor May 1-31,  2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q2.htm#Humor043015

Humor April 1-30, 2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q2.htm#Humor043015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 




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