In 2017 my Website was migrated to the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
can be changed to corrected link
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to
reduce the size of my Website
Contact me at rjensen@trinity.edu if
you really need to file that is missing
Tidbits on July 14, 2016
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Set 3 of My Favorite Animal
Pictures
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Animals/Set03/Set03.htm
Tidbits on June 14, 2016
Scroll Down This Page
Bob Jensen's Tidbits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For
earlier editions of Fraud Updates go to
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Bookmarks for the World's Library ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page is at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
Updates from WebMD
--- Click Here
Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
Warning to Some USA Academics: This is a Patriotism Video ---
KUDOS to Gary Sinise!
Https://www.youtube.com/embed/l3P15s4zWNQ
God Bless America ---
https://www.youtube.com/embed/daqwGRdRIsk?feature=player_detailpage
2016 Olympic Trials: Simone Biles' Floor Routine ---
https://www.facebook.com/nbcolympics/videos/10154775019040329/
32 Animated Videos by Wireless Philosophy Teach You the Essentials of
Critical Thinking ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/wireless-philosophy-critical-thinking.html
World Record Eagle Flight From World's Tallest Building ---
http://www.flixxy.com/world-record-eagle-flight-from-worlds-tallest-building.htm?utm_source=nl
These cool dancing animations are modelled on real people ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/dancing-animations-avatars-real-people-motion-capture-2016-7
EUscreen (European History in Video) ---
http://euscreen.eu
Museum of the Moving Image: Silent Film Era ---
http://collection.movingimage.us/silent_film_era.php
Carry the One Radio (interviews with scientists) ---
http://www.carrytheoneradio.com
How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?: A Short Course from Stanford on the Ancient
Mystery ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/how-did-hannibal-cross-the-alps-a-short-course-on-the-ancient-mystery.html
Free music downloads ---
http://faculty.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://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Wynton Marsalis Takes Louis Armstrong’s Trumpet Out of the
Museum & Plays It Again ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/05/wynton-marsalis-takes-louis-armstrongs-trumpet-out-of-the-museum-plays-it-again.html
Top 40 Philosophy (music) ---
http://www.top40philosophy.com
These cool dancing animations are modeled on real people ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/dancing-animations-avatars-real-people-motion-capture-2016-7
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://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm
Photographs and Art
The stunning work that got an amateur crowned Nat Geo’s travel
photographer of the year ---
http://qz.com/722318/stunning-photo-of-mongolian-horseman-wins-hong-kong-photographer-nat-geo-award-of-the-year/
Pearls of Wisdom: The Arts of Islam at the University of
Michigan ---
http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey/pearls/index.html
The Story of the Beautiful: The Peacock Room ---
http://peacockroom.wayne.edu
This is what ISIS' longest-held city looks like after years of
occupation ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/fallujah-after-isis-2016-7
An Eye-Popping Collection of 400+ Japanese Matchbox Covers: From
1920 through the 1940s ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/an-eye-popping-collection-of-400-japanese-matchbox-covers.html
Visualizing Isaiah (religion) ---
http://www.imj.org.il/isaiah
Visualizing 19th-Century New York ---
http://visualizingnyc.org
22 of the most beautiful pictures of the world ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/beautiful-photos-of-world-from-instagram-2016-6
Time Magazine: Drone Photographs ---
http://time.com/4402695/best-drone-photos-2016/?xid=newsletter-brief
Time Magazine: The Best iPhone Photos of 2016 ---
http://time.com/4393576/iphone-photo-awards-2016/?xid=newsletter-brief
National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year ---
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2016/jul/01/national-geographic-travel-photographer-of-the-year-pictures
Old Rotten Tree Trunk ---
http://www.davidwolfe.com/it-looks-like-an-old-rotten-tree-trunk-from-here-but-up-close-it-is-something-epic/
Olivia de Havilland at 100: See Classic Photos of the Star ---
http://time.com/4375422/olivia-de-havilland-photos-100/?xid=newsletter-brief
Jensen Comment
On a very hot Fourth of July we stayed in a B&B in Boerne, Texas that was at one
time her ranch. She and her famous sister Joan Fontaine were not on speaking
terms ,much of their lives.
Destination Indiana ---
http://www.destination-indiana.com
National Archives: Ansel Adams Photographs: Records of the
National Park Service ---
http://www.archives.gov/research/ansel-adams
Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv_TVXxWe_A
The Creative Process of Ansel Adams Revealed in 1958
Documentary ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/the_creative_process_of_ansel_adams_revealed_in_1958_documentary.html
The Creative Process of Ansel Adams Revealed in 1958 Documentary ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/the_creative_process_of_ansel_adams_revealed_in_1958_documentary.html
Ansel Adams: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea - at the National
Maritime Museum, London until 28 April 2013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20304829
Thank you Roger Collins for the heads up
From the Scout Report on July 1, 2016
Exhibiting the Singular and
Spectacular Hieronymus Bosch, 500 Years
After His Death
Hieronymus Bosch Died 500 Years Ago, But His Art Will Still Creep You Out
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/26/483225865/hieronymus-bosch-died-500-years-ago-but-his-art-will-still-creep-you-out
Hieronymus Bosch's Five-Hundredth-Anniversary Homecoming
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/hieronymus-boschs-five-hundredth-anniversary-homecoming
The Impious Delights of Hieronymus Bosch
https://newrepublic.com/article/132024/impious-delights-hieronymus-bosch
Bosch. The 5th Centenary Exhibition
https://www.museodelprado.es/en/whats-on/exhibition/bosch-the-centenary-exhibition/f049c260-888a-4ff1-8911-b320f587324a?searchMeta=bosch
Jheronimus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights
https://tuinderlusten-jheronimusbosch.ntr.nl/en
Bosch Research and Conservation Project
http://boschproject.org
20 Tourist Attractions Worth the Money (and 5 That Aren’t) ---
http://time.com/money/4386356/summer-tourist-attractions-worth-money/?xid=newsletter-brief
Jensen Comment
Although I do like the San Antonio River Walk as a tourist center in some
seasons, I think The Alamo Historic Site is disappointing as a tourist site. To
make matters worse there's a lot of traffic in downtown San Antonio and parking
can be difficult. The River Walk is best at night with all the colored lights.
It's also a pretty good run or walk for exercise in the early morning.
It's difficult to compare tourist centers because different things attract
different tourists. Disneyworld is a no-brainer for the young and old, but it's
very expensive and very crowded. The USA National Parks are scenic but in my
opinion they're too crowded. Washington DC has the most to offer for history
buffs, but hotels are very expensive within walking distance of the major
attractions. NYC has many things for many types of tourists, but everything is
expensive in NYC. NYC is also very crowded. Hikers and climbers are the easiest
to please. Beaches are hot and boring except for the bikinis. The Canadian
Pacific Railroad is on my bucket list with stopovers in some of the old luxury
CP hotels. As you get older in retirement there's no place like home.
Bob Jensen's threads on art history ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#ArtHistory
Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://faculty.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://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on libraries ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#---Libraries
Belfast Group Poetry: Networks ---
http://belfastgroup.digitalscholarship.emory.edu
A Bloomsday Remembrance of James Joyce ---
http://daily.jstor.org/bloomsday-remembrance-of-james-joyce/
James Joyce Centre ---
http://jamesjoyce.ie
ABC Books (alphabet books) ---
https://etc.princeton.edu/abcbooks
Letters of Note ---
http://lettersofnote.com
Shelf Awareness (books and libraries) ---
http://shelf-awareness.com
Montague Rhoades James: A Thin Ghost (ghost stories) ---
http://www.thin-ghost.org
The Steamy Love Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (1925-1929)
---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/the-steamy-love-letters-of-virginia-woolf-and-vita-sackville-west-1925-1929.html
Free Electronic Literature ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Now in
Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on July 14, 2016
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2016/TidbitsQuotations071416.htm
To Whom Does the USA Federal Government Owe Money (the booked
obligation of $19+ trillion) ---
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations/2016/05/25/spring-2016-to-whom-does-the-us-government-owe-money-n2168161?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
The US Debt Clock in Real Time ---
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Remember the Jane Fonda Movie called "Rollover" ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(film)
To Whom Does the USA Federal Government Owe Money (the
unbooked obligation of $100 trillion and unknown more in contracted
entitlements) ---
http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/15/news/economy/entitlement-benefits/
The biggest worry of the entitlements obligations is enormous obligation for the
future under the Medicare and Medicaid programs that are now deemed totally
unsustainable ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Entitlements are two-thirds of the federal budget.
Entitlement spending has grown 100-fold over the past 50 years. Half of all
American households now rely on government handouts. When we hear statistics
like that, most of us shake our heads and mutter some sort of expletive. That’s
because nobody thinks they’re the problem. Nobody ever wants to think they’re
the problem. But that’s not the truth. The truth is, as long as we continue to
think of the rising entitlement culture in America as someone else’s problem,
someone else’s fault, we’ll never truly understand it and we’ll have absolutely
zero chance...
Steve Tobak ---
http://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/2013/02/07/truth-behind-our-entitlement-culture/?intcmp=sem_outloud
"These Slides Show Why We Have Such A Huge Budget Deficit And Why Taxes
Need To Go Up," by Rob Wile, Business Insider, April 27, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/cbo-presentation-on-the-federal-budget-2013-4
This is a slide show based on a presentation by a Harvard Economics Professor.
Peter G. Peterson Website on Deficit/Debt Solutions ---
http://www.pgpf.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on entitlements
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
Bob
Jensen's health care messaging updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm
Spread the Word
Fraudsters claiming to be from the Internal Revenue
Service ring up college students and demand payment for something they call the
“Federal Student Tax.” It’s a variation on a common scam that tries to convince
victims that they’re in trouble with the government.
IRS Phone Scam Threatens Students ---
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/irs-a-new-phone-scam-threatens-college-students/2016/07/06/0ff6fb7a-4380-11e6-8856-f26de2537a9d_story.html
Bob Jensen's Threads on Scams ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm
The Brexit Vote Was Advisory Only and Can Be Undone by Invoking Article 50 of
the Lisbon Treaty
Article 50 TEU: Withdrawalofa Member State from the EU ---
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2016/577971/EPRS_BRI%282016%29577971_EN.pdf
The 10 Most Popular MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in
July ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/the-10-most-popular-moocs-massive-open-online-courses-getting-started-in-july.html
The best free online business courses starting in July
---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-best-free-online-business-courses-starting-in-july-2016-7
The courses are free but transcript credits for taking them are not free
Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
The 50 Most Popular MOOCs of All time ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/05/learning-how-to-learn-enroll-in-the-latest-edition-of-the-most-popular-mooc.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free online courses from
prestigious universities---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Learning & the Brain blog ---
http://learningandthebrain.com/blog
Bob Jensen's threads on blogs, listservs, and the social media ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Listservroles.htm
Classic Bridge Riddle (not contract bridge in cards) ---
http://ed.ted.com/lessons/can-you-solve-the-bridge-riddle-alex-gendler
Video ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yDmGnA8Hw0
Critical Thinking ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
32 Animated Videos by Wireless Philosophy Teach You the Essentials of
Critical Thinking ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/wireless-philosophy-critical-thinking.html
Bob Jensen's threads on critical thinking ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge
Executive Compensation at Private and Public Colleges ---
http://chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensation?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=866ca3b4b77e4ffa88ee05a4b94baf0b&elq=9132efa809fe409db5791e2f335e8fe2&elqaid=9863&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3617#id=table_public_2015
Texas professor claims concealed carry will force
her to give A’s or get shot
http://www.thecoachsteam.com/2016/07/texas-professor-claims-concealed-carry.html
Jensen Question
With the median grade in the USA being A- giving all A grades won't matter much
This merely eliminates the need to give examinations or assign term papers
Just show her any kind of bulge under an armpit to get an A
Drum Roll
What Every Business School Graduate Should Know
Mary Bara, CEO of General Motors
Click Here
Nine Low-Cost Ideas from College Students (Number seven is
bookkeeping)
http://www.businessinsider.com/9-low-cost-business-ideas-for-college-students-2016-7
Jensen Comment
Some of these are questionable. In some parts of the world like Texas,
California, and Florida the first three student ideas will encounter stiff price
competition from undocumented workers who mostly already have a monopoly on
those services.
Bookkeeping is done by computer apps these days and there might be some
market for students good at running these apps. The problem is that most
customers want a longer-term commitment and do not like to change bookkeepers
every time a good bookkeeper graduates and moves onward and upward. It might be
good experience for a student who, as an expected future stay-at-home parent,
wants to earn added money working at home with small children running about.
This can often be extended to a small tax return preparation practice and even
tax/financial consulting.
Tutoring is a good idea, but there is growing competition from online
services and computer apps that are getting cheaper and cheaper and better and
better. Think wonderful and free online Khan Academy.
A widow down the road from our cottage has been a jewelry maker for decades.
She says profits are down due to changing priorities of customers regarding
spending on jewelry versus such other newer types of products like tech gadgets.
She tells me making money making jewelry profits for her entails having to
travel following the jewelry and craft shows. She pulls a small trailer to keep
travel expenses down.
I think a somewhat better idea is lawn service that the bigger outfits prefer
to avoid like pulling weeds by hand. Lawn services providers prefer riding on
equipment and blowing debris with powerful blowers, but these workers seldom
like the chore getting down on their knees to pull weeds and edge by hand.
Another service that falls somewhat under house cleaning is window washing,
and this service is not restricted to residential houses. Of course college
students are not likely to land jobs requiring scaffolding, but there are a lot
windows these days that can be cleaned inside and out from the inside. Our new
bedroom windows flip like to a horizontal position. For most of the cottage,
however, we hire a professional window washing service that does a great job and
keeps me off ladders.
When you think of the explosion of baby boomers retiring you can imagine the
growth of eldercare services such as my wife wanting woman to come in now
and then to help her with bathing and hair care. The problem for students doing
this is that I think such home care services now requires licensing in many
parts of the USA. I think child care runs into the same issues of licensing plus
the cost of insurance.
Educause ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educause
Take a
broad look at current trends ---
http://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications
EDUCAUSE publications explore
current issues, emerging trends, and the management of information
technology, as well as how IT affects institutions, higher education and
society.
EDUCAUSE Review—Award-winning
magazine for the higher education IT community
eBooks—Thought
leadership on the impact of information technology in higher education
Multimedia—Conversations
with community experts on effective practices
7 Things You Should Know
About—Essential information on emerging technologies and
practices
Students at Michigan State University will no longer have to take
college-level algebra, thanks to a revision of the general-education math
requirement ---
"Algebra
No More," Inside Higher Ed, July
6, 2016 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/06/michigan-state-drops-college-algebra-requirement?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=d5cb16d025-DNU20160706&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-d5cb16d025-197565045
Jensen Questions
Will college-level algebra requirements fall like dominos in the common core
requirements of higher education?
Wayne State University dropped algebra and is considering replacing it with a
diversity course.
Michigan State will still have a math requirement that does not have formulas
and equations..
What the universities dropping algebra are not revealing, at least to my
knowledge. of
whether they are still requiring remedial math and algebra for students deemed
exceptionally weak in middle-school algebra on SAT/ACT admission tests.
My guess is no since the dropping of algebra seems to be an effort to make it
easier for those students to graduate.there will be no remedial algebra.
In terms of
math requirements for GRE, GMAT, MCAT, and other
graduate school admissions requirements undergraduates will now fall
into two classifications. The math dummies who graduate versus the the graduates
required to take math and algebra and statistics in their majors like
engineering students, science students, and business students. Humanities majors
who might want to go to graduate school are are advised to take college-level
algebra as an elective course, especially if they had lousy SAT/ACT scores in
high school.
Maybe SAT and ACT exam preparers will yield to pressures and drop algebra
from college admissions tests.
It all sounds like dumbing down to me to make up for the lousy high schools in
the USA relative to those in Asia and Europe.
But in Asia and Europe less
than half the Tier 2 graduates are even allowed to go to college.
July 6, 2016 reply from Jagdish
I think this debasement of curriculum is
deplorable, and in my opinion is the equivalent of affirmative action for
the math challenged. Unfortunately these educational experiments will ruin
millions of lives. I refuse to believe that one should graduate from college
with no algebra and no calculus.
If use of something determines what must be taught
in college, then why not get rid of English requirements in colleges? Isn't
high school English sufficient for most people? The simple fact is that most
people detest anything that requires discipline and flexing the brain
muscle. And tragically, the educationists are more than willing to oblige.
Unfortunately, in the long run they also will ensure that we do not have an
informed citizenry.
Regards,
Jagdish
Jagdish S. Gangolly Department of Information
Science College Engineering & Applied Sciences State University of New York
at Albany 1400 Washington Ave Albany, NY 12222
Chronicle of Higher Education: Selected List of "Juicy"
Academic Novels ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Academic-Novels-for-Real/236981?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=b705e106bef6476fadd9b79b255d721a&elq=96bb18dee51c40c0a82dd15d75d73b32&elqaid=9713&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3473
Bob Jensen's neglected threads on accounting novels and plays (frequently
focused on frauds) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNovels.htm
"Amazon’s Quiet Dominance of Higher-Ed Learning Platforms," by Phil
Hill, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 1, 2016 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Amazon-s-Quiet-Dominance-of/236991?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=08238386e4fb47ca9bd1d9242c81d9eb&elq=34901e53567741fba0eb6cf30a8b9516&elqaid=9714&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3474
At the International Society for Technology in
Education conference in Denver this week — attended by more than 15,000 K-12
teachers, school officials, vendors, and reporters — the biggest news was
Amazon’s release of Inspire. This platform looks like the Amazon consumer
shopping site, but it is targeted at helping teachers find, organize, and
share freely available course materials. While the system could easily be
adopted for higher-education usage, the default content organization is
built on K-12 grade levels. There is an area, however, where Amazon has
already come to dominate the educational technology market for colleges and
universities.
In the past five years or so, more and more
software that colleges use for online teaching and classroom management has
moved to "the cloud," meaning it is run from some far-off data center via
the web rather than from servers controlled by a college. And these days
most of those cloud systems are hosted by Amazon, through its Amazon Web
Services, or AWS.
How did this sea change occur, and what are the
implications for faculty and staff?
Cloud-based learning platforms are not new, but as
recently as 10 years ago they were the exception. The norm for a
learning-management system in higher education was for the institution to
run the application in its own data center. In fact, colleges initially
pushed back against the cloud trend, insisting that academic data never
leave the campus for privacy reasons (Ferpa in particular) and for the
concern about big tech companies using personal data in ways the colleges
could not control.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
The Innovative Instructor (higher education innovation from Johns Hopkins
University) ---
http://ii.library.jhu.edu
Bob Jensen's threads on tricks and tools of the trade ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Our World in Data (many graphics and links to databases) ---
https://ourworldindata.org
Bob Jensen's links to economic and social statistics ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
Eight books that
America's most prestigious private (high) schools love to assign for summer
reading ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-are-students-reading-this-summer-2016-7
Jensen Comment
Maybe I'm too out of touch with modern times, but these are not even on my Top
50 books young people need to read.
It seems that the teachers
assigning these books are not being very current with newer books coming out
Here are my possible Top 8 books for young people.
Reason Versus Statistical Analysis
MIT Facebook ---
https://www.facebook.com/technologyreview/?utm_source=MIT+TR+Newsletters&utm_campaign=c8a8af1ccd-The_Download_July_07_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-c8a8af1ccd-153727301&goal=0_997ed6f472-c8a8af1ccd-153727301&mc_cid=c8a8af1ccd&mc_eid=fe7f400ea3
Tesla’s Dubious Autopilot Safety Numbers
Since news broke about the first fatal crash of a Tesla using its autonomous
Autopilot system, the car manufacturer has been providing numbers to defend
itself. The system, it says, has driven people over 130 million miles, more
than the 94 million on average between fatalities on U.S. roads. Elon Musk
has asserted that "of the over 1 million auto deaths per year worldwide,
approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla
autopilot was universally available." But those comparisons are
questionable, according to experts. Autopilot only drives on highways, so it
can’t be directly compared with U.S.-wide statistics. And Tesla’s cars are
bigger and safer than many on the road, so you’d expect fewer fatalities. A
recent report suggested that automated cars may have to drive hundreds of
billions of miles before their performance can be fairly compared with
statistics from human drivers. Tesla seems to disagree.
Jensen Comment
I think MIT is being a bit misleading here. Sometimes reasoning makes more sense
than statistical analysis.
Statistical outcomes, even from very large databases, can be misleading. In
Tesla's case the outcome might be misleading unless geography is taken into
account. Electric cars are more apt to be used for urban commutes in large
cities than out in the boondocks like where I live. Rush hour on Interstate 93
near where I live entails seeing three three other cars on my drive to
Littleton, NH. Naturally there are going to be more accidents on commutes with
electric cars because those commutes are mostly taking place in congested
traffic.
It makes sense that, if "autopilot" is used on any car according to
instructions and warnings, it doesn't take steering and braking away from a
human driver. Hence autopilot only adds to safety except in one instance ---
neglect of instructions. It is probably easier to lose concentration when the
autopilot is doing the driving. But in the future there will be new technologies
for maintaining concentration and alertness.
Beware of statistical inference with data over "billions of miles." Time and
time again statistics professors warn students that with large samples
insignificant differences are declared statistically significant such as when
831,261 consumers prefer bran flakes versus 831,258 consumers who prefer corn
flakes.
In the future autopilot hardware and software will be improved such as
automatic braking with approaching collisions much like there is now technology
for diverting airliners that are in danger of colliding. Of course no technology
is fool proof when optimal braking will not totally prevent some collisions on
the road such as when a deer leaps out of nowhere in front of a fast-moving car.
Six "Fascinating Things" Noted by MIT on Facebook
01.
Setting up a cellular network is an expensive business. So Facebook has
created an open source platform—hardware, software, and all—to
help improve
connectivity in remote areas of the world.
02. Are facial recognition systems accurate? Sadly, because of the
data that’s used to train artificial intelligence,
the answer seems to depend on your race.
03. Kurt Vonnegut famously described the shapes of narratives
using graphs. Now computer scientists have used sentiment analysis to
analyze the emotional arcs of over 1,700 stories—and
the results are surprisingly familiar.
04. Snapchat is best known for its self-destructive photo sharing,
but its latest party trick
actually allows users to save memories instead.
05. With Britain leaving the EU and Donald Trump’s provocative
foreign policy a potential presidential reality, the world’s political
situation is changing. Nick Bilton wonders whether we might be
on the brink of a technological world war.
06. A new microfluidic device passes grape juice through its
channels, exposing it to yeast via a series of nanopores along the way. The
result:
a constant, if modest, stream of wine.
"Manipulated Journal Rankings?" by Jerry A. Jacobs, Inside Higher
Ed, July 1, 2016 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/07/01/examination-whether-academic-journal-rankings-are-being-manipulated-essay?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=e7c759e754-WNU20160701&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-e7c759e754-197565045
Are
editors manipulating citation scores in order to inflate the status of their
publications? Are they corrupting the rankings of scholarly journals?
While any allegations about cheating or other academic chicanery are cause
for concern, journal rankings to date continue to offer one rough but useful
source of information to a wide variety of audiences.
Journal rankings help authors to answer the omnipresent question “Where to
publish?” Tenure review committees also use rankings as evidence for
visibility, recognition and even quality in the academic review process,
especially for junior candidates. For them, journal ranking becomes a proxy
when other, more direct measures of recognition and quality are not
available. Given that many candidates for tenure have recent publications,
journal rankings become a surrogate measure for the eventual visibility of
that research.
Yet
it is easy to rely unduly on quantitative rating scores. The trouble arises
when journal rankings becomes a stand-in for the quality of the research. In
many fields, research quality is a multifaceted concept that is not
reducible to a single quantitative metric. For example, imposing a single
rule -- for example, that top-quartile journals count as “high-quality”
journals while others do not -- assigns more weight to journal rankings than
they deserve and generates the temptation to inflate journals’ scores.
In
an
editorial in the journal Research Policy,
editor Ben R. Martin voiced his concern that the manipulation of journal
impact factors undermines the validity of Thompson/Reuters Journal Citation
Reports (JCR). He concludes that “… in light of the ever more devious ruses
of editors, the JIF [journal impact factor] indicator has lost most of its
credibility.” A journal’s impact factor represents the average number of
citations per article. The standard, one-year
impact factor is calculated by summing up
citations to articles published in a journal within the last year, divided
by the number of articles published.
Continued in article
One way journals manipulate their rankings and reputations is to actively
organize in ways such that their authors are nominated for awards
Bob Jensen's
Recommendations for Change on the American Accounting Association's
Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryNotable.htm
March 28, 2016 reply
from Paul Williams
Bob,
Hurray for you!! The AAA is still the last remaining Politburo on earth.
Like Russian generals with medal strewn chests, the Notable awards
process is truly a farce. The same applies to the Seminal Contribution
award; does anyone know how that process works? It mustn't work very
well because if we are to believe in the wisdom of the process nothing
of any worth was written before 1968. The two Notable exceptions were
the result of selection committees that were put together by the AAA to
create the appearance that it was taking diversity seriously. For the
Notable Contribution why do we need a Nominating Committee and a
Selection Committee? Because the nominating committee is a way to let
the peons participate but deny them any power to actually decide what is
or is not noteworthy (as if within a five year period that is possible).
Here is a study for someone to do. Two awards, the Horizons and Issues
best papers, are by a vote of the membership. All of the others are by a
committee whose members are selected, I assume, by the "Board. My sense
is that there is a dramatic contrast between who wins by vote and who
wins by committee. Tony Tinker and Tony Puxty published a book a number
of years ago titled Policing Accounting Knowledge, which documents with
actual cases of how the review and awards process at AAA worked in the
past. Until the bylaws are changed to allow a more democratic selection
of directors of research and publication nothing is going to happen. In
former AAA president Gregory Waymire's white paper "Seeds of Innovation"
he made the following assessment of the status of the U.S. academy's
premier research: "As a result, I believe our discipline is evolving
towards irrelevance within the academy and the broader society with the
ultimate result being intellectual irrelevance and eventually
extinction." That assessment is spot on, but when a leader of the
academy apparently is powerless to alter the course, it indicates how
firmly entrenched and institutionalized the intellectual mindset of the
AAA is. Until it takes the view that the purpose of research and writing
is not to garner politically correct academic reputations but to address
serious and interesting questions then we will become extinct and no one
will even notice. Our plenary speaker the last time our meeting was in
Anaheim was Diedre McCloskey whose message was the message that Bob has
been harping on for years -- the mindlessness of regressions and
obsession with p values. Did it have any effect? Just look at the
content of our so-called U.S. based premier journals. One huge linear
model after another utilizing data completely ill-suited to the task.
Bob: Guess when we get old the Don Quixote in us comes out. I wish you
well.
Bob,
Addenda to my previous rant. Your point about replication is more
significant than some seem to appreciate. No archival study that I know
of has ever been literally replicated. Even worse none of those studies
can be replicated because the people who did them violate one of the
fundamental "ethics" of science. Every laboratory scientist must
maintain a log book which describes in great detail how the result of a
particular experiment was produced, i.e., a complete recipe that permits
an independent scientist to actually replicate the study in its entirety
to simply validate the knowledge claim being made by the scientist.
Without that capacity, the claim being made is merely an anecdote (think
of the Jim Hunton affair). It should be sobering to an academy to
realize that the corpus of its knowledge is simply a collection of
anecdotes. "Anecdotal evidence"-- the ultimate put-down, yet most of our
evidence is little more than anecdotes.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Time Magazine: The 25 Weirdest Gadgets of All Time
---
http://time.com/4387701/weirdest-gadgets-ever/?xid=newsletter-brief
US Rep. Corrine Brown indicted after fraud investigation
---
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-rep-corrine-brown-indicted-fraud-investigation-151201102.html?nhp=1
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown
of Florida and her chief of staff pleaded not guilty Friday to multiple
fraud charges and other federal offenses in a grand jury indictment unsealed
after an investigation into what prosecutors call a phony charity turned
into a personal slush fund.
Brown, a 69-year-old Democrat, and Chief of Staff
Elias "Ronnie" Simmons, 50, entered pleas in Jacksonville federal court on
charges of mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, obstruction and filing of false
tax returns.
She has represented a Jacksonville-based
congressional district since 1993 — one of the first three African-Americans
elected to Congress from Florida since Reconstruction
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
When the Coaches Pass the Courses Instead of College Players
Georgia Southern U. Staff Members Helped Athletes Cheat, NCAA Rules ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/georgia-southern-u-staff-members-helped-athletes-cheat-ncaa-rules/112712?elqTrackId=a1026a29777340c083601d5162be9744&elq=7378f786eb3748d5a44644b992d1716e&elqaid=9769&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3508
Former U. of Southern Mississippi Coach Directed Cheating Ring,
NCAA Says ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/former-u-of-southern-mississippi-coach-directed-cheating-ring-ncaa-says/110171?elqTrackId=9d30a63574cb44dc94a698eac5a736a6&elq=ecde872b4ec84565b7b560ec97cde1ff&elqaid=8605&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=2882
"We’re Glad We Say No to College Football," by John A. Frey,
The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/were-glad-we-say-no-to-college-football-1451855999?mod=djemMER
Jensen Comment
For many schools the cheating is more likely to be prevalent in basketball and
baseball. One problem is that both basketball and baseball players have five
times or more out-of-town games in a season that keeping up with academics on
campus is nearly impossible relative to less travel for football players.
What NCAA Division 1 university has never been caught up in an academic
cheating scandal? I can't name one university. Most have been caught multiple
times, and the ones that got caught are probably the
tip of the iceberg.
What is really sad is how common place it is for
coaches and alumni to encourage cheating for the sake of winning games.
Many of those Division 1 cheating scandals are documented here ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Athletics
Big Data Analysis Versus Cluster Analysis
Big Data ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
. . .
Analysis of data sets can
find new correlations
to "spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on."[2]
Scientists, business executives, practitioners of medicine, advertising and
governments alike regularly meet difficulties with large data sets in areas
including Internet search, finance and business informatics. Scientists
encounter limitations in e-Science work, including meteorology, genomics,[3]
connectomics, complex physics simulations, biology and environmental
research.[
"As Big Data Comes to College, Officials Wrestle to Set New Ethical Norms,"
by By Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 28, 2016 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/As-Big-Data-Comes-to-College/236934?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=21fea4cb4e564b27a086d1b0bac37d20&elq=f0600a68e23f4857bca9ccc0913c2eae&elqaid=9631&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3438
Cluster Analysis ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis
Jensen Comment
In the prime of my research years I devoted many, many hours seeking to improve
cluster analysis. I think there is an interesting similarity between Big Data
Analysis and Cluster Analysis. That similarity is what is tantamount to stirring
the pot of a data set to look for lumps. Traditional empirical research entails
forming hypotheses in advance, building testing models (often regression models
of some type or time series models), and then testing these models in a
database.
Big Data Analysis and Cluster Analysis take a different tack. Instead of
forming hypotheses and building testing models in advance, BD and CA analyses
stir the pot searching for hypotheses to test. For example, at a conference I
listened to a speaker who had a child diagnosed with a rare disease. The doctors
though this was one disease. The speaker went around the world and collected all
sorts of data on the small number diagnosed with this disease.
The speaker then used cluster analysis on the data he'd collected. What he
found is that the patients tended to cluster into three groups. This suggested
two hypetheses that might be tested. Hypothesis 1 is that what doctors were
calling one disease was really three separate diseases. Hypothesis 2 was that
this was one disease with three distinct sub-types.
The begs the question of whether cluster analysis can become a type of Big
Data Analysis in the 21st Century.
My opinion is negative. In my research years cluster analysis was never
practical for large databases due to computer limitations. Computers have
greatly improved but not to a point, in my opinion, where cluster analysis is
practical for Big Data. Of course in retirement I've not tracked advances in
cluster analysis. But cluster analysis faded from the scene largely due to
computing nightmares.
Here are some of Bob Jensen's earlier papers on cluster analysis ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm
"A Dynamic Programming Algorithm for Cluster Analysis,"
The Journal of Operations Research,
Vol. 17, No. 6, November-December 1969.
"A Dynamic Programming Algorithm for Cluster Analysis,"
Mathematical Programming in Statistics,
Edited by Arthanari and Dodge, New York, John
Wiley & Sons.
"A Cluster Analysis Study of Financial Performance of Selected Business
Firms," The Accounting Review,
Vol. XLVI, No. 1, January 1971, 36-56.
"Isotropic Scaling of the Interior Components Inside Joiner
Scaler Block Clusterings
of Entities (Cases) and Variates (Attributes):
An Application to United Nations Voting Records,"
University of Manchester, England, October 3, 1988.
Seminar on cluster analysis, sponsored by The
Institute for Advanced Technology,
January 10 and 11, 1972, New York City.
COMPARISONS OF EIGENVECTOR, LEAST SQUARES, CHI SQUARE, AND LOGARITHMIC
LEAST SQUARES
METHODS OF SCALING A RECIPROCAL MATRIX ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/127wp/127wp.htm
Added Jensen Comment
I said I spent many, many hours of time in cluster analysis. including one
summer on a research grant at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Much
of this became wasted time looking for more efficient ways to perform cluster
analysis on larger databases.
Sigh!
"4 Big Economic Questions Now Facing the EU,' by Fernando Fernandez,
Harvard Business Review Blog, June 28, 2016 ---
https://hbr.org/2016/06/4-big-economic-questions-now-facing-the-eu?referral=00209&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-finance-_-finance_date&utm_source=newsletter_finance&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=finance_date
David Pogue Review: Review: Eero is a pricey but effective fix for
Wi-Fi dead spots ---
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/eero-the-hero-a-pricey-end-to-wi-fi-dead-spots-192537160.html
From David Giles: Econometrics Readings for July 2016
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2016/07/recommended-reading-for-july.html
Recommended Reading for
July
Now that the Canada Day and Independence Day celebrations are behind (some
of) us, it's time for some serious reading at the cottage. Here are some
suggestions for you:
Farmer, R. E. A.,
2015. The stock market crash really did cause the great recession. Oxford
Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 77, 617-633.
Franses, P. H., R.
Legerstee, and R. Paap, 2016. Estimating loss functions of
experts. Applied Economics, in press.
Hartigan, L.,
2016. Alternative HAC covariance matrix estimators with improved finite
sample properties. Mimeo., School of Economics, University of New South
Wales.
Harvey, D. I. and S. J.
Leybourne, 2016. Improving the length of confidence sets for the
date of a break in level and trend when the order of integration is unknown.
Economics Letters, in press.
Noguchi, K. and F.
Marmalejo-Ramos, 2016. Assessing the equality of means using the
overlap of range-preserving confidence intervals. American Statistician,
in press.
Studer, R. and R. Winkelmann, 2016.
Econometric analysis of
ratings - With an application to health and wellbeing. SOEP
Papers 846.
Jensen Comment
Farmer's paper is very interesting given the zillions of illustrations (often
humorous) about how correlation is not causation., Farmer hedges a bit by
claiming his is a "plausible causal explanation." Certainly Yates correlation of
the number of stork nests in Denmark with Danish birth rates was not a
"plausible causal explanation" except for die hards that believe storks really
do deliver babies to households.
"How to Fix Psychology’s Replication Crisis," by Brian D. Earp and Jim
A.C. Everett, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Fix-Psychology-s/233857?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=5260de11ef714813a4003f5dc2eede4e&elq=fadcc1747dcb40cb836385262f29afe5&elqaid=9619&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3428
Jensen Comment
Academic accounting research has a worse flaw --- replication in accounting
research is a rare event due largely to the fact that leading accounting
research journals will not publish reports of replication efforts and outcomes.
One thing we can say about hypothesis testing in accounting research is that the
first test constitutes TRUTH!
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
"The Flaw at the Heart of Psychological Research," the Chronicle of
Higher Education's Chronicle Review, June 26, 2016 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Flaw-at-the-Heart-of/236916?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=724bd7450b2a480cb14b37b02d872fcf&elq=fadcc1747dcb40cb836385262f29afe5&elqaid=9619&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3428
Jensen Comment
Academic accounting research has this same flaw plus a boatload of other flaws.
What went wrong?
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
"No Cookie Cutting in My Classroom,"
by Rebecca Eggenschwiler, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 21, 2016
---
http://chronicle.com/article/No-Cookie-Cutting-in-My/236878?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=76f6827232cb4daaa96e2dcf719e14aa&elq=07e77e934e0a4468beb7e04c103514fd&elqaid=9632&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3439
Jensen Comment,
Much depends upon the objectives for the particular course.
Courses vary to the extent that creativity should be allowed and encouraged in
in the course. Sometimes creativity wastes time in terms of course objectives.
For example, instructors in linear algebra have vary narrow objectives relative
to instructors in creative writing. Instructors of tax law really want their
students to learn portions of the tax law. Instructors of brain surgery must
demand that their students understand the surgical procedures and risks.
Colleges can encourage creativity and experimentation in
pedagogy. But sometimes creativity in content and performance evaluation is
dysfunctional.
Gov. Maggie Hassan signed H.B. 1547 into law to ban
sexual assault on animals in New Hampshire. This bipartisan effort was initiated
to address the disturbing and prevalent issue of animal sexual assault in the
Granite State.
http://www.humanesociety.org/news/news_briefs/2016/06/nh-animal-sexual-assault-ban-062416.html
Jensen Comment
Time to move back to Texas where A&M sheep approach a fence backwards.
What do you call an Aggie with a sheep under each arm? A pimp!
This is a joke I first herd when I was on leave in New Zealand.
"The Rise of Bayesian Econometrics," by David Giles,
Econometrics Beat, November 19, 2014 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-rise-of-bayesian-econometrics.html
Logit Regression ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_regression
Probit Model ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probit_model
"Choosing Between the Logit and Probit Models," by David Giles,
Econometrics Beat, June 25, 2016 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2016/06/choosing-between-logit-and-probit-models.html
I've had quite a bit
say about Logit and Probit models, and the Linear Probability Model (LPM),
in various posts in recent years. (For instance, see
here.)
I'm not going to bore you by going over old ground again.
However, an important
question came up recently in the comments section of one of those posts.
Essentially, the question was, "How can I choose between the Logit and
Probit models in practice?"
I responded to that
question by referring to a study by Chen and Tsurumi (2010), and I think
it's worth elaborating on that response here, rather than leaving the answer
buried in the comments of an old post.
So, let's take a look.
Putting the LPM entirely to
one side (where,as far as I'm concerned, it rightly belongs!), the issue is
whether a standard normal distribution, or a logistic distribution, is the
better choice when it comes to modelling the link between our discrete
dependent variable and the regressors (covariates). If we choose the normal
distribution we end up with the so-called Probit model; and if we choose the
logistic distribution we end up with the Logistic model.
Let's begin by asking, "how
much are the results likely to differ when we make one of these choices or
the other?"
The short answer is, "not
very much, in general." So, this may seem to suggest that we can basically
flip a coin when it comes to deciding whether to go the Logit route or the
Probit route. However, it's not quite that simple.
Why not?
First, the answer given
above relates to the simple case where we have a binomial Logit or
Probit model. That is, there are only two discrete choices for our
qualitative variable. As soon as we move to the multinomial case,
where there are three or more choices, the story changes fundamentally. In
particular, the multinomial Logit model is computationally simpler to
implement than is the multinomial Probit model, and this may factor into our
choice. On the other hand, there is the well-known problem associated with
the "Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives" that arises with the
multinomial Logit model, but not with the multinomial Probit model. So there
are pros and cons when it comes to making this choice in the multinomial
case.
Second, even when we
restrict ourselves to the standard binomial (zero-one) case, there can be
some marked differences between Logit and Probit results when we focus on
the tails of the underlying distributions (e.g., Cox, 1966)
So, it's still interesting
to think about whether we can come up with some formal statistical procedure
to help us to decide between the Logit and Probit models, when we have the
same (limited) dependent variable.
These two models are
"non-nested", so a natural way to proceed is to use some information
criterion or other to discriminate between them. This applies whether we're
talking about a binomial model or a multinomial model. Note that this is
not an example of hypothesis testing. Rather, we're effectively
"ranking" the Probit and Logit models. (For some general comments about the
use of information criteria in other contexts, see my earlier posts
here and
here.)
One of the few studies to
evaluate the effectiveness of alternative information criteria to
discriminate between Logit and Probit models is that by Chen and Tsurumi
(2010). They consider five different criteria, namely:
-
The
deviance information criterion (DIC).
-
The
predictive deviance information criterion (PDIC).
-
The
unweighted sum of squared errors (USSE).
-
The
weighted sum of squared errors (WSSE).
-
Akaike's
information criterion (AIC).
The main conclusions
emerging from the Chen-Tsurumi paper are as follows, and they aren't all
that encouraging:
If the binary data that are
being modelled are "balanced" (i.e., there is roughly a 50-50 split
between the zero and one values), then none of the above information
criteria are very effective at discriminating properly between the Logit and
Probit models.
If the data are
"unbalanced", then only the DIC and AIC criteria are effective.
The more information that
is available about the higher moments of the underlying distribution of the
binary data, the more effective are these criteria in the "unbalanced" case.
Sample sizes of at least
1,000 or more are needed to be able to discriminate between the Logit and
Probit models using this approach.
If these information
criteria don't help us very much, is there some other way to choose between
the Logit and Probit specifications?
Continued in article
Why San Francisco stopped teaching algebra in middle school ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-san-francisco-stopped-teaching-algebra-in-middle-school-2016-6
San Francisco has bigger education problems than algebra ---
http://educationanddemocracy.org/SF/SFUSD_status.htm
. . .
GPA trends:
improvement – Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans
and Whites
no
improvement – Other non white, Filipino Americans, Native Americans,
Latinos and African Americans [African American remaining below 2.0] p. 40
Particularly troubling are African American GPA’s at Burton, Mission,
O’Connell and Washington p. 41
Number of AP classes offered
While
the number of AP classes at Lowell continues to increase
dramatically (from 54 to 74 from 2001 to 2004) the picture is not as
positive in many of the other District high Schools. Most have remained
about the same, gaining a few classes or losing a few classes. P.42
Credit should be given in this context, however, to Mission High School,
for its thorough and ongoing efforts to create new, top quality AP programs
. . .since 2001 from 6 to 10.
BUT .
. . Marshall has gone form 16 to 6. . .
Every
time we visit Washington, we observe that its AP classes are
comprised almost entirely of Asian Pacific American students, while its
special education classes are comprised disproportionately of very large
percentages of African American students. P. 43
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
San Francisco is more multicultural than most major cities in the USA due to
higher proportions of Asian students relative to African Americans.
Algebra in middle school may not be so troubling for the top Asian students
since parents probably have them learning algebra before middle school.
African Americans have so much trouble with GPAs that maybe delays in requiring
algebra is a good thing so long as they get a good shot at algebra before it
becomes time to seriously study for SAT and ACT keys to college admissions.
It is true that one-size-fits-all is probably not a good curriculum idea at
all levels of K-12. It's not a good idea for me to comment futher on this since
teachers in urban schools have a lot more sensible things to say about this
problem than me.
I'm not in favor of dumming down the curricula. But perhaps it is time to
consider other alternatives, especially for students who early on seem unable to
stay on track in a pre-college curriculum and are at high risk of dropping out.
The fact of the matter is that learning in the home is often more important
than learning in school, especially in this era where K-12 students are not
getting much more than four hours per day in the classrooms. What school systems
should do is provide more guidance and online helpers for parents to both
motivate and educate their children in the homes. Online learning is not a magic
bullet, but it sure beats less five hours per school day in a classroom and ten
hours a day of stupid television and teen texting and sexting.
Data Recovery ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery
One company to consider for data recovery ---
File Savers
www.filesaversdatarecovery.com
Picture File Recovery
Enter "Picture File Recovery" at
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Bob Jensen's Technology Helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm
Now it's discriminatory in schools for teachers to try to stop minorities
from cheating
School leaders allow cheating ‘to boost the numbers’: staffers ---
http://nypost.com/2016/07/03/school-leaders-allow-cheating-to-boost-the-numbers-staffers/
Cheating is in the lesson plan at a Brooklyn high
school, where grade-fixing is so blatant, even intellectually disabled
students pass rigorous state tests, faculty members charge.
At Urban Action Academy in Canarsie, an 18-year-old
girl with the reading skills of a kindergartner had a passing grade of 65 on
the Regents US history exam, a whistleblower told The Post.
The girl scored a 73 on the algebra exam, despite
calculation skills at the level of a second-grader.
Teachers suspect the student’s tests were taken by
an educational aide.
Inflated scores will eventually backfire on
disabled students, a school staffer said: “It raises false hopes.”
Urban Action Academy administrators promote a
cheating culture, staffers say.
When the Regents Global History exam was given at
the school on June 14, students stashed review materials in toilet stalls so
they could sneak information during bathroom breaks.
Alert teachers tried to thwart the cheating. But
Assistant Principal Jordan Barnett slammed their “discriminatory” treatment
of students and ordered them to back off, teachers
say.
Continued in article
Professors and Teachers Who Let Students
Cheat
Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management
Accused of Letting Students Cheat
"Northwestern's business school is being rocked by cheating allegations,"
by Abbie Jackson, Business Insider, November 6, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/cheating-scandal-at-northwesterns-kellogg-school-2015-11
Students at
Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management have claimed that six peers
blatantly cheated on a final and that the administration is trying to cover
it up, according to a detailed
article by Ethan Baron of Poets and Quants, which
covers business schools.
Six male students in the MS
in Management Studies program engaged in blatant cheating while taking their
account and statistics finals, Baron reported, citing three students who
spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The anonymous sources
claimed that the students were passing notes, drawing charts in the air, and
sharing answers on their exams when proctors left the room.
The three anonymous students
claim the
administration is complicit in the cheating because it doesn't want the
school's reputation ruined.
"Everybody in the class
knows what is happening and everyone in the class knows that the sole goal
of the administration is to silence the witnesses," one source told Baron.
The students also say that
they fear retribution from the school over discussing the cheating
allegations because the honor code forbids students from discussing possible
violations of the honor code.
The witnesses also
claim that they have been threatened over the phone with physical harm by
the cheaters, Baron reports.
"The day I come to know who
reported me, I will f------ kill him or her,” one of the cheaters pledged,
according to a witness.
Of the six students accused
of cheating, two told Poets and Quants that they did not cheat, two would
not address the allegations against them, and two did not speak to the news
publication.
Poets and Quants got an
email response from Kellogg saying that it takes any cheating allegations
seriously and "all Honor Code issues that are reported are investigated
thoroughly and, if necessary and appropriate, include hearings and
sanctions."
Continued in article
"Cheating in Atlanta: A Teachable Moment When unions attack testing and
ensure that bad teachers stay hired, it’s no wonder some of them broke the rules,"
by Jason L. Riley, The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cheating-in-atlanta-a-teachable-moment-1428521500?tesla=y
. . .
The state decided to investigate cheating in the
public schools after an analysis of test results by the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution found suspiciously high gains in math and reading
proficiency. “A miracle occurred at Atherton Elementary this summer, if its
standardized math test scores are to be believed,” the paper reported in
2008. “Half of the DeKalb County school’s fifth-graders failed a yearly
state test in the spring. When the 32 students took retests, not only did
every one of them pass—26 scored at the highest level.”
The suspicion was warranted. A subsequent 400-page
report issued by the state in 2011 found that 44 of 56 investigated schools
had falsified results on state exams. The cheating was “widespread and
organized” and conducted “with the tacit knowledge and even approval of
high-level administrators.” According to investigators, Atlanta Public
Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall and her aides allowed “cheating—at all
levels—to go unchecked for years.” Teachers would gather at so-called
“erasure” parties to correct answers on exams and inflate scores. Some 178
public-school employees, including 34 principals, were implicated.
Thirty-five of them were eventually indicted by a grand jury, and 21 reached
plea agreements. Hall maintained her innocence but died before she could
stand trial.
The reaction to these shenanigans from defenders of
the public-education status quo has been sad but not at all surprising. Yes,
the teachers were wrong to falsify scores and set up students to fail by
promoting them to the next grade unprepared. But if you are Randi
Weingarten, who heads the powerful American Federation of Teachers (AFT),
the real victims are your union members. For Ms. Weingarten, a strong
opponent of the testing requirements included in the No Child Left Behind
education law signed by President Bush, the Atlanta scandal “crystallizes
the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies.”
Lily Eskelsen García, who is president of the AFT’s
sister union, the National Education Association (NEA), wrote in a
Journal-Constitution op-ed at the start of the trial that “too often, and in
too many places, we have turned the time-tested practice of teach, learn and
test into a system of test, blame and punish.” She added: “We are using
these tests to punish schools, teachers, students and school districts. This
simply isn’t right. It is toxic.”
. . .
In 2011 an investigation by a local television
station in Atlanta, WSB-TV, revealed that more than 700 teachers in Georgia
had repeatedly failed at least one portion of a test they must pass before
receiving a teaching certificate. Nearly 60 teachers failed the test at
least 10 times, and “there were 297 teachers on the payrolls of metro
Atlanta school systems in the past three years after having failed the state
certification test five times or more.”
Would you want your child taught by someone who
flunked the certification test five times, let alone 10? And would that
instructor be more or less likely to resort to changing student test scores
to hide his own incompetence?
The eagerness to blame No Child Left Behind’s
accountability provisions for these cheating scandals is off-base. The law
has its flaws, including an overly stringent method of judging a school’s
performance, but those flaws aren’t fatal. The much bigger problem is the
one exposed by WSB-TV. Long before Mr. Bush signed NCLB, public-school
teaching was attracting the least-qualified students from universities. For
decades, the test scores of people who enter teaching have trailed those of
people entering other professions, and research by Stanford economist Eric
Hanushek and others shows that the trend has worsened in recent years.
Moreover, brighter college students who do want to
teach for a few years after graduation, via highly selective programs such
as Teach for America, are scorned by the education establishment as
insufficiently committed to the profession. Among other things, Atlanta’s
cheating scandal is a byproduct of who goes into teaching.
"Schoolteacher Cheating," Walter E. Williams, Townhall,
February 5, 2014 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2014/02/05/schoolteacher-cheating-n1788915?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
Philadelphia's public school system has joined
several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and
Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized
academic achievement tests. So far, the city has fired three school
principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, "Nearly 140 teachers and
administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of
the nation's largest cheating scandals." (1/23/14) (http://tinyurl.com/q5makm3).
Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the
students' incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers. In some
cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers during the test.
Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia
Federation of Teachers, identifies the problem as district officials
focusing too heavily on test scores to judge teacher performance, and
they've converted low-performing schools to charters run by independent
groups that typically hire nonunion teachers. But William Hite,
superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, said cheating by
adults harms students because schools use test scores to determine which
students need remedial help, saying, "There is no circumstance, no matter
how pressured the cooker, that adults should be cheating students."
While there's widespread teacher test cheating to
conceal education failure, most notably among black children, it's just the
tip of the iceberg. The National Assessment of Educational Progress,
published by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for
Education Statistics and sometimes referred to as the Nation's Report Card,
measures student performance in the fourth and eighth grades. In 2013, 46
percent of Philadelphia eighth-graders scored below basic, and 35 percent
scored basic. Below basic is a score meaning that a student is unable to
demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for
proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery.
It's a similar story in reading, with 42 percent below basic and 41 percent
basic. With this kind of performance, no one should be surprised that of the
state of Pennsylvania's 27 most poorly performing schools on the SAT, 25 are
in Philadelphia.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on professors and teachers who allow students to
cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
From the
CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on July 5, 2016
Italian banks reeling
after Brexit
Britain’s vote
to leave the EU has produced dire predictions for the U.K. economy. The
damage to the rest of Europe could be more immediate and potentially more
serious. Nowhere is the risk concentrated more heavily than in the Italian
banking sector. In Italy, 17% of banks’ loans have gone bad. That is nearly
10 times the level in the U.S. Among publicly traded banks in the eurozone,
Italian lenders account for nearly half of total bad loans. Years of lax
lending standards left Italian banks ill-prepared when an economic slump
sent bankruptcies soaring a few years ago.
From the Former Chief Economic
Advisor to President Obama and Former President of Harvard University
"Why Brexit is worse for Europe than Britain,"
Larry Summer's Blog, June 24, 2016 ---
http://larrysummers.com/2016/06/24/why-brexit-is-worse-for-europe-than-britain/
. . .
Economics
For Britain, the
economic effects are two sided. On the one hand, a major jolt has been
delivered to confidence, to future unity and down the road to trade. On the
other, the currency has become more competitive, and liquidity will be in
very ample supply. I would expect that a significant deterioration in growth
and a recession beginning in the next 12 months has to be a substantial risk
though short of an odds on bet.
As suggested by the
fact that stock markets in Italy and Spain are down almost twice as much as
in the UK, the prospects for Europe may in some ways be worse than for the
UK. There is the real risk of “populist exit contagion” in a number of
countries. A credit crunch is a serious risk. Unlike in Britain, the trade
weighted exchange rate is unlikely to decline very much. The central bank
has less room for incremental policy measures.
The effects on the rest
of the world will depend heavily on psychology. I continue to be alarmed as
I wrote in this space a few days ago that this unexpected outcome in the UK
will raise the spectre of “Trump risk”. If the UK can vote for Brexit
perhaps the U.S. can vote for Donald Trump. I fear this possibility will
lead to a freezing up of spending decisions particularly on the part of
internationally oriented businesses. The odds of U.S. recession beginning
within the next 12 months are I think now in the 30 percent range. Also
noteworthy is that an environment of increased risk aversion and flight to
quality will complicate Japan’s problem of generating inflation, and China’s
challenge of attaining currency stability.
To an extent that is
underestimated in some quarters and understated in others, the world economy
is far more brittle than usual because of the inability almost everywhere to
lower interest rates substantially. Normally in response to incipient
downturns central banks lower rates by 400 basis points or more. Nowhere do
they have that kind of room. Nor is there large scope for reducing term and
credit spreads given their very low levels. This is no time for austerity.
Greater use of fiscal policy should be on the agenda almost everywhere and
certainly with the change of government in the UK.
Brexit will rightly be
taken as a signal that the political support for global integration is at
best waning and at worst collapsing. Dramatic exchange rate fluctuations
tend to portend upswings in protectionist pressure. And problems in European
banks could as in 2009 lead to a drying up of trade finance. Already global
trade has lagged global growth in recent years. A clear sense of commitment
to avoid backsliding towards protection from the G20 will be essential going
forward. Specific efforts with respect to trade finance may be appropriate.
Broader Observations
After Brexit, Trump,
Sanders and the misforecast British and Canadian general elections, it
should be clear that the term political science is an oxymoron. Political
events cannot be reliably predicted by pollsters, pundits or punters. All
three groups should have humility going forward. In particular no one should
be confident about the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.
The political challenge
in many countries going forward is to develop a “responsible nationalism”.
It is clear that there is a hunger on the part of electorates, if not the
Davos set within countries, for approaches to policy that privilege local
interests and local people over more cosmopolitan concerns. Channeling this
hunger constructively rather than destructively is the challenge for the
next decade. We now know that neither denying the hunger, or explaining that
it is based on fallacy is a viable strategy.
MIT: The All American iPhone (Dream)
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601491/the-all-american-iphone/
Political candidates
opposed to free trade say Apple should make phones in the United States.
Let’s see what that would look like.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In addition the USA is increasingly dependent upon rare earth metals (notably
lithium) to power our electric vehicles and other needs such as back up power
for home solar panels. The two main sources of lithium are China and Chile. It
could get very Ch...Ch..Chilly in the USA if China and Chile raise prices using
their oligopoly economic hold on the USA. Maybe they're just waiting until we
turn the lights off on the last oil refinery in the USA before they exercise
their oligopoly pricing power on rare earth minerals. The USA produces some of
the rare earth metals at the moment, but the domestic capacity falls way short
of our needs.
From MIT on April 6,
2016
Tech Slowdown Threatens the American Dream
Economist Robert Gordon has a surprising message for techno-optimists:
American innovation just isn’t what it used to be. Earlier this year we took
a critical look at claims that productivity is stagnant, and that the
inventions of the past few decades pale in comparison to those of the
previous century.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601199/tech-slowdown-threatens-the-american-dream/
From the Scout Report on July 1, 2016
History Here ---
http://www.history.com/history-here
The History Channel's History Here app allows users
to learn about historic sites both near and far. Once users download this
application, they can discover historical sites in their proximity through
GPS, or investigate any place in the the world by searching for a new
address or using the app's "explore" option. Historic sites are marked with
drop pins; by tapping a pin, users can read about each selected historic
site. At this point, most featured sites are in the United States, but the
application is continually being updated to include more locations. In
addition, the application features a handful of virtual tours of select
locations, including a Los Angeles Culinary Tour, a Mississippi Civil Rights
Tour, and a Nashville Music History Tour. The History Here application is
free and currently compatible on Apple devices with iOS 5 or higher and
Android devices running 4.0 and up. ]
Giphy ---
http://giphy.com/create/gifmaker
GIFs (Graphical Interchange Format) are a great way
to add some character and sass to an email, website, or blog post. Giphy
allows anyone to easily make their own custom GIFs using either a link to an
online video or by uploading their own media. Next, users can select the
portion and duration of the video they would like to use in the GIF, then
select a font and color in order to write a caption. You now have a GIF to
embed anywhere you chose. You can choose to make your GIFs private or
public, store them on your account for as long as you'd like, and also
browse through other public GIFs.
Exhibiting the Singular and
Spectacular Hieronymus Bosch, 500 Years
After His Death
Hieronymus Bosch Died 500 Years Ago, But His Art Will Still Creep You Out
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/26/483225865/hieronymus-bosch-died-500-years-ago-but-his-art-will-still-creep-you-out
Hieronymus Bosch's Five-Hundredth-Anniversary Homecoming
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/hieronymus-boschs-five-hundredth-anniversary-homecoming
The Impious Delights of Hieronymus Bosch
https://newrepublic.com/article/132024/impious-delights-hieronymus-bosch
Bosch. The 5th Centenary Exhibition
https://www.museodelprado.es/en/whats-on/exhibition/bosch-the-centenary-exhibition/f049c260-888a-4ff1-8911-b320f587324a?searchMeta=bosch
Jheronimus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights
https://tuinderlusten-jheronimusbosch.ntr.nl/en
Bosch Research and Conservation Project
http://boschproject.org
From the Scout Report
Consensus on Dietary Guidelines May Be Long In Coming
Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes -
WHO
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/26/bacon-ham-sausages-processed-meats-cancer-risk-smoking-says-who
Q&A on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat
and processed
meat
http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
What the New Dietary Guidelines Mean for You
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/health-wellness/articles/2015/03/04/what-the-new-dietary-guidelines-mean-for-you
How strong is the science behind the U.S. Dietary
Guidelines?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/24/health/dietary-guidelines-science/
Why the new, proposed U.S. dietary guidelines are provoking
controversy and
ire
http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/dietary-guidelines-usda/
Health.gov: Dietary Guidelines
http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/qanda.asp
From the Scout Report on July 8, 2016
30/30 --- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/30-30/id505863977
30/30 is a free productivity app for iPhones and
iPad with iOS 4.3 or higher. On this app, users can write their own to-do
list and allot an amount of time of their choice to complete each task. At
the end of this time, an alarm will go off to signal that it is time to move
to the next activity. Users can also schedule timed breaks into their to-do
list, making this app especially appealing for Pomodoro Technique
aficionados. Users can easily edit their to-do list, set the list to
automatically loop, and email their lists to others.
Noisli ---
http://noisli.com
If you are someone who needs "white noise" to work,
relax, or block out the chatter of an office or coffee shop, Noisli may be
the website for you. On this site, users can select to listen to a variety
of noises, including rain, leaves, and railroad tracks. Alternatively, users
can search for a previously composed collection of sounds, designed for
either productivity or relaxing. By creating a free account, users can also
save their favorite white noise medleys for future use.
What Foods are "Healthy"?
Is Sushi 'Healthy? What About Granola? Where Americans and Nutritionists
Disagree.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/05/upshot/is-sushi-healthy-what-about-granola-where-americans-and-nutritionists-disagree.html
FDA Targets Sugar in New Labeling Rules
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fda-targets-sugar-in-new-labeling-rules
Why the FDA is Re-Evaluating the Nutty Definition of "Healthy" Food
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/10/477514200/why-the-fda-is-reevaluating-the-nutty-definition-of-healthy-food
Why you shouldn't always listen to dietary guidelines
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/why-you-shouldn-t-always-listen-dietary-guidelines
Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Response
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415014816
A Short History of Nutritional Sciences
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/133/3/638.full
Free Online Tutorials, Videos, Course Materials, and
Learning Centers
Education Tutorials
KQED: Education (resources for teachers) ---
http://kqed.org/education
American Journal of Play ---
http://www.journalofplay.org
Open Syllabus Project ---
http://opensyllabusproject.org
I find it better to use more than one filter simultaneously
For example, it's better to filter on the University of Texas at Austin and
Business rather than just the University of Texas
The Innovative Instructor (higher education innovation from Johns Hopkins
University) ---
http://ii.library.jhu.edu
Learning & the Brain blog ---
http://learningandthebrain.com/blog
Sounding Out! (English, music, and communications) ---
https://soundstudiesblog.com
Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of
Women's Education ---
http://greenfield.brynmawr.edu
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Bob Jensen's bookmarks for multiple disciplines ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Undark (misc. science) ---
http://undark.org
Carry the One Radio (interviews with scientists) ---
http://www.carrytheoneradio.com
LANL: Periodic Table of Elements ---
http://periodic.lanl.gov
The Periodic Table of Videos ---
http://www.periodicvideos.com/
The Sourcebook for Teaching Science: Periodic Tables ---
http://www.csun.edu/science/chemistry/periodic_table/
NOVA: Hunting the Elements
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/hunting-elements.html
Physics & Caffeine: Stop Motion Film Uses a Cup of Coffee to Explain Key
Concepts in Physics ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/06/stop-motion-film-uses-a-cup-of-coffee-to-explain-key-concepts-in-physics.html
On This Day in Chemistry ---
http://www.rsc.org/learn-chemistry/collections/chemistry-calendar
Jackson Laboratory (genetics) ---
https://www.jax.org
Archaeology of the Great War ---
http://archeologie1418.culture.fr/en
Virology Down Under (epidemiciology in Australia) ---
http://virologydownunder.blogspot.com
Edge Effects (ecology) ---
http://edgeeffects.net
The History of Vaccines ---
http://historyofvaccines.org
TIME Magazine: Health ---
http://time.com/health
From the Scout Report on July 15, 2016
A New
Dwarf Planet Identified in Pluto's Neighborhood
New Dwarf Planet Discovered Far Beyond Pluto's Orbit
http://www.space.com/33387-dwarf-planet-discovery-2015-rr245.html
Astronomers Discover Distant Dwarf Planet Beyond Neptune
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/11/astronomers-discover-distant-dwarf-planet-beyond-neptune-2015-rr245
What is a Dwarf Planet?
http://www.universetoday.com/72717/what-is-a-dwarf-planet
How many dwarf planets are there in the outer solar system?
http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/dps.html
NOVA: Chasing Pluto
http://www.pbs.org/video/2365527017
New Dwarf Planet Beyond Pluto Hints At No Planet Nine
http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/07/12/new-dwarf-planet-beyond-pluto-hints-at-no-planet-nine/#6035f49b945b
Online Structural Engineering Library ---
http://thestructuralengineer.info/online-library
Bob Jensen's threads on free online science,
engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Social Science and Economics Tutorials
Our World in Data (many graphics and links to databases) ---
https://ourworldindata.org
Carry the One Radio (interviews with scientists) ---
http://www.carrytheoneradio.com
Kitsap Regional Library: Kitsap History (Japanese-American Internment Camps
in WWII) ---
http://www.krl.org/kitsap-history
Borderlands History (of the USA) ---
https://borderlandshistory.org
Identities: Understanding Islam in Cross-Cultural Contexts ---
http://marb.kennesaw.edu/identities
Sounding Out! (English, music, and communications) ---
https://soundstudiesblog.com
American Journal of Play ---
http://www.journalofplay.org
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Law and Legal Studies
Life of the Law ---
http://www.lifeofthelaw.org
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Math Tutorials
Chalkdust (mathematics magazine, including puzzles and humor) ---
http://chalkdustmagazine.com
"The Rise of Bayesian Econometrics," by David Giles,
Econometrics Beat, November 19, 2014 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-rise-of-bayesian-econometrics.html
Backchannel (tech tales) ---
https://backchannel.com
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
History Tutorials
How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?: A Short Course from Stanford on the Ancient
Mystery ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/how-did-hannibal-cross-the-alps-a-short-course-on-the-ancient-mystery.html
Digital Humanities Quarterly ---
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq
Pearls of Wisdom: The Arts of Islam at the University of Michigan ---
http://lw.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey/pearls/index.html
Museum of the Moving Image: Silent Film Era ---
http://collection.movingimage.us/silent_film_era.php
Persian Carpets ---
http://daily.jstor.org/object-history-persian-carpet/
Borderlands History (of the USA) ---
https://borderlandshistory.org
Belfast Group Poetry: Networks ---
http://belfastgroup.digitalscholarship.emory.edu
Letters of Note ---
http://lettersofnote.com
EUscreen (European History in Video) ---
http://euscreen.eu
ABC Books (alphabet books) ---
https://etc.princeton.edu/abcbooks
Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of
Women's Education ---
http://greenfield.brynmawr.edu
Visualizing Isaiah (religion) ---
http://www.imj.org.il/isaiah
Montague Rhoades James: A Thin Ghost (ghost stories) ---
http://www.thin-ghost.org
Identities: Understanding Islam in Cross-Cultural Contexts http://marb.kennesaw.edu/identities
Visualizing 19th-Century New York ---
http://visualizingnyc.org
A Bloomsday Remembrance of James Joyce ---
http://daily.jstor.org/bloomsday-remembrance-of-james-joyce/
The Steamy Love Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (1925-1929)
---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/the-steamy-love-letters-of-virginia-woolf-and-vita-sackville-west-1925-1929.html
James Joyce Centre ---
http://jamesjoyce.ie
The History of Vaccines ---
http://historyofvaccines.org
Archaeology of the Great War ---
http://archeologie1418.culture.fr/en
The Great War: A Visual History ---
http://www.abmc.gov/sites/default/files/interactive/interactive_files/WW1/index.html
Kitsap Regional Library: Kitsap History (Japanese-American Internment Camps
in WWII) ---
http://www.krl.org/kitsap-history
Shelf Awareness (books and libraries) ---
http://shelf-awareness.com
The Story of the Beautiful: The Peacock Room ---
http://peacockroom.wayne.edu
Destination Indiana ---
http://www.destination-indiana.com
National Archives: Ansel Adams Photographs: Records of the National Park
Service ---
http://www.archives.gov/research/ansel-adams
Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv_TVXxWe_A
The Creative Process of Ansel Adams Revealed in 1958
Documentary ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/the_creative_process_of_ansel_adams_revealed_in_1958_documentary.html
The Creative Process of Ansel Adams Revealed in 1958 Documentary ---
http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/the_creative_process_of_ansel_adams_revealed_in_1958_documentary.html
An 1585 Recipe for Making Pancakes: Make It Your Saturday Morning
Breakfast ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/an-1585-recipe-for-making-pancakes-make-it-your-saturday-morning-breakfast.html
An Archive of 3,000 Vintage Cookbooks Lets You Travel Back Through Culinary
Time ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/an-archive-of-3000-vintage-cookbooks-lets-you-travel-back-through-culinary-time.html
Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a
Modern Kitchen ---
https://rarecooking.com
Ansel Adams: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea - at the National
Maritime Museum, London until 28 April 2013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20304829
Thank you Roger Collins for the heads up
History Here Free App: Select your current
location with GPS or choose any location across the country
History Here ---
http://www.history.com/history-here
HISTORY HERE is a Webby Award-winning interactive
travel guide to thousands of historic locations across the United States.Use
the app to learn the history around your neighborhood, when you visit
someplace new or if you're just feeling curious while sitting on the couch!
Get the facts about the history that's hidden all
around you, including architecture, museums, battlefields, monuments, famous
homes and much more! And now, you can explore TOURS, a new feature that use
locations as a way to learn about historical themes and topics, such as
Marilyn Monroe's Hollywood, Civil War Atlanta and Al Capone's Chicago. WE
ARE ADDING MORE POINTS OF INTEREST ALL THE TIME. Know a place that's not
listed in the app? Use the Suggest a Place feature to submit it to the
HISTORY editorial team.
Features: Select your current location with GPS or
choose any location across the country. Explore thousands of exclusive
points of interest, written by the history experts at HISTORY. Tap Surprise
Me! to see a random location somewhere in the U.S. Display historic
locations in a zoomable, map-based view or in a scrolling list. Swipe the
top panel on the map to browse. Pinch out and watch the pins cluster. Share
the locations you find with friends via Facebook, Twitter and email. Get
distances and driving or walking directions to points of interest.
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Also see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Top 40 Philosophy (music) ---
http://www.top40philosophy.com
Sounding Out! (English, music, and communications) ---
https://soundstudiesblog.com
Jane Austen’s Music Collection, Now Digitized and Available Online ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/jane-austens-music-collection-now-digitized-and-available-online.html
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
9 Tools for the Accidental Writing Teacher ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1460-9-tools-for-the-accidental-writing-teacher?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=c02935b437544e33aec1dd60ec6b609b&elq=120fbf25b20343698b941ab37c7e8aca&elqaid=9702&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3464
Sounding Out! (English, music, and communications) ---
https://soundstudiesblog.com
Shelf Awareness (books and libraries) ---
http://shelf-awareness.com
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Bob Jensen's threads on medicine ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#Medicine
CDC Blogs ---
http://blogs.cdc.gov/
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
June 27, 2016
June 28, 2016
June 29, 2016
July 1, 2016
July 2, 2016
July 5, 2016
July 6, 2016
July 7, 2016
July 8, 2016
July 9, 2016
July 11, 2016
July 13, 2016
The History of Vaccines ---
http://historyofvaccines.org
TIME Magazine: Health ---
http://time.com/health
How Cataract Surgery Went From $500 to Under $2 ---
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a21478/open-your-eyes-hbo-documentary/
Thank you Rick Elam for the heads up
Getting Medicare While Traveling or Living Overseas ---
http://www.elderlawanswers.com/getting-medicare-while-traveling-or-living-overseas-8229
Many retirees look
forward to traveling in their retirement, and more and more are actually
retiring overseas, in part as a way to stretch savings. But what happens to
retirees' federal benefits while they are out of the country? The short
answer is that although Social Security benefits are available to retirees
in other countries, Medicare generally is not. In this installment we look
at Medicare.
Traditional
Medicare does not provide coverage for hospital or medical costs outside the
United States (although Medicare does cover residents
of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the
Northern Mariana Islands). In rare cases, Medicare may pay for inpatient
hospital services in Canada or Mexico. (For details,
click here.)
Some Medicare
Advantage (private Medicare) plans may provide coverage benefits for health
care needs when enrollees travel outside the United States. (Check with your
plan before traveling.) But those retiring overseas -- or travelers enrolled
in the traditional Medicare program or whose Medicare Advantage plan does
not cover foreign travel -- will need to purchase health insurance from
another source.
Medicare beneficiaries who are traveling and who have
no other coverage must either buy short-term travel insurance or a
Medigap policy that covers foreign emergencies.
Medigap plans C through J offer travel emergency coverage, but the
benefit applies only during the first 60 days of any trip. This Medigap
benefit covers 80 percent of emergency care administered outside the
country. A $250 deductible and $50,000 lifetime maximum apply. In addition,
many travel agents and private companies offer insurance plans that will
cover health care expenses incurred overseas, including evacuations. The
State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs provides information on
medical insurance while overseas, including a list of companies that offer
travel medical insurance, at its
Web site.
Retirees who are
moving to a foreign country cannot use Medicare to pay for health care while
they are living overseas. The options for retirees are to buy private
coverage, to pay into a government-sponsored system in their new country of
residence, or to go without coverage. If the retiree is moving to a country
with a strong national plan, he or she may be able to pay into the plan and
receive coverage similar to that accorded residents of the country. If
national insurance isn't an option, many companies offer "expatriate" health
insurance plans. Choosing the right plan depends on where the retiree is
moving. For example, if a retiree is traveling somewhere remote or with poor
local health care, evacuation coverage may be important. Another country may
offer excellent health care, but each doctor visit may cost a lot of money,
so a plan that covers outpatient doctor visits may be necessary there. No
matter where the retiree is moving, another consideration is whether the
plan covers pre-existing conditions.
Whatever option
retirees choose while abroad, if they return to the United States they will
still be covered by Medicare Part A. Medicare Part A covers institutional
care in hospitals and skilled nursing facilities, as well as certain care
given by home health agencies and care provided in hospices. There are no
premiums for this part of the Medicare program and anyone who is 65 or older
and is eligible for Social Security automatically qualifies.
Medicare Part B,
which covers outpatient services, charges a monthly premium. Unless retirees
continue to pay the premiums while they are overseas, they will not
automatically be covered by Medicare Part B when they return to the United
States. Retirees who drop Part B and then move back to the United States
will have to pay an enrollment penalty. Premiums increase by 10 percent for
each year that an individual is not enrolled in Part B. Therefore, retirees
who think they may return to the United States may find it worthwhile to
continue paying Part B premiums while they live abroad.
U.S. citizens who
were living abroad when they turned 65 and who are not eligible for Social
Security, do not have to pay higher Part B premiums when they return to the
United States. These retireees won't have to pay a higher premium if they
enroll in Part B within 3 months of returning and establishing residence.
For information on living outside the United States and Part B, go here: https://www.medicare.gov/people-like-me/outside-us/signing-up-for-part-b-outside-us.html.
For more about the
Medicare program,
click here.
From the Scout Report on July 8, 2016
What Foods are "Healthy"?
Is Sushi 'Healthy? What About Granola? Where Americans and Nutritionists
Disagree.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/05/upshot/is-sushi-healthy-what-about-granola-where-americans-and-nutritionists-disagree.html
FDA Targets Sugar in New Labeling Rules
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fda-targets-sugar-in-new-labeling-rules
Why the FDA is Re-Evaluating the Nutty Definition of "Healthy" Food
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/10/477514200/why-the-fda-is-reevaluating-the-nutty-definition-of-healthy-food
Why you shouldn't always listen to dietary guidelines
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/why-you-shouldn-t-always-listen-dietary-guidelines
Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Response
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415014816
A Short History of Nutritional Sciences
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/133/3/638.full
From the Scout Report
Consensus on Dietary Guidelines May Be Long In Coming
Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes -
WHO
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/26/bacon-ham-sausages-processed-meats-cancer-risk-smoking-says-who
Q&A on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat
and processed
meat
http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
What the New Dietary Guidelines Mean for You
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/health-wellness/articles/2015/03/04/what-the-new-dietary-guidelines-mean-for-you
How strong is the science behind the U.S. Dietary
Guidelines?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/24/health/dietary-guidelines-science/
Why the new, proposed U.S. dietary guidelines are provoking
controversy and
ire
http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/dietary-guidelines-usda/
Health.gov: Dietary Guidelines
http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/qanda.asp
Humor for July 2016
Gov. Maggie Hassan signed H.B. 1547 into law to ban
sexual assault on animals in New Hampshire. This bipartisan effort was initiated
to address the disturbing and prevalent issue of animal sexual assault in the
Granite State.
http://www.humanesociety.org/news/news_briefs/2016/06/nh-animal-sexual-assault-ban-062416.html
Jensen Comment
Time to move back to Texas where A&M sheep approach a fence backwards.
What do you call an Aggie with a sheep under each arm? A pimp!
This is a joke I first herd when I was on leave in New Zealand.
The great Al Hirschfeld had been supplying his
much-loved caricatures to the New York Times for 37 years when, in 1962, tipped
over the edge by the newspaper's accounting department, he sent the following
amusing letter to the Sunday editor, Lester Markel.
(Keep scrolling down here)
http://www.lettersofnote.com/search?q=+accounting
Letters of Note ---
http://lettersofnote.com
NTSB says Delta plane landed at wrong airport in Sout---
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ntsb-says-delta-plane-landed-wrong-airport-185643679.html?nhp=1
Jensen Comment
This is not humorous per se, but a lot of comedians will use it for comic
material. For example, GPS on Delta means Good Pilots Snoring or Gawking Pilots
Sightseeing pr Gppfu Pilots Surprise.
Forwarded by Paula
WHY SENIORS STILL NEED NEWSPAPERS
I was visiting my daughter last night when I asked if I could borrow a
newspaper.
"This is the 21st century" she said. "We don't waste money on newspapers.
Here… use my iPad."
I can tell you this….. that friggin fly never knew what hit him..
Forwarded by Auntie Bev
LOST WORDS OF OUR YOUTH
Heavens to Murgatroyd! Would you believe the email spell checker did not
recognize the word murgatroyd? Lost Words from our childhood: Words gone as fast
as the buggy whip! Sad really!
The other day a not so elderly (65) (I say 75) lady said something to her son
about driving a Jalopy and he looked at her quizzically and said "What the heck
is a Jalopy? OMG (new) phrase! He never heard of the word jalopy!! She knew she
was old but not that old.
Well, I hope you are Hunky Dory after you read this and chuckle.
About a month ago, I illuminated some old expressions that have become
obsolete because of the inexorable march of technology. These phrases included
"Don't touch that dial," "Carbon copy," "You sound like a broken record" and
"Hung out to dry."
Back in the olden days we had a lot of moxie. We'd put on our best bib and
tucker to straighten up and fly right.
Heavens to Betsy! Gee whillikers! Jumping Jehoshaphat! Holy moley! We were in
like Flynn and living the life of Riley, and even a regular guy couldn't accuse
us of being a knucklehead, a nincompoop or a pill. Not for all the tea in China!
Back in the olden days, life used to be swell, but when's the last time
anything was swell?
Swell has gone the way of beehives, pageboys and the D.A.; of spats,
knickers, fedoras, poodle skirts, saddle shoes and pedal pushers. Oh, my aching
back. Kilroy was here, but he isn't anymore.
We wake up from what surely has been just a short nap, and before we can say,
well I'll be a monkey's uncle! or, This is a fine kettle of fish! we discover
that the words we grew up with, the words that seemed omnipresent, as oxygen,
have vanished with scarcely a notice from our tongues and our pens and our
keyboards.
Poof, go the words of our youth, the words we've left behind We blink, and
they're gone. Where have all those phrases gone?
Long gone: Pshaw, The milkman did it. Hey! It's your nickel.
Don't forget to pull the chain. Knee high to a grasshopper.
Well, Fiddlesticks! Going like sixty. I'll see you in the funny papers. Don't
take any wooden nickels.
It turns out there are more of these lost words and expressions than Carter
has liver pills. This can be disturbing stuff !
We of a certain age have been blessed to live in changeable times. For a
child each new word is like a shiny toy, a toy that has no age. We at the other
end of the chronological arc have the advantage of remembering there are words
that once did not exist and there were words that once strutted their hour upon
the earthly stage and now are heard no more, except in our collective memory.
It's one of the greatest advantages of aging.
See ya later, alligator!
Forwarded by Paula
A blonde lady motorist was about two hours from San Diego when she was
flagged down by a man whose truck had broken down......
The man walked up to the car and asked, "Are you going to San Diego?"
"Sure," answered the blonde, "do you need a lift?"
"Not for me.
I'll be spending the next three hours fixing my truck. My problem is I've got
two chimpanzees in the back that have to be taken to the San Diego Zoo. They're
a bit stressed already so I don't want to keep them on the road all day.
Could you possibly take them to the zoo for me? I'll give you $200 for your
trouble”
"I'd be happy to," said the blonde.
So the two chimpanzees were ushered into the back seat of the blonde's car
and carefully strapped into their seat belts, and off they went.
Five hours later, the truck driver was driving through the heart of San Diego
when suddenly he was horrified!
There was the blonde walking down the street, holding hands with the two
chimps, much to the amusement of a big crowd.
With a screech of brakes he pulled off the road and ran over to the blonde.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded,
"I gave you $200 to take these chimpanzees to the zoo!
"Yes, I know you did," said the blonde.
"But we had money left over so now we're going to Sea World."
Some new and some old forwarded by Paula
A distraught
senior citizen
phoned her
doctor's office.
"Is it true,"
she wanted to know,
"that the
medication
you
prescribed has to be taken
for the rest
of my life?"
"'Yes, I'm
afraid so,"' the doctor told her.
There was a
moment of silence
before the
senior lady replied,
"I'm
wondering, then,
just
how serious is my condition
because this
prescription is marked
'NO
REFILLS'.."
***********************
An older
gentleman was
on the
operating table
awaiting
surgery
and he
insisted that his son,
a renowned
surgeon,
perform the
operation.
As he was
about to get the anesthesia,
he asked to
speak to his son.
"Yes, Dad ,
what is it?"
"Don't be
nervous, son;
do your best,
and just
remember,
if it doesn't
go well,
if
something happens to me,
your mother
is
going to come and
live
with you and your wife...."
(I LOVE IT!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Aging:
Eventually
you will reach a point
when
you stop lying about your age
and
start bragging about it. This is so true. I love
to hear them
say "you don't look that old."
---------------------------------
The older we
get,
the
fewer things
seem
worth waiting in line for.
---------------------------------
Some people
try
to turn back their odometers.
Not me!
I want people
to know why
I look this
way.
I've traveled
a long way
and some of
the roads weren't paved.
********************
When you are
dissatisfied
and would
like to go back to youth,
think of
Algebra.
-------------------------------
One of the
many things
no one tells
you about aging
is that it is
such a nice change
from being
young.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Ah, being young
is beautiful,
but
being old is comfortable.
*********
First you forget
names,
then you forget
faces.
Then you forget
to pull up your zipper...
it's worse when
you forget to
pull it down.
```````````````
Two
guys, one old, one young,
are pushing
their carts around- WalMart
when they
collide.
The old guy
says to the young guy,
"Sorry about
that. I'm looking for my wife,
and
I guess I wasn't paying attention
to where I
was going."
The
young guy says, "That's OK, it's a coincidence.
I'm
looking for my wife, too...
I
can't find her and I'm getting a little desperate."
The
old guy says, "Well,
maybe
I can help you find her...
what
does she look like?"
The young guy
says,
"Well,
she is 27 years old, tall,
with red
hair,
blue eyes, is
buxom...wearing no bra,
long legs,
and is
wearing short shorts.
What does your wife
look like?'
To
which the old guy says, “Doesn't matter,
Let's look for yours."
Humor
June 2016
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q2.htm#Humor063016.htm
Humor
May 2016
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q2.htm#Humor053116.htm
Humor
April 2016
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q2.htm#Humor043016.htm
Humor
March 2016
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q1.htm#Humor033116.htm
Humor February 2016
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q1.htm#Humor022916.htm
Humor January 2016
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q1.htm#Humor013116.htm
Humor December 1-31, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q4.htm#Humor123115.htm.htm
Humor November 1-30, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q4.htm#Humor113015.htm
Humor October 1-31, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q4.htm#Humor103115
Humor September 1-30, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q3.htm#Humor093015
Humor August 1-31, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q3.htm#Humor081115
Humor July 1-31, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q3.htm#Humor073115
Humor June 1-30, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q2.htm#Humor043015
Humor May 1-31, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q2.htm#Humor043015
Humor April 1-30, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q2.htm#Humor043015
Humor March 1-31, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q1.htm#Humor033115
Humor February 1-28, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q1.htm#Humor022815
Humor January 1-31, 2015
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book15q1.htm#Humor013115
Tidbits Archives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://faculty.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://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
The Cult of Statistical Significance:
How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
How Accountics Scientists Should Change:
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review
I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://faculty.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://faculty.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://faculty.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://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://faculty.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://faculty.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://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for
free) go to http://faculty.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://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://faculty.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://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's
Threads ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://faculty.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