Political Correctness Offends Me
John Cleese Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klu1SCueDow
Not Humor
The phrase "living in 1984" relates to "Big Brother" in the writing of George
Orwell
Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature In the past I've provided links to various
types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
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
Born without Arms and Legs:
‘I’m Glad I Don’t Need Any Shoes’: Janis McDavid, 25, was born with no arms and
legs. But he still goes to university, drives a car and travels the world. Today
he is embarking on his career. How, though, does he do it?
http://www.yerepouni-news.com/archives/277990
If you do a search for 'Janis McDavid" images you will find that he's truly a
handsome young man and an inspiration for us all.
I'm about halfway
through reading "The Undoing Project." It isn't as easy a read as Liar's
Poker or Moneyball, but the subject matter is fascinating. I
particularly enjoyed this sentence describing some of the papers by
professors Kahneman and Tversky: "They had to play, at least in the
beginning, by the rules of the academic game, and in that game it wasn't
quite respectable to be easily understood."
Jensen
Comment
To this I would add the failure to estimate medical expenses in retirement even
when you're relatively healthy. First, note that Medicare is not free. You must
pay for Medicare insurance even though you've been taxed for it for most or all
of your working life. Secondly, Medicare only pays 80% of the hospital and
doctor charges. You can pay less by taking out Supplemental Medicare coverage,
but this coverage is relatively expensive for what it pays for most people. Much
depends on your medical expenses. Blue Cross Anthem thus far makes out like a
bandit in my case but has lost a fortune on my wife due mostly to her enormous
surgery expenses.
Medicines
are expensive in spite of paying out more for Medicare D coverage. Firstly,
there are many medications not covered by Medicare D. Secondly, there is a donut
hole. For example, most users of insulin will hit the donut hole before the end
of the year and find themselves paying out hundreds of dollars just for insulin
before the end of the year.
Many
retirees fail to estimate what how lousy the standard deduction is for reducing
income taxes. For most of their working lives they saved on income tax by
deducting interest on their home mortgage, employee business expenses, etc.
Unless they have sizeable added medical expenses in retirement they discover
that they are no longer able to itemize deductions, and that the standard
deduction is not a suitable substitute.
Many retired parents who prepared for their own expense emergencies failed to
factor in the future pleas of their children and grandchildren for financial
assistance. Those children and grandchildren might experience divorces, health
disasters, job losses, etc. and make appeals for funding from retired parents
and grandparents. Sometimes it comes down to tough love once again
The family of a Spokane woman who was murdered along with her son can pursue
a lawsuit over whether the killer’s psychiatrist should have done more to
protect them, the Washington Supreme Court held in a case with implications
for mental-health professionals around the state.
Rebecca Schiering and one of her sons, Phillip, were shot by her ex-fiance,
Jan DeMeerleer, in 2010. DeMeerleer, who also wounded another of Schiering’s
sons in the attack, then returned to his own home and killed himself.
Schiering’s family sued the killer’s psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Ashby, and
Spokane Psychiatric Clinic, alleging they were negligent in their treatment
of DeMeerleer and that they should have done more to protect the victims.
Ashby knew his patient had previously expressed homicidal and suicidal
ideas, but found no “real clinical problem” in their most recent meeting,
three months before the killings.
In a 6-3 opinion, the Supreme Court held Thursday that the lawsuit can go
forward. The majority said mental-health professionals must act with
reasonable care to identify and mitigate the dangerousness of psychiatric
patients.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Sounds like a good way for the psychiatrist to become the killer's main target.
I wonder how this affects some revelations in a killer's
college essay graded by a professor.
Reply from a school teacher on December 27, 2016
Good Morning, Bob.
In the public school
district where I work, we are required to immediately report to the
designated authority all statements, actions, writings, etc., that are
suicidal or homicidal.
I also follow this rule
in my personal life. These are serious issues and professional
help should always be sought.
If we are to live in
harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate
freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or
otherwise defends his own ideas.
Political Correctness Offends Me
John Cleese Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klu1SCueDow
Not Humor
The phrase "living in 1984" relates to "Big Brother" in the writings of George
Orwell
Jensen Comment
Remember the familiar pedagogy (sitll widely used in large universities) where a
professor lectures to 1,000 or more students who then also meet in much smaller
recitation sections who meet with TAs.
I have to wonder how this might change if the students still have the
recitation sections when the large lectures are replaced with free MOOCs from
prestigious universities. Of course a university doing so runs the risk of being
criticized for too much outsourcing. However, this might work for a very small
number of courses (such as experimenting with one course).
This outsourcing model might work even better in smaller universities
struggling to provide enough resources for some majors such as when a small
Computer Science department outsourcers some programming languages to
prestigious universities like MIT.
Jensen Comment
Wal-Mart has always tended to pay the managers within stores quite well and
tended to promote employees to managers from within.
This is more of an experiment with paying higher wages to non-managers.
Wal-Mart has always had pretty good fringe benefits such as free college
(on-line) and employee training. The most controversial fringe was health care
that in the past had a substantial waiting period between the date of hire and
the date health care benefits became available. This tended to weed out
employees who were not going to stay on the job such as those with addiction
problems and high absenteeism..
Jensen Comment
A huge problem lies in choosing the sample size of critics. This particular
study suggests it's more likely to get a majority to agree as sample size is
degreased. For example, having only three tasters increases the odds of all
favoring McDonalds based on the results of this particular study.. It's hard to
say what increasing the sample size to a million critics my become since
predicting that from a very small pre-sample is very tenuous in this case.
There's also a problem of politics. In particular, Chic-fil-A is likely to
have a positive or negative outcome based upon it's conservative political
stances rather than taste of its chicken nuggets. Even though this was a blind
taste test, some sample subjects may assume that the best tasting nuggets have
to come from Chic-fil-A and vote for or against those nuggets according to
politics rather than taste.
What I'm trying to say is that taste my not always be in the eyes, nose, and
tongue of the beholder.
Jensen Comment
As "research and publication" took over as the leading criterion for promotion
and tenure the academic world experienced and exposion of so-called refereed
journals, many of them from profit-seeking publishers. The result was an
explosion in quantity and an a bifurcation of quality from extremes of highest
quality to garbage with sham refereeing. The good news was an increase in
specialty journals. The bad news was a shortage of dedicated referees.
One controversial factor was the impact of technology on publication and
distribution costs, especially in the rise of e-journals that did not even
entail hard copy printing of journals. This made it possible for libraries to be
almost the entire source of revenue for some journals. My point here is that
journals no longer had to rely on reader subscriptions to foot the bill in a
market of supply and demand. Interestingly, the market of supply and demand now
applies to blogs rather than "refereed" publications. For a blog to be
successful it has to satisfy the needs of readers rather than libraries that
fail to allocate resources based upon user demand. For example, one faculty
member may be responsible for a campus library's subscription to an obscure
journal.
What the above PLOS One Website fails to get across is that opposing the
benefits of publishing many papers are the frauds perpetrated by making it so
easy for faculty to get promotions and tenure based on the many P&T committees
and administrators who are willing to count publication records rather than read
the publications.
Jensen Comment
Maybe he should transfer to Wayne State or Michigan State where algebra is no
longer required. Actually this student is naive about the difference between
education and training in the early years of college. The purpose of algebra and
calculus is to educate of abstract reasoning and to keep options open for
changing majors. I recommend that financial literacy (that includes some basics
on tax knowledge) be part of the common core in the first two years of college.
But I don't think this is what the particular student in this case had in mind
about "learning taxes" that we normally teach in later years in both schools of
accounting and law. Since he has a 4.0 GPA perhaps he should have tested out of
algebra and taken whatever Kansas State allows for substitution in the common
core.
I don't think this student had the best kind of academic counseling.
Jensen Comment
All three of our sons became seriously unemployed their careers. One thing about
unemployment is that it tends to make for greater appreciation when employment
is found. They no longer complain as much about their supervisors. Maybe all
three sons now have better supervisors. Or perhaps they are happier because
employment beats the alternative. I was more fortunate in life. I was happy in
every one of my jobs and never had a supervisor that I did not like and
appreciate. It may have helped that, like my father, I'm a workaholic.
Examples of How Both Files and Backup Files Can Be Lost Forever
1. There are 30,000+ emails lost forever in the Hillary Clinton email
scandal. They were apparently destroyed before the Wikileaks backup system
obtained access.
2. The IRS lost Lois Lerner's backup files after being ordered by Congress to
protect those backup files in a scandal where President Obama is suspected of
illegally using the IRS to help his 2012 re-election campaign.
Security research
company White Ops has uncovered what it calls the “largest and most
profitable ad fraud operation to strike digital advertising to date.”
Russian criminals acted as an advertising firm, promising to host ads on
sites like Fox News, ESPN, or CBS Sports. In reality, they built fake web
pages that no real person would visit. Then, they used a sophisticated army
of bots, scattered across 500,000 different U.S. IP addresses, to view the
ads. Those bots were programmed to be active during the daytime, appeared to
be using Chrome on a Mac, and even had fake Facebook accounts. To anyone
checking stats, they looked like real people. The approach netted the
hackers between $3 million and $5 million per day. "[It] is a beautiful
simulacrum of a real browser," explained White Ops CEO Michael Tiffany to
CNN. "This is the kind of theft in which nothing has gone missing." Apart
from $180 million—because the trick was so good that it took two months to
spot.
Treasury Secretary Hank
Paulson's Bank of America Extortion Scheme (Hustle) Finally Laid to Rest
From the
CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on November 23,
2016
Do the Hustle? Nope
The government’s Hustle
case against Bank of America Corp. is
finally dead. The case, in which the government accused the bank’s
Countrywide Financial Corp. unit of
churning out shoddy mortgage securities in the run-up to the financial
crisis, already was thrown out by a U.S. appeals court in May. The U.S.
attorney’s office in Manhattan, which had first brought the case in 2012,
then asked the appeals court to reconsider its decision, a request that was
denied.
Jensen Comment
A better word for "Hustle" is Treasury Department
"Extortion." When the economy collapsed in 2007 due to poisoned mortgages
BofA had no poisoned mortgages. Then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson came
calling like an extortionist according to former BofS CEO Ken Lewis. Paulson
gave BofA no choice but to buy Countrywide Financial with its millions of
poisoned mortgages. The secret intent was to give Countrywide deeper pockets
so that the Federal Government could turn around a sue BofA billions for all
the financial crimes of Countrywide Financial.
There was never any doubt about the high crimes of
Countrywide Financial on the main streets of cities and towns across the
USA. Countrywide issued millions of mortgages to borrowers having no hope of
meeting their mortgage obligations.
It makes me feel good that Paulson finally got his just
dessert. I only wish he would be sued. As the former CEO of Goldman Sachs he
bailed out Goldman with milk and honey and pissed on BofA. Now he's retired
on his millions from Goldman and seemingly can't be touched for his
extortion crimes.
Paulson Also Forced Merrill Lynch onto Bank of America Merrill Lynch had a friend in Hank Paulson, but
he was no friend to Bank of America shareholders
The ex-US Treasury Secretary
has admitted telling the Bank of America boss he might lose his job if he walked
away from a merger from Merrill Lynch. The former US Treasury Secretary says the
merger was necessary Hank Paulson warned the bank's chief executive Kenneth
Lewis that the Federal Reserve could oust him and the board if the rescue did
not proceed. But Mr. Paulson insisted that remarks he made were "appropriate."
Bank of America bought Merrill during the height of the financial crisis and
suffered severe losses.
"Paulson admits bank merger threat,"
BBC News, July 15, 2009 ---
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8152858.stm
Jensen Comment
In the dark ages when I got my first job in a CPA firm (the Denver Office of
Ernst & Ernst) the CPA profession was virtually a male profession. We had one
woman in the back room doing tax returns who was not allowed to see clients. Now
CPA firms hire more women than men --- in part because more women than men
graduate in accounting. Because of the 150-hour requirement most graduates
aspiring to become CPAs earn masters degrees in accounting. CPA firms are also
making a concerted effort to break the glass ceiling to partnership status. The
largest CPA firms have family leave programs and flexible work scheduling where
client work can often be done at home using modern networking technology.
The sticking point for men and women is that usually less then 20% of the new
hires become partners in larger CPA firms. However, most of those new hires
don't aspire to become partners subject to high tension and pressures to obtain
and maintain clients for their firms. What new hires typically want most from
CPA firms are experience, costly training in specialties, and exposure to
clients who often offer higher paying jobs with less travel and workload
pressures.
Professors of accounting usually like the high turnover in the first ten
years of CPA firm employment. This creates the openings for our latest graduates
to get experience, costly training in specialties, and placement in a corporate
world reluctant to hire new graduates who have no experience and specialty
training. It seems to be win-win as far as turnover is concerned.
Not surprisingly some of our accounting graduates start their own small firms
after being well-trained by the larger CPA firms. Firms specializing in tax
services and investment consulting services are especially popular for younger
professionals seeking to go out on their own. CPAs are often much more trusted
than brokers and other finance consultants who are not CPAs with tax
specialties. Often law firms secretly outsource their tax return preparations to
CPA specialists.
HOne would think there there would be more wanting to go back for accounting
Ph.D. degrees, but the huge pre-requisites in mathematics and statistics in
virtually all respected accounting doctoral programs are barriers to entry,
especially since life in academe is in most instances less financially
rewarding. Accounting doctoral programs are no longer about accounting.
The good news is, however, that most accounting doctoral programs are free,
including room and board allowances. Even so, there are now less than 150 Ph.D.
graduates in accounting annually across the USA ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoctInfo.html
Accounting doctoral programs were larger when accounting doctoral programs were
about accounting and there was less publish or perish pressure for non-tenured
accounting faculty.
There are no incentives to earn an accounting Ph.D. for graduates who do not
want academic careers. Certificates of specialty are much more important for
non-academic careers such as CPA certificates, CMA certificates. forensic
accounting certificates, CFA certificates, etc. The world of accounting can be a
very, very technical world much like the world of medicine is a very technical
world of sub-specialties.
Jensen Comment
I once listened to a presentation by a professor from a major university who
said the entire course grade was based upon a team project in a class of 10
students. He said that he resolved the team grading dilemma by giving
every student an A grade every semester he taught the course. It's no wonder
that this course had to be limited to 10 students per semester. Otherwise every
university student meeting the prerequisites would surely want this course.
Also what's the point of even grading the project? I suspect he really
didn't spend mjch time grading the project.
Jensen Comment
The most rapid and fearsome explosions of world population are in Asia and
Africa. It occurred to me that the fastest way to destroy the United Nations
would be to have all UN representatives be chosen by popular vote. What would
happen is that Asia and Africa would take over the UN and the NATO countries and
Russia would probably pull out, thereby defeating the purpose of the UN in
unifying the world.
Patrick
J. Curran struggles with the problem when studying alcoholism in families.
Quynh C. Nguyen sees it when analyzing housing-voucher programs. And the
Nobel laureate Harold E. Varmus encounters it while developing genomic
databases for cancer patients.
Their trouble isn’t with sharing their data — all three professors are eager
participants in the open-data revolution.
Instead, the problem is confidently sharing and interpreting data — huge
amounts of it — with relevance and accuracy.
As they and other scientists embrace sharing, they’re finding that computer
systems are quite good at storing and easing access to the enormous
quantities of information they generate. But comparing and synthesizing all
that data, in differing formats and styles and methods, requires human skill
and judgment. And even the best aren’t sure how to do it, raising questions
of whether the nationwide rush toward open data will really mean a momentous
revolution in scientific progress or just a whole new level ofgnarlyreproducibilityissues.
Mr. Curran is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill who studies the effects of alcoholic parents on their
children. He combines findings from multiple studies and sees a challenge
lurking in the varied scientific meanings and assessments that professional
colleagues apply to terms such as "anxiety" and "depression."
"The thing that keeps me up at night," he said, "is, Am I making a
substantive theoretical conclusion that is based on some artifact of how we
scored the scale?"
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One of the huge problems in finance and accounting is that empirical
researchers often use the same purchased databases like CompuStat, CRSP, and
AuditAnalytics. Efforts to replicate/reproduce research findings are rare,
really rare, in financial accounting and when they do happen they usually use
the same data. Errors in that data happen a lot, and any research conclusions
drawn from faulty data are likely to be the same conclusions drawn in
replication attempts,. This is why findings that contradict earlier findings are
so rare in accounting research.
AP reveals political
science professor who cited a focus group as key source for his many
interviews and essays never had one.
Iowa State University will
not take any action involving a professor who has made misleading references
to a focus group in frequent commentaries on U.S. politics.
Steffen Schmidt, a
political science professor at the university, is an oft-quoted source in
local and state media outlets for his insight about issues related to the
presidential election and politics more widely. In his comments to the media
and opinion pieces, he has frequently referenced a focus group that informs
his public comments.
An Associated Press
report found
that the term “focus group” in Schmidt's statements and writings refers not
to a carefully designed academic study or a set of trusted expert sources
but to anyone Schmidt might speak with about an issue he comments on.
The AP began looking into
the focus group in November after Schmidt cited its findings in
a critique of
Hillary Clinton’s outreach to African-American, women and LGBTQ voters.
After the AP filed an open records request for communications about the
focus group, he acknowledged that there was no set panel.
Schmidt said in an email
that he was not aware the term would be confusing and plans to stop using it
in the future.
“My thought is that I
don’t need to use any term in future, since the columns are my views,” he
added.
Iowa State’s leadership
drew a distinction between use of the term in formal research in scholarly
venues and in opinions offered to the media or in news columns.
“His use of the term
‘focus group’ has been to provide context or support for opinion pieces he
has shared with media,” said Wolfgang Kliemann, the university’s associate
vice president for research and research integrity officer. “At no point has
he presented this as formal research, nor does it meet the definition of
research in a federal or academic sense. We have been clear about Dr.
Schmidt’s intent.”
Marybeth Gasman is a
University of Pennsylvania higher education professor and the editor of
Academics Going Public: How to Write and Speak Beyond Academe.
She said that argument put forth by Iowa State doesn’t hold water. The term
“focus group” is not a confusing one, and it does not take on a different
meaning depending on the context, she said.
“He knows exactly what it
means,” Gasman said. “He also knows it lends an enormous amount of weight to
his argument if he uses that term.”
A focus group usually involves a random collection of people -- not a group
of an academic’s friends or colleagues and students he encounters, as
Schmidt told the AP he saw the term. A professor's focus group research may
also require the approval of a university institutional review board, a
committee set up to approve and monitor research involving human subjects
Jensen Comment
The article does not stress what seems to me to be obvious in the graphic ---
raising the minimum wage may be dysfunctional. For example, California, Oregon,
and Washington that have raised minimum rages have some of the worst problems
with counties struggling financially. Firstly, there's a problem with cost of
living. A minimums wage of $25 per hour might not be enough in those states
counties where living costs are relatively high. For example, in San Francisco
nearly all low-wage workers have to be homeless or cummute long distances from
outside the city. This is not the case in San Antonio, Texas.
Secondly, there's a problem of how businesses and local governments
deal with minimum wages. One problem is outsourcing such as when a university or
courthouse outsourcers its janitorial services. A related problem is to cut back
on working hours as wage rates increase. Another problem, especially in
California and Oregon is discouraging new business ventures due to taxation and
regulations. For example, the Town of Portland, Oregon just imposed a surtax on
some companies (like Wal-Mart) to raise money to help the homeless. This may
help the homeless at the expense of low-wage workers who will actually see their
incomes decline due to working less hours and losing opportunities for jobs in
companies that now shirk moving into Portland.
Jensen Comment
About the only thing we can conclude is that minimum wages have differing
impacts in differing circumstances such as local employment markets, worker
ages, living costs, and fringe benefits such as the value of
training/apprenticeships. In a really free market economy some workers might
benefit greatly from working for nothing if the training is extremely valuable.
And we have to consider the prospects of workers on minimum wages. Wal-Mart has
low wages but in most instances those wages are above minimum wage. But Wal-Mart
also offers solid promotion tracks for quality workers, and the promotions in
almost all instances are relatively attractive even if the work itself can be
boring and stressful at the same time.
Minimum wage impact data from Seattle may be highly misleading when compared
to similar studies in San Antonio.
Minimum wage impact data may be quite different when comparing Burger King in
San Antonio with construction workers in San Antonio. This is because Burger
King resists hiring undocumented workers nationwide whereas in San Antonio there
are probably more undocumented construction workers in the underground
(cash-only) market than those who work for reported wages and fringe benefits.
In my opinion raising the minimum wage in San Antonio will only strengthen the
underground market job supply. Authorities are hesitant to shut down the
underground labor supply since doing so will badly hurt thousands and thousands
of families of undocumented workers.
Comparing minimum wages in Europe with the USA is also misleading. In spite
of the current media coverage of immigration issues in Europe, those issues are
relatively small compared to immigration issues for people easily getting into
the USA from Latin and South America.
Jensen Comment
This is a case for highly stratified sampling. The voices we should be listening
to most are teachers who are meritorious for both their online and their onsite
teaching. Those that we should listen to least are those that do a lousy job
onsite and online. The problem is how much to listen to those teachers who are
meritorious onsite and lousy online. More than anything else, this is probably
an attitude problem for which there is no easy attitude adjustment.
If done well, online teaching tends to burn out teachers who allow instant
messaging or very frequent messaging. In part this is because it's so easy to
contact a teacher online relative to having to trudge across campus to catch an
onsite teacher during office hours. It's a little like why tech support often
will allow telephone support but not email support. The email support system may
become overwhelmed whereas students/users become discouraged by telephone queues
and try harder to solve problems on their own.
December 17 Reply from Elliot Kamlet
Hi Bob
I teach on-line during
our winter and summer sessions. I'm really sensitive to the texting
issue so I do not take texts, although I can text my students through
remind.com if the need arises. I do not accept email from students
about general course questions (as opposed to my grandmother died and I
can't take the test).
The only way they
question is through the Blackboard discussion board. That has the
impact of a question in class. All students can see the question
and answer. I check 3-4 times per day-not constantly like email and
texts. It makes the experience that much more enjoyable.
If I were fresh out of
school and setting myself up, I wouldn't teach on-line and the elder
statesmen, as you say, would oppose it. After all, if I taught online,
and researched at home, I mighty never come to school. All those
discussions that happen in the hallways and generate lines of thought would
not be part of my experience. I wonder if that will continue on out
into the future.
The Obama administration on Wednesday finalized a
rule that lets wind-energy companies operate high-speed turbines for up to
30 years — even if means killing or injuring thousands of federally
protected bald and golden eagles.
Under the new rule, wind companies and other power
providers will not face a penalty if they kill or injure up to 4,200 bald
eagles, nearly four times the current limit.
Deaths of the more rare golden eagles would be allowed without penalty so
long as companies minimize losses by taking steps such as retrofitting power
poles to reduce the risk of electrocution.
The new rule will conserve eagles while also
spurring development of a pollution-free energy source intended to ease
global warming, a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's energy plan, said
Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe.
"No animal says America like the bald eagle," Ashe
said in a statement, calling recovery of the bald eagle "one of our greatest
national conservation achievements."
The new rule attempts to build on that success,
Ashe said, adding that the Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to balance
energy development with eagle conservation. Wind power has increased
significantly since Obama took office, and wind turbines as tall as 30-story
buildings are rising across the country. The wind towers have spinning
rotors as wide as a passenger jet's wingspan, and blades reach speeds of up
to 170 mph at the tips, creating tornado-like vortexes.
The surge in wind power has generally been
well-received in the environmental community, but bird deaths — and eagle
deaths in particular — have been a source of contention.
The birds are not endangered species but are
protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory
Bird Treaty Act. The laws prohibit killing, selling or otherwise harming
eagles, their nests or eggs without a permit.
It's unclear what toll wind energy companies
are having on eagle populations, although Ashe said as many 500 golden
eagles a year are killed by collisions with wind towers, power lines,
buildings, cars and trucks. Thousands more are killed by gunshots and
poisonings.
Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000
birds each year in North America, making it the most threatening form of
green energy.
And yet, it’s also one of the most rapidly
expanding energy industries: more than 49,000 individual wind turbines now
exist across 39 states. The wind industry has the incentive to stop the
slaughter: Thanks to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, it’s illegal to kill any
bird protected by the Act—even if the death is "incidental," meaning it
occurs unintentionally on the part of the wind farm.
The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act recommends
that to avoid eagle deaths, specifically, companies seriously consider where
they site their wind developments, and that they also limit turbines’ impact
using techniques like radar to detect incoming birds. But as the accident at
the Peñascal wind farm shows, it’s unclear if deterrents like these actually
work. The Ways Wind Farms Try to Scare Birds Away There are many kinds of
retrofits that people are testing to hopefully make wind turbines better for
birds.
Here are some of the options (the Audubon
Society thinks clean energy is more important that the banning of
windmills).
Having made his living in the utility industry,
Warfel, a 17-year island resident, said he analyzed the project as well as
Block Island’s power problems, and concluded that they could have been
solved much more cheaply with energy conservation and on-island resources.
He accused the Block Island Power Co. of being a “rogue utility” not
properly regulated by the state that left the island vulnerable to
Deepwater’s pitch. “I see no joy in taking this historic viewshed and
adulterating it for the benefit of D.E. Shaw,” he said.
Costs Environmentalists Don't Like to Measure or Disclose
Carl Sagan is famed for saying, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent
on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows about science and
technology.” He could have been talking directly about lithium-ion
batteries. Chances are you are sitting within three feet of something that
uses lithium-ion technology, heck you are probably reading these words
thanks to lithium-ion batteries. Yet, not
that many people really understand what goes into them.
So how do they work? Like any battery, lithium-ions work by creating a flow
of current (electrons) between a positively charged (missing electrons)
cathode and a negatively charged anode (extra electrons), through a
conductive electrolyte. Lithium makes a great battery because it is both
very conductive, making it a good electrolyte, allows for extremely high
electrical potential. And of course, because this electrochemical reaction
is reversible, the batteries are readily rechargeable.
As great as lithium is for batteries, it has a dark side as well: The stuff
is downright nasty. Lithium is flammable and highly reactive, as
anyone who has seen photos of burning a Tesla can attest,
but that’s the least of our worries. The EPA
has linked
the use of extremely powerful solvents in the creation of lithium
electrolytes and cathodes to everything from cancer to neurological
problems. Specifically, the cobalt used in the creation of the most energy
dense lithium-ion batteries is poisonous and extremely carcinogenic.
Pulmonary, neurological, and respiratory problems have all been connected to
cobalt exposure.
A good rule of thumb is that any industrial process that makes liberal use
of the word ‘slurry’ is not good for pandas, or for that matter people. And,
boy, does slurry come up a lot in the battery-making process.
Other combinations of lithium are not as bad, but none is exactly good. The
lithium-iron phosphate used in lower energy density batteries is better in
terms of its carcinogenic effect, but might be worse in terms of the impact
on the biosphere.
Is it getting hot in here?
Clearly then, EVs and plug-in hybrids have environmental costs. What effects
however, do lithium-ion batteries have on John Q. Polar Bear? Well, a
recent study from Norway
looked at the global-warming potential of the complete lifecycle of EVs,
from mining to recycling. Previous studies hadn’t accounted for the
energy-intensive process of building EVs, and missed the point: They’re not
that much better than gasoline cars.
The best outcome for EVs was a 24-percent improvement in global-warming
potential over the average gas powered car, and between 10 percent and 14
percent over diesel. These numbers are nothing to sneeze at, but they change
radically depending on the source of electricity that EVs are powered on.
The above numbers rely on the European power mix, which more heavily favors
nuclear, hydroelectric, and renewable sources of energy than other parts of
the world.
The global warming potential for EVs that rely on natural gas – generally
considered to be the cleanest fossil fuel – show an improvement of only 12
percent over gasoline, and break even with diesel.
Most alarming, EVs that depend on coal for their electricity are actually 17
percent to 27 percent worse than diesel
or gas engines. That is especially bad for the United States, because we
derive close to 45 percent of our electricity from coal. In states like
Texas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, that number is much closer to 100 percent.
That’s right folks; for residents of some of the most populous states,
buying an EV is not only toxic, it’s warming the planet more than its
gas-powered counterparts.
With cars that supposedly generate “zero tailpipe emissions,” how are these
pollution numbers even possible? The simple answer is that as well as being
messy to produce; battery production requires a tremendous amount of
electricity. The initial production of the vehicle and the batteries
together make up something like 40 percent of the total carbon footprint of
an EV – nearly double that of an equivalent gasoline-powered vehicle.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In fairness coal is on it's way out is some nations, but not in India, China,
and various coal-rich nations. Cleaner natural gas, propane, nuclear fuel, and
hydrogen will still be major power sources on the grid for years to come
All these sources of grid power to recharge batteries are relatively costly..
The hottest selling CD of the year is from Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, who sold 1.25 million CDs in five weeks according to
Billboard, blowing away all his younger (and alive) competition. There’s a
catch, though: Universal Music Group dropped a box set of Mozart’s complete
discography to mark the 225th anniversary of his death, and each of the 200
discs in the set counts as a sale. So only about 6,000 buyers are
responsible for Mozart topping the pops
NEW YORK — Having a family while working at American Express is about to get
a lot better.
Starting in January, the financial services giant will expand its paid
parental leave policy for mothers and fathers to 20 weeks at full pay, plus
another six to eight weeks for women who give birth and require medical
leave. Full-time and part-time employees who have worked at Amex for at
least a year are eligible.
That’s a big shift from the company’s current policy of offering six weeks
of paid leave for the primary parent plus another six to eight weeks for
birth mothers who require medical leave. Secondary caregivers, meanwhile,
have gotten just two weeks.
Under the new policy, parents will also have access to a 24-hour lactation
consultant. And mothers who go on business trips will be able to ship their
breast milk home for free.
In addition, expectant parents will have access to a parent concierge, whom
they can go to for information on the company’s family benefits and
resources.
And employees who wish to have a child will receive up to $35,000 for
adoption or surrogacy for up to two children. Those undergoing infertility
treatments, meanwhile, will receive up to a lifetime maximum of $35,000 to
help defray costs.
Ikea, AXA also get more generous
Amex joins a growing list of companies that have made their parental and
family leave policies more generous in the past two years.
President-elect Donald Trump has warned companies
that they are not going to leave the United States anymore "without
consequences." He has lived up to his threat by pressuring Carrier to give
up its planned move to Monterrey, Mexico, in exchange for a taxpayer
handout. It is a safe bet that other U.S. companies will be descending on
Washington looking for handouts in the name of "fair trade" and "leveling
the playing field."
Part of Carrier's problem is the congressional
miracle created for the U.S. metal industry. Import restrictions placed on
steel, copper tubing and aluminum extrusions benefit American producers of
those products. Not having to worry about foreign steel, copper tubing and
aluminum extrusions, American producers of those products can charge higher
prices and maintain higher employment. The real cost of import restrictions
is the harm they do to steel-, copper- and aluminum-using manufacturers.
Companies can escape some of those U.S. government-imposed costs simply by
moving across the border.
There are other government-imposed costs that can
be avoided through relocation. The U.S. corporate income tax is the highest
in the world. Slashing the U.S. corporate income tax would reduce incentives
to relocate. While we're at it, there should be an elimination of the
taxation of foreign earnings when they are repatriated into the U.S.
Finally, we should apply reasoning to the onerous regulations emerging from
unelected bureaucracies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.
If you're looking for a good example of the effect
of a nearly completed congressional miracle, it would be the U.S. candy
manufacturing industry. American Sugar Alliance spends millions of dollars
lobbying Congress to impose restrictions on foreign sugar, in the form of
tariffs and quotas. That means the American sugar producers can charge
higher prices, create more jobs and have higher profits. But that's just
stage one of the effect of the congressionally created miracle.
Chicago used to be America's candy capital. Today
it's a mere shadow of its former self. Brach's used to employ about 2,300
Americans; now most of its jobs are in Mexico. Ferrara Candy Co. has also
moved much of its production to Mexico. Wages are indeed lower in Mexico,
but wages are not the only factor in candy manufacturers' flight from
America. Life Savers, which manufactured in America for 90 years, moved to
Canada, where wages are comparable to ours. By moving to Canada, Life Savers
became more competitive because it saved itself a whopping $10 million a
year in sugar costs.
Mac upgrades, once a
frequent ritual, are few and far between. The Mac Pro, Apple's marquee
computer, hasn't been refreshed since 2013. The affordable and flexible Mac
mini was last upgraded in 2014. And when a new machine does roll out, the
results are sometimes underwhelming, if not infuriating, to devotees.
In October, after more
than 500 days without an update, Apple unveiled the new MacBook Pro with a
slimmer design and louder speakers. The laptop garnered mostly favorable
reviews from the technology press but grumbles from creative types, a key
constituency, who said the device under-performed rival products.
Interviews with people
familiar with Apple's inner workings reveal that the Mac is getting far less
attention than it once did. They say the Mac team has lost clout with the
famed industrial design group led by Jony Ive and the company's software
team. They also describe a lack of clear direction from senior
management, departures of key people working on Mac hardware and technical
challenges that have delayed the roll-out of new computers.
While the Mac generates
about 10 percent of Apple sales, the company can't afford to alienate
professional designers and other business customers. After all, they helped
fuel Apple's revival in the late 1990s. In a stinging critique, Peter Kirn,
founder of a website for music and video creators, wrote: "This is a company
with no real vision for what its most creative users actually do with their
most advanced machines."
If more Mac users
switch, the Apple ecosystem will become less sticky—opening the door to
people abandoning higher-value products like the iPhone and iPad.
People now have more
options. Microsoft Corp., once derided by Mac loyalists for its clunky,
buggy software, offers Windows 10, which provides the tablet type
functionality Apple pioneered with the iPad. Microsoft's Surface computers
offer Apple-esque quality and a well-reviewed creative paint program aimed
at the Mac's audience. Sensing an opportunity, Microsoft called the MacBook
Pro a
"disappointment" and
said more users than ever were switching to its Surface laptops.
An Apple spokesman
declined to comment. However, the company has said the Macintosh remains one
of its most important products and denies it takes a back seat to other
gadgets.
Four years ago at
Apple's annual developer conference, marketing chief Phil Schiller pledged
to keep the computer front and center in the company's product
arsenal. "Nobody turns over their entire line as quickly and completely as
we do at Apple," Schiller said. "We’re really proud of the engineering team
and the work they do to do this quick so you can get the exact product you
need." Two years later, the company held a 30th birthday party for the
Macintosh, a splashy event that featured a OneRepublic concert at Apple's
Cupertino, California headquarters. The company also created a website
celebrating the Mac's history.
To be fair, Apple
depends on Intel Corp., which still makes key chips for Macs. Like the rest
of the PC industry, Apple's innovation and product cycles are sometimes
constrained by when Intel produces new chips—a
process that's getting
more difficult.
10.
Google Books Case Finally Ends
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the last appeal of the Authors
Guild in the nearly decade-old Google Books copyright case.
9.
Open Data Initiatives
This year saw continued growth of efforts to make research data freely
available.
8.
Libraries Catch Pokémon Go Fever
Many libraries got on board with the latest augmented reality app based on
collecting and fighting with other Pokémon creatures.
5.
Welcome, Robot Overlords
This year AI agents won a game against a grandmaster of Go, made medical
diagnoses, and drove a truck across the highway. Time will tell how these
advances impact libraries.
4.
Sci-Hub
Piracy of academic research became a big league success via the website Sci-Hub,
raising many questions and discussions about the need for such a clandestine
distribution of knowledge.
3.
"Illegal Aliens"
After the U.S. Library of Congress announced the Subject Heading "Illegal
Aliens" would be replaced with the terms "Noncitizens" and "Unauthorized
immigration," Congress legislated a halt to the renaming process.
1.
Our "Post-truth" Era
The circumstances resulting in the naming of OED's word of the year, namely
the rise of fake news and our current political climate, make librarians and
other educators as important as ever.
The Vegetarian By Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith
War and Turpentine By Stefan Hertmans. Translated by David McKay.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails By
Sarah Bakewell
In the Darkroom By Susan Faludi
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between By Hisham Matar
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City By Matthew Desmond
Jensen Comment
This is a book that shows us the dark side of USA poverty. It's an
eye-opening book about government welfare policies and programs gone
bad.
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the
Radical Right By Jane Mayer
Jensen Comment
There are 400 billionaires in the USA: Half are Good (Democrats) and
Half are Bad (Republicans)
A better title for this book would've been "A Billionaires Guide for
Political Correctness" (Of course Oprah and Bill Moyers love it)
Michael Lewis’s brilliant book celebrates Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Israeli-American psychologists who are our
age’s apostles of doubt about human reason. The timing is fortunate,
given that overconfident experts may have caused and then failed to
predict such momentous events as Brexit and the election of Donald
Trump.
Mr. Kahneman and Tversky (who died in 1996) first
started working together in 1969. They were well-matched. The Holocaust
survivor Mr. Kahneman chronically doubted even himself. The brash
Tversky targeted his doubts toward others, especially (as one
acquaintance noted) “people who don’t know the difference between
knowing and not knowing.” Testing people with quizzes in their
laboratory, they found a host of “cognitive biases” afflicting rational
thinking.
One bias they found is that we underestimate
uncertainty. In hindsight bias, for example, test subjects misremembered
their own predictions as being correct. As Tversky explained, “we find
ourselves unable to predict what will happen; yet, after the fact we
explain what did happen with a great deal of confidence. . . . It leads
us to believe that there is a less uncertain world than there actually
is.” Mr. Lewis is outraged by McKinsey & Co. coaching their consultants
to radiate certainty while billing clients huge fees to forecast such
unknowable variables as the future price of oil. The work of Tversky and
Mr. Kahneman convinced Mr. Lewis that, as he puts it when summarizing
the view of a jaded former consultant, such “confidence was a sign of
fraudulence.”
Failing to process uncertainty
correctly, we attach too much importance to too small a number of
observations. Basketball teams believe that players suddenly have a “hot
hand” after they have made a string of baskets, so you should pass them
the ball. Tversky showed that the hot hand was a myth—among many small
samples of shooting attempts, there will randomly be some streaks.
Instead of a hot hand, there was “regression to the mean”—players fall
back down to their average shooting prowess after a streak. Likewise a
“cold” player will move back up to his own average. (Both Mr. Lewis and
his subjects love sports examples; Mr. Lewis now says that he realizes
the insights chronicled in his 2003 “Moneyball,” about flawed judgment
in baseball, had been predicted by Mr. Kahneman and Tversky all along.)
Failing to understand regression to the
mean is a ubiquitous source of prediction errors, such as expecting
China’s world-record streak of high economic growth rates to continue
forever (it won’t). Mr. Kahneman showed that such flawed thinking had
even messed up the Israeli Air Force. Officers praised pilots after a
great landing and berated them after a terrible one. Officers then
noticed that the next landing after a fantastic one was worse, while the
one after a horrendous one was better. The Air Force concluded that
praise backfired while criticism improved performance. Mr. Kahneman
noted that this spurious conclusion failed to understand regression to
the mean. When he repeated this story to test subjects later, they made
up stories about why praise backfired—they were also blind to the
regression to the mean. Mr. Kahneman wrote: “It is part of the human
condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and
rewarded for punishing them.”
We also process uncertainty about people
badly, resorting to stereotypes based on a small number of vivid
examples about different types of people. Nobody in basketball thought
of an awkward Chinese-American as a typical star, so nobody drafted Jeremy Lin in 2010. The Knicks discovered his abilities only in 2012 after a rash
of injuries forced them to play him. Tversky and Mr. Kahneman found that
stereotypes are more powerful than the logic of probability. They told
test subjects that a fictitious “Linda” was smart and socially conscious
and asked which is more likely: (a) that Linda is a bank teller or (b)
that Linda is a bank teller and a feminist. Subjects chose (b) even
though the subset of feminist bank tellers has to be smaller than the
set of all bank tellers (feminist and non-feminist). Linda was just too
irresistible a stereotype of a feminist to obey the laws of sets and
probability.
Today vivid examples of Muslim
terrorists have the far more serious consequence of inducing many to
vastly overestimate the likelihood that any random Muslim might be a
terrorist. A passenger on an American Airlines flight in May reported a
suspicious dark-haired man next to her scribbling what looked like
Arabic on a piece of paper. Security personnel pulled him off the plane
only to discover that he was an Italian professor of economics at the
University of Pennsylvania who had been doing differential equations.
It would be wrong to mock uneducated
people for such mistakes, because Mr. Kahneman and Tversky found that
even those trained in statistics exhibit the same cognitive biases.
Indeed, there exist no experts without cognitive biases to fix everyone
else’s cognitive biases.
Tversky sadly died much too young, at age 59.
Mr. Kahneman went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, then
wrote a best-selling book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” in 2011—the next
great book to read after this one. There Mr. Kahneman balanced out the
account a bit. He and Tversky had focused on mistakes, but there are
many things that the brain does well—as Mr. Lewis also notes.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One of my all-time favorite writers is Michael Lewis. I first encountered
him in my research on derivative financial instruments frauds. My "timeline"
of these frauds has many quotes from books by Michael Lewis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
Environmental groups raced to the scene in West Kalimantan province, on the
island of Borneo, to find a charred wasteland: smoldering fires, orangutans
driven from their nests, and signs of an extensive release of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere.
“There was pretty much no forest left,” said Karmele Llano Sánchez, director
of the nonprofit International Animal Rescue’s orangutan rescue group, which
set out to save the endangered primates. “All the forest had burned.”
Fingers pointed to the
Rajawali Group, a sprawling local conglomerate known for its
ties
to powerful politicians like Malaysia’s
scandal-plagued
prime minister. But lesser known is how some of the world’s largest banks
have helped Rajawali — and other global agricultural powerhouses — expand
their plantation empires.
The year before the
clearing of trees in West Kalimantan, Rajawali’s plantation arm secured $235
million in loans — funds that the Indonesian company used to buy out a
partner and bolster its landholdings — from banks including
Credit Suisse
and
Bank of America,
according to an examination of lending data by The New York Times.
Jensen Comment
This is a variation of the Cuban Model wherein every Cuban gets free housing,
free education, free medical services, free transportation, and free coupon
books for food and beer. Unlike Finland, however, there's not much incentive to
become employed since the maximum wage allowed is $27 per day.
This Finnish Model is an experiment akin to a negative income tax favored by
conservative economist Milton Friedman. Neither the Finnish Model nor the
Negative Income Tax Model, however, would work well in large economies having
massive underground (cash-only) economies where many people supposedly being low
in income are really secretly employed for cash supplementing their reported
incomes. Examples of economies having huge underground economies include the USA
and India. India is now trying to fight back against the underground economy by
replacing cash with digital payment systems having records of payments. However,
thus far the experiment in India is a disaster since it was too big a transition
implemented much too quickly.
There's potential unfairness in the Finnish Model and the Negative Income Tax
Model for people living alone versus people living in co-habitation such as is
common in marriage. It is harder to live alone on a $40,000 cash benefit than to
live with another person and doubling up two $40,000 cash payments or living
with another person earning $200,000 per year.
The Cuban model is better in many instances to giving cash for not working
since many people are irresponsible with money --- such as letting the
kids go hungry and not paying the rent so that the cash can be spent on booze,
drugs, gambling, cruises, etc.
However good it sounds on paper, however, the Cuban model is not sustainable.
The same can probably be said for the new Finnish Model and the Negative Income
Tax Model. They can probably only work in a nation having an enormous windfall
to support enormous numbers of people who do not work --- Kuwait comes first to
mind before the crash in oil prices. Norway could not make it on oil money alone
even before oil prices crashed.. North Korea would like to win by extortion
where the rest of the world pays enormous amounts to prevent North Korea from
selling WMDs to terrorists. There's great risk to this strategy, however, since
North Korea might be destroyed in retaliation if terrorists use those WMDs.
His self-awareness
evinced itself most notably during a discussion about the relevance of Cuban
revolutionary socialism. I had asked him if he believed that the Cuban model
was still something worth exporting.
He answered, “The Cuban
model doesn't even work for us anymore.”
As I wrote at the time, this struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella
moments—it seemed as if the leader of the Revolution had just said, in
essence, “never mind.”
Continued in article
In Cuba where the goal was to eliminate inequality, Fidel Castro found that
his ration books, free housing, free public transportation, and minimal wages
destroyed incentives to work.
Fidel Castro told a
visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't
work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously
steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.
The fact that things
are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly
news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's president, has said the same thing
repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution
is sure to raise eyebrows.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a
national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic
system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied:
"The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday
in a post on his Atlantic blog.
He said Castro made the
comment casually over lunch following a long talk about the Middle East, and
did not elaborate. The Cuban government had no immediate comment on
Goldberg's account.
Since stepping down
from power in 2006, the ex-president has focused almost entirely on
international affairs and said very little about Cuba and its politics,
perhaps to limit the perception he is stepping on his brother's toes.
Goldberg, who traveled
to Cuba at Castro's invitation last week to discuss a recent Atlantic
article he wrote about Iran's nuclear program, also reported on Tuesday that
Castro questioned his own actions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,
including his recommendation to Soviet leaders that they use nuclear weapons
against the United States.
Even after the fall of
the Soviet Union, Cuba has clung to its communist system.
The state controls well
over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month
in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation
and housing. At least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to
them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.
President Raul Castro
and others have instituted a series of limited economic reforms, and have
warned Cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from
the government. But the president has also made it clear he has no desire to
depart from Cuba's socialist system or embrace capitalism.
Fidel Castro stepped
down temporarily in July 2006 due to a serious illness that nearly killed
him.
He resigned permanently
two years later, but remains head of the Communist Party. After staying
almost entirely out of the spotlight for four years, he re-emerged in July
and now speaks frequently about international affairs. He has been warning
for weeks of the threat of a nuclear war over Iran.
Castro's interview with
Goldberg is the only one he has given to an American journalist since he
left office.
For Mac users concerned
about cybersecurity, OverSight is a free security tool designed to alert
users when the microphone or webcam on their computers have been activated.
As the creators of OverSight note, "[o]ne of the most insidious actions of
malware" is that it can "[abuse] the audio and video capabilities of an
infected host to record an unknowing user." The creators go on to say, that
"while the webcam's LED will turn on whenever a session is initially
started, new research has shown that malware can surreptitiously piggyback
into such existing sessions [such as Facetime or Skype sessions] and record
both audio and video - without fear of detection." For more information
about OverSight and to download this tool, check out the link above. [MMB]
Gmail users interested
in adding some simplicity to their lives will want to check out deseat.me, a
tool that identifies websites that you've previously signed up for in order
to help users unsubscribe. By visiting the website above and signing into
Google, users can see the names of organizations and businesses where they
currently have subscriptions. For each email list, visitors can select to
keep the subscription or to add it to the "Delete Queue." A heads up: adding
sites to the Delete Queue does not automatically unsubscribe users, but
users can click on a link to the host site's webpage in order to
unsubscribe.
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to Lawhttp://depts.washington.edu/nwcenter/lessonplans/ethical-dilemma-self-driving-cars/lele
More About Social Correctness Than Political Correctness Lake Superior State University's 41st Annual List
of Banished Words ---
http://www.lssu.edu/banished/
Jensen Comment
Much depends upon context. Motivational speakers make millions of dollars
beating socially incorrect words to death. Rappers make millions beating
politically incorrect words to death.
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
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.
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.
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)
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
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/
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