Tidbits on October 28, 2015
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Wes Lavin's Foliage Season in 2015
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Foliage/Set19/FoliageSet10.htm 

 

Tidbits on October 28, 2015
Bob Jensen

PS
When October roles around it's time to think about another donation to keep knowledge free. Please contribute something to advertising-free Wikipedia ---
https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:FundraiserLandingPage&country=US&uselang=en&utm_medium=sidebar&utm_source=donate&utm_campaign=C13_en.wikipedia.org

Bob Jensen's Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

For earlier editions of Fraud Updates go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 
Bookmarks for the World's Library --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm 

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
 

105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/105-animated-philosophy-videos-from-wireless-philosophy.html

New drone footage of Iceland is out of this world ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/iceland-drone-footage-2015-10

Watch an F-35 land on an aircraft carrier in slow motion ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/watch-an-f-35-land-on-an-aircraft-carrier-in-slow-motion-2015-10

Stream 61 Hours of Orson Welles’ Classic 1930s Radio Plays: War of the Worlds, Heart of Darkness & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/stream-61-hours-of-orson-welles-classic-1930s-radio-plays-war-of-the-worlds-heart-of-darkness-more.html

Listen to Orson Welles’ Classic Radio Performance of 10 Shakespeare Plays ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/listen-to-orson-welles-classic-radio-performance-of-10-shakespeare-plays.html

A Truly Amazing Chinese Bridge-building Machine

Chinese Bridge Builder Machine: Just in case you think you’ve seen everything
https://www.youtube.com/embed/B6X82g2UZOs
Thank you Auntie Bev for the heads up.

Watch All 18,225 Lines of The Iliad Read by 66 Actors in a Marathon Event For an Audience of 50,000 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/watch-the-entire-iliad-read-by-66-actors-in-a-marathon-event-for-an-audience-of-50000.html


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 

1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/1200-years-of-women-composers-a-free-78-hour-music-playlist.html

The Best Music To Put You To Sleep: Minimalist Composer Max Richter, Pop Phenom Ed Sheeran & Your Favorites ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/music-to-put-you-to-sleep.html

Web outfits like Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2

Pandora (my favorite online music station) --- www.pandora.com
TheRadio
(online music site) --- http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.slacker.com/

Gerald Trites likes this international radio site --- http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:  Search for a song or band and play the selection --- http://songza.com/
Also try Jango --- http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) --- http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live --- http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note
U.S. Army Band recordings --- http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp

Bob Jensen's threads on nearly all types of free music selections online ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm


Photographs and Art

Google Cultural Institute --- https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project

Google Art Project --- http://www.googleartproject.com/

Pictorial:  What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/04/what-people-in-1900-thought-the-year-2000-would-look-like/

The History of Modern Art Visualized in a Massive 130-Foot Timeline ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/the-history-of-modern-art-visualized-in-a-massive-130-foot-timeline.html

Photogrammar (USA historical photographs archive) --- http://photogrammar.yale.edu

FOTOFOLIO: Adams, Strand, Weston, Weston, White (photography) ---
http://www.portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=1549;type=901

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2015 ---
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/wildlife-photographer-of-the-year-2015/ss-AAfqwIT?ocid=spartandhp

Photos: A French museum has a collection of the most incredibly realistic miniature settings ---
http://qz.com/526312/photos-a-french-museum-has-a-collection-of-the-most-incredibly-realistic-miniature-settings/

An astronaut's stunning photos from space will change the way we see the Earth ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/scott-kelly-awesome-space-photography-iss-nasa-2015-10

17 hotels with stunning views of iconic sites ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/hotels-with-stunning-views-2015-10

Italy's 10 most charming seaside villages ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/italys-10-most-charming-seaside-villages-2015-10

Experience some of the world's most breathtaking sights! ---
http://www.msn.com/en-us/video/peopleandplaces/experience-some-of-the-worlds-most-breathtaking-sights/vi-AAfpL83?ocid=spartanntp

Perfect conditions at Cowboys-Patriots game helped create incredible pictures ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/dallas-cowboys-patriots-att-stadium-sun-photos-2015-10

Automotive History in the UK
The Goodwood Revival: The Most Elegant Blast from the Past Ever ---
http://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/enthusiasts/the-goodwood-revival-the-most-elegant-blast-from-the-past-ever/ss-AAeng5O?ocid=spartanntp

MIA ArtStories (military armor) --- http://artstories.artsmia.org/#/

Autochromes: Dawn of Colour (Photography) --- http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/nmem/autochrome/

Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting Is Now Free Online: Watch Season 1 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/season-1-of-bob-ross-show-the-joy-of-painting-is-now-free-online.html

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

Rare Book Room --- http://www.rarebookroom.org/

From Steamer Trunk to Rare Books Collection ---
https://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/from-steamer-trunk-to-rare-books-collection/

Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise (Essay by David Foster Wallace) ---
http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf

Hear David Foster Wallace Read His Own Essays & Short Fiction on the 6th Anniversary of His Death, ---
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/TsXiIUe5AWk/hear-david-foster-wallace-read-his-own-essays-and-short-fiction.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Marlon James Wins the 2015 Man Booker Prize --- http://time.com/4072147/2015-man-booker-prize/?xid=newsletter-brief

Hannah Arendt on Being vs. Appearing and Our Impulse for Self-Display ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/14/hannah-arendt-life-of-the-mind-being-appearing/?mc_cid=23a7c01a76&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Watch All 18,225 Lines of The Iliad Read by 66 Actors in a Marathon Event For an Audience of 50,000 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/watch-the-entire-iliad-read-by-66-actors-in-a-marathon-event-for-an-audience-of-50000.html

Digital Stories: Wellcome Collection (with a major focus in widespread diseases in history) ---  http://digitalstories.wellcomecollection.org/

Famous last words of 18 famous people --- http://www.businessinsider.com/list-compilation-famous-last-words-2015-10

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

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 October 28, 2015
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2015/TidbitsQuotations102815.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 

Cato Institute: Social Security http://www.cato.org/research/social-security

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




PDF Annotator (not free and only for Windows):  Type, Write & Highlight ---
http://www.pdfannotator.com/en/how?utm_source=PDF+Annotator+Newsletter&utm_campaign=54e734fe67-PA_News_2015_10_1_EN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0f269f1950-54e734fe67-196223493

With PDF Annotator you can ...

·         Take notes on academic articles.

·         Grade student papers.

·         Mark-up your text books.

·         Get rid of PPT presentations and the like, by live completing PDFs.

                        And much more, learn about it.

October 12, 2015 message from accounting professor Jim McKinney (University of Maryland)

I use the PDF Annotator with my tablet PC in class all the time. I create pdf worksheets and walk through problems in class and can save the results and post on-line.

Bob Jensen's threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


Question
What is the estimate of the number of humans who have ever lived on earth?

One Answer = 100,825,272,791 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/significant-digits-for-thursday-oct-15-2015/


Hamburger University (onsite campuses are no joke) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_University

"McDonald's Hamburger University can be harder to get into than Harvard and is even cooler than you'd imagine," by Natalie Walters, Business Insider, October 24, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-hamburger-university-2333

McDonald's Hamburger University is no joke.

With a selection rate of 1% at its Shanghai campus, the intense, weeklong training program is more exclusive than Harvard, reports Bloomberg.

Students at the American campus can earn up to 23 credits toward their Hamburgerology degree, according to CNN, or toward an associate or bachelor's degree at 1,600 US colleges and universities, the American Council on Education reports

The program currently has seven campuses worldwide in Oak Brook, Illinois; Tokyo, London, Sydney, Munich, São Paulo, and Shanghai, with an eighth campus scheduled to open in Moscow later this year. 

Founded in 1961, Hamburger University now has more than 275,000 graduates and will celebrate its 55th anniversary next year. Here's a look at how it started and how it's evolved.

Jensen Comment
The phrase "harder to get into than Harvard" is an example of misleading statistics based upon acceptance/rejection rates. My guess is that if more students going to Harvard had applied to Hamburger University they would have a higher probability of acceptance than vice versa. Ivy League schools would have much higher rejection rates if more high SAT students bothered to apply. Many of these desirable students don't even apply because of tuition costs, distance from home, and most importantly the fact that they think the odds of rejection are so high they don't even bother to apply.


How to use math to win at Monopoly --- http://www.businessinsider.com/use-math-win-monopoly-probability-statistics-2015-10

As with any game, including those in a casino, the probabilities are based on repeated playing of a game. The math may improve your odds of winning a single play, but the probabilities apply less to a single play than repeated play just like the odds of a "Head" on only one flip of a fair coin toss.

Of course in repeated plays in a casino you're even less likely to win due to the cut taken by the house. The only way you could win in a casino is if you were very, very wealthy and the house did not have limits on the size of the bets ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox


Bloomberg's 2015 Ranking of the Top MBA Programs ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-best-business-schools/?cmpid=BBD102015_BIZ

Jensen Comment
This is nicely presented in a table that lets you compare how rankings differ under the component criteria. For example, the Booth Business School at the University of Chicago comes in at an overall Rank 2. It 's Number 1 in terms of employer ranking and in job placement. However, it came in at Rank 29 in terms of the alumni survey. Stanford is at Rank 1 in terms of alumni but is Rank 21 in terms of job placement.

The US News rankings of Top MBA programs can be found at http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/mba-rankings
I think US News relies more on rankings submitted by business school deans. Accordingly we would expect US News to be more influenced by the reputations of faculty, especially research reputations.

The Bloomberg rankings illustrate what I call a systemic vegetable nourishment problem of rankings on the basis of multiple criteria ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews


Villanova Law School Is Still Paying A Steep U.S. News Rankings Price For Cooking Its Admissions Books ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com//taxprof_blog/2015/10/villanova-law-school-is-still-paying-a-steep-us-news-rankings-price-for-cooking-its-admissions-books.html


In Defense of the Lecture Pedagogy:  Yeah Right!
Lecture Me. Really,” by Molly Worthen, The New York Times, October 17, 2015 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/lecture-me-really.html?ref=opinion&_r=0[RJ1] 

BEFORE the semester began earlier this fall, I went to check out the classroom where I would be teaching an introductory American history course. Like most classrooms at my university, this one featured lots of helpful gadgets: a computer console linked to an audiovisual system, a projector screen that deploys at the touch of a button and USB ports galore. But one thing was missing. The piece of technology that I really needed is centuries old: a simple wooden lectern to hold my lecture notes. I managed to obtain one, but it took a week of emails and phone calls.

Jensen Comment
This is a article is more subjective thinking than scholarly. It overlooks the fact that there are widely varying circumstances in the synchronous-learning lecture pedagogy. Much depends upon the course, the use of visual aids, existence of video playback, quality of the recitation sections and on and on and on. Much depends on the aptitudes and motivations of the students. Large lectures are typically given in introductory courses for economic reasons where students instead need more individual attention the most.

The most obvious drawback of learning in a lecture is that students learning at different paces get out of synch with the lecture pace. A great deal depends upon how understanding earlier parts of the lecture depend heavily on learning later on such as in a math lecture where if you don't follow early on you get hopelessly lost later on in the lecture. This is where video playback becomes essential where students can replay the lectures and learn at their own paces.

For the good students countless studies show that pedagogy does not matter much for motivated students who learn the material most any way it is presented. Pedagogy matters more of the low motivation students, and the lecture pedagogy is probably the worst pedagogy for these students.

There are, however, many studies that show how an asychronous (non-lecture) pedagogy is more efficient for both high and low motivated students ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
I don't think Mary Worthen did a scholarly investigation of those studies.



"Professor Is Punished for Not Assigning Department Chair’s Textbook," by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 20, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/professor-is-punished-for-not-assigning-department-chairs-textbook/105925?elq=1fc0fa25aca84412ad2a4447c89123da&elqCampaignId=1658&elqaid=6638&elqat=1&elqTrackId=4f7abc427a044f8fa071c5ead45a8614

An associate professor of mathematics at California State University at Fullerton is fighting the institution’s decision to discipline him for not assigning a textbook that was co-authored by his department chair. The Orange County Register reports that Alain Bourget was reprimanded last year after opting not to use the $180 textbook, against department policies.

Differential Equations and Linear Algebra, which was written by the math department’s chair and vice chair, has been used to teach the university’s “Introduction to Linear Algebra and Differential Equations” course for a quarter-century, according to the newspaper.

But Mr. Bourget says he doesn’t like the textbook, and would “feel completely dishonest trying to sell a book I don’t believe in.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
No mention is made about the ethics of a Department Chair to collect royalties from such a policy of forcing all students in these courses to by his or her textbook. Some faculty authors turn back these royalties to the students who buy new copies of the book. Others donate their royalties to the college, but this raises questions about the ethics of forcing students to essentially donate more money to the institutions.

Some institutions discourage adoption of local-faculty textbooks in enormous courses such as principles of accounting courses having over 1,000 students per semester. I know of one instance where this led to a cozy relationship between competing accounting textbook author/department heads in two huge universities. Essentially the arrangement between the department heads was that 'I'll adopt yours if you adopt mine."


"Losing His Job for Teaching Too Well?" by Josh Logue, Inside Higher Ed, October 13, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/13/popular-lecturer-berkeley-will-lose-job-despite-strong-record-promoting-student?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=53e3cf05af-DNU201510013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-53e3cf05af-197565045

Jensen Comment
You may want to scroll down to my comment published beneath this article. I would not describe him as a great teacher for reasons expressed in my comment.


Jane Hart's Top 100 Tools for Learning (2015 Edition)
Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (United Kingdom)
http://c4lpt.co.uk/

For thousands of other tools that did not make the above listing see
Bob Jensen's Threads on Tools and Tricks of the Trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


Massive Open Online Course --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

By definition there are no admission standards to take a MOOC and admission is free, although fees may be charged for recognition (badges, completion credentials, or college credits) that have added academic standards. In general, MOOCs are video windows into advanced courses filmed live across the curriculum at prestigious universities. Although some universities provide MOOCs for introductory courses (undergraduate or graduate) MOOCs are not well suited to introductory students who need more hand holding and personalized supervision that are seldom, if ever, available in a MOOC taken by a "massive" number of students. At the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania introductory courses in the first-year MBA core can be taken for free as MOOCs. Students who are planning to go into MBA programs around the world often take these MOOCs in preparation when they will later be taking similar courses in accounting, finance, management, marketing, etc. for credit.

Whereas the Wharton Business School offers core MBA courses as MOOCs, other programs have distance education courses that are not MOOCs because of fees and admission standards. For example, the Harvard Business School has an extension program for pre-MBA courses that are relatively expensive and capped regarding course size with competitive admission standards. Bob Jensen's threads on these and other free-based distance education courses are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

The cumulative number of MOOCs didn’t break 100 until the end of 2012. But by the end of 2013 that number had grown to over 800. And today the number of registered MOOC students added in 2015 is nearly equal to the last three years combined.
"MOOCs Are Still Rising, at Least in Numbers," by Ellen Wexler, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 19, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/moocs-are-still-rising-at-least-in-numbers/57527?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elq=7bf78ed93ead47d3a4da220c40587cbd&elqCampaignId=1647&elqaid=6629&elqat=1&elqTrackId=f325471009eb4e959e66d27de2031216

When one of the first massive open online courses appeared at Stanford University, 160,000 students enrolled. It was 2011, and fewer than 10 MOOCs existed worldwide.

It has been four years since then, and according to a new report, the cumulative number of MOOCs has reached nearly 4,000.

Compiled earlier this month by Dhawal Shah, founder of the MOOC aggregator Class Central, the report summarizes data on MOOCs from the past four years. And the data show that even as the MOOC hype has started to die down, interest hasn’t tapered off.

The cumulative number of MOOCs didn’t break 100 until the end of 2012. But by the end of 2013 that number had grown to over 800. And today the number of registered MOOC students added in 2015 is nearly equal to the last three years combined.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Note the graph showing that the cumulative number of MOOCs to date is nearly 4,000 course, most of which are courses from prestigious universities like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Rice, etc. Although MOOCs are free by definition they cannot usually be taken for transcript credit unless a fee is paid for competency-based testing. The two largest credit providers are Coursera and EdX. One of the more noted MOOCs available is from Arizona State University where the entire first year of courses can be taken for credit.

Noncredit credentials (badges) for a fee are also available for most MOOCs that demonstrate completion of a MOOC and sometimes a level of competency that might be recognized by employers even though they do not qualify for transcript college credit.

"Who Takes MOOCs?" by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, June 5, 2012 ---
 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/05/early-demographic-data-hints-what-type-student-takes-mooc

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are popular. This much we know.

But as investors and higher ed prognosticators squint into their crystal balls for hints of what this popularity could portend for the rest of higher education, two crucial questions remains largely unanswered: Who are these students, and what do they want?

Some early inquiries into this by two major MOOC providers offer a few hints.

Coursera, a company started by two Stanford University professors, originated with a course called Machine Learning, which co-founder Andrew Ng taught last fall to a virtual classroom of 104,000 students. Coursera surveyed a sample of those students to find out, among other things, their education and work backgrounds and why they decided to take the course.

Among 14,045 students in the Machine Learning course who responded to a demographic survey, half were professionals who currently held jobs in the tech industry. The largest chunk, 41 percent, said they were professionals currently working in the software industry; another 9 percent said they were professionals working in non-software areas of the computing and information technology industries.

Many were enrolled in some kind of traditional postsecondary education. Nearly 20 percent were graduate students, and another 11.6 percent were undergraduates. The remaining registrants were either unemployed (3.5 percent), employed somewhere other than the tech industry (2.5 percent), enrolled in a K-12 school (1 percent), or “other” (11.5 percent).

A subset (11,686 registrants) also answered a question about why they chose to take the course. The most common response, given by 39 percent of the respondents, was that they were “just curious about the topic.” Another 30.5 percent said they wanted to “sharpen the skills” they use in their current job. The smallest proportion, 18 percent, said they wanted to “position [themselves] for a better job.”

Udacity, another for-profit MOOC provider founded by (erstwhile) Stanford professors, has also conducted some initial probes into the make-up of its early registrants. While the company did not share any data tables with Inside Higher Ed, chief executive officer David Stavens said more than 75 percent of the students who took the company’s first course, Artificial Intelligence, last fall were looking to “improve their skills relevant for either current or future employment.”

That is a broad category, encompassing both professionals and students, so it does not lend much nuance to the questions of who the students are or what they want. And even the more detailed breakdown of the students who registered for Ng’s Machine Learning course cannot offer very much upon which to build a sweeping thesis on how MOOCs might fit into the large and diverse landscape of higher education.

Coursera has since completed the first iterations of seven additional courses and opened registration for 32 more beyond that. Many of those courses — which cover poetry, world music, finance, and behavioral neurology — are likely to attract different sorts of people, with different goals, than Machine Learning did. “I'm expecting that the demographics for some of our upcoming classes (Stats One, Soc 101, Pharmacology, etc.) will be very different,” said Daphne Koller, one of Coursera’s founders, in an e-mail.

Continued in article

"Coursera Tops 1 Million Students," Inside Higher Ed, August 10, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/08/10/coursera-tops-1-million-students

Coursera, the company that provides support and Web hosting for massive open online courses at top universities, announced Thursday that more than 1 million students have registered for its courses. The company now serves as a MOOC platform for 16 universities and lists 116 courses, most of which have not started yet. The students registering for the courses are increasingly from the United States. Coursera told Inside Higher Ed earlier this summer that about 25 percent of its students hailed from the United States; that figure now stands at 38.5 percent, or about 385,000 students. Brazil, India and China follow, with between 40,000 to 60,000 registrants each. U.S. students cannot easily get formal credit through Coursera or its partners institutions, but some universities abroad reportedly have awarded credit to students who have taken the free courses.

Educating the Masses:  Coursera doubles the number of university partners
"MOOC Host Expands," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, September 19, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/19/coursera-doubles-university-partnerships 

"The 12 Most Popular Free Online Courses (MOOCs) For Professionals," by Maggie Zhang, Business Insider, July 8, 2014 ---
 http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7

01. Wesleyan University's "Social Psychology"

02. University of Maryland's "Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems"

03. Duke University's "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue"

04. Duke University's "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior"

05. University of Toronto's "Learn to Program: The Fundamentals"

06. Stanford University's "Startup Engineering"

07. Yale University's "Financial Markets"

08. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Financial Accounting"

09. University of Washington's "Introduction to Public Speaking"

10. University of Michigan's "Introduction to Finance"

11. The University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's "An Introduction to Marketing"

12. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's "Data Analysis"

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/free-online-courses-for-professionals-2014-7#ixzz37LiJgQ57

"MOOCs haven't lived up to the hopes and the hype, Stanford participants say," by Dan Stober, Stanford Report, October 15, 2015 ---
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/october/moocs-no-panacea-101515.html
Thank you Glen Gray for the heads up.

October 17, 2015 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Glen,

Is the message that learning from Stanford professors is not worth the price of $0?

Actually I think the message is that for many folks who try MOOCs the work of learning is too intense and time consuming given their lack of commitment to keeping up with the class.

Richard Campbell once revealed to the AECM that when he tried to learn from a MOOC it was like "trying to drink from a firehose." I dropped out of a C++ programming course because my heart just was not in keeping up with the class. Ruth Bender revealed to the AECM that completing a MOOC was one of the hardest things she ever tried.

In my viewpoint MOOCs are not good models for introductory students where more hand holding is generally needed. MOOCs are better suited to highly specialized advanced courses for learners who are way above average in terms of aptitude and prior learning.

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI 


American Dream --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream

A Table of the World's Most Valuable Privately Held Startups Since 2014 ---
http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/

  1. Uber ($51.0 Billion)  New estimates are $70 billion
  2. Xionmi ($46.0 Billion)
  3. AirBnB ($25.5 Billion)
  4. Palantir ($20.0 Billion)
  5. Snapchat ($16.0 Billion)
  6. Didi Kuaidi ($16.0 Billion)
  7. Flipkart ($15.0 Billion)
  8. SpaceX ($12.0  Billion)
  9. Pinterest ($11.0 Billion
  10. Dropbox ($10.0 Billion) 
  11. WeWork ($10.0 Billion)
  12. Many others over $1.0 billion are in the table (most with unfamiliar names)

Jensen Comment
The American Dream still exists but it's not the dream we envisioned before the age of technology. Keep in mind the $1.0 billion is a buck greater than $999,999,999 million. It would be interesting to know how many jobs these startups have created directly and indirectly by outsourcing and purchasing of goods and services. Then there are all those higher-order jobs created such as the number of IRS agents and other government agency employees hired just to keep track of these new startups in the Billionaires' Club. The higher order impacts go on and on and on. And let's not forget all those lawyers and accountants and teachers indirectly affected by these startups and employee families that send their kids to schools and universities.

Bob Jensen's threads on the American Dream ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm 


How to Mislead With Statistics
"Women with MBAs face a gender-based pay divide that starts as soon as they graduate, and plagues them throughout their careers
," by Natalie Kitroeff   and Jonathan Rodkin, Bloomberg, October 20, 2015 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/the-real-cost-of-an-mba-is-different-for-men-and-women?cmpid=BBWGP102115_BIZ 

As far as investments go, business school is an unimpeachable bet for young professionals who can muster $100,000. MBAs, who are typically in their early 30s and have already spent a few years in the workforce, saw their salaries triple within eight years of graduation. They also report consistently high levels of job satisfaction and career growth, according to a survey of thousands of alumni conducted by Bloomberg Businessweek as part of the magazine’s annual ranking of business schools. But that general contentment hides a troubling divide: Within a few years of graduation, women with MBAs earn lower salaries, manage fewer people, and are less pleased with their progress than men with the same degree.

Each year, we rank business schools by polling students on topics such as academics, career services, and campus climate. We also ask employers about skills they seek in MBA hires and which schools best prepare their graduates. This year, for the first time, we surveyed alumni who graduated six to eight years ago, asking them how well their degrees had delivered on the promise of a fulfilling, well-paid job. The 12,773 responses we collected offer a wealth of salary information and other data on MBAs working in a variety of industries.

The inclusion of the alumni responses helped propel Harvard Business School to the top of the 2015 rankings. HBS alums reported the largest gains in compensation and many attributed their success to their alma mater. Last year’s No. 1, Duke Fuqua School of Business, slipped to eighth overall, partly because of a comparatively lackluster job placement rate of 86.1 percent, which is below the 87.9 percent rate overall.

Women and men start their post-MBA careers earning almost the same money—$98,000 for women and $105,000 for men—according to our survey of those who graduated from 2007 through 2009. But the gap then widens sharply. By 2014 men hauled in a median of $175,000 and women, $140,000. That means employers pay women 80 percent of what men with the same degree take home.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I want to start out by saying that I believe there are differences in compensation levels by gender. However, the article above, and virtually every other related article I've ever encountered, does not probe very deep to uncover possible reasons for the so-called gender salary gap. First I want to compliment the authors for using medians rather than mean averages. This is the first thing I look for because means can be skewed by outliers more easily than medians.

Let me begin by noting that what are outliers in smaller populations can also be outliers in large populations but there are randomly more such outliers in large populations. It was always surprising in the NBA when the Houston Rockets imported Yao Ming, a 7-foot 6 inch Chinese center. In both the USA and China Yao Ming is an outlier in terms of height ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yao_Ming

In terms of population the USA has an estimated population of slightly over 320 million people.  China has an estimated 1,376 million people. People over seven feet tall are outliers in both the USA and China. However, the odds of having many more people over seven feet tall are much greater in China than the USA due to the sheer difference in the populations of these two nations.

In a random sample of 320 female MBA graduates and a random sample of 1,376 male graduates one would expect that the mean and median salaries of the men would be higher than the women due to random chance because there are many more high-salaried outliers in the larger sample of males. Since the lower salaried men and women are bounded by zero the means and medians of the random samples are driven upward by the higher salaried men and women. Suppose we designated a high salary as anything over $200,000. One would expect more high salaried men than women in these two samples due to the difference in the sample sizes.

It's the bottom part of the salary distribution where gender analysis becomes more complicated. In a random world one would expect to find more zero-salaried men than women in the above samples due to the sample size differences. However, here is where the real world is not random because statistically female MBA graduates in reality have a higher probability of not entering or soon dropping out of the work force to devote full time or nearly full time to mothering their new babies.

As a result statistical analysis showing higher mean or median salaries among the 1,376 males is not probably as much due to hiring and promotion bias due to gender as it is to such complications as having more male MBA graduates than female graduates and the higher probability that a female will leave the full-time work force at least during the early years of raising children.

Of course all of this becomes more complicated when the number of female graduates becomes larger relative to male graduates. I think there are still more male MBA graduates, but in terms of accounting graduates the number of females now exceeds the number of male graduates. Also the large public accounting firms are hiring more female than male graduates. Carried to extremes suppose that we randomly sample 1,376 female accounting graduates and 321 male accounting graduates. My hypothesis is that the mean and median salaries of the females will exceed those of the males after five years of employment. Of course these averages may differ for the entire populations of accounting graduates because the gender differences among all accounting graduates is closer to 50/50 than 1,376/321.

There are other complications in this analysis. My opinion is that newly-hired male and female graduates joining a given local office of a Big Four firm will earn the same starting compensation. However, the new hires in the San Francisco local office will have higher salaries than the San Antonio office of a given firm based upon huge differences in costs of living in these two cities. To do a complete gender analysis we would have to factor in whether there are gender differences based upon cost of living in local offices. Do mothers tend to prefer or avoid San Francisco vis-a-vis San Antonio? It's certainly more complicated to both work full time and raise young children in San Francisco where rents are now higher than anywhere in the USA. Hence one would expect mothers to prefer San Antonio relative to San Francisco. One would expect more females moving away from the San Francisco office once they became mothers.

My point is that one has to be very careful when it comes to inferring gender bias causality in most any type of statistical analysis beyond the usual problem of spurious correlation. I think most studies of gender differences in salaries do not delve deeply enough into the really complicated factors affecting statistical analysis outcomes.

But I do still believe there is gender bias against mothers of young children in terms of employment and compensation. I'm not convinced there's such a degree of bias against those women who are not mothers of young children.

"The 100 Best Companies For Working Moms," by Jacquelyn Smith, Working Mothers Magazine via Business Insider, September 16, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-companies-for-working-moms-2014-9 
The largest CPA firms are among the best places for moms to be employed.

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

Bob Jensen's threads on the histories of women in the professions ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Women


9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings,by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, October 23, 2015 ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/23/nine-years-of-brain-pickings/?mc_cid=637ca026b4&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

. . .

As Brain Pickings turns nine, I continue to stand by these seven reflections, but the time has come to add two more. (Nine is also an excellent numeral — an exponential factorial, the number of Muses in Greek mythology, my favorite chapter in Alice in Wonderland.) Here are the original seven, as they appeared in 2013:

  1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
  2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
  3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

4.      Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

  1. When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
  2. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
  3. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

And here are the two new additions:

  1. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
  2. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

In the spirit of reflection, here are my current nine favorite pieces from the first nine years of Brain Pickings:

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
There are always exceptions to most every rule. For example, being an idealist can sometimes get in the way of creativity and even stifle effort. For example, you should perhaps write something every day and post much of it at your Website even though it is not as perfect as you would like and opens you to criticisms from experts who are idealists who criticize a lot but never create anything that might open themselves to criticism.


"38 Percent Of Women Earn More Than Their Husbands," by Mona Chalabi, NPR via Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog, February 8, 2015 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/38-percent-of-women-earn-more-than-their-husbands/

Times are changing for professional women at work. The big CPA firms now hire more female accounting graduates than male accounting graduates. There are also cracks in the glass ceiling. Deloitte, one of the top Big Four firms, just appointed a woman CEO.


Ole yust does not yet vant Lena to be da boss
Women CEOs are rare in Norway and Sweden even though these nations are highest in terms of gender equality on other criteria

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_executive_officer

. . .

In some European Union countries, there are two separate boards, one executive board for the day-to-day business and one supervisory board for control purposes (selected by the shareholders). In these countries, the CEO presides over the executive board and the chairman presides over the supervisory board, and these two roles will always be held by different people. This ensures a distinction between management by the executive board and governance by the supervisory board. This allows for clear lines of authority. The aim is to prevent a conflict of interest and too much power being concentrated in the hands of one person.

Women on Board The Norwegian Experience (June 2010) ---
http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/id/ipa/07309.pdf

  • Norway was the first country to introduce a quota for women on company boards. Since its introduction in 2003, the number of women on board has reached 40 per cent as required by law. 

     
  • In several European countries, Germany being one of them, a debate has begun on how to increase the number of women in leading positions in business. The question of whether or not quota legislation is needed to reach this goal is highly contested. 

     
  • The Norwegian experience reveals that a quota is the key to a successful implementation. Not only does it create the pressure needed for fundamental change but it also triggers a public debate at the core of which are questions of gender equality in wider society

Ole yust does not yet vant Lena to be da boss (Norway is not in the 28-Member European Union)
From the Harvard Business Review Blog on December 30, 2014

Norwegian Companies Morph to Avoid Gender-Balance Law

One of the consequences of Norway’s law mandating that at least 40% of the directors of public limited companies be female is that numerous firms have switched their organizational form, sometimes at significant cost, so that they are no longer public limited companies, say Øyvind Bøhren and Siv Staubo of Norwegian Business School. Among the companies in that category when the law was passed in 2003, 51% chose to become private limited-liability firms by the time it became binding five years later. However, Norway may further extend the board-representation rule to other corporate forms.

SOURCE:
Does mandatory gender balance work? Changing organizational form to avoid board upheaval
http://links.mkt3142.com/ctt?kn=14&ms=MTAyNjY5MjMS1&r=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&b=0&j=NDQyMzY1ODgzS0&mt=1&rt=0

Germany since passed quota (30% in 2016) legislation for publically-traded companies but rejected similar quotas for private corporations ---
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cdu-and-spd-agree-on-gender-quota-in-german-boardrooms-a-934155.html

Jensen Comment
In the USA the CEO generally has enormous power is choosing the slate of board members voted on by the shareholders. Also shareholders uninterested in voting often give voting proxies to the CEO. Hence the election of board members is not exactly an example of great democracy in action. For public relations purposes and for purposes of competency, however, CEOs are increasingly attempting to get women on corporate boards. Also corporate boards for sometimes complicated reasons, including competency, are increasingly trying to appoint women as CEOs.

Gender Equality --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_equality

Global Gender Gap Report (2013) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report

Gender Inequality Index --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index
Note that this index is based on multiple criteria and is not a measure of business executive power or executive compensation.

Female Labor Force in the Muslim World --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_labor_force_in_the_Muslim_world

More at
Bob Jensen's threads on the histories of women in the professions ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Women

 


"U of Florida Cancels Huge Pearson Contract," Inside Higher Ed, October 22, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/10/22/u-florida-cancels-huge-pearson-contract?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=fc286db93b-DNU201510022&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-fc286db93b-197565

The University of Florida on Wednesday announced that it is terminating a huge 11-year deal for Pearson to build and manage the university's online programs. The announcement came in an internal email obtained and published by Politico Florida. The email says the university will be better able to serve online students by including them in general university operations and obtaining some new specialized help for some areas, such as marketing.

The size of the deal (Pearson could have earned $186 million if it met all goals) has made it a target of criticism from some on campus. The agreement included a provision stating that Florida could withdraw or renegotiate if certain goals weren't met. And out-of-state enrollment goals weren't met, giving the university the option it is now exercising. A month ago, both sides said they were in discussions that could have led to the agreement being modified, not ended.

Pearson released the following statement: "In November 2013, Pearson and the University of Florida signed a landmark agreement to deliver UF Online. In that time, Pearson made a significant up-front investment in this program, shouldering much of the risk, including building a Florida-based staff and developing the marketing effort around the program. We are disappointed that the university has decided not to move forward with this partnership. There are always challenges when launching innovative, multifaceted programs such as this, especially at highly competitive institutions and on such a tight timeline. It is important to note there have been successes. UF saw an 84 percent increase in UF Online student enrollment this fall when compared to fall 2014 and continues to expand the number of online undergraduate programs with a total of 19 majors from six colleges slated to be offered by next fall. Due to the reduced in-state tuition offered through UF Online, Florida students have saved over $3.5 million in tuition since the inception of the program. Pearson is proud to offer programs that make higher education more accessible and affordable for students. Pearson's online program management services have been successful at a number of colleges and universities across the U.S. We have learned a great deal from the UF partnership that can be applied to helping both Pearson and other university customers improve their delivery of online options for students."

Jensen Comment
These online courses from Pearson were fee-based and apparently had a condition that they would attract out-of-state and well as in-state students. Out-of-state tuition at $500 per credit is substantially higher than $112 for in-state students. Out-of-state students had little incentive to pay the higher prices when there own in-state universities offered much less expensive and possibly better online credits. And the Pearson courses did not have the high performance rankings of other in-state online programs ranked by US News at
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

Also Pearson did not fully cover the most popular programs such as most of the University of Florida courses in accounting, finance, and business in general.


Video:  Illegal to Film in the Library---
https://multcolib.org/policies-manuals/behavior-rules-governing-use-multnomah-county-library

Jensen Comment
Photocopy machines are often placed in libraries because it's assumed that extensive photocopying of books is too expensive for copyright violations. However, newer technologies in video make page copying quite cheap.

October 16, 2015 reply from Scott Bokacker

This would be one tool to do it cheaply https://www.camscanner.com/  


Deirdre N. McCloskey:  About Living, Teaching, Research, and Writing Following Transgender Realignment Surgery Later in Life
"Been There, Done That,' by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 18, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Been-There-Done-That/233763?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elq=e7d1ca9fbfb3460db11fe2bd5a71e1a0&elqCampaignId=1646&elqaid=6628&elqat=1&elqTrackId=c1a8bfd34a6d4c038ec84f0ab2e5afce

My born name was the gloriously Celtic Donald. It means in Old Irish "world ruler," and is out of favor now for its association with a duck. One wonders what The Donald’s impact will be.

In 1995, to keep the D and the Irish, while losing the masculinity, I chose Deirdre, which may have meant "wanderer," and whose ravishingly romantic myth inspired two plays in the Celtic Revival, by Yeats and by Synge. That fact — and that university teachers in Britain are called "dons" — illuminates one of my favorite headlines. Written by some genius at the (London) Times Higher Education Supplement, it was affixed to a column I wrote saying that transitioning in academic life is far less traumatic than one might expect, and certainly easier than, say, in the Navy or on a football team: "It Helps to Be a Don if You’re Going to Be a Deirdre."

Two decades later, that’s even more true, and academe should take a moment out of its busy day to congratulate itself for setting a good example for the rest of society, which has caught up to a surprising degree.

Even in 1995 I met someone who transitioned while working at an auto factory in Tennessee. She had little trouble, being very open about it, and having acquired through sheer force of will and much practice a suitably feminine voice. And in one way, 1995 was easier than 2015 — the lawyers had not gotten into the game.

When in Iowa City I went to the courthouse to change my name, the judge had seen such efforts before and had no over-lawyered regulations to undermine Iowa common sense. Likewise at the Iowa Motor Vehicle Division. Even the feds took things in stride. A few days before flying to Holland to teach for a year, I pleaded through tears on the telephone for a New Hampshire office to send me a passport with my new name, and the woman did, possibly skirting a regulation or two.

Continued in article

Among her many scholarly books in economics and statistics, Deirdre wrote a book about her life before and after her Transgender Realignment Surgery
Crossing: A Memoir ---
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Memoir-Deirdre-N-McCloskey/dp/0226556697/ref=sr_1_3?s=beauty&ie=UTF8&qid=1445350949&sr=8-3&keywords=Deirdre+Nansen+McCloskey

Jensen Comment
In 2012 at the annual meetings of the American Accounting Association I had the genuine privilege of being one of the discussants on a plenary session presentation by renowned economic and statistics historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Deirdre was born Don McCloskey and had transgender realignment surgery after obtaining a Ph.D. from Harvard and raising a family as an economics professor at the University of Iowa. You can read my (Bob Jensen's) discussion comments and other matters related to her presentation at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm

The Cult of Statistical Significance:  How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives, by Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, ISBN-13: 978-472-05007-9, 2007)

Page 206
Like scientists today in medical and economic and other sizeless sciences, Pearson mistook a large sample size for the definite, substantive significance---evidence s Hayek put it, of "wholes." But it was as Hayek said "just an illusion." Pearson's columns of sparkling asterisks, though quantitative in appearance and as appealing a is the simple truth of the sky, signified nothing.

 pp. xv-xvi
The implied reader of our book is a significance tester, the keeper of numerical things. We want to persuade you of one claim:  that William Sealy Gosset (1879-1937) --- aka "Student" of Student's t-test --- was right and that his difficult friend, Ronald A. Fisher, though a genius, was wrong.  Fit is not the same thing as importance. Statistical significance is not the same thing as scientific finding. R2. t-statistic, p-value, F-test, and all the more sophisticated versions of them in time series and the most advanced statistics are misleading at best.

No working scientist today knows much about Gosset, a brewer of Guinness stout and the inventor of a good deal of modern statistics. The scruffy little Gossset, with his tall leather boots and a rucksack on his back, is the heroic underdog of our story. Gosset, we claim, was a great scientist. He took an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty. For over two decades he quietly tried to educate Fisher. But Fisher, our flawed villain, erased from Gosset's inventions the consciously economic element. We want to bring it back.

. . .

Can so many scientists have been wrong for the eighty years since 1925? Unhappily yes. The mainstream in science, as any scientist will tell you, is often wrong. Otherwise, come to think of it, science would be complete. Few scientists would make that claim, or would want to. Statistical significance is surely not the only error of modern science, although it has been, as we will show, an exceptionally damaging one. Scientists are often tardy in fixing basic flaws in their sciences despite the presence of better alternatives. ...

Continued in the Preface


Page 3
A brewer of beer, William Sealy Gosset (1876-1937), proved its (statistical significance) in small samples. He worked at the Guinness Brewer in Dublin, where for most of his working life he was head experimental brewer. He saw in 1905 where the need for a small-smle test because he was testing varieties of hops and barley in field samples with N as small as four. Gosset, who is hardly remembered nowadays, quietly invented many tools of modern applied statistics, including Monte Carlo analysis, the balanced design of experiments, and, especially, Student's t, which is the foundation of small-sample theory and the most commonsly7 used test of statistical significance in the sciences. ... But the value Gosset intended with his test, he said without deviation from 1905 until his death in 1937. was its ability to sharpen statements of substantive or economic significance. ... (he) wrote to his elderly friend, the great Karl Person:  "My own war work is obviously to brew Guinness stout in each way as to waste as little labor and material as possible, and I am hoping to help to do something fairly creditable in that way." It seems he did.

Page 10
Sizelessness is not what most Fisherians (deciples of Ronald Fisher) believe they are getting. The sizeless scientists have adopted a method of deciding which numbers are significant that has little to do with the humanly significant numbers. The scientists re counting, to be sure:  "3.14159***," they proudly report of simply "****." But, as the probablist Bruno de Finetti said, they proudly report scientists are acting as though "addition requires different operations if concerned with pure number or amounts of money" (De Finetti 1971, 486, quoted in Savage 1971a).

Substituting "significance" for scientific how much would imply that the value of a lottery ticket is the chance itself, the chance 1 in 38,000, say in or 1 in 1,000,000,000. It supposes that the only source in value in the lottery is sampling variability. It sets aside as irrelevant---simply ignores---the value of the expected prize., the millions that success in the lottery could in fact yield. Setting aside both old and new criticisms of expected utility theory, a prize of $3.56 is very different, other things equal, from a prize of $356,000,000. No matter. Statistical significance, startlingly, ignores the difference.

Continued on Page 10

Page 15
The doctor who cannot distinguish statistical significance from substantive significance, an F-statistic from a heart attach, is like an economist who ignores opportunity cost---what statistical theorists call the loss function. The doctors of "significance" in medicine and economy are merely "deciding what to say rather than what to do" (Savage 1954, 159). In the 1950s Ronald Fisher published an article and a book that intended to rid decision from the vocabulary of working statisticians (1955, 1956). He was annoyed by the rising authority in highbrow circles of those he called "the Neymanites."

Continued on Page 15


pp. 28-31
An example is provided regarding how Merck manipulated statistical inference to keep its killing pain killer Vioxx from being pulled from the market.

Page 31
Another story. The Japanese government in June 2005 increased the limit on the number of whales that may be annually killed in the Antarctica---from around 440 annually to over 1,000 annually. Deputy Commissioner Akira Nakamae explained why:  "We will implement JARPS-2 [the plan for the higher killing] according to the schedule, because the sample size is determined in order to get statistically significant results" (Black 2005). The Japanese hunt for the whales, they claim, in order to collect scientific data on them. That and whale steaks. The commissioner is right:  increasing sample size, other things equal, does increase the statistical significance of the result. It is, fter all, a mathematical fact that statistical significance increases, other things equal, as sample size increases. Thus the theoretical standard error of JAEPA-2, s/SQROOT(440+560) [given for example the simple mean formula], yields more sampling precision than the standard error JARPA-1, s/SQROOT(440). In fact it raises the significance level to Fisher's percent cutoff. So the Japanese government has found a formula for killing more whales, annually some 560 additional victims, under the cover of getting the conventional level of Fisherian statistical significance for their "scientific" studies.


pp. 250-251
The textbooks are wrong. The teaching is wrong. The seminar you just attended is wrong. The most prestigious journal in your scientific field is wrong.

You are searching, we know, for ways to avoid being wrong. Science, as Jeffreys said, is mainly a series of approximations to discovering the sources of error. Science is a systematic way of reducing wrongs or can be. Perhaps you feel frustrated by the random epistemology of the mainstream and don't know what to do. Perhaps you've been sedated by significance and lulled into silence. Perhaps you sense that the power of a Roghamsted test against a plausible Dublin alternative is statistically speaking low but you feel oppressed by the instrumental variable one should dare not to wield. Perhaps you feel frazzled by what Morris Altman (2004) called the "social psychology rhetoric of fear," the deeply embedded path dependency that keeps the abuse of significance in circulation. You want to come out of it. But perhaps you are cowed by the prestige of Fisherian dogma. Or, worse thought, perhaps you are cynically willing to be corrupted if it will keep a nice job


See the review at
http://economiclogic.blogspot.com/2012/03/about-cult-of-statistical-significance.html

Related articles in Academe Today, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 20

Dilemmas From Day 1

By Lee Gardner

As admissions offices struggle to accommodate those who don’t conform to standard gender roles, supportive administrators are forced to "find ways to meet students along the way."

 

Transgender Athletes Make Their Own Way

By Ben Gose

Perhaps even more so than other transgender students, athletes face tough choices, conflicting policies, and intense scrutiny.

 

Been There, Done That

By Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Don’t be surprised if your gender transition is greeted with an amiable shrug, if not a yawn.

 

'Ask Me': What LGBTQ Students Want Their Professors to Know

By Julia Schmalz

Transgender and gender-nonbinary students share what keeps them from feeling safe and thriving on campus.

Transgender Oral History Project --- http://transoralhistory.com/

Also see
In this video from TEDxStanford, Hoover Institution research fellow and former CIA operative Alice Miller shares why, at the age of 50, she chose to transition from male to female. "It's never too late to be who you are," she says ---
Video:  The Importance of Being Alice | Alice Miller | TEDxStanford
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScG-lv9dCeY&list=PLsRNoUx8w3rN6_4wJsEdAuasodNUUhO31


Fair Use Act --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_USE_Act

"Google Gets Another Win in Book-Scanning Court Challenge," Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 16, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/google-gets-another-win-in-book-scanning-court-challenge/105884?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elq=ec9e14ee5eff44fa87240c66a2380dd4&elqCampaignId=1636&elqaid=6609&elqat=1&elqTrackId=ac65689c97d147cdacf63acf9caf390a

Jensen Comment
It's a bit confusing regarding how scanned Google books can be used in the many nations that do not have a Fair Use Safe Harbor used to justify Google book scanning in the USA.


Artificial Intelligence --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

"What to Think About Machines That Think: Leading Thinkers on Artificial Intelligence and What It Means to Be Human," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, October 12, 2015 ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/12/what-to-think-about-machines-that-think-brockman-edge-question/?mc_cid=23a7c01a76&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

When Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage invented the world’s first computer, their “Analytical Engine” became the evolutionary progenitor of a new class of human extensions — machines that think. A generation later, Alan Turing picked up where they left off and, in laying the foundations of artificial intelligence with his Turing Test, famously posed the techno-philosophical question of whether a computer could ever enjoy strawberries and cream or compel you to fall in love with it.

From its very outset, this new branch of human-machine evolution made it clear that any answer to these questions would invariably alter how we answer the most fundamental questions of what it means to be human.

That’s what Edge founder John Brockman explores in the 2015 edition of his annual question, inviting 192 of today’s most prominent thinkers to tussle with these core questions of artificial intelligence and its undergirding human dilemmas. The answers, collected in What to Think About Machines That Think: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence (public library), come from such diverse contributors as physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, music pioneer Brian Eno, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, Positive Psychology founding father Martin Seligman, computer scientist and inventor Danny Hillis, TED curator Chris Anderson, neuroscientist Sam Harris, legendary curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker, and yours truly.

The answers are strewn with a handful of common threads, a major one being the idea that artificial intelligence isn’t some futuristic abstraction but a palpably present reality with which we’re already living.

Beloved musician and prolific reader Brian Eno looks at the many elements of his day, from cooking porridge to switching on the radio, that work seamlessly thanks to an invisible mesh of connected human intelligence — a Rube Goldberg machine of micro-expertise that makes it possible for the energy in a distant oil field to power the stove built in a foreign factory out of components made by scattered manufacturers, and ultimately cook his porridge. In a sentiment that calls to mind I, Pencil that magnificent vintage allegory of how everything is connected — Eno explains why he sees artificial intelligence not as a protagonist in a techno-dystopian future but as an indelible and fruitful part of our past and present:

My untroubled attitude results from my almost absolute faith in the reliability of the vast supercomputer I’m permanently plugged into. It was built with the intelligence of thousands of generations of human minds, and they’re still working at it now. All that human intelligence remains alive, in the form of the supercomputer of tools, theories, technologies, crafts, sciences, disciplines, customs, rituals, rules of thumb, arts, systems of belief, superstitions, work-arounds, and observations that we call Global Civilization.

Global Civilization is something we humans created, though none of us really know how. It’s out of the individual control of any of us — a seething synergy of embodied intelligence that we’re all plugged into. None of us understands more than a tiny sliver of it, but by and large we aren’t paralyzed or terrorized by that fact — we still live in it and make use of it. We feed it problems — such as “I want some porridge” — and it miraculously offers us solutions that we don’t really understand.

[…]

We’ve been living happily with artificial intelligence for thousands of years.

Continued in article


Arizona State University School Offers a Free Full-Time, Two Year Onsite MBA to All Students Who are Admitted
"This School Will Give You a Completely Free MBA," by Sarah Grant, Bloomberg, October 15, 2015 ---
 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-15/this-school-will-give-you-a-completely-free-mba?cmpid=BBD101515_BIZ

 
Students who applied to Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business will be pleasantly surprised to hear that the school is making its two-year, full-time MBA program completely free.

Thanks to a $50 million gift from the W.P. Carey Foundation, Arizona State's business school is awarding up to 120 scholarships to students accepted into its full-time MBA program—which amounts to a tuition-free MBA for at least one class of students. Arizona State is one of the highest-ranked (No. 67) and largest business schools in the U.S., according to Bloomberg’s Business School Rankings.

"This is risk-taking," said W.P. Carey Dean Amy Hillman. "The more conservative thing would have been to name some scholarships that look for a specific type of applicant, but our fear was that we wouldn't have the kind of impact we're able to have with this. While helping a few individuals is important, this is more important."

Any chance at a free MBA is noteworthy considering the increased cost of business school. This fall, some top MBA programs raised tuition as much as 10 percent. Among top 20 schools surveyed by Bloomberg Business last year, University of Maryland's Smith School of Business had the biggest tuition jump, 9.9 percent for out-of-state residents.

Arizona State's business school is in the midlevel price category for MBA programs, ranging from $54,000 for in-state students to $90,000 for international ones, according to a spokesperson for the school. Prior to this year, the school awarded 17 full-tuition scholarships per class.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This should not be confused with the Thunderbird International School of Global Management that, following a financial crisis, is now a part of Arizona State University in 2015 ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbird_School_of_Global_Management
Thunderbird focuses more on international management and international students.

The School of Accountancy and other "business programs" have various top onsite and online undergraduate and masters degrees that are not free. ASU is a very large university with multiple campuses  ---
https://students.asu.edu/colleges

Starbucks employees get huge discounts when taking ASU online courses (not just in business) ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Year-After-Starbucks-Offered/233415?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elq=7e720a49b36e406998c4b99364a0cf9a&elqCampaignId=1625&elqaid=6593&elqat=1&elqTrackId=5e64efce97544f2aa2e60bbc0a82df71


Dan Ariely (cognitive psychology blog that often answers readers' questions) --- http://danariely.com/ 

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


Black Swan --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan

Black swan risk rises to highest level ever --- http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/13/black-swan-risk-rises-to-highest-level-ever.html

The following is a free preview of CNBC Pro. To get more investment analysis and the live CNBC TV feed, please subscribe.

Investors fear a "black swan" catastrophic event in the financial markets right now more than ever before.

At least according to the CBOE Skew Index, which measures the prices of far out-of-the-money options on the S&P 500. Its goal is to determine the benchmark's tail risk or the "risk of outlier returns two or more standard deviations below the mean," according to the CBOE website.

Put simply, traders are buying options that pay off only if the stock market drops a whole lot.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the causes of the 2007 economic collapse (Black Swans were all over the place) ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#CausesOfCollapse

PS
When October roles around it's time to think about another donation to keep knowledge free. Please contribute something to advertising-free Wikipedia ---
https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:FundraiserLandingPage&country=US&uselang=en&utm_medium=sidebar&utm_source=donate&utm_campaign=C13_en.wikipedia.org


MIT:  Recommended from Around the Web (Week ending October 24, 2015) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542656/recommended-from-around-the-web-week-ending-october-24-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151023

 

MIT:  Recommended Robot and AI Reads  (Week ending October 21, 2015) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542501/recommended-robot-and-ai-reads-this-week/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-weekly-robotics&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151021

MIT:  Recommended Biomedicine Reads  (Week ending October 21, 2015) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542666/recommended-biomedicine-reads-this-week/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151021

MIT:   (Week ending October 17, 2015) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542501/recommended-robot-and-ai-reads-this-week/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151019

MIT:  Recommended Computing Reads (Week ending October 17, 2015) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542491/recommended-computing-reads-this-week/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151015

MIT:  Recommended from Around the Web (Week ending October 17, 2015 ) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542536/recommended-from-around-the-web-week-ending-october-17-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151019

MIT:  Seven Must-Read Stories (Week ending October 14, 2015 )
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542546/seven-must-read-stories-week-ending-october-17-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151019

MIT:  Recommended from Around the Web (Week ending October 10, 2015) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542266/recommended-from-around-the-web-week-ending-october-10-2015/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-weekly-robotics&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151014


Thomas Robert Malthus --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

MIT:  The United Nations now projects 10 billion people on earth for reasons not given as much emphasis by Malthus (who focused more on birth rates) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/graphiti/542346/more-life-less-death/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151013

Jensen Question
Will the population centers also shift to the USA and Germany?


Question
What is the estimate of the number of humans who have ever lived on earth?

One Answer = 100,825,272,791 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/significant-digits-for-thursday-oct-15-2015/
Jensen Comment
Due to issues of definition of when life begins and data errors this should perhaps have been rounded to 100 or 101 billion.

 

Thomas Robert Malthus --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

MIT:  The United Nations now projects 10 billion people on earth for reasons not given as much emphasis by Malthus (who focused more on birth rates rather than death delays) ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/graphiti/542346/more-life-less-death/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151013

"Nine Billion Mouths to Feed:  The author is sympathetic to anti-globalization activists. But history amply shows that limiting people to local crops is a recipe for famine," by Ronald Bailey, The Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/nine-billion-mouths-to-feed-1445206195?mod=djemMER 

In the late 18th century, Robert Thomas Malthus argued that human population growth would always outstrip food production, thus perpetually condemning some portion of humanity to famine. His disciples today are now pointing to recent steep increases in food prices as harbingers of a new age of scarcity. Global food prices have indeed been soaring, along with other commodity prices, since 2005. In real terms, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s price index crested in 2011 at 60% above its 2005 price levels. Farmers around the world predictably reacted to the higher prices by growing more food. World cereal production rose from 2,348 million tons in 2011 to 2,540 million tons today. Since the 2011 peak, food prices have been drifting downward, although they remain 18% higher than they were a decade or so ago.

Cue the prophets of doom. Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute has said that the world is now at “peak everything.” He has further warned that humanity is “waking up to a century of declines.” In 2013, Earth Policy Institute founder Lester Brown asserted: “The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity.” Journalist Joel K. Bourne Jr. declared earlier this year, in his book “The End of Plenty,” that “the world is running out of food.”

Now comes the neo-Malthusian journalist David Rieff. He argues in “The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century” that “if significant changes to the global food system are not made, a crisis of absolute global food supply could occur sometime between 2030 and 2050.” Mr. Rieff’s argument is halfhearted in comparison to Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich’s bold 1968 pronouncement, in “The Population Bomb,” that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

The chief question for Mr. Rieff is: Will it be possible to feed the nine billion people who will most likely be living on the planet by the middle of this century? He writes that, “in the main,” his “own views are pessimistic.” But he immediately acknowledges the possibility of predictive failure and declares: “I insist that it is entirely possible that twenty years from now, it is the optimists who will be proven right.”

Mr. Rieff spends most of the book excoriating in turgid prose those he designates as “optimists,” who argue that hunger and poverty are technically solvable problems. He accuses them of “an overreliance verging on mystical faith in the application of scientific breakthroughs that will give farmers in the poor world the technological inputs and market savvy needed to grow enough food to comfortably feed the nine or ten billion human beings who will be alive on this earth by 2050.” He has particular disdain for philanthro-capitalists as personified by Bill Gates. When Mr. Gates’s foundation advocates harnessing technology to feed the hungry and reduce poverty, Mr. Rieff sees only ideology. “Perhaps twenty-first century liberal capitalism’s greatest trick has been convincing so much of the world that it is not an ideology, and as it did so, convincing itself as well,” he writes.

The author’s sympathy rests with anti-globalization activists and their demands for “food sovereignty,” which amounts essentially to autarkic agriculture by peasant farmers. As history amply shows, limiting people to local crops is a recipe for periodic famine.

Mr. Rieff denounces what he sees as the global development “consensus” that “only transformative power of liberal capitalism in combination with science and technological innovation can end hunger and extreme poverty.” He finds that the “only feasible” answer to the problems of hunger and poverty “is to be found in the strengthening of the state and in the promise and burden of democratic politics.” Ultimately, politics is the key to fixing the “broken” global food system.

Broken? It is true that far too many people are still hungry, but poverty is receding around the globe. Earlier this month the World Bank released projections that the number of people living in absolute poverty (defined as $1.90 per day) will have fallen from 902 million people (or 12.8% of the global population) in 2012 to 702 million people (or 9.6% of the global population) this year. According to the World Bank, these figures provide “fresh evidence that a quarter-century-long sustained reduction in poverty is moving the world closer to the historic goal of ending poverty by 2030.”

Continued in article

Update in 2015
Add to this the perils of irreversible climate change in that is probably more of a disaster to food supplies than any other event in the history of mankind. Crop production impacts in the USA are small potatoes compared to the implications climate change on global food supplies. However, one great unknown is technology for making desalinized ocean water cheap for irrigation around the world.

Bob Jensen's Threads
Food, Agriculture, and Botany
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#Botany

 

A 2007 Bob Jensen Tidbit ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070716.htm

The latest (in 2007) from the campaign trail of Obama
"Shift Troops to Fight al-Qaida": "We cannot win a war against the terrorists if we're on the wrong battlefield," Obama said. "America must urgently begin deploying from Iraq and take the fight more effectively to the enemy's home by destroying al-Qaida's leadership along the Afghan-Pakistan border, eliminating their command and control networks and disrupting their funding."

"Clueless," Powerline, July 14, 2007 --- http://powerlineblog.com/archives/018232.php
Jensen Comment
While Commander and Chief Obama's U.S. military is "deploying form Iraq ... [to]... the Afghan-Pakistan border," the al-Qaida's top leaders will deploy from Pakistan to the vacated Iraq. To carry the fight to those warring leaders, Obama's military will then have to re-invade Iraq or give terrorism's command a safe haven. What will Commander and Chief Obama do if the new battlefield in fact becomes Iraq? Much depends upon how much terror the U.S. and its allies will tolerate before re-invading Iraq. Many anti-war protesters hope that if we give al-Qaida 80% of the world's oil reserves (which means give them the entire Middle East) that they will become capitalists dependent upon a safer world to buy their oil. I think "clueless" is a good word here for the strategy to pull completely out of Iraq and shift the theatre of war to the Afghan-Pakistan border. Of course we are and will continue to be worried about Pakistan, because Pakistan is a major nuclear power teetering on the brink of control by Islamic militants. If  al-Qaida and its sympathizers get control of a nuclear arsenal in Pakistan or Iraq, "someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away."

They're rioting in Africa. They're starving in Spain. There's hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch and I don't like anybody very much!
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud for man's been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud.

And we know for certain that some lovely day someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.
They're rioting in Africa. There's strife in Iran.
What nature doesn't do to us will be done by our fellow man.
Kingston Trio, 1959 --- http://www.kingstontrio.com/

Jensen Comment
ISIS and other insane enemies around the world are intent on weapons of mass destruction far more lethal than atomic bombs. Attaining a world population of 10 billion is most assuredly not a sure thing in spite of climate change disasters.

It's hard to beat a person who never gives up.

Babe Ruth,
And he wasn't even thinking about Jihads in those days but I am thinking Jihads these days


Apple is finally acknowledging there's a big problem with some MacBook screens ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-launches-replacement-program-for-staingate-macbook-screens-2015-10


We'd rather be obese on benefits than thin and working.
Janice and Amber Manzur
John Hill, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11347454/Mother-and-daughter-weigh-a-total-of-43-stone-and-get-34k-a-year-handouts-but-refuse-to-diet.html 

 

Moocher Hall of Fame --- https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/the-moocher-hall-of-fame/

 

"Psychologist Barry Schwartz on What Motivates Us to Work, Why Incentives Fail, and How Our Ideas About Human Nature Shape Who We Become," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, October 5, 2015 ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/05/barry-schwartz-why-we-work-ted-books/?mc_cid=91738e7dd6&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

The organism we call culture — all of our art and literature and human thought — is in a constant symbiotic dance with human nature. Our culture both reflects who we are — our values, our hopes, our fears, our ideals — and shapes who we become by immersing us in its collectively agreed upon mythology, systematically perpetuating certain values and negating others. E.B. White knew this when he considered the responsibility of the writer and asserted that “writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.” It’s a perennial dialogue between our nature and what we come to believe is our nature, perhaps best captured by the physicist David Bohm in his 1977 Berkeley lecture: “Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true.”

In a particularly palpable manifestation of this symbiotic dance, the rise of workaholism and the toxic mythology of work/life balance have warped our understanding of why we work, what meaningful labor means, and how we can avail ourselves of the true rewards of our vocation. That’s what psychologist Barry Schwartz explores in Why We Work (public library) — an inquiry into the diverse sources of satisfaction in work, the demoralizing effect of incentives, and how we can reimagine work culture to enlarge the human spirit rather than contract it.


Schwartz, who has previously studied the paradox of choice and the moral machinery of practical wisdom — casts the issue against the staggering statistic that, according to a recent Gallup study of 230,000 full-time and part-time workers in 142 countries, only 13% of people feel engaged and fulfilled by their jobs. He writes:

Work is more often a source of frustration than one of fulfillment for nearly 90 percent of the world’s workers. Think of the social, emotional, and perhaps even economic waste that this statistic represents. Ninety percent of adults spend half their waking lives doing things they would rather not be doing at places they would rather not be.

This, of course, is far from new — one need only look at that marvelous 1949 manifesto for avoiding work to appreciate that enduring frustration. But Schwartz’s central point is that, far from a necessary sunk cost of making a living, this profound dissatisfaction with work is one of our own making — the product of how we’ve designed our institutions, how that design has shaped our core beliefs, and how those beliefs in turn shape who we become. By examining the dichotomy between discovery and invention — one I think about often — Schwartz argues that human nature is something we actively invent:

Does the market cater to consumer desires or does it create consumer desires? Do the media cater to people’s tastes in news and entertainment or do the media create those tastes? We are all accustomed to the difficulties surrounding discussion of these issues in modern society, and we may all have fairly strong opinions about the “cater/create” debate. Questions of just this sort are all around us, and finding the right answer to them can have profound consequences for the future of society. In a sense, the distinction I’m making is between discovery and invention. Discoveries tell us things about how the world works. Inventions use those discoveries to create objects or processes that make the world work differently. The discovery of pathogens leads to the invention of antibiotics. The discovery of nuclear energy leads to bombs, power plants, and medical procedures. The discovery of the genome leads, or will lead, to untold changes in almost every part of our lives. Of course, discoveries also change the world, by changing how we understand it and live in it, but they rarely change the world by themselves.

Continued in article

 

Jensen Comment
The fundamental difference between capitalism and communism is the setting of wages. In capitalism the theory is that wages are set by supply and demand. In a world where over half the work force is unskilled wages will be low such as the hourly rate for washing dishes in a Denny's Restaurant. Accordingly, workers get paid more for skills in great demand such as the skill in removing tumors deep within human brains. A disappointing aspect of capitalism is that the market price of unskilled labor may be so low that it's not even a living wage, thereby we have lobbying for minimum wages and welfare. Another disappointing part of capitalism is that labor requiring great skill is paid very little if there is almost no demand for the skill relative to the supply of workers with that skill such as the skill of being a violinist living in western Nebraska or even in Boston.

A disappointing aspect of Communism is in making transfer payments for skilled labor not in demand. Another disappointment is in not being able to pay premiums for highly skilled labor in great demand. Another disappointment is that if workers can choose jobs they enjoy there will be virtually nobody wanting to clean toilets and wash dishes in restaurants.


California Equal Pay Law Mainly Boosts Pay of Lawyers ---
https://reason.com/archives/2015/10/11/california-equal-pay-law-mainly-boosts-p



Economic Principles: How the Economic Machine Works --- http://www.economicprinciples.org/

Economix Explained in Comics/Cartoons --- http://economixcomix.com/


Why the loss of active military is huge to the University of Phoenix ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-a-Certain-21-Million-Is/233720?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elq=2e383f4dcbc3473fb68db6a2f6f1b6fe&elqCampaignId=1580&elqaid=6511&elqat=1&elqTrackId=a33c52c9277d448dad168078aac443e0

Recruits will have to do without University of Phoenix funded rock bands on military bases
"Defense Department Suspends U. of Phoenix From Its Tuition Assistance Program," by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 8, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/defense-department-suspends-u-of-phoenix-from-its-tuition-assistance-program/105697?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elq=cbb14bf5e15e412181f925cb759e031e&elqCampaignId=1571&elqaid=6489&elqat=1&elqTrackId=9270826283dd45b880f7f88ac605f6d2
Jensen Comment
Actually it's only probation with both further investigations and chances of getting back into the payola program.

What recruits really need to ask is what transcript credits are worth from any for-profit university. In many (most?) instances the transcripts are worthless in terms of transfer credit, careers, and graduate school.

Why not instead choose a top-ranked distance education alternative from a non-profit university?

  • From US News in 2014
    Best Online Degree Programs (ranked)
    ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education

    Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
    Central Michigan is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
    Indiana University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Education Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
    Northern Illinois is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
    Columbia University is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
    http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
    The University of Southern California is the big winner

    Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
    St. Xavier University is the big winner

    US News Degree Finder --- http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
    This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders

    US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they don't seem to want to provide the data.

    U.S. News College Compass Details of 1,800 Colleges and Universities ($29.95 Annual Database Subscription Fee) ---
    http://www.usnews.com/usnews/store/college_compass.htm
     


    "The US Supreme Court could ruin Elon Musk's plan for Tesla," by Seth Blumstack, Business Insider, October 15, 2015 ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/the-supreme-court-could-ruin-elon-musks-plan-for-tesla-2015-10

    Jensen Comment
    This article most likely overstates the importance of power company deals for lowered usage of electricity under Order 745. Firstly, battery-powered car owners would probably still find it cheaper to buy electricity than to pay fuel prices at the pump, especially since fuel prices are expected soon to soar upwards. Secondly, home owners will soon be generating more of there own power off the grid. Electric cars are, in my opinion, much more dependent on tax subsidies on purchase prices and free rides on having to pay nothing for road and bridge maintenance.

    Furthermore, Blumstack overestimates the concerns of Tesla owners about what they're paying for electricity. Tesla owners are probably in the top 10% in terms of income given the price of any Tesla vehicle.

    Tax Breaks for the 1%:  Tesla Model X Buyers Get $35,000 Tax Break ---
    http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/10/tesla-model-x-buyers-get-35000-tax-break.html

    Jensen Comment
    Whew! I was so worried that electric car tax breaks for the wealthy would be eliminated by President Obama. It was even further of concern that Tesla owners would have to start contributing a few dollars to pay for road a bridge maintenance. But Tesla owners continue to get a free ride on top of their $15.000 tax break on each Tesla purchased. Only the proletariat pay for bridge and road maintenance (except in Oregon)..


    From Quartz on October 18, 2015

     

  • Germany reportedly bribed its way to hosting the 2006 FIFA World Cup
    Documents obtained by German newspaper Der Spiegel indicate that Germany may have spent up to 10.3 million Swiss francs (about $11 million in today’s money) in bribes to host the World Cup in 2006. The newspaper alleges that the German bidding committee set up a slush fund, secretly filled by Adidas CEO Robert Louis-Dreyfus, and used the money to obtain four votes from the FIFA executive committee. Germany won the bid by a 12-11 margin in July 2000.

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


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

    Bill Gate's Enormous Investment in Nuclear Power
    The Atlantic Video:  The Company Determined to Fix Nuclear Energy ---
    http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/410029/the-company-determined-to-fix-nuclear-energy/?utm_source=BI 

    Meet the leaders of TerraPower, a new company that hopes to solve some of nuclear energy's biggest challenges. TerraPower is one of Bill Gates's biggest bets in the search for an energy miracle—and their strategy is to tackle the issues that surround nuclear energy head on in order to mitigate its problems. Gates looked at solar and wind energies, but according to John Gilleland, CTO of TerraPower, "Nuclear is the only source of energy which could provide the necessary huge quantities that we need on a global basis." Read more about Gates's commitment to moving the world beyond fossil fuels in the November 2015 issue of The Atlantic.


    Momma Don't Let Your Babies Choose These Careers
    Cowboy careers are already gone except maybe in Argentina

    15 Types of Jobs That Will Soon Disappear ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/15-jobs-that-are-quickly-disappearing-2015-10

    1. Printing worker
    2. Fishing men and women
    3. Desktop publisher
    4. Metal or plastic machine worker
    5. Insurance underwriter
    6. Flight attendant
    7. Power-plant operator, distributor, or dispatcher
    8. Floral designer
    9. Logging worker
    10. Jeweler or precious-stone and metal worker
    11. Travel agent
    12. Reporters, correspondents, or broadcast-news analysts
    13. Farmer or rancher
    14. Semiconductor processor
    15. Postal-service worker

    Jensen Comment
    Among the most secure jobs are those that will be hardest to replace by robots such as those that require the most personal and social interaction such as teachers, counselors, sex workers, hospital room nurses, etc. It will be a long, long time before truck drivers, pilots, beauticians, police officers, and firefighters disappear from the labor market.

    Many careers will change greatly. Increasingly robots will greet patients arriving for medical services. We will still need nurses but not the ones that feed data into laptops as patients arrive in hospitals and physician offices. Interactive robots will collect that data before patients are directed to where the medical treatments take place. Computers will do more and more of the medical diagnostics and even some medical treatments but most certainly not all the treatments such as stitching up a wound on a wailing and wiggling child.

    Much of the robotics displacements will take a very long time. How long will it be until a robot pianist can perform better than any human in history? The return of the big hotel ballroom dance bands is a long way off when all of the musicians in the orchestra are robots..

    Robots will do much of the legal work now performed by humans, but the last living beings on earth will probably be cockroaches and lawyers. Many of us would prefer to be governed by robots but politicians are among the lawyers that will be the last to go. I forgot to mention that accountants (not bookkeepers) will be among the last to go because the living world will always need creative accounting.


    From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on October 12, 2015

    More retailers offering free shipping on online orders.
    http://www.wsj.com/articles/more-retailers-offering-free-shipping-on-online-orders-1444402553?mod=djemCFO_h
    Retailers are making free returns available to more online customers, delighting consumers but raising costs for the companies. About 49% of retailers now offer free return shipping, according to a new study released this month by the National Retail Federation, underscoring how companies that had long been resistant to footing the bill for returns are being forced to do so by their customers.

    Jensen Comment
    Erika now buys a lot of stuff from various online retailers with the intent of returning most if it with free shipping. For example it's hard to fit her narrow feet. So she orders three sizes shoes online, chooses the pair that is most comfortable, and returns the other boxes with free shipping. Up here in the boondocks she rarely finds comfortable shoes in stores. It's amazing how sizes of shoes and clothes in general vary even though they are labeled as being a given size.

    In large measure free return shipping by online vendors is driven by Amazon's long-time policy of free shipping for returns coupled with easiness in transacting those returns. All you have to do is to point to a recent order that was received and click on the option to return the item. It's then easy to print a return label that has a free return postage declaration. Most times we simply drop the package off down the hill to our village post office that now accepts USPO packages, UPS packages, and FedEx packages all at the same counter. We don't even have to wait in line with free shipping labels --- not that there's ever much of a line at our small village post office.

    Also many retailers are offering original shipping deals to compete with Amazon Prime ---
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Amazon_Prime
    Some like LL Bean now offer free shipping most of the time such that it pays to wait for when there are such free shipping deals. Of course you don't have to wait for such times using Amazon Prime, although there are quite a few items at Amazon that do not qualify for "free shipping" under Amazon Prime. For example, yesterday I ordered a new book published a few years ago that carried a notice reading "no longer available for Amazon Prime." In other words the Amazon Prime free shipping deal tends to expire on older books and is almost never available on used books. I have to chuckle when a used book has a $0 price with only a small shipping charge rather than a large shipping and handling charge. It hardly seems worth the effort for a vendor to sell a used book for $0.00 or $0.01 and $2 for shipping.

    One thing I've noticed about Amazon is that increasingly simultaneous orders are shipped in the same box.
    I recently ordered a new pair of red flannel long johns underwear and artificial flowers on the same day. The artificial flowers arrived two days later but the long johns did not show up for over a week. So I checked the status of the long johns order (which is easy to do online with Amazon) and learned that the item was received me on the same day I received the artificial flowers. So I went out to my studio, dug down deep in the artificial flower box, and discovered the pair of new long johns. Sadly the long johns were way too big so I shipped them back and ordered a smaller size to wear under my snow suit when I move my driveway snow at below-zero temperatures in a howling north wind.

    By the way it has not snowed yet at our cottage this autumn, but I can see new snow on the high mountain tops ---
    http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/Foliage/Set18/FoliageSet09.htm 




    From the Scout Report on October 9, 2015

    Grammarly --- https://www.grammarly.com 

    Grammarly is an online spelling and grammar checker that is easy to use and simple to install as a free browser extension on either Chrome or Safari. The service flags grammar or spelling issues and suggests alternatives while explaining the reasoning behind its suggestions. Like most products of this kind, there is a free browser extension, which corrects about 150 types of grammar and spelling errors, and a premium version that will spot and correct more than 250 kinds of errors. Most people find that the free version is sufficient. However, those who are writing professionally or particularly concerned with their grammar may want to upgrade to the pay version in order to access the full service. Once installed and an account is created, Grammarly automatically becomes active during all your online writing, including email and social media.  


    Privacy Palette --- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-palette/mjkcflkplhgpebknipkekjggglimnone?hl=en 

    Designed as an add-on for Google Chrome, Privacy Palette is a web app that allows users to "regain control" over their web browsing. Using Privacy Palette, readers may clear private data from their computers or browsers within seconds, making it difficult for advertisers to gather information by disabling tracking, controlling ad tracking, managing privacy on Facebook, deleting cookies, clearing caches, and more. To install, simply click Add to Chrome. From there, readers can choose from the simple menu what services they would like Privacy Palette to implement. For instance, Browsing History clears the history of all previously visited websites, while Cache clears the previously stored data from visited websites.


    The World Bank Announces a Major Milestone in the Fight Against Extreme
    Poverty
    World Bank Forecasts Global Poverty to Fall Below 10% for First Time; Major
    Hurdles Remain in Goal to End Poverty by 2030
    http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/world-bank-forecasts-global-poverty-to-fall-below-10-for-first-time-major-hurdles-remain-in-goal-to-end-poverty-by-2030


    How did the global poverty rate halve in 20 years?
    http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/06/economist-explains-0

    Our World in Data: World Poverty
    http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-prosperity/world-poverty/

    Sustainable Development Goals
    http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

    World Bank's new vision on tackling poverty 'very unambitious'
    http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/mar/21/world-bank-vision-poverty-unambitious

    Factsheet: The IMF and the World Bank
    https://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/imfwb.htm

    From the Scout Report on October 25, 2013

    How do you solve a problem like poverty?
    Zen and the art of poverty reduction
    http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21588119-calm-and-confusion-worlds-biggest-development-institution-zen-and-art

    World Bank President Pledges to Reduce Poverty in Half by 2020
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-09/world-bank-president-pledges-to-reduce-poverty-in-half-by-2020.html

    Is the World bank reforming its approach?
    http://tribune.com.pk/story/616278/is-the-world-bank-reforming-its-approach/

    A Solutions Partnership to End Poverty
    http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2013/10/16/solutions-partnership-end-poverty

    Poverty Home: World Bank
    http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty

    World Bank Data: Poverty
    http://data.worldbank.org/topic/poverty

    Confronting Suburban Poverty --- http://confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org/


    From the Scout Report on October 16, 2015


  • Privacy Badger --
    -
    https://www.eff.org/privacybadger 

    Privacy Badger, a browser add-on for Firefox and Chrome, works to block advertisers from tracking where you go and what you do on the web. As many people know, advertisers employ tracking companies to follow users on the web, gathering information about purchasing habits, interests, political views, health status, personal finances, and other information. When installed, Privacy Badger tracks the trackers. If an online entity seems to be following you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger then automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. Unlike other similar extensions, Privacy Badger does not use a blacklist to determine what to block but instead detects tracking sites by how they behave. To install, simply select "Install Privacy Badger and Enable Do Not Track," then click "Add extension." Once the add-on is installed, it can be useful to go through the "helpful tips" to fully understand the service.  


    ClickToFlash (blocking some annoying popups) --- http://clicktoflash.com 

    For many web users, Flash content is the thorn in the side of their Internet use. Whether its flashing ads on the side of your favorite shopping site or unwanted and automatic music or video that loads the moment you arrive on a landing page, Flash can really get bothersome. ClickToFlash blocks all Flash content unless you choose to experience it by simply clicking a box so that Flash will then load. Using the contextual menu, readers can also exempt certain sites from ClickToFlash blocking, so that they can still watch videos on Vimeo or YouTube or listen to audio from their favorite news stations. To install the plug-in, simply select Download from the homepage, then double click the downloaded zip file.


    Celebrating the Centennial of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity
    Explore 100 years of general relativity
    https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830420-600-explore-100-years-of-general-relativity/

    Standing the Test of Time (and Space)
    http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/standing-the-test-of-time-and-space/408415/

    BBC Universe: General Relativity
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/universe/questions_and_ideas/general_relativity

    Relativity and the Cosmos
    http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/phy03.sci.phys.fund.relandcosmos/relativity-and-the-cosmos/

    Exploring Black Holes: General Relativity & Astrophysics
    http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-224-exploring-black-holes-general-relativity-astrophysics-spring-2003/index.htm

    Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity
    http://hermes.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Einstein_GRelativity_1916.pdf
     


    From the Scout Report on October 23, 2015

    Turn Off the Lights --- https://www.turnoffthelights.com/ 

    Have you ever wished you could dim all the bright spots on your computer while watching a YouTube or Vimeo video? Turn Off the Lights, a free browser extension available for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, Maxthon, and Yandex Browser, allows users to do just that. To download, visit the site and select Download Now. The program will automatically download to whatever browser is open. From there, a gray lamp icon will appear in your browser menu whenever a video is detected. Simply click the icon to make the screen around the video fade.


    Atavist --- https://atavist.com/ 

    Atavist advertises itself as "a simple web tool for powerful storytelling." For those readers who love to write - and write online - it may be just the service they have been searching for, as it allows authors to upload photos, video, and audio to create an immersive experience. The best way to form a sense of what can be done with Atavist is to select the menu on the top right hand side of the screen and then go to Examples to peruse creative articles that integrate a variety of multimedia possibilities. Interested readers will then want to create an account using Facebook or their email address. From there, the instructions walk through the steps of creating a New Project, including writing text and using the convenient drag and drop functions for various media. Many readers will want to take the Tour, which can be located on the top of the screen after selecting New Project


    What <i>Back the Future II</i> Got Right (And Wrong)
    Back to the Future II: What did it get right and wrong?
    http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34569759

    5 Ways 'Back to the Future II' Predicted 2015
    http://www.usnews.com/news/slideshows/5-ways-back-to-the-future-ii-predicted-2015

    'Back to the Future' Writer predicts next 30 years
    http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2015/10/22/back-future-yet-again/74240982/

    Review the Future
    http://reviewthefuture.com/

    Futurism
    http://futurism.com/

    Finding the Science Behind Science Fiction through Paired Readings
    http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/finding-science-behind-science-927.html?tab=4#tabs
     




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


    Education Tutorials

    Teach.com: Teacher Blog --- http://teach.com/blog
    Tools and Tricks of the Trade --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

    JSTOR Daily (a free source for new and old published research and scholarship) --- http://daily.jstor.org/

    Crash Course Kids (YouTube video series for science education) --- https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcoursekids

    Science NetLinks: Afterschool Resources http://sciencenetlinks.com/afterschool-resources/

    Gigaom (technology news) --- https://gigaom.com/

    The American Yawp (free American History textbook) ---  http://www.americanyawp.com/

    Economic Principles: How the Economic Machine Works --- http://www.economicprinciples.org/

    Economix Explained in Comics/Cartoons --- http://economixcomix.com/

    Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting Is Now Free Online: Watch Season 1 ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/season-1-of-bob-ross-show-the-joy-of-painting-is-now-free-online.html

    Education Week: Bullying --- http://www.edweek.org/topics/bullying/index.html?intc=main-topnav

    Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media --- http://chnm.gmu.edu

    Sunlight Foundation (transparency in politics and government) --- https://sunlightfoundation.com/

    Teach Engineering: Algebra --- https://www.teachengineering.org/view_subjectarea.php?url=collection/wpi_/subject_areas/wpi_algebra/algebra.xml

    Explore the Nobel Prize Talks Podcast --- http://www.nobelprize.org/podcast/index.html

    The Molecularium Project (tutorials of the atomic world) ---  http://www.molecularium.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

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

     


    Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

    The Molecularium Project (tutorials of the atomic world) ---  http://www.molecularium.com/

    Crash Course Kids (YouTube video series for science education) --- https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcoursekids

    STEM-Works --- http://stem-works.com/

    Science NetLinks: Afterschool Resources http://sciencenetlinks.com/afterschool-resources/

    Practical Prof (helpers for practicing doctors and nurses) --- http://www.practicaldoc.ca/teaching/practical-prof/

    Bob Jensen's STEM Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#---STEM

    Addressing the Empathy Deficit: Beliefs about the Malleability of Empathy Predict Effortful Responses when Empathy is Challenging ---
    http://ssnl.stanford.edu/content/addressing-empathy-deficit-beliefs-about-malleability-empathy-predict-effortful-responses-0

    Diesel Engine --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine
    The tumultuous history of the diesel engine ---
    http://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/fuel-economy/the-tumultuous-history-of-the-diesel-engine/ar-AAfaG8D?ocid=spartandhp

    Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Teach --- http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/

    Teach Engineering: Algebra --- https://www.teachengineering.org/view_subjectarea.php?url=collection/wpi_/subject_areas/wpi_algebra/algebra.xml

    WSDOT: Visual Engineering Resource Group (VERG) http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/business/visualcommunications/

    InsideClimate News --- http://insideclimatenews.org/

    Enhancing Humane Science: Improving Animal Research --- http://ocw.jhsph.edu/index.cfm/go/viewCourse/course/HumaneScience/coursePage/index/

    The real roots of yoga --- https://uddari.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/the-real-roots-of-yoga-by-wendy-doniger/

    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

    From the Scout Report on October 16, 2015

  • Celebrating the Centennial of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity
    Explore 100 years of general relativity
    https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830420-600-explore-100-years-of-general-relativity/

    Standing the Test of Time (and Space)
    http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/standing-the-test-of-time-and-space/408415/

    BBC Universe: General Relativity
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/universe/questions_and_ideas/general_relativity

    Relativity and the Cosmos
    http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/phy03.sci.phys.fund.relandcosmos/relativity-and-the-cosmos/

    Exploring Black Holes: General Relativity & Astrophysics
    http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-224-exploring-black-holes-general-relativity-astrophysics-spring-2003/index.htm

    Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity
    http://hermes.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Einstein_GRelativity_1916.pdf
     


    Social Science and Economics Tutorials

    Economic Principles: How the Economic Machine Works --- http://www.economicprinciples.org/

    Cato Institute: Social Security http://www.cato.org/research/social-security

    JSTOR Daily (a free source for new and old published research and scholarship) --- http://daily.jstor.org/

    Dan Ariely (cognitive psychology blog that often answers readers' questions) --- http://danariely.com/ 

    Economix Explained in Comics/Cartoons --- http://economixcomix.com/

    The Relationship Between SNAP (supplemental nutrition) and Work Among Low-Income Households ---
    http://www.cbpp.org/research/the-relationship-between-snap-and-work-among-low-income-households

    BBC: iPlayer Radio (Internet Radio) --- http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio

    We're History (in politics and government) --- http://werehistory.org/

    Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago's Hidden Archives ---  http://mts.lib.uchicago.edu/

    Confronting Suburban Poverty --- http://confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org/

    Final Report of the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing --- http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/taskforce/TaskForce_FinalReport.pdf

    Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media --- http://chnm.gmu.edu

    Sunlight Foundation (transparency in politics and government) --- https://sunlightfoundation.com/

    Transgender Oral History Project --- http://transoralhistory.com/

    Addressing the Empathy Deficit: Beliefs about the Malleability of Empathy Predict Effortful Responses when Empathy is Challenging ---
    http://ssnl.stanford.edu/content/addressing-empathy-deficit-beliefs-about-malleability-empathy-predict-effortful-responses-0

    Quartz (news and current events) --- http://qz.com/

    Museum of Tolerance (human rights history) --- http://www.museumoftolerance.com/

    Education Week: Bullying --- http://www.edweek.org/topics/bullying/index.html?intc=main-topnav

    The real roots of yoga --- https://uddari.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/the-real-roots-of-yoga-by-wendy-doniger/

    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

    Constitute (comparison of governing constitutions) --- https://www.constituteproject.org/

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


    Math Tutorials

    How to use math to win at Monopoly --- http://www.businessinsider.com/use-math-win-monopoly-probability-statistics-2015-10

    Teach Engineering: Algebra --- https://www.teachengineering.org/view_subjectarea.php?url=collection/wpi_/subject_areas/wpi_algebra/algebra.xml

    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

    Pictorial:  What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like ---
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/04/what-people-in-1900-thought-the-year-2000-would-look-like/

    The History of Modern Art Visualized in a Massive 130-Foot Timeline ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/the-history-of-modern-art-visualized-in-a-massive-130-foot-timeline.html

    Google Cultural Institute --- https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project

    Google Art Project --- http://www.googleartproject.com/

    Rare Book Room --- http://www.rarebookroom.org/

    From Steamer Trunk to Rare Books Collection ---
    https://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/from-steamer-trunk-to-rare-books-collection/

    Digital Stories: Wellcome Collection (with a major focus in widespread diseases in history) ---  http://digitalstories.wellcomecollection.org/

    Transgender Oral History Project --- http://transoralhistory.com/

    Stream 61 Hours of Orson Welles’ Classic 1930s Radio Plays: War of the Worlds, Heart of Darkness & More ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/stream-61-hours-of-orson-welles-classic-1930s-radio-plays-war-of-the-worlds-heart-of-darkness-more.html

    Listen to Orson Welles’ Classic Radio Performance of 10 Shakespeare Plays ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/listen-to-orson-welles-classic-radio-performance-of-10-shakespeare-plays.html

    105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/105-animated-philosophy-videos-from-wireless-philosophy.html

    Famous last words of 18 famous people --- http://www.businessinsider.com/list-compilation-famous-last-words-2015-10

    BBC: iPlayer Radio (Internet Radio) --- http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio

    We're History (in politics and government) --- http://werehistory.org/

    The American Yawp (free American History textbook) ---  http://www.americanyawp.com/

    The real roots of yoga --- https://uddari.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/the-real-roots-of-yoga-by-wendy-doniger/

    A global guide to the first world war - interactive documentary ---
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2014/jul/23/a-global-guide-to-the-first-world-war-interactive-documentary

    Interactive WW I Timeline --- https://theworldwar.org/explore/interactive-wwi-timeline

    Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media --- http://chnm.gmu.edu

    Economic Principles: How the Economic Machine Works --- http://www.economicprinciples.org/

    100 Leaders (in history) --- http://100leaders.org/

    Museum of Tolerance (human rights history) --- http://www.museumoftolerance.com/

    Photogrammar (USA historical photographs archive) --- http://photogrammar.yale.edu

    Autochromes: Dawn of Colour (Photography) --- http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/nmem/autochrome/

    History: The Colonial Williamsburg Official History Site http://www.history.org/history/index.cfm

    Colonial Williamsburg Journal http://www.history.org/foundation/journal

    FOTOFOLIO: Adams, Strand, Weston, Weston, White (photography) ---
    http://www.portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record;id=1549;type=901

    Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise (Essay by David Foster Wallace) ---
    http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf

    Hear David Foster Wallace Read His Own Essays & Short Fiction on the 6th Anniversary of His Death, ---
    http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenCulture/~3/TsXiIUe5AWk/hear-david-foster-wallace-read-his-own-essays-and-short-fiction.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

    Living in the Chinese Cosmos: Understanding Religion in Late-Imperial China --- http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/cosmos/

    The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values --- http://thecenter.mit.edu/

    Pilgrimage and Buddhist Art [Flash Player] http://pilgrimage.asiasociety.org/

    Wellcome Images (Tibetan Buddhist paintings, ancient Sanskrit manuscripts, Persian books plus a biomedical collection --- also found here, includes over 40,000 high-quality images) ---
    http://wellcomeimages.org/

    Podcast Archives: Buddhist Geeks --- http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/category/podcast/

    Constitute (comparison of governing constitutions) --- https://www.constituteproject.org/

    Diesel Engine --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine
    The tumultuous history of the diesel engine ---
    http://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/fuel-economy/the-tumultuous-history-of-the-diesel-engine/ar-AAfaG8D?ocid=spartandhp

    Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Teach --- http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/

    Jay Leno takes an in-depth look at a 1964 Porsche 356C restomod ---
    http://www.autoblog.com/2015/10/12/jay-leno-garage-porsche-356c-restomod-video/?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000618

    Automotive History in the UK
    The Goodwood Revival: The Most Elegant Blast from the Past Ever ---
    http://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/enthusiasts/the-goodwood-revival-the-most-elegant-blast-from-the-past-ever/ss-AAeng5O?ocid=spartanntp

    MIA ArtStories (military armor) --- http://artstories.artsmia.org/#/ 

    1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/1200-years-of-women-composers-a-free-78-hour-music-playlist.html

    The Food Museum --- http://www.foodmuseum.com/

    To Live and Dine in L.A (History) ---.http://toliveanddinela.com/

    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

    1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now ---
    http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/1200-years-of-women-composers-a-free-78-hour-music-playlist.html

    Google Cultural Institute --- https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project

    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/

    October 12, 2015

    October 13, 2015

    October 14, 2015

    October 15, 2015

    October 17, 2015

    October 19, 2015

    October 21, 2015

    October 22,2015

    October 23, 2015

    October 24, 2015

    October 26, 2015

     


    Life with dementia — misery, anger, sadness, dark comedy — is an awkward teeter between despair and hope ---
    https://theamericanscholar.org/hope-is-the-enemy/#.ViQTDTZdGh2


    "Paralyzed Man’s Arm Wired to Receive Brain Signals," by By Antonio Regalado, MIT's Technology Review, October 20, 2015 ---
    http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542581/paralyzed-mans-arm-wired-to-receive-brain-signals/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151021


    MIT:  Fountain of Youth Outside the USA?
    "A Tale of Do-It-Yourself Gene Therapy," by Antonio Regalado, MIT's Technology Review, October 14, 2015 ---
    http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542371/a-tale-of-do-it-yourself-gene-therapy/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151014

    Can aging be slowed by using gene therapy to make permanent changes to a person’s DNA?

    One Seattle-area woman says she has tried exactly that. Her claim has entangled some high-profile American academics in a strange tale of do-it-yourself medicine that involves plane flights to Latin America, an L.A. film crew, and what’s purported to be the first attempt to use gene therapy to forestall normal aging.

    Elizabeth Parrish, the 44-year-old CEO of a biotechnology startup called BioViva, says she underwent a gene therapy at an undisclosed location overseas last month, a first step in what she says is a plan to develop treatments for ravages of old age like Alzheimer’s and muscle loss. “I am patient zero,” she declared during a Q&A on the website Reddit on Sunday. “I have aging as a disease.”

    Since last week, MIT Technology Review has attempted to independently verify the accuracy of Parrish’s claims, particularly how she obtained the genetic therapy. While many key details could not be confirmed, people involved in with her company said the medical procedure took place September 15 in Colombia.

    The experiment seems likely to be remembered as either a new low in medical quackery or, perhaps, the unlikely start of an era in which people receive genetic modifications not just to treat disease, but to reverse aging. It also raises ethical questions about how quickly such treatments should be tested in people and whether they ought to be developed outside the scrutiny of regulators. The field of anti-aging research is known for attracting a mix of serious scientists, vitamin entrepreneurs, futurists, and cranks peddling various paths to immortality, including brain freezing.

    Parrish’s assertions set off a scramble among members of her company’s scientific advisory board to understand what had occurred. One distanced himself from the company. “This is a big problem,” says George Martin, a professor at the University of Washington and the former scientific director of the American Federation of Aging Research. He says he’d agreed to advise Parrish several months ago but resigned his role over the weekend. “I am very upset by what is happening. I would urge lots of preclinical studies,” he says.

    Although lacking formal scientific training, over the last two years Parrish has emerged as an enthusiastic spokesperson for the life-extension movement on blogs and podcasts. According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 27, she’d raised $250,000 for BioViva, which lists a modest two-bedroom home outside Seattle as its headquarters. Her LinkedIn profile lists a work history going back six years, including administrative roles at software companies.

    Parrish said in an interview she chose to bypass the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by trying the procedure overseas. The FDA requires costly trials, and aging itself is not generally recognized as a disease that can be addressed by drugs. “What we did is we moved forward to try to treat biological aging,” Parrish says. “We are attempting to reverse aging at a biological level.

    Continued in article


    Addressing the Empathy Deficit: Beliefs about the Malleability of Empathy Predict Effortful Responses when Empathy is Challenging ---
    http://ssnl.stanford.edu/content/addressing-empathy-deficit-beliefs-about-malleability-empathy-predict-effortful-responses-0


    Stress and the Social Self: How Relationships Affect Our Immune System ---
    https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/07/esther-sternberg-stress-relationships/?mc_cid=91738e7dd6&mc_eid=4d2bd13843




    Humor September October 13-31, 2015

    The 10 funniest 'Dilbert' comic strips about idiot bosses ---
    http://www.businessinsider.com/dilbert-comics-on-bosses-2015-10
    They're not all that funny!

    Economics Humor --- http://alternativeinvestmentcoach.com/economics-resources/jokes/

    The funniest Amazon product reviews you’ve ever seen (like many Amazon reviews some may be fake) ---
    https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/funniest-amazon-product-reviews-ve-ever-seen-160558073.html

    Famous last words of 18 famous people --- http://www.businessinsider.com/list-compilation-famous-last-words-2015-10


    Forwarded by Paula

     

    When Insults Had Class...


     
    These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words.

    _______________________________________________________

    "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one."
    -George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
     


    "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one."
    -Winston Churchill, in response


    A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease." 

    "That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."


    "He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
    -John Bright

     
    "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
    -Irvin S. Cobb

     
    "He had delusions of adequacy."
    -Walter Kerr

     
    "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
    - Winston Churchill

     
    "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
    -Clarence Darrow

     
    "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
    -William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

     
    "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."
    -Moses Hadas

     
    "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
    -Mark Twain

     
    "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
    -Oscar Wilde

     
    "I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here."
    -Stephen Bishop

     
    "He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others."
    -Samuel Johnson

     
    "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
    - Paul Keating

     
    "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
    -Charles, Count Talleyrand

     
    "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
    -Forrest Tucker

     
    "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
    -Mark Twain

     
    "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
    -Mae West

     
    "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
    -Oscar Wilde

     
    "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination."
    -Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

     
    "He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
    -Billy Wilder


    "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But I'm afraid this wasn't it."
    -Groucho Marx


    A Repeat Forwarded by Auntie Bev

    To Those of Us Born 1925 - 1970 : At the end is a well-stated quote by Jay Leno. ~~~~~~~~~ TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE 1930s, '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s!! First, we survived Being born to mothers who may have smoked and/or drank While they were Pregnant.

    They took aspirin, Ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

    Then, after that Trauma, we were Put to sleep On our tummies In baby cribs Covered With bright colored Lead-based paints. We had no Childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets, And, when we Rode our bikes, We had baseball Caps, Not helmets, on Our heads.

    As infants and Children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, No air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes..

    Riding in the Back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

    We drank water From the garden hose and not from a bottle. We shared one Soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.

    We ate cupcakes, White bread, real butter, and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And we weren't overweight. WHY? Because we were Always outside playing...that's why! We would leave Home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights Came on. No one was Able to reach us all day. --And, we were OKAY.

    We would spend Hours building Our go-carts out Of scraps And then rideThem down the hill, Only to find Out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned To solve the problem.

    We did not Have Play Stations, Nintendos and X-boxes. There were No video games, No 150 channels on cable, No video movies Or DVDs, No surround-sound or CDs, No cell phones, No personal computers, No Internet and No chat rooms. WE HAD FRIENDS And we went Outside and found them! We fell out Of trees, got cut, Broke bones and Teeth, And there were No lawsuits From those accidents.

    We would get Spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping-pong paddles, or just a bare hand, And no one would call child services to report abuse. We ate worms, And mud pies Made from dirt, And The worms did Not live in us forever.

    We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, 22 rifles for our 12th, rode horses,made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and -although we were Told it would happen- we did not put out very many eyes.

    We rode bikes Or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just Walked in and talked to them.

    Little League had Tryouts And not everyone Made the team. Those who didn't Had to learn To deal with Disappointment. Imagine that!!

    The idea of a parent bailing Us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law! These generations have Produced some of the best risk-takers, Problem solvers, and Inventors ever. The past 50To 85 years have seen an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, Failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

     If YOU are One of those born Between 1925-1970, CONGRATULATIONS!

     




    Humor October 1-31,  2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q4.htm#Humor103115

    Humor September 1-30,  2015 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q3.htm#Humor093015

    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