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 May July 28, 2016
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Set 5 of My Summertime Flower Favorite Photographs
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/SummertimeFavorites/Set05/Set05.htm
 

 

Tidbits on Julu 28, 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
 

See How The Gutenberg Press Worked: Demonstration Shows the Oldest Functioning Gutenberg Press in Action ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/how-the-gutenberg-press-worked.html

Mozart's Got Talent (Humor) --- https://www.youtube.com/embed/gKpFhPdyQLM?rel=0

Animated map shows the most dangerous countries in the world for tourists ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/animated-map-dangerous-countries-world-tourists-terrorism-2016-7

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

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

MoMA: Object:Photo (art history) --- http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/#home

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

Aerial Photographs of London --- http://www.businessinsider.com/aerial-photos-of-london-2016-7

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/

The British Museum: African Rock Art Image Project --- http://africanrockart.britishmuseum.org

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

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

OAPEN (free books) --- http://www.oapen.org/home

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

Woolf Online (Virginia Woolf literature) --- http://www.woolfonline.com

Booknotes: One Book. One Author. One Hour ---. http://booknotes.gmu.edu

Women and the World of Dime Novels --- http://americanantiquarian.org/dimenovelwomen

See How The Gutenberg Press Worked: Demonstration Shows the Oldest Functioning Gutenberg Press in Action ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/how-the-gutenberg-press-worked.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 28, 2016
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2016/TidbitsQuotations072816.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




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


The Economist Magazine:  The first in our series on seminal economic ideas looks at George Akerlof’s 1970 paper, a foundation stone of information economics ---
http://www.economist.com/news/economics-brief/21702428-george-akerlofs-1970-paper-market-lemons-foundation-stone-information?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/20160721n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/n


How Astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell Shaped Our Understanding of the Universe by Discovering Pulsars, Only to Be Excluded from the Nobel Prize ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/07/15/jocelyn-bell-burnell-pulsar-nobel/?mc_cid=ed7ac71960&mc_eid=4d2bd13843 


New York Times:  The Trouble With Hillary Clinton’s Free Tuition Plan ---
Kevin Carey
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/upshot/the-trouble-with-hillary-clintons-free-tuition-plan.html?hpw&rref=education&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
Jensen Comment
Carey focuses on costs and current differences between states in support of higher education. What he ignores that in the scramble to sop up the gravy of government subsidies some (most?) universities will sacrifice rigor to a point where a college diploma is like a blue ribbon top prize in a kindergarten pet show

"As Dual Enrollments Swell, So Do Worries About Academic Rigor," by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 22, 2016 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/As-Dual-Enrollments-Swell-So/237220?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=88ff3b6b967d4768aa30a44690ae9dd8&elq=040eca75a0ba44aeb7cf94488a83963f&elqaid=9954&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3664

Jensen Comment
The enormous difference between college education in Europe versus the USA is that in Europe going to college is a competitive process based upon academic rigor and less than half of the Tier 2 graduates are allowed into colleges. In the USA, especially under the initiatives of Sanders and Hillary Clinton, college will be free to almost everybody and colleges wanting the money will admit students that would never get into college in Europe. What college education in the USA will become is like a kindergarten pet competition. Every person will get a top blue ribbon (diploma), and nobody will be denied admission.

Already the median college grade in the USA is an A-. It can go higher. Soon the median grade will be an A+


Misleading Statistical Significance Reporting
Statisticians Found One Thing They Can Agree On: It’s Time To Stop Misusing P-Values ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/statisticians-found-one-thing-they-can-agree-on-its-time-to-stop-misusing-p-values/

How many statisticians does it take to ensure at least a 50 percent chance of a disagreement about p-values? According to a tongue-in-cheek assessment by statistician George Cobb of Mount Holyoke College, the answer is two … or one. So it’s no surprise that when the American Statistical Association gathered 26 experts to develop a consensus statement on statistical significance and p-values, the discussion quickly became heated.

It may sound crazy to get indignant over a scientific term that few lay people have even heard of, but the consequences matter. The misuse of the p-value can drive bad science (there was no disagreement over that), and the consensus project was spurred by a growing worry that in some scientific fields, p-values have become a litmus test for deciding which studies are worthy of publication. As a result, research that produces p-values that surpass an arbitrary threshold are more likely to be published, while studies with greater or equal scientific importance may remain in the file drawer, unseen by the scientific community.

The results can be devastating, said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “Patients with serious diseases have been harmed,” he wrote in a commentary published today. “Researchers have chased wild geese, finding too often that statistically significant conclusions could not be reproduced.” Faulty statistical conclusions, he added, have real economic consequences.

“The p-value was never intended to be a substitute for scientific reasoning,” the ASA’s executive director, Ron Wasserstein, said in a press release. On that point, the consensus committee members agreed, but statisticians have deep philosophical differences1 about the proper way to approach inference and statistics, and “this was taken as a battleground for those different views,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford. Much of the dispute centered around technical arguments over frequentist versus Bayesian methods and possible alternatives or supplements to p-values. “There were huge differences, including profoundly different views about the core problems and practices in need of reform,” Goodman said. “People were apoplectic over it.”

The group debated and discussed the issues for more than a year before finally producing a statement they could all sign. They released that consensus statement on Monday, along with 20 additional commentaries from members of the committee. The ASA statement is intended to address the misuse of p-values and promote a better understanding of them among researchers and science writers, and it marks the first time the association has taken an official position on a matter of statistical practice. The statement outlines some fundamental principles regarding p-values.

Among the committee’s tasks: Selecting a definition of the p-value that nonstatisticians could understand. They eventually settled on this: “Informally, a p-value is the probability under a specified statistical model that a statistical summary of the data (for example, the sample mean difference between two compared groups) would be equal to or more extreme than its observed value.” That definition is about as clear as mud (I stand by my conclusion that even scientists can’t easily explain p-values), but the rest of the statement and the ideas it presents are far more accessible.

One of the most important messages is that the p-value cannot tell you if your hypothesis is correct. Instead, it’s the probability of your data given your hypothesis. That sounds tantalizingly similar to “the probability of your hypothesis given your data,” but they’re not the same thing, said Stephen Senn, a biostatistician at the Luxembourg Institute of Health. To understand why, consider this example. “Is the pope Catholic? The answer is yes,” said Senn. “Is a Catholic the pope? The answer is probably not. If you change the order, the statement doesn’t survive.”

A common misconception among nonstatisticians is that p-values can tell you the probability that a result occurred by chance. This interpretation is dead wrong, but you see it again and again and again and again. The p-value only tells you something about the probability of seeing your results given a particular hypothetical explanation — it cannot tell you the probability that the results are true or whether they’re due to random chance. The ASA statement’s Principle No. 2: “P-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone.”

Nor can a p-value tell you the size of an effect, the strength of the evidence or the importance of a result. Yet despite all these limitations, p-values are often used as a way to separate true findings from spurious ones, and that creates perverse incentives. When the goal shifts from seeking the truth to obtaining a p-value that clears an arbitrary threshold (0.05 or less is considered “statistically significant” in many fields), researchers tend to fish around in their data and keep trying different analyses until they find something with the right p-value, as you can see for yourself in a p-hacking tool we built last year.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on how accountics scientists in accounting research have been worshiping the false idols of p-values for decades ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong


In the 1948 disastrous polling forecasts, that Thomas Dewey would defeat  Harry Truman in the USA Presidential race, blame was put on ignoring that so many voters did not own telephones in those days. Voters who could not afford phones were more likely to vote for Truman.

Now the question seems to be on the difference between telephone polling and Internet polling.
An added problem in 21st Century telephone polling is that people are very hard to reach via their telephones.
There's an added problem in both telephone and Internet polling in that voters are reluctant to give answers in polls in fear about personal security.
I won't answer political polls in fear of being spammed afterwards.

What can be learned from the disastrous Brexit referendum polling?
http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/9738


Is It Time For Authors To Leave SSRN? ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/07/is-it-time-for-authors-to-leave-ssrn.html

SSRN is Calling Removal of Some Papers from the Archives "Staff Error"
There Isn't Some Big Conspiracy Happening ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/19/social-science-research-network-confusion-leads-calls-boycott?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=2b3041f8e4-DNU20160719&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-2b3041f8e4-197565045

Jensen Comment
One thing I've noticed is that SSRN is becoming more of a for-profit journal table of contents service where abstracts of published articles are put on SSRN without allowing free access to the articles themselves. However, we never had free access to most of those articles in the first place, so this is a good feature of SSRN.


The 50 best computer science schools in the world ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-computer-science-schools-in-the-world-2016-6


How a guy from a Montana trailer park who almost never went to college proved a 150-year-old idea in biology wrong ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/lichens-are-three-organisms-discovery-2016-7

Jensen Comment
This is not a tale of a person without a college education astounding scientific scholars. In this case that might have been next to impossible given the degree of knowledge necessary to advance knowledge in such a specialized discipline.


"Tenure/Teaching: The Pendulum Swings (away from teaching performance)," by Joseph Asch, Dartmouth Daily Blog, July 21, 2016 ---
http://www.dartblog.com/data/2016/07/012717.php

Faculty hired 5-7 years ago were told explicitly that a couple of peer-reviewed articles and a book contract with a well-respected academic press was sufficient for tenure. I often used the word “humane” to describe the requirements for tenure, in that they rewarded both scholarship of a high caliber and teaching prowess. Dartmouth had a reputation as a place where work-life balance was valued, and the inconveniences associated with its rural location were offset by the benefits of raising children within a close-knit community.

Professors hired at that time are now coming up for tenure, having been mentored by department members whose curriculum vitae were far less impressive when they initially made associate. Some of my peers were pressured into service commitments that would have no bearing on tenure, and encouraged to take on projects (writing for anthologies and organizing conferences, for example) that would be time-consuming yet not lead to professional advancement. Recent tenure decisions have many members of my cohort scrambling for the exits—going on the market and taking on visiting appointments elsewhere—now that they understand that they were given a false impression of how different aspects of their trajectories would be evaluated.

I hate to say this, but many younger colleagues express regret at having agonized over their lesson plans and expended so much effort on honing their skills as classroom instructors, when a talent for teaching simply does not factor into tenure decisions. Phil Hanlon’s recent remarks on education only confirm what we already know, that Dartmouth is moving toward a corporate state university model wherein professors are retained for their “productivity”—quantity of publication over quality—and ability to bring in large grants, while underpaid adjuncts teach undergraduates.

The standalone graduate school announced in October cements Dartmouth’s movement in this direction, since teaching experience is mandatory for professionalization, and what are graduate students but an easily exploitable workforce?

I hope readers appreciate this carefully thought through and well expressed opinion. That Phil has tightened up tenure standards is a good thing — we have noted in the past that Jim Wright and his gang often granted tenure for political loyalty and social ties (to people who will be in Hanover for 30+ years stuck at the associate professor level) — but Phil’s search for prestige has gone too far: the word is out there now among tenure-track faculty members that Phil and Carolyn are looking only for prestige and publications, and teaching and mentoring students count for little or nothing.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think this article is probably a bit too broad brush. Firstly, I don't think you can paint quite such a broad brush across all schools and departments of a power university like Dartmouth. Secondly, I don't think you can paint such a broad brush across all tenure cases.

For example, the medical school is probably an outlier that places more value on clinical reputation within the medical school than external reputation. It would be very hard expensive to hang on to an extremely skillful surgeon with a national or international reputation. Perhaps the medical school must suffice with more emphasis on internal and opposed to external reputation.

Prestigious universities like Dartmouth tend to place high value on a combination of internal and external reputation. A tenure candidate with an extremely high reputation for teaching across various departments is not exactly like a tenure case for a lesser-known teacher. A strong researcher with a miserable teaching reputation across various departments is not exactly like a strong researcher with a better (not necessarily) stellar teachingt reputation.

Also Dartmouth is not exactly immune from diversity and affirmative action concerns. For example Dartmouth has a well-funded program to attract native American students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. I can't imagine denying tenure to a native American tenure candidate with a strong teaching reputation who has slightly fewer hits in top journals than a white male tenure candidate.

Having said this I do know that times have changed in prestigious schools of business. Four decades ago some Harvard Business School faculty were not necessarily known for their research publications in top business academic journals. They sometimes built their reputations of their writings of textbooks and teaching case books where they were also known for their consulting in the boardrooms of huge multinational business firms. Reputation among corporate CEOs trumped having ten multivariate regression studies in The Accounting Review or the Journal of Marketing Research.

Those days have changed somewhat in that the 21st Century new tenure awards at prestigious universities go to rising faculty stars with reputations in consulting who also have their names on 20 or more business research journal where their names are alongside three or more co-authors who maybe did a lot of the data mining in each published paper.

Having said this, I would be very shocked if the Harvard Business School or Tuck School of Business (at Dartmouth) put a lousy teacher in front of an MBA class. I do know of one lousy teacher in the Harvard Business School who was a renowned international writer of cases, but I don't think the HBS put him in front of MBA students, at least not in front of the typically large classes in the MBA program at Harvard. He has since left Harvard. Actually I don't hear anything about him anymore, but I'm told he's not yet fully retired. I think he got tenure at Harvard when tenure hurdles were different than they are in the 21st Century. Now he would have to be a stellar teacher with 20 or more published multiple regression studies (co-authored of course).

Harvard by the way has a ten-year tenure track, unlike most universities that follow the traditional AAUP seven-year track.


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on July 22, 2016

Amazon enters student-loan business
Amazon.com Inc.
 is stepping into the student-loan marketplace. The online retailer has entered into a partnership with San Francisco lender Wells Fargo & Co. in which the bank’s student-lending arm will offer interest-rate discounts to select Amazon shoppers. Amazon said this is the first time members of the company’s “Prime Student” service are receiving a student-loan offer by a lender through its site since that service was launched in 2010. The discount will be offered both to students who want college loans and those who want to refinance. The offer also represents the latest effort among private student lenders to stand out by discounting.

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on July 22, 2016

Tesla’s Musk’s ambitious vision
Vox takes a hard look at Tesla Motors Inc. founder Elon Musk’s bold new vision, unveiled this week, which Vox calls “ridiculously ambitious.” By merging it with his other firm, SolarCity Corp., he can offer integrated in-home power systems; self-driving trucks and buses could help the environment, traffic and commerce; the ability for Tesla owners to rent their cars when not in use could change auto sales plus take a bite out of Uber Technologies Inc. But Mr. Musk is trying to do all of this at once while achieving the heady goals he had already set. Then again, he has a shot, given his track record and investor thirst for game-changing ideas.

Also see
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/22/amazon-wells-fargo-partnership-private-student-loans-troubles-consumer-advocates?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=56cdbb1f78-DNU20160722&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-56cdbb1f78-197565045

Jensen Comment
Bezos and Musk may be trying to do too many things at the same time.


"Why Land and Homes Actually Tend to Be Disappointing Investments," by Robert J. Schiller, The New York Times, July 15, 2016 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/upshot/why-land-may-not-be-the-smartest-place-to-put-your-nest-egg.html?_r=1

Jensen Comment
This article is yet another example of how to mislead with statistics. Making money in land parcels and homes is exactly like making money in the stock market --- you've got to have picked the right ones to put into your portfolio. I sold an Iowa farm that more than doubled in value after I sold it. One reason was the idiotic decision to subsidize corn farmers by requiring upwards of 10% corn ethanol in every gallon of gas. North Dakota farmers made a lot of money selling oil rights. Owners of condos in Manhattan and San Francisco made small fortunes on tiny bits of property. Houses purchased for less than $50,000 in 1980 in Silicon Valley may be worth more than $5 million in 2016.

But what looks like good deals in stocks and real estate in hindsight is just that --- hindsight! There are no guarantees of high returns without taking risks unless you are in the Mafia where you can force your own returns. Expectations of higher returns means acquiring more financial risk for most of us.

There are some serious advantages to investing as much as you can in a home when you anticipate owning it for more than 10 years. Firstly, you get the added non-financial enjoyment of living in a wonderful home. Secondly, there are some tax breaks for the the 50% of taxpayers that really pay taxes. But there are a drawbacks. Property taxes are the primary way the USA funds its K-12 schools as well as pay for county and municipal services. In most instances growth rates for property taxes outpaced the capital gains since the real estate bubble burst in 2007.

There are also some wonderful instances where owners have successful rental properties such as owning a duplex where the rent from one half of the house pays all the expenses of the entire house. A friend of mine, Tom Selling, says that when he moved from Dartmouth it was a good decision to continue to rent his condo rather than sell it at the time. That is probably true of nearly all rental property close to college campuses if the property was purchased before the real estate bubble burst in 2007. There are some tax breaks of rental housing such as depreciation and maintenance expense write-offs. For example, half the cost of the roof on a duplex might be expensed.

Don't get carried away investing in land that has no serious annual cash inflow. Of course there are exceptions, but in general the taxes and maintenance fees (e.g., mowing) plus the eventual cost of selling the land take all the fun out of trying to eventually make a profit.

With bank savings deposits earning virtually zero interest it's tempting to take on more financial risks with your savings. Each investor is unique. I advise getting "free" advice from reputable mutual funds like Vanguard or Fidelity or TIAA. I don't advise paying dearly for it at your local investment advisor service. Find out the range of alternatives from long-term tax exempt mutual funds to diversified real estate fund to a variety of long-term and short term equity alternatives. Learn enough to become your own adviser.

Bob Jensen's helpers for investors (free because that may be more than they're worth) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers


Annals of Improbable Research ---
http://www.improbable.com/magazine/


The Entire Discipline of Philosophy Visualized with Mapping Software: See All of the Complex Networks ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/the-entire-discipline-of-philosophy-visualized-with-mapping-software-see-all-of-the-complex-networks.html


Money Magazine
Best Colleges and Universities for the Money ---
http://new.money.com/money/best-colleges/rankings/best-colleges/

Jensen Comment
There are of course other considerations such as surriculum specialties and deficiencies. For example, a student who wants to major in business as an undergraduate would not choose most of the Ivy League schools or Stanford. A student wanting to become a CPA or an engineer would not choose some of the top-ranked universities. The same is true for other careers such as nursing, phamacy, forestry, etc.


Thomas Kuhn --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn

Paradigm Shift --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift

"What Is A Paradigm Shift, Anyway?" by Tania Lombrozo, NPR, July 18. 2016 ---
 http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/07/18/486487713/what-is-a-paradigm-shift-anyway

Thomas Kuhn, the well-known physicist, philosopher and historian of science, was born 94 years ago today. He went on to become an important and broad-ranging thinker, and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

Kuhn's 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, transformed the philosophy of science and changed the way many scientists think about their work. But his influence extended well beyond the academy: The book was widely read — and seeped into popular culture. One measure of his influence is the widespread use of the term "paradigm shift," which he introduced in articulating his views about how science changes over time.

Inspired, in part, by the theories of psychologist Jean Piaget, who saw children's development as a series of discrete stages marked by periods of transition, Kuhn posited two kinds of scientific change: incremental developments in the course of what he called "normal science," and scientific revolutions that punctuate these more stable periods. He suggested that scientific revolutions are not a matter of incremental advance; they involve "paradigm shifts."

Talk of paradigms and paradigm shifts has since become commonplace — not only in science, but also in business, social movements and beyond. In a column at The Globe and Mail, Robert Fulford describes paradigm as "a crossover hit: It moved nimbly from science to culture to sports to business."

But what, exactly, is a paradigm shift? Or, for that matter, a paradigm?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary offers the following:

Simple Definition of paradigm:

Accordingly, a paradigm shift is defined as "an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way."

More than 50 years after Kuhn's famous book, these definitions may seem intuitive rather than technical. But do they capture what Kuhn actually had in mind in developing an account of scientific change?

It turns out this question is hard to answer — not because paradigm has an especially technical or obscure definition, but because it has many. In a paper published in 1970, Margaret Masterson presented a careful reading of Kuhn's 1962 book. She identified 21 distinct senses in which Kuhn used the term paradigm. (That's right: 21.)

Consider a few examples.

First, a paradigm could refer to a special kind of achievement. Masterson quotes Kuhn, who introduces a paradigm as a textbook or classic example that is "sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity," but that is simultaneously "sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve." Writes Kuhn: "Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as 'paradigms.' "

But in other parts of the text, paradigms cover more ground. Paradigms can offer general epistemological viewpoints, like the "philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes," or define a broad sweep of reality, as when "Paradigms determine large areas of experience at the same time."

Given this bounty of related uses, Masterson asks a provocative question:

Is there, philosophically speaking, anything definite or general about the notion of a paradigm which Kuhn is trying to make clear? Or is he just a historian-poet describing different happenings which have occurred in the course of the history of science, and referring to them all by using the same word "paradigm"?

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Ask your accounting theory students if there have been any paradigm shifts in accounting?
Were these shifts tided to the paradigm shifts in finance?

On its 50th anniversary, Thomas Kuhn’s "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" remains not only revolutionary but controversial.
 "Shift Happens," David Weinberger, The Chronicle Review, April 22, 2012 ---
 http://chronicle.com/article/Shift-Happens/131580/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

From the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Science and Pseudo-Science --- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/

Enter "Paradigm Shift" as a search phrase in MAAW ---
http://www.maaw.info/Searchmaaw.htm
Keep scrolling down

  • I hope Jim K will comment on how "research in business schools is becoming increasingly distanced from the reality of business"
    "In 2008 Hopwood commented on a number of issues," by Jim Martin, MAAW Blog, June 26, 2013 ---
    http://maaw.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-2008-hopwood-commented-on-number-of.html

    The first issue below is related to the one addressed by Bennis and O'Toole. According to Hopwood, research in business schools is becoming increasingly distanced from the reality of business. The worlds of practice and research have become ever more separated. More and more accounting and finance researchers know less and less about accounting and finance practice. Other professions such as medicine have avoided this problem so it is not an inevitable development.

    Another issue has to do with the status of management accounting. Hopwood tells us that the term management accountant is no longer popular and virtually no one in the U.S. refers to themselves as a management accountant. The body of knowledge formally associated with the term is now linked to a variety of other concepts and job titles. In addition, management accounting is no longer an attractive subject to students in business schools. This is in spite of the fact that many students will be working in positions where a knowledge of management control and systems design issues will be needed. Unfortunately, the present positioning and image of management accounting does not make this known.

    Continued in article

    Avoiding applied research for practitioners and failure to attract practitioner interest in academic research journals ---
    "Why business ignores the business schools," by Michael Skapinker
    Some ideas for applied research ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession

    Essays on the (mostly sad) State of Accounting Scholarship ---
    http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm#Essays

 


It's well known that media rankings (think US News) can affect the quality and number of applications to a college or university.
Harvard Study:  Articles about a scandal (e.g., academic cheating, rape, protest gone bad, racial incident, etc.) can have a similar effect ---
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51246

In recent years, there have been a number of high profile scandals on college campuses, ranging from cheating to hazing to rape. With so much information regarding a college’s academic and non-academic attributes available to students, how do these scandals affect their applications? To investigate, we construct a dataset of scandals at the top 100 U.S. universities between 2001 and 2013. Scandals with a high level of media coverage significantly reduce applications. For example, a scandal covered in a long-form news article leads to a ten percent drop in applications the following year. This is roughly the same as the impact on applications of dropping ten spots in the U.S. News and World Report college rankings. Moreover, colleges react to scandals – the probability of another incident in the subsequent years falls – but this effect dissipates within five years. Combined, these results suggest important demand side and supply side responses to incidents with negative media coverage.

Jensen Comment
Impacts are probably asymetric. The public expects a lot of good news articles, including those released by a college's Public Relations Department. The good news articles on average have less impact than bad news articles.


Colleges and Universities are Facing Enormous Re-construction Liabilities That The ACLU Won't Mention
 "Target is Having a Really Bad Week," by Haley Peterson, Business Insider, July 16, 2016 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/target-is-having-a-really-bad-week-2016-7

Target is having a bad week.

The retailer is facing widespread backlash for two unrelated incidents at its stores that have outraged thousands of customers.

On Thursday, a transgender woman was arrested and charged with taking pictures of an 18-year-old woman changing clothes in a fitting room at a Target store in Idaho.

The incident has renewed outrage among opponents of Target's new policy allowing customers to use the restroom or fitting room that matches their gender identity.

The policy's critics had previously warned that it posed a "danger to wives and daughters" and is "exactly how sexual predators get access to their victims."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Among things aside from the current boycott by upwards of a million Target customers there are accounting issues caused by the gender-neutral policy of Target with respect to bathrooms and fitting rooms. That issue is how to report the liability for possibly tens of millions of dollars needed to totally privatize each bathroom stall and fitting room. Fitting room renovation probably only entails ceiling to wall partionings and locks on the doors. But bathroom renovations entail putting in private bathrooms with each having it's own sink --- that could be really costly for Target.

The same enormous liability (much bigger than for Target) is coming to colleges and universities that will need to do things to help make more difficult to take pictures of people in bathrooms and locker rooms. One of the problems is the difficulty of controlling picture taking with remote phones. One reason it's much more of a problem for universities is that universities will eventually have to install private showers in locker rooms as well as private bathrooms with commodes and sinks and clothing lockers.

Colleges may need to act quickly to ward off lawsuits regarding privacy invasion. Colleges without privacy in locker rooms may even face troubles competing for athletes applying for college.

Reconstruction will happen. Colleges spent even more to accommodate disabled-person access. Now more money is needed for privacy protection.

 


In a recent newsletter Barry Ritholz provided the following interesting "facts"
http://ritholtz.com/

6-10 people per year are killed by sharks worldwide

Other large predators kill numbers:

Lions (100)
Elephants (100)
Hippos (500)
Crocodiles (1,000)
Dogs (25,000)
Snakes (50,000

Jensen Comment
Every time a shark kills somebody it makes network news. Kills by a hippo or a snake go unreported.

It's something like when a cop kills a person versus when 50 are killed on the streets of Chicago on a weekend (yawn).


300 Random Animal Facts (that I did not attempt to verify) ---
http://www.thefactsite.com/2010/09/300-random-animal-facts.html


Question
What do the Albany Law School and many MBA programs have in common"

Answer
Bob are two-year programs that only charge for two years of education ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/07/albany-is-15th-law-school-to-offer-2-year-jd-but-first-to-charge-only-2-years-of-tuition.html

Many other MBA programs and most masters of accounting programs are less than two years but pile on the prerequisite courses such that many undergraduate students must take two years or more in the supposedly shorter programs.

When I was in the Stanford doctoral program one of my friends socially (from France) was getting his Ph.D. in physics. He completed his Ph.D. in one year, but Stanford charged him for three years of tuition.

Since the doctoral program for me was free (including room and board) I stuck around for six years dabbling in a lot of courses. It was then and only then that I learned to like mathematics. I almost became what was known at Texas A&M as the Phantom of the Library who lived hidden  in the library for some years.
 


Pokemon Go --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go

Jensen Comment
I didn't care for video games, and I never cared for computer games later on.
But tens of millions of people, including my children and grandchildren, are addicted to them.
What a waste of time.

Museums are Embracing Pokemon Go ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-14/find-pok-spots-at-these-major-museums-then-stay-for-the-art?cmpid=BBD071416_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=


Putin Peers Into Shadows Where 30 Million Toil on Fringes ---
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/putin-peers-into-shadows-where-30-million-toil-on-fringes/ar-BBuiX7j?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

Uncounted by statisticians and invisible to tax collectors, a population the size of Texas -- or about 30 million people -- plies its trade in the nooks and crannies of what’s become known as the “garage economy.” There, professions such as mechanics, builders, dentists and veterinarians conduct their business off-the-books and in cash. President Vladimir Putin is zeroing in on the phenomenon, said two participants in a recent Kremlin meeting on economic policy.

It’s the cops, prosecutors and taxes driving them underground, he told a gathering of ministers, advisers and regional bureaucrats, according to the people, who asked to remain unidentified because the discussion wasn’t public. Putin asked the “serious, bespectacled” lot in front of him to devise a way to ferret out the businesses and motivate them to legalize their operations, the people said.

The scale of this underworld, estimated at as much as a quarter of gross domestic product, presents Russia’s leader with a dilemma. For an economy that’s struggling to shake off a recession in an era of cheap oil, the millions of undocumented workers could prove an unrivaled resource as government finances run dry.

Jensen Comment
It's too bad the USA does not put the same or greater priority on its own $ 2+ trillion underground economy most likely much larger than the underground economy of Russia. In the USA this leads to great frauds such as working for more than $20 per hour while collecting welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, etc. ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm

One of the most effectvie ways to clobber the underground economy and underground crime is to do away with cash ala Kenya where it seems to be quite effectie.


"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


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


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

 




From the Scout Report on July 15, 2016

StayFocusd --- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji?hl=en 

Google Chrome users looking to boost their productivity may want to check out StayFocusd, an extension that enables users to limit the time they allow themselves to spend on designated websites. Once users add the extension, they can choose which websites they would like to limit their time surfing. One aspect of StayFocusd that may appeal to some users is that, unlike many productivity extensions and applications, it does not entirely block sites. Rather, StayFocusd allows users to allot a set amount of time to peruse marked sites. After this time is up, users will see a screen that says "Shouldn't You be Working?" when they attempt to load URLs that they have chosen to limit. Users may also remove URLs from this restricted list, but must wait 24 hours to access the site again. Thus, users can ensure that their daily browsing of social media, blogs, or newspapers is limited to a time of their choice.  


Jeopardy Rocks --- https://www.jeopardy.rocks 

Educators who are fans of using games to facilitate learning will appreciate Jeopardy Rocks. This free, easy-to-use tool allows users to create and save their own Jeopardy game questions to use in the classroom. Users can then facilitate their Jeopardy games by projecting the game board onto a screen, wall, or other surface. Facilitators can reveal new questions by clicking on each square and adjust scores simply by indicating whether a team answered correctly or incorrectly. Facilitators may choose to adjust the number of players (or teams) to accommodate different class sizes. Users will need to sign up for a free account to create and save games.


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


From the Scout Report on July 22, 2016

Flamyngo --- https://www.flamyngo.co 

Flamyngo is a free iPhone application designed to help travelers crowdsource suggestions when they visit new cities. To use Flamyngo, users select a city they plan to explore. Next, users can send an email, text, or Facebook message to friends in order to ask for suggestions of sites or restaurants to visit. Once messages are sent, the app will gereate a link where friends can add ideas (they will not need to download the application themselves). Flamyngo will then add these suggestions to your map, creating a personalized guidebook for your next trip. Flamyngo is compatible with Apple devices running iOS 9.1 or higher. Notably, Flamyngo is also available as a widget that can be added onto blogs.


Moo.do --- https://www.moo.do 

Moo.do allows users to import information from other organizational devices (including Google Tasks, Google Contacts, Workflowy, and Wunderlist) to create multi-pane to-do lists that indicate tasks to do, tasks in progress, and tasks completed. By adding hashtags and ampersands, users can tag their activities by topics or indicate when an activity needs to be completed. To-do lists can then be searched in order to identify items with common tags or due dates (e.g. "outreach project" or "tomorrow"). Once completed, the item may be automatically added to an archived list by selecting a check mark. This online to-do list application is currently available as a web application or as a phone application on Android devices.


Uncharted Territory: New Study Maps 180 Distinct Regions in the Brain
Updated map of the human brain hailed as a scientific tour de force
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/20/updated-map-of-the-human-brain-hailed-as-a-scientific-tour-de-force

New Brain Map Doubles Number of Known Regions
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-brain-map-doubles-known-number-regions-180959869/?no-ist

A multi-modal parcellation of the human cerebral cortex
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature18933.html

Brain Cartography: Modern Day Explorers are Mapping the Wiring of the Human
Mind
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/06/brain-mapping-human-connectome-project-brainprint-neuroscience-452121.html

The Many Ways to Map the Brain
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/new-directions-of-brain-mapping/491318

A First Big Step Toward Mapping the Human Brain
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/first-big-step-toward-mapping-human-brain


Free Online Tutorials, Videos, Course Materials, and Learning Centers


Education Tutorials

The Entire Discipline of Philosophy Visualized with Mapping Software: See All of the Complex Networks ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/the-entire-discipline-of-philosophy-visualized-with-mapping-software-see-all-of-the-complex-networks.html

Qatar Digital Library (what money can buy) --- http://www.qdl.qa/en

KQED: Education (resources for teachers) --- http://kqed.org/education

Signal to Noise (science for non-scientists) --- http://www.signaltonoisemag.com

ACRL TechConnect Blog --- http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect

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

Stuff You Missed in History Class --- http://www.missedinhistory.com

Booknotes: One Book. One Author. One Hour ---. http://booknotes.gmu.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

HHMI BioInteractive: Diversity of Organisms --- https://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/diversity-organisms

Undark (misc. science) --- http://undark.org

Signal to Noise (science for non-scientists) --- http://www.signaltonoisemag.com

Carry the One Radio (interviews with scientists) --- http://www.carrytheoneradio.com

ACRL TechConnect Blog --- http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect

ScienceOpen --- https://www.scienceopen.com

LANL: Periodic Table of Elements --- http://periodic.lanl.gov

The Periodic Table of Videos --- http://www.periodicvideos.com/ 

Apollo 17 in Real Time --- http://apollo17.org

The Sourcebook for Teaching Science: Periodic Tables --- http://www.csun.edu/science/chemistry/periodic_table/

Lab Lit: Writing Fiction Based on Real Science --- http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/lab-lit-writing-fiction-based-on-real-science

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

From the Scout Report on July 22, 2016

Uncharted Territory: New Study Maps 180 Distinct Regions in the Brain
Updated map of the human brain hailed as a scientific tour de force
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/20/updated-map-of-the-human-brain-hailed-as-a-scientific-tour-de-force

New Brain Map Doubles Number of Known Regions
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-brain-map-doubles-known-number-regions-180959869/?no-ist

A multi-modal parcellation of the human cerebral cortex
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature18933.html

Brain Cartography: Modern Day Explorers are Mapping the Wiring of the Human
Mind
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/06/brain-mapping-human-connectome-project-brainprint-neuroscience-452121.html

The Many Ways to Map the Brain
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/new-directions-of-brain-mapping/491318

A First Big Step Toward Mapping the Human Brain
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/first-big-step-toward-mapping-human-brain

 

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

The Many Worlds of Logic --- http://www.manyworldsoflogic.com

Data.gov (a place to start for downloading government data) --- https://www.data.gov
Bob Jensen's helpers for data search --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics

ScienceOpen --- https://www.scienceopen.com

Signal to Noise (science for non-scientists) --- http://www.signaltonoisemag.com

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

Black Quotidian (African American History) --- http://blackquotidian.com/anvc/black-quotidian

Booknotes: One Book. One Author. One Hour ---. http://booknotes.gmu.edu

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

The U.S Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright

Plagiarism --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

David Brin --- http://www.davidbrin.com/

Ina Fey --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Fey

Plagiarism in Academe Versus Comedy Versus Music

Acacemic/Fiction Idea Quotation

After all,” he muttered, “what can they do to shake the confidence of a fellow who’s got delusions of adequacy?
David Brin

"Delusions and Confidence"
A Google search turns up hundreds of links

Comedy Quotation

"Confidence in 10% Hard Work and 90% delusional "
Tina Fey
https://www.buzzfeed.com/samimain/inspirational-quotes-from-tina-fey?utm_term=.lk7Gd8rpPJ#.ct7en2ZpPN

Jensen Comment

In academia plagiarism is the borrowing of central ideas (themes) and/or literal quotations without attribution. This includes papers and presentations such as graduation speeches. There have been a number of university presidents fired after giving a graduation speech that had relatively small portions of plagiarized ideas or quotations without attributions.

The same is not the case in politics. Exhibit A is Joe Biden who was not fired for plagiarisms as a senator or as a USA Vice President even though he probably would have been fired as a university president for his public speaking plagiarisms. The excuse given is that faceless speech writers really committed the politicians' plagiarisms. Occasionally the speech writers get fired.

What's traditional in academic papers and presentations is that it's nearly always expected in both scholarship and research papers/presentations to set the stage early on by making attributions to both important ideas and quotations of previous contributions to what follows in the paper or presentation. Seldom is any research contribution to the knowledge base so seminal that there is no stage setting necessary.

The DMCA allows for reasonable (short) literal quotations without permission of the original authors. There are limitations and disputes regarding the length of cited quotations, but the idea is that an author cannot prevent public criticism of his or her work by not allowing any quotations. But these are not to be plagiarisms without attribution. These are to be quotations with attribution. Shortness can be defined in terms of proportion. For example, quoting three paragraphs of an entire book is a undisputably "short." Quoting three paragraphs from a very short article may be taking too much liberty.

 

In comedy plagiarism includes literal quotations without attributions but excludes failure to include attributions for ideas and themes of presentations and writings. In other words comedians are not expected to set the stage for the ideas of their comedy material and failure to do so is not plagiarism except in the case of literal uncited quotations. Even in the case of literal quotations comedians seem to take wide license quoting without attribution. For example, Milton Berle established somewhat of a reputation for using the comedy material of other comedians ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Berle
Even when he got away with it we would have to call his borrowing of literal quotations plagiarism. It's just not as common in comedy to get called to the carpet or the courts for uncited quotations. Most certainly ideas for comedy material usually are seldom given attributions. For example, nobody would expect Tina Fey to cite sources of ideas for a joke about cofidence and delusion. Writing an academic paper this topic, however, would be an entirely different matter.

 

Interestingly in the DMCA clips up to 30 seconds are usually allowed to be broadcast (in the news, shows, and courses) without permission of copyright holders. For example, Lady Gaga did a great job singing the USA National Anthem in the 2016 Super Bowl. Even though the NFL probably owns the copyright, neither the NFL nor Lady Gaga can prevent broadcasters and even professors in courses from using up to a 30-second clip of Lady Gaga's performance. There are exceptions such as when the only really interesting thing in a bystander's video of a shooting incident is the five seconds when the victim is shot.

Music is probably the strictest discipline regarding plagiarism. Many copyright infringement suits are focused on extremely short bits of music. Furthermore the copyright holder is more likely to claim millions of dollars in damages. In academic plagiarisms it is usually much more difficult to assess damages. It's much more common for the copyright holder to merely insist on removal of the plagiarism (cease and desist) such as plagiarism on a Website or a Website that gives attribution to an unreasonably long quotation.

The U.S Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright

America's broken digital copyright law is about to be challenged in court ---
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/digital-millennium-copyright-act-eff-supreme-court

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the US government over ‘unconstitutional’ use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit on Thursday that American copyright wonks, technologists and security researchers have been hotly awaiting for nearly 20 years.

If they succeed, one of America’s most controversial technology laws will be struck down, and countries all over the world who have been pressured by the US trade representative to adopt this American rule will have to figure out whether they’ll still enforce it, even after the US has given up on it.

The rule is section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, the “anti-circumvention” rule that makes it illegal to break an “access control” for copyrighted works. These “access controls” often manifest as “digital rights management” (DRM), and the DMCA gives them unique standing in law.

EFF is suing the US government, arguing that section 1201 of the DMCA is unconstitutional, and also that the Library of Congress and the copyright office have failed to perform their duties in the three-year DMCA 1201 exemption hearings.

What is digital rights management?

If you buy something, it’s yours, and – you can modify, configure, or use it any way you’d like, even if the manufacturer would prefer that you didn’t. But the law forbids you from doing otherwise legal things if you have to tamper with the DRM to do them.

Originally, this was used exclusively by the entertainment industries: by adding DRM to DVDs, they could prevent companies from making DVD players that accepted DVDs bought abroad. It’s not illegal to bring a DVD home from an overseas holiday and watch it, but if your DVD player recognises the disc as out-of-region, it is supposed to refuse to play it back, and the act of altering the DVD player to run out-of-region discs is unlawful under the DMCA’s section 1201. It could even be a crime carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense (the act of offering a region-free DVD player for sale, or even the neighbour’s kid helping you to deregionalise your DVD player, can be criminal acts).

Companies can only use the DMCA if they can argue that their DRM protected a copyrighted work. Nike can’t invoke section 1201 of the DMCA to prevent a rival company from offering replacement shoelaces for its trainers, because shoelaces and trainers aren’t copyrighted (or copyrightable). But once there’s software involved, copyright enters the picture because software itself can be copyrighted.

The proliferation of “smart” devices has put software – and potentially, the DMCA – into every part of our lives. Your car is a computer that surrounds your body. Auto manufacturers use DRM to prevent independent mechanics from reading out information from broken cars and to prevent diagnostic tool-makers from making smarter diagnostic equipment. Mechanics and tool-makers who want to know what’s wrong with your car have to either break the DRM (risking fines or even prison) or get the official manufacturer’s permission to compete, which drives up repair costs. In other words, now that there’s software in your car, the DMCA can be invoked to give manufacturers a monopoly over parts, service and features for them.

And it’s not just cars. Every three years, the US copyright office entertains proposals for limited exemptions to section 1201 of the DMCA.

In 2015, they heard from people who have been frustrated by anti-circumvention rules as applied to voting machines (a computer we put a democracy inside of); hospital equipment (a computer we put sick people inside of); medical implants (computers we put inside our bodies); as well as critical infrastructure, financial technology and more.

Continued in article

From the Scout Report on March 18, 2016

Teaching Copyright
https://www.teachingcopyright.org/

When California passed a law in 2006 requiring schools that accept
technology funding to educate their students about copyright, plagiarism,
and Internet safety, many states considered following suit. However, to
date there are few online curricula that help educators to present
copyright law in a way that is both balanced and thought provoking. Enter
Teaching Copyright, which boasts five lessons that seek to teach students
the basics of copyright while encouraging their creativity and curiosity.
Lessons cover such topics as copyright and the rewards of innovation, the
intricacies of fair use, free speech, public domain, and a review of what
students already know. The last lesson takes students through an
entertaining and educational mock trial that helps them master the
principles of fair use. [CNH]

 



2. Library of Congress: Timeline of Copyright Milestones
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/copyrightmystery/text/files/

Prior to the Statute of Anne, which was passed in England on April 10,
1710, the rights of authors and publishers to control the copying and
distribution of their work went largely unacknowledged. However, after that
landmark law, a number of nations instituted copyright laws similar to the
ones we know today, including laws passed in the post-Revolutionary War
United States. On this page from the Library of Congress, readers will find
an excellent timeline of copyright milestones, from the age of scribes
prior to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century to the age
of the Internet. Along the way they may enjoy perusing entries about the
Universal Copyright Convention, held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1952, the
amending copyright laws in 1980 to include computer programs, and the 1998
law that extended copyright protection to the life of an author plus 70
years after the author's death. Indeed, this excellent compilation helps
take "the mystery out of copyright," and offers a comprehensive look at
copyright law through the ages. [CNH]

 



3. Common Sense Media: Copyright and Fair Use Animation
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/videos/copyright-and-fair-use-animation

This three-minute video about copyright and fair use, which was produced by
Common Sense Media and intended for use by secondary teachers, provides an
excellent overview of basic concepts related to copyright law. For example,
the video offers five tips for using copyrighted Internet content,
including: check who owns it, get permission to use it, give credit to the
creator, buy it (if necessary), and use it responsibly. The video also
explains that content can be used fairly when the intention is related to
schoolwork and education, news reporting, criticizing or commenting, and
comedy or parody, but that the work must not be for profit and only small
bits of it can be presented. In addition to the short animation, the site
provides a helpful lesson plan called "Copyrights and Wrongs," as well as a
Video Discussion Guide to help students engage with the material. [CNH]


 



4. Copyright in Education Flowchart
https://exbibliolibris.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/copyright-flowchart.jpg

"Can I use material I found online for teaching or school work?" This
illuminating infographic answers the question in a step-by-step guide,
identifying what material can - and cannot - be used for teaching or school
purposes. For example, the flowchart suggests that readers who need media
to present their research or to assist with teaching might first consider
creating their own media. If they can't do that, they might search for
Public Domain materials. If they can't find what they're looking for in the
public domain, they might search for Creative Commons. If that doesn't
work, they can then think about whether they might claim Fair Use. The
infographic also includes a section on licensing one's own media, a section
on how to think about whether it might be feasible to claim fair use, and
instructions for how to ethically and legally claim fair use in certain
circumstances. [CNH]


 



5. Fair Use Evaluator

http://librarycopyright.net/resources/fairuse/

In the United States, use of copyrighted material is considered fair when
it is done for a limited and transformative purpose. Knowing what is
determined fair use and what isn't, however, is not always as easy as it
sounds. The Fair Use Evaluator, which was created by the American Library
Association's Office for Information Technology Policy, helps readers
through the process of deciding what is and isn't fair use under the U.S.
Copyright Code. To use the evaluator, select "Make a Fair Use Evaluation."
The program will then take readers through five steps, including Getting
Started, The Fair Use Evaluator, Provide Additional Information, Get a Hard
or Electronic Copy, and How to Use Your Analysis. In addition, on the
homepage readers may also select Learn More About Fair Use, for basic
information about fair use guidelines. As an interactive tool, the
Evaluator is a helpful resource for anyone unsure about fairness of use.
[CNH]


 



6. The United States Copyright Office
http://copyright.gov

The United States Copyright Office website virtually teems with information
about the multifarious intricacies and real world practicalities of
copyright law. Here readers may Register a Copyright, Record a Document,
Search Records, and Learn About Statutory Licensing. They may also engage
in various Tutorials that are designed to help users navigate the site,
such as an excellent Copyright Search Tutorial, which may be viewed in
PowerPoint, Webpage, PDF, and OpenDocument formats. Beginners to the wide
world of Copyright may benefit from the answers found in the Frequently
Asked Questions section, where they can find explanations of such
quandaries as "What is Copyright?" and "When is my work protected?" Finally
the Law and Policy page includes a range of services, including sections
dedicate to Copyright Law, Regulations, and Policy Reports, among many
others. Interested readers may also find the Fair Use Index especially
useful as it allows users to search jurisdictions and categories for
particular cases and judicial decisions. [CNH]

 



7. NYPL: Public Domain Collections
http://www.nypl.org/research/collections/digital-collections/public-domain

According to Copyright.gov, "A work of authorship is in the 'public domain'
if it is no longer under copyright protection or if it failed to meet the
requirements for copyright protection." Works in the public domain may be
used free of charge for any purpose. Amazingly, the New York Public Library
has recently placed more than 180,000 of the items in their Digital
Collections in the public domain. Readers may like to explore several tools
and projects designed to inspire use of the public domain resources. These
include Visualize the Public Domain, where readers may scout the public
domain resources by century, genre, collection, or color; Discover the
Collections, where experts post blog entries inviting users to use the
collections in interesting ways; and a series of Public Domain Remixes, in
which NYPL staff have used public domain materials to create groundbreaking
games and projects. In addition, readers may use the excellent search
function to explore the digital collections and discover for themselves
what might be useful. [CNH]

 



===== Intellectual Property and Licensing ===

8. WIPO: What is Intellectual Property?
http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/

As this excellent site from the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO) so succinctly explains, intellectual property (IP) refers to
creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works;
designs; and symbols, names, and images used in commerce. Types of IP
include Copyright, Patents, Trademarks, Industrial Designs, and
Geographical Indications. As a whole, the WIPO website is broadly
informative and readers will find a number of excellent Publications. For
example, the freely downloadable PDF "What is IP?" contains an introduction
and pithy chapters on the subjects of patents, trademarks, industrial
design, and geographical indications, as well as a chapter dedicated to
copyright and related rights. For a more comprehensive treatment, readers
will also find the freely downloadable "WIPO Intellectual Property
Handbook." [CNH]

 



9. Intellectual Property Law: Why Should I Care?
https://unitproj.library.ucla.edu/col/bruinsuccess/01/01.cfm

This entertaining site from the UCLA Library helps readers understand the
elaborate case law of intellectual property through illustrations, quizzes,
and colorful text boxes. After perusing the homepage, readers may like to
explore the various sections of the site. The first, Intellectual Property,
includes 15 subsections that explain the basics of copyright, fair use,
patents, trademarks, and other related topics before offering a quiz to
help readers maximize their learning. Need a File, Share a File delves into
copyright as related to the ever more common practice of file sharing,
while Citing and Documenting Sources provides an excellent primer on how to
avoid plagiarism and how to properly cite various types of media. For
readers working in a college context, this sterling resource from UCLA
libraries can provide students and professors with everything they need to
know about intellectual property in academia. [CNH]

 



10. Ten Simple Rules to Protect Your Intellectual Property
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3493459/

Scientists of all kinds will benefit from reading this excellent article
from the open access journal, PLoS: Computational Biology. The authors,
each of whom is well established in his field, offer ten simple rules that
might help researchers protect their intellectual property. These include
tips such as: Get Professional Help, Know Your (Intellectual Property)
Rights, Think about Why You Want IP, Be Realistic about What You Can, and
Cannot, Protect, Keep Your Idea Secret until You Have Filed a Patent
Application, and others. Each rule is accompanied by several explanatory
paragraphs that elucidate and clarify the points, making for an
exceptionally useful list of advice for scientists that would like to
protect their innovative work and develop it for the next phase of inquiry
and results.[CNH]

 



11. Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: Industries in Focus (PDF)
http://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/news/publications/IP_Report_March_2012.pdf

This 76-page report prepared by the Economics and Statistics Administration
and the United States Patent and Trademark Office makes the case that, far
from being secondary to the task, trademarks and other intellectual
property (IP) rights provide the very bedrock by which the United States
expands its economy and makes its place in the world. Key findings of the
report include the fact that the U.S. economy as a whole relies on some
form of IP, because nearly every industry either produces or uses
intellectual property. The report also identifies 75 industries that are
particularly IP-intensive, and these industries accounted for approximately
27 million jobs and almost 19 percent of employment in the year 2010. The
report also includes distinct sections dedicated to patents, trademarks,
copyrights, and employment, each of which are fact filled and educational
in their own right. [CNH]

 



12. Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org

Creative Commons is a nonprofit that offers free legal tools to creative
people who would like to share their work under specified conditions. On
the site, readers may like to start by searching the commons, which they
can do using the convenient search feature. A search turns up results from
the OpenClipArt library, Google, Wikimedia Commons, SoundCloud, and other
sources - all of it pre-approved for legal use. The site also features a
number of compelling features for users who would like to license their own
content. For example, under Licenses, users will find categories such as
About the Licenses, Choose a License, and Things to know before licensing
to understand available licensing options for particular products. On the
other hand, readers who would like to use the work of others may also read
about Best practices for attribution and Getting permission. Finally, the
Creative Commons blog is a regularly updated source of information about
licensing, public domain work, and the various artists and others that use
Creative Commons to license their work. [CNH]

 



13. Foter Blog: How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos
http://foter.com/blog/how-to-attribute-creative-commons-photos/

With more than 227 million images available for legal use on its site,
Creative Commons is a phenomenal resource for bloggers, educators, web
designers, and many others working in digital images. However, according to
the researchers at Foter Blog, more than 90 percent of Creative Commons
photos are not attributed at all. Of those that are attributed, less than
10 percent are attributed properly. This surprisingly clear infographic
provides concise directions for how, exactly, to attribute Creative Commons
content. First, the infographic explains what a Creative Commons license is
and what it allows users to do. Then it explains the different conditions
(Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works, and Share Alike) and
what they mean. Finally, the graphic offers some statistics on the most
popular licenses and categories before reviewing how users should attribute
photos, using a simple four-step process that includes citing the author,
the title of the work, the license type, and the copyright notices. For
readers who would like to understand how to properly attribute Creative
Commons content, this infographic is a must see. [CNH]

 



14. YouTube: A Shared Culture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQqZU8G7bAo

This snappy and succinct 3-minute video offers readers a concise
explanation of what Creative Commons is, what it does, and how artists,
corporations, musicians, bloggers, and anyone else might make use of it.
Put simply, according the video, Creative Commons is like a public park:
anyone can use a public park, as long as they follow certain guidelines.
Likewise, anyone can use the materials on the Creative Commons website, as
long as they correctly attribute the work, based on the Creative Commons
licensing system. In addition, artists and others who would like to share
their work may choose exactly how they would like it to be used. For
example, can it be used for commercial purposes, or not? Or, can people use
it to make derivative work? Or, do the users need to share alike? Creative
Commons seeks to build a global community of shared ideas, and this video
explains the process. [CNH]

 



15. Finding Public Domain & Creative Commons Media
http://guides.library.harvard.edu/Finding_Images

Subject matter experts at the Harvard Law School Library have compiled over
130 Research Guides  to assist students and other library patrons with
their research initiatives. Ranging in topic from Animal Law to Mergers &
Acquisitions to Visualization Tools, there are numerous resources to be
explored. One particular guide of note is the Public Domain and Creative
Commons Media Finder. This handy reference was crafted by Research
Librarian Meg Kribble and will help interested readers locate and correctly
attribute public domain and Creative Commons media for personal and
academic use. To start, the guide breaks down the difference between the
public domain and Creative Commons. Then, the guide links to a helpful
three-minute video that explains the Creative Commons process and offers an
infographic detailing the various types of Creative Commons licenses.
Perhaps most helpful, are the  annotated listings of public domain and
Creative Commons Web resources. This thorough compilation is sure to make
it easy to find Images, Audio Content, and Video Content for a variety of
projects and presentations. [CBD]

 


 

 "In Support of Taylor Swift, Economist," by David Feith, The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-support-of-taylor-swift-economist-1469056548?mod=djemMER

Never mind the feud with Kanye West, the pop star has waged more important fights defending the value of intellectual property.

Pop star Taylor Swift has been feuding in recent days with rapper Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian. The details of the drama are lurid and complicated, but young aficionados of Snapchat and Instagram have been following it all intently.

If only the same were true for other Taylor Swift feuds that have received less attention. Namely those the 26-year-old songstress has fought in defense of a principle often scorned by fellow celebrities and the social-media generation generally: the value of intellectual property. In battles against tech titans, Chinese e-commerce swindlers and others, Ms. Swift has repeatedly insisted on being paid for her music and brand—and in the process has taught some valuable lessons in basic economics.

This may be the “information wants to be free” era, when online content is glibly swiped by millions who would never dream of shoplifting, but Ms. Swift has a deep appreciation for the profit motive and the fruits it bestows on society.

Last year she picked a fight with Apple after the company announced plans to launch its Apple Music streaming service with a three-month trial period during which users wouldn’t pay subscription fees and Apple wouldn’t pay royalties for the songs streamed. It was a win-win for Apple and its users—but for songwriters, it meant turning over their music at no charge to secure a spot on Apple’s platform. That is, until Ms. Swift published an open letter, “To Apple, Love Taylor.”

Continued in the article

Bob Jensen's threads on the dreaded DMCA and Fair Use ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright

Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to "Law"


Math Tutorials

Chalkdust (mathematics magazine, including puzzles and humor) --- http://chalkdustmagazine.com

The Many Worlds of Logic --- http://www.manyworldsoflogic.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

See How The Gutenberg Press Worked: Demonstration Shows the Oldest Functioning Gutenberg Press in Action ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/how-the-gutenberg-press-worked.html

Stuff You Missed in History Class --- http://www.missedinhistory.com

The Many Worlds of Logic --- http://www.manyworldsoflogic.com

OAPEN (free books) --- http://www.oapen.org/home

Qatar Digital Library (what money can buy) --- http://www.qdl.qa/en

MoMA: Object:Photo (art history) --- http://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/#home

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

DC Digital Museum (Washington DC history) --- http://www.wdchumanities.org/dcdm/index

Women and the World of Dime Novels --- http://americanantiquarian.org/dimenovelwomen

Woolf Online (Virginia Woolf literature) --- http://www.woolfonline.com

Black Quotidian (African American History) --- http://blackquotidian.com/anvc/black-quotidian

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/

The British Museum: African Rock Art Image Project --- http://africanrockart.britishmuseum.org

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

Mozart's Got Talent (Humor) ---
https://www.youtube.com/embed/gKpFhPdyQLM?rel=0

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

Lab Lit: Writing Fiction Based on Real Science --- http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/lab-lit-writing-fiction-based-on-real-science

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/

July 13, 2016

July 14, 2016

July 16, 2016

July 18, 2016

July 19, 2016

July 21, 2016

July 22, 2016

July 23, 2016

July 25, 2016

July 26, 2016

 


In Touching Video, People with Alzheimer’s Tell Us Which Memories They Never Want to Forget ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/people-with-alzheimers-tell-us-which-memories-they-never-want-to-forget.html
Jensen Comment
My Uncle Ralph lived for decades in Mankato, Minnesota. One of the first signs he was getting worse with Alzheimer's is when, after letting his wife off at their church, he could not remember how to get home. That probably was not his most cherished memory, but sometimes it's the little things,like self-sufficiency, in life that add up to a big thing


2014 Leading Causes of Death According to the Center for Disease Control ---
http://www.snopes.com/causes-of-death-2016/

Heart disease: 614,348

Cancer: 591,699

Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 147,101

Accidents (unintentional injuries): 136,053

Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 133,103

Alzheimer's disease: 93,541

Diabetes: 76,488

Influenza and pneumonia: 55,227

Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,146

Intentional self-harm (suicide): 42,773

During that same year the FBI recorded 8,124 murders by firearms in the United States, a statistic that would indeed rank below all other entries on this list.

The usefulness of this information to make a point about gun issues is somewhat questionable, however.
None of the entries on the list save for the last involves intentional killing, while nearly every other entry on the list other than the last references some form of medical malady. It's an inescapable fact that everyone who manages to avoid being killed (intentionally or otherwise) by someone or something else first will eventually die of some sort of medical condition.

 


Go Figure!
The suicide rate per 100,000 person-years for active-duty soldiers who work in mechanical and electrical repair. A 2013 study found that that group has a higher suicide rate than soldiers whose jobs place them on the front line in combat positions.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/suicide-in-the-military/

Jensen Comment
I'm no expert, but could it be that the techies had more troubles with failed aspirations? My cousin Bill retired as major as a combat fighter pilot in both Europe and Viet Nam. He did not commit suicide, but he was unhappy in his post-retirement life as a television repairman.


Humor for July 2015

Oops!

91-year-old woman fills in crossword at museum - only to discover it was a £60,000 artwork

‎7‎/‎14‎/‎2016‎ ‎5‎:‎48‎:‎51‎ ‎PM · by NRx · 5 replies

The Telegraph ^ | 06-14-2016 | Justin Huggler

A 91-year-old woman has been questioned by police in Germany — after she filled in the blanks in a piece of modern art based on a crossword puzzle. The pensioner, who has not been named under German privacy law, was questioned under caution after she filled in the work valued at €80,000 (£67,000) with a biro. "Reading-work-piece", a 1977 work by Arthur Köpcke of the Fluxus movement, essentially looks like an empty crossword puzzle. Next to the work is a sign which reads: “Insert words”. The hapless pensioner explained to police that she was simply following the instructions. “The lady...


Mozart's Got Talent (Humor) --- https://www.youtube.com/embed/gKpFhPdyQLM?rel=0


It's All In How You Look At Things
http://www.life-with-confidence.com/confidence-humor.html

A pessimist sees the glass as half empty, the optimist sees it as half full, and to the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

If the world didn't suck, you'd fall off.

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Which runs faster, heat or cold?
Heat, everyone knows you can catch a cold.

My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

Opportunities always look bigger going than coming.

Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for they shall never cease to be amused.

If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

We can't change the weather, we can only accept it which means we should all learn from the weather; it pays no attention to criticism.


Forwarded by Paula

A lexophile of  course!

  
How does Moses make tea?  Hebrews it.  
   Venison for dinner again?  Oh deer!  
   A cartoonist was found dead in his home.  Details are  sketchy.
   I used to be a banker, but then I lost  interest.
   Haunted French pancakes give me the  crêpes.
   England has no kidney bank, but it does have a  Liverpool  .
   I tried to catch some fog, but I  mist.
   They told me I had type-A blood, but it was a  Typo.
   I changed my iPod's name to Titanic. It's syncing  now.
   Jokes about German sausage are the  wurst.
   I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid, but he says he can stop any  time.
   I stayed up all night to see where the sun went, and then it dawned on  me.
   This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never  met herbivore.
   When chemists die, they  barium.
   I'm reading a book about anti-gravity.  I just can't put it  down.
   I did a theatrical performance about puns.  It was a play on  words.
   Why were the Indians here first?  They had  reservations.
   I didn't like my beard at first.  Then it grew on  me.
   Did you hear about the cross-eyed teacher who lost her job because she  couldn't control her pupils?
   When you get a bladder infection, urine  trouble.
   Broken pencils are  pointless.
   What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary?  A  thesaurus.
   I dropped out of communism class because of lousy  Marx.
   All the toilets in  New York 's police stations have been  stolen.  The police have nothing to go on.
   I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded  dough.
   Velcro - what a rip  off!
   Don't worry about old age; it doesn't  last.

 


What came first: The diet or the donut?

Study: Fat People More Likely to Be Stupid

‎7‎/‎14‎/‎2016‎ ‎4‎:‎46‎:‎49‎ ‎PM · by bkopto · 63 replies

Breitbart ^ | 7/14/2016 | Ben Kew

A new study suggests that people are are overweight tend to be less intelligent than those who are not. According to the study, people who are overweight have less grey and white matter in key parts of the brain, meaning their brain develops an “altered reward processing,” effectively meaning they lack the ability to control their eating. The results were extracted from “very thorough” brain scans of 32 people from Baltimore....

300 Random Animal Facts (that I did not attempt to verify) ---
http://www.thefactsite.com/2010/09/300-random-animal-facts.html

 




Humor July  2016 --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q3.htm#Humor0716.htm  

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

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