I
Tidbits on April 17, 2017
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Set 01 of
Renate's Pictures From Germany
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Renate/April2017/Renate01.htm
Tidbits on April 17, 2017
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
Google Scholar ---
https://scholar.google.com/
Wikipedia ---
https://www.wikipedia.org/
Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm
Bob Jensen's World Library ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
USA Debt Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
American Accounting Association 2016 Centennial Video ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home
This video may only be available to AAA Commons subscribers (free I think)
NOVA: Treasures of the Earth: Gems ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/treasures-earth-gems.html
YouTube: Math Mornings at Yale ---
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqHnHG5X2PXBVZsf_rvAwGnUgZ-mGdqCy
YouTube: Infinite Series (infinity) ---
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs4aHmggTfFrpkPcWSaBN9g
Quickies
138 Short Animated Introductions to the World’s Greatest Ideas: Plato, Michel
Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/138-short-animated-introductions-to-the-worlds-greatest-ideas.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Flying Surf Board ---
http://www.flixxy.com/the-incredible-flyboard-air.htm
Is He the Best Magician Ever ---
http://1funny.com/magic-trick-leave-you-stunned/
Jim Henson’s Commercials for Wilkins Coffee: 15 Twisted Minutes of Muppet
Coffee Ads (1957-1961) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/03/jim-hensons-commercials-for-wilkins-coffee-15-twisted-minutes-of-muppet-coffee-ads-1957-1961.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
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
Hear Jimi Hendrix’s Virtuoso Guitar Performances in Isolated
Tracks: “Fire,” “Purple Haze,” “Third Stone from the Sun” & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/03/jimi-hendrixs-virtuoso-guitar-performances-in-isolated-tracks.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Watch 450 NPR Tiny Desk Concerts: Intimate Performances from The
Pixies, Adele, Wilco, Yo-Yo Ma & Many More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/03/450-npr-tiny-desk-concerts.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
NPR Full Concerts ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1109
A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music (jazz) from Haruki Murakami’s
Personal Record Collection ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/a-3350-song-playlist-of-music-from-haruki-murakamis-personal-record-collection.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Watch Frank Sinatra Record “It Was a Very Good Year” in the
Studio in 1965, and You’ll Know Why They Called Him “The Voice”
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/watch-frank-sinatra-record-it-was-a-very-good-year-in-the-studio-in-1965.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
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
Download 437 Issues of Soviet Photo Magazine, the Soviet Union’s
Historic Photography Journal (1926-1991) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/03/download-437-issues-of-soviet-photo.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
NASA's $1 billion Jupiter probe just sent back breathtaking new
images of the gas giant ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-jupiter-images-nasa-juno-2017-3
NASA's Astronauts ---
http://time.com/unseen-apollo/?xid=newsletter-brief
Chinese Cities With No People (ideal for avoiding civilian
casualties in a bombing raid) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-chinese-cities-are-ghost-towns-2017-4
National Geographic Society: Gray Wolf Educator's Guide ---
http://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/gray-wolf-educator-guide
These historic black and white photos have been transformed into
colour masterpieces by a 21-year-old Brazilian artist ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/black-and-white-photos-transformed-into-colour-2017-2
The World's Great Cities Before They Were Cities ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/images-worlds-greatest-cities-history-2017-3
The Wall of Birds ---
https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/features/wallofbirds
Photos that show where 30 world leaders live (actually most have
multiple residences) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/where-world-leaders-live-2017-3
Things You Never Knew About the Eiffel Tower ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/eiffel-tower-facts-and-history-2017-3/#the-eiffel-tower-wasnt-the-brainchild-of-gustave-eiffel-1
Photos Show How the USA Attack on Syria Unfolded ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-photos-syria-airstrike-2017-4
Bob Jensen's threads on art history ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#ArtHistory
Apple's $5 billion campus opens next month — here's what it
looks like now
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-park-campus-drone-flyover-photos-video-2017-3
David and Gladys Wright House (Frank Lloyd Wright) ---
http://davidwrighthouse.org
Musee des Beaux-Artes: Collections (art works) ---
http://mbarouen.fr/en/collections
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
Dictionary of the Bood ---
http://lisnews.org/the_dictionary_of_the_book
Marginalia Review of Books ---
http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org
Amazon's List of 100 Books to Read in Your Lifetime (not many ancient
classics or or other free books in this listing)---
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-100-best-books-to-read-in-your-lifetime-2017-3
P.G. Wodehouse, Great American Humorist?
https://daily.jstor.org/p-g-wodehouse-great-american-humorist/
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 April 17, 2017
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2017/TidbitsQuotations041717.htm
USA Debt Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/ ubl
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
Microsoft just released a huge new update for Windows 10 — here's what's
new (including more control over timing of updates)
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-windows-10-creators-update-whats-new-2017-4
Note that this article is a slide show.
The updates may not be so "huge" for most users (like me for instance).
Congratulations to Trinity University's Fiorenza Bruni on the publication
of her poem
The Dream
Voices de la Luna, A Quarterly Poetry & Arts Magazine
February 2017
http://voicesdelaluna.org/201702/TOC.html
This was a poem shw wrote 20 years ago.
It's going to take some getting used to as our journals, books, email
messages, letters, etc. do away with the singular (think I, me, he, him,
himself, she, her, and herself) with the plural (think they, their, theirself,
and them) where we used to use the singular case for just one person. The
Wall Street Journal writes about this by quoting an acceptance letter from a
Dean Powell at Brown University where they writes
(now supposedly politically correct grammar) in the new politically correct
(plural) case.
"A Letter From An Ivy League Admissions Dean," by James Freeman,
The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2017 ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-letter-from-an-ivy-league-admissions-dean-1492107041?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb
. . .
Oddly, the note referred to the accepted student
not as “she” but as “they.” Dean Powell’s letter also stated that our
reader’s daughter had no doubt worked hard and made positive contributions
to “their” school and community. Our reader reports that his perplexed
family initially thought that Brown had made a word-processing error. That
was before they listened to a voice mail message from the school
congratulating his daughter and referring to her as “them.”
. . .
The letter from Dean Powell included a total of
four short paragraphs, including this one: “And now, as we invite you to
join the Brown family, we encourage you to allow [daughter’s name] to chart
their own course. Just as you have always been there, now we will provide
support, challenge and opportunities for growth.”
Nearly a complete stranger, Mr. Powell is writing a
short, error-filled letter to parents claiming that his organization is fit
to replace them. No doubt the “Brown family” with all its “thems” and
“theys” can offer a wealth of valuable educational opportunities. But anyone
who buys the line that competent parenting is part of the package has
probably never set foot on campus.
Jensen Comment
They (meaning I) am going to continue to use such politically-incorrect words
like " I, me, he, him, himself, she, her, herself" just because we is too
old to become two old men (no longer a politically-correct word) in one old
body.
It might be an interesting writing workshop exercise next semester to rewrite
all the politically incorrect graduation speeches that will be given this coming
May and June. What celebrity is going to make a fool out of theirself by
speaking in the new politically correct plural doublespeak in a graduation
speech?
How Are Colleges Protecting Their Data?
http://www.chronicle.com/article/keeping-up-with-the-growing/239704?cid=db&elqTrackId=9ef7f21030e349f692c2e54bfcfcc9f6&elq=60253c1dcbb04737b458b23041f01ba5&elqaid=13391&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5556
Hint
It's complicated and varied.
A Free 700-Page Chess Manual Explains 1,000 Chess Tactics in Plain English
---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/a-free-700-page-chess-manual-explains-1000-chess-tactics-in-plain-english.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
MIT: Technology and Inequality ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531726/technology-and-inequality/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=d1f1d0c2d1-Weekend_Reads&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-d1f1d0c2d1-153727301&mc_cid=d1f1d0c2d1&mc_eid=fe7f400ea3
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture
capitalists are fond of arguing they are disrupting hidebound industries and
“changing the world”— the implicit assumption being that such change is
good. In this feature, we explore how technology is indeed changing our
economy, but in a way that’s leaving more and more people behind.
Interesting Facts You Probably Did Not Know About the History of Amazon
---
http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-history-facts-2017-4/#amazon-wasnt-the-companys-original-name-1
California is getting so much power from solar that wholesale electricity
prices are turning negative ---
https://qz.com/953614/california-produced-so-much-power-from-solar-energy-this-spring-that-wholesale-electricity-prices-turned-negative/
Jensen Comment
When power companies buy solar power on the wholesale market they have to store
it in a costly manner. This is why wholesale prices are a lot lower than retail
prices.
MIT: Praying for an Energy Miracle ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/422836/praying-for-an-energy-miracle/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=d1f1d0c2d1-Weekend_Reads&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-d1f1d0c2d1-153727301&mc_cid=d1f1d0c2d1&mc_eid=fe7f400ea3
Solar and wind power are increasingly important as
a means of generating electricity, but they account for a small fraction of
America’s total energy use. Sadly, we still need some major advances to
guide us to our clean-energy future.
Jensen Comment
The oil and gas industry keeps lowering prices to make alternative energy
sources in need of taxpayer subsidies to compete. Batteries are giving hope to
the solar power industry, but batteries add considerably to the cost of solar
power.
The mood in America is becoming more negative about taxpayer subsidies for
alternative energies. Even the greens of California decided to charge each
electric car owner $100 annually for use of the state's roads and bridges ---
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1109824_even-california-imposes-new-fee-on-electric-cars-in-lieu-of-gas-taxes
This is way to low, but it does signal the a changing mood about giving electric
car owners free rides on roadways.
Current tax reform measures for the entire USA will probably result in lower
subsidies for wind and solar.
If a family has one and only one car it will probably not be an electric car
due to the limited range of around 200 miles (give or take) between charges and
battery inefficiency in cold climates. Electric cars are relatively expensive
second cars for higher income families. Another drawback is the lack of electric
car infrastructure (think charging stations) across the USA compared to gas
stations. Electric cars are more viable in small and warm nations like Israel.
The bottom line is that the oil and gas industry will not go down without a
price war.
Also applause must be given to traditional vehicles that pay for roadway new
construction, maintenance, and snow/ice removal.
In California the new added 12 cent gas tax is now paying for under-funded
pensions of state workers. Electric car owners aren't paying a farthing for
those pensions.
How to Mislead With Statistics
OECD: Taxing Wages in 2017 ---
http://www.oecd.org/tax/taxing-wages-20725124.htm
Sorry America Your Taxes Aren't High ---
http://www.oecd.org/tax/taxing-wages-20725124.htm
Jensen Comment
Time and time again I've lamented that some things are generally misleading when
they are compared between nations or even between the various 50 states of the
USA.. For example, poverty is relative. A family below the poverty line in the
USA is really not comparable to a family below the poverty line in many other
countries of the world such as in India, China, and the poor nations of Africa.
One problem in comparing poverty is that the safety nets vary so much for where
in the USA there's Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, homeless shelters,
aid to dependent children, earned income tax credits, disability income, etc.
Tax rates are also not comparable unless you also compare what those taxes
buy in the way of goods and services. For example, to the population of the USA
not below the poverty line and not on Medicare there is no "free" national
health care services and medications relative to nations having taxpayer-funded
national health care for everybody.
In the USA Medicare does not pay for nursing homes for afflicted patients not
in hospitals whereas many national health care plans pay for nursing home care.
Some nations like Germany have taxpayer-funded higher education, although the
funding is not available for education and training for over half the high
school graduates.
In Europe less than half of the Tier 2 (high school) graduates are even allowed
to go to college or free trade schools ---
OECD Study Published in 2014: List of countries
by 25- to 34-year-olds having a tertiary education degree ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_25-_to_34-year-olds_having_a_tertiary_education_degre
But employer-funded apprentice programs are much better in Europe than the USA.
Also there are many types of taxes that are difficult to compare. Many
nations supplement income taxes with highly variable sales taxes and VAT taxes
that are collected ultimately in prices rather than tax assessments.
Nations also vary in terms of public services such as transportation. Cars
are luxury goods in nations like Denmark (due largely to high taxes) where
people move about cheaply on bicycles and low-cost public transportation. In
most parts of the USA cars are essential because of bad weather and lousy public
transportation outside the largest metropolitan areas.
I could carry on with my rant about misleading world statistics, but to do so
might take the rest of my life.
MIT: Google’s been experimenting with trying to understand your
crappy drawings for a while, but its new (free) AutoDraw AI effortlessly turns
your doodles into perfect pictures ---
https://www.autodraw.com/
Also see
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-autodraw-artificial-intelligence-art-photos-2017-4
Want to Understand AI? Try Sketching a Duck for a Neural Network ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602941/want-to-understand-ai-try-sketching-a-duck-for-a-neural-network/
Big Data for Student Success Still Limited to Early Adopters ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Big-Data-for-Student-Success/239713?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=247ba275d27747ae8bf1e73ea670bf40&elq=43fcc0fff7514f1cb258789e2e463d6f&elqaid=13390&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5555
Also see this special report ---
http://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/The-Digital-Campus-Big-Data/105?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=129d303c269d4b04b7a323f0c2de5ae3&elq=43fcc0fff7514f1cb258789e2e463d6f&elqaid=13390&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5555
Sunk Cost Cartoons That Probably Apply to 'Bob Jensen More Than Most
Folks ---
http://ritholtz.com/2017/04/sunk-cost/
April Fools Jokes You
Probably Missed ---
http://www.adweek.com/creativity/april-fools-day-2017-the-best-of-the-brand-hoaxes/
Note that you really can't buy a home cremation box.
For-Real Blog Updates
You Probably Missed
These editions came on on March 31 and are not jokes
March
31 Edition of Bob Jensen's New Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
March
31 Edition of Bob Jensen's Tidbits --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
March 31 Edition of Bob
Jensen's Fraud
Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Read the essay of a student who got into all 8 Ivy
League schools, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/admissions-essay-all-ivy-league-schools-2017-4
Jensen Comment
No comment
Quiz: How well do you know the popular Google
Chrome browser?
http://www.cgma.org/magazine/2017/apr/google-chrome-quiz.html?utm_source=mnl:cpald&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11Apr2017
Click on "Submit" to move on to the next question.
Hackers are attacking Word users with new Microsoft
Office zero-day vulnerability ---
http://www.zdnet.com/article/hackers-are-attacking-word-users-with-new-microsoft-office-zero-day-vulnerability/
Time Magazine: The 20 Most Successful Tech
Failures of All Time ---
http://time.com/4704250/most-successful-technology-tech-failures-gadgets-flops-bombs-fails/?xid=newsletter-brief
:
Pearson and Chegg Partner for Textbook Rentals ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/04/11/pearson-and-chegg-partner-textbook-rentals?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=2062fa5171-DNU20170411&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-2062fa5171-197565045&mc_cid=2062fa5171&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Not An April Fools Question
Is Most Published Research Really False?
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-statistics-060116-054104
"The new astrology: By fetishising mathematical models, economists
turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience," by Alan Jay
Levinovitz, AEON, May 2016 ---
https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers
Bob Jensen's threads on what went wrong ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
This is a long, slow loading document
Who was professional baseball's catcher who also was a WW II spy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_Berg
'Unlearning' workshops at OU raise 'brainwashing' concerns ---
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=9028
The University of Oklahoma is defending its decision to offer students in
greek life a series of “unlearning” workshops on topics such as racism,
sexism, ableism, and classism.
OU Student Affairs, the Women’s and Gender Studies
Program, and the Center for Social Justice are jointly sponsoring
"Unlearning: Workshops for the Greek Community," the first of which is
scheduled to take place Friday, with seven additional sessions throughout
April, according
to OU Daily.
"It came out of just discussions with greek students saying, 'We feel like
these are things in our community, within the whole OU community, and we
want to know how to combat them and how to deal with those things,'" said
Kylie Frisby, public relations and marketing coordinator at OU Career
Services.
While the workshops are tailored toward greek students, registration is open
to everyone and is voluntary, though this has not saved the school from
significant backlash, with many critics likening the programming to
Orwellian reeducation measures.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
If only attitude and behavior changes were so simple as making students take
"unlearning" workshops. I'm no expert, but I suspect that humans are highly
variable in their reactions to these or similar sensitivity training workshops.
There must be a huge problem for those individuals, not all, who despise being
so overtly manipulated in an Orwellian world. Others more susceptible to
"unlearning" most likely have already unlearned. Others are more apt to endure
the workshops and pretend to be reformed sinners.
This seems to be a type of thing that's attempted in gangland urban schools
over and over again with little success in brainwashing gang members against
gang behaviors and drug addictions. This seems to be the thing that's
tried over and over in prison with pedophiles, alcoholics, wife beaters, child
beaters, and rapists with only small probabilities of preventing highly
recidivism behaviors.
In less obvious ways K-12 students experience "unlearning" attempts by their
teachers and counselors over all their years of schooling. Sometimes parents
positively support such unlearning. In other instances parents resent such
unlearning. One thing that's known is that for many, many children parental
attitudes and behaviors are the most powerful factors affecting social attitudes
and behaviors. But for other children there's rebellion at some point against
parental pleadings.
My point is that if there were such simple solutions to "unlearning" we
would've all unlearned by now. Behavior is so complicated that we're not all
marching in step in Orwellian parades or electing legislatures that are not
gnashing at each other.
Please don't let this be a discouragement to trying new things such as the
experiment now taking place among fraternities and sororities at Oklahoma
University.
Nothing comes from experiments that never take place.
But experiments must be monitored to discover if they are causing more harm
than good such as preaching at your rebellious teenage children that only makes
them more difficult to live with.
Things the Amazon Echo Can Do That You Might Not Know About ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/coolest-amazon-echo-alexa-features-2016-7
New York Adopts Free Tuition for Residents Below $125,000 in Family Income
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/10/new-york-state-reaches-deal-provide-free-tuition-suny-and-cuny-students?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=40d4220488-DNU20170410&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-40d4220488-197565045&mc_cid=40d4220488&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
SUNY and CUNY students from families with incomes
up to $125,000 will not pay tuition. But some aid experts are alarmed by
requirement that graduates stay in state for same number of years they
receive the benefit.
. . .
The
governor's office estimates that nearly 940,000 families in New York State
will be eligible for free public college tuition when the plan is fully
phased in.
The
announcement from the governor also noted a "generous maintenance of effort"
provision to protect SUNY and CUNY budgets. The provision is designed to
address the fear of some educators that free tuition could reduce the
pressure to provide adequate budgets to public higher education.
At
the same time, a last-minute addition to the bill is alarming some student
aid experts, including advocates for free public college tuition. The
agreement requires those who receive free tuition to live and work in the
state for the same number of years that they receive the awards. If they do
not, the scholarships would convert to student loans. The requirement may be
deferred if recipients leave the state to complete their undergraduate
education, to enroll in graduate school or because of "extreme hardship."
The
budget deal also contains two other measures related to college
affordability:
$8
million will be provided for promoting and distributing open educational
resources (free online education materials) for SUNY and CUNY students. The
systems have been urged to focus on high-enrollment courses, with the goal
of minimizing or eliminating textbook costs for those courses.
A new
grant program will be created for students who attend private colleges in
the state, with a maximum award of $3,000. However, private colleges would
be required to match the grants, and to freeze tuition for the duration of a
student's grant.
Revival of Free Tuition and the Public-Private Split
The action in New York represents a revival of the
free tuition concept -- which featured prominently in the presidential
campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton last year and then was
widely seen as dead after Donald Trump defeated Clinton in November. But
Cuomo -- with Sanders at his side --
proposed a version of
the plan in January and fought hard
for it in negotiations with legislative leaders. Sanders, meanwhile, has
also
introduced a new version
of his free-tuition plan in the U.S.
Senate.
Cuomo
also battled against private colleges in New York State, most of which
opposed the plan. Many New York private colleges largely enroll state
residents, and some of these colleges' leaders have feared a loss of
enrollment to the SUNY and CUNY systems. Generally, the plan was a tougher
sell for Cuomo in the Senate than in the Assembly. But major legislative
initiatives in New York tend to be adopted or rejected as part of the
overall state budget -- and in this case the Cuomo proposal made it into the
final deal.
Many
private college leaders opposed the Clinton and Sanders free-tuition plans,
and a similar split played out in New York.
On
Saturday, as college leaders studied the legislative language, reactions
split between public and private institutions.
Gail
Mellow, president of LaGuardia Community College of the City University of
New York, said she thought the new policy was "extraordinary" and would lead
to dramatic shifts in college attendance in the state. She said too many in
New York and elsewhere "have blown through their aid attending for-profit
schools and leaving without skills." The free-tuition model will "change the
discussion" in the state and attract many more students to community
college, she believes. "This is going to change the college-going culture,"
she said, "by taking tuition off the table."
Nancy
Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York, said she too
expects the greatest impact at community colleges, which the vast majority
of students attend without room and board costs. But she said that New York
State had also changed the free-tuition discussion by including four-year
public institutions.
"We
may be on the precipice" of a new era, of promoting the idea that many more
people need a four-year education than have earned bachelor's degrees in the
past, and this would be a historic shift, she said.
Zimpher also noted that the bill includes requirements that students enroll
full time and maintain minimum grade point averages. This will "move the
completion dial," she said.
But
for Mary Beth Labate, president of the Commission on Independent Colleges
and Universities in New York, the news was "dispiriting."
"There is a clear divide in the way students will be treated, depending on
whether they go to a public or private institution," she said, adding that
the Cuomo plan is poor public policy, given the excellent outcomes for those
who attend private colleges.
As to
the new funds for private college students, Labate said she wasn't sure that
many institutions would find the program viable. She said the requirement
that colleges freeze tuition for students when they first receive the aid
would appear to mean colleges would end up with different tuition rates for
students in different classes, and would have to track the students.
"This
would be bureaucratically difficult," she said. "Colleges would have to ask
if it was worth it."
The Requirement to Stay in the State
As
news of the budget deal spread, one provision drew criticism from advocates
for free public higher education. That is the provision that would require
recipients to work or live in the state after graduation for the same number
of years that they receive support (which presumably would be up to four
years, given the requirements that students enroll full time).
Sara
Goldrick-Rab, one
such advocate and a professor of higher education policy and sociology at
Temple University, posted a series of highly critical tweets on the
provision, calling it "extortion," "bad public policy" and a "trick." Other
aid experts agreed.
Indeed, historically, many scholars of aid policy have
said that trying to "tether" students to states won't work, and that
graduates will follow jobs elsewhere. But
many of those debates
have been about states such as Maine
that have been losing recent college graduates to other states with more
jobs.
SUNY
and CUNY, unlike many public systems in other states, have not heavily
pushed out-of-state recruitment. As a result, both systems overwhelmingly
enroll New York State residents and report that 80-plus percent (higher for
CUNY and high for most community colleges) stay in the state after
graduation.
Marc
Cohen, president of the SUNY Student Assembly, said that his group believes
public higher education should be free "without strings," and that he would
not want a recent SUNY or CUNY graduate to pay a financial cost "for taking
a great job out of the state."
At
the same time, he said that he didn't see the provision having an impact on
most students. "New York State is the greatest state in the union, and there
are great opportunities here," said Cohen, a master's student at (and
undergraduate alumnus of) SUNY's Albany campus.
Cohen
said the big story was really about the opportunities free tuition would
provide. "An affordable and accessible higher education will now be
available to many more people," he said. Cohen said he saw the program
"propelling New York State to being the leader in public higher education."
What Wasn't in the Bill
The
free tuition plan is now part of the New York State budget. As lobbying over
Cuomo's proposal intensified, debate was most fraught over two proposals
that were not in the final deal.
One
was proposed by Cuomo. That was to impose limits on how much private
colleges could increase tuition if they wanted in-state students to remain
eligible for grants under the Tuition Assistance Program, which is one of
the most generous student aid programs in the country. Private college
officials said that the tuition limits were inappropriate to impose on
colleges, whose independence should include the right to set their own
tuition rates. While New York State's private colleges include some
relatively well-endowed institutions that attract national student bodies,
most of the colleges depend on tuition for their budgets and enroll almost
entirely students from within the state.
The other was an idea -- rumored in the last two weeks
-- that the state would pay for free tuition in part with a 10 percent tax
on unrestricted gifts to SUNY campuses. This idea (which Cuomo said he
opposed)
worried many SUNY
leaders. But this, too, was not in
the final deal.
An
Old Idea/A New Idea
Free
tuition for public higher education is not a new idea. Many public colleges
-- including City College of CUNY -- were founded that way. For a time, all
of CUNY was tuition-free, but that ended in 1976, with New York City facing
a fiscal crisis.
The
idea was always on the wish list of various activist groups but was largely
dismissed by political leaders as unrealistic.
Then in 2014, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, a
Republican,
proposed and quickly won
approval for making community
college free in his state. It was the Tennessee plan that led
President Obama to
propose in 2015 a state-federal partnership
that would have made community college free in participating states.
Congress never acted on the Obama proposal, but many
individual community college districts --
in particular in
California -- have embraced the idea
with a variety of approaches to free community college.
Continued in article
Jensen Questions
How much will this NY free college program be a pay-as-you-go tax collection
system versus how much will become an unfunded entitlement burdening future
taxpayers? This is problematic much like Medicare and Medicaid in that college
budget increases, like health care expenses, grow at a rate greatly exceeding
the general inflation rate.
I have some questions that maybe others can answer. In states like Texas the
tuition is relatively low but all students are assessed "fees" that are
relatively high that help support athletics, student activities of various
kinds, etc. When my daughter attended the University of Texas I discovered that
the university was very creative in adding to fees while holding tuition down.
Will all such fees be waved as well for students legible for free tuition in New
York? Or will fees at NY universities be waived for all students?
Will students eligible for Federal Aid and other scholarships have to pay
part of that funding toward tuition as is being done now or will that future aid
provide more money to students for room, board, car expenses, etc.?
What happens in the case of divorced parents having highly unequal incomes.
In one scenario custody of the children was given to the father who is still
writing books that never sell and a birth mother who works at Wall Street and
does not have custody of her children. Suppose that over a period of 15 years
she paid officially $30,000 per year in child support and alimony plus another
$50,000 secretly on the side so her kids could get private schooling. Will her
children be eligible for free NY college tuition even though she now has an
income of over $2+ million per year? If so, will this lead
to phony on-paper divorces just so children can get a free college education?
My wife and I know of a person (the daughter of a friend) in Texas who just got
a welfare divorce and is still living with her former (working) husband. Even
worse suppose that one parent making tons of money after a divorce never
contributed more than the bare minimum child support required by the court 15
years ago. Does that parent's high income prevent the children from getting free
college in New York even though that parent will not contribute a farthing for
their college educations?
Of course there are the other ways to cheat the system that are now commonly
used for welfare cheating. A New York woman living with a man partly in his
mansion and driving his new Lincoln may still get housing subsidies, food
stamps, and aid to dependent children. Supposedly her kids will now get free
college educations.
There are all sorts of ways to make high incomes in the underground economy
where services for cash are never reported. The contractor who attached a garage
to my barn gave me a huge cash discount. I've no idea if he reported his profit
to the government, and I did not ask that question. Knowing his hatred for taxes
my guess is that his cash jobs did not get reported on his income tax returns.
It's impossible to estimate the size of the underground economy in the USA, but
I've seen estimates of over $2 trillion per year. Until the USA does away with
cash (like is being attempted now in India, Kenya, and some other parts of the
world) there will always be massive and criminal cheating in the underground
economy.
That $125,000 threshold for free college in New York provides a huge
incentive for some people to shift into the underground economy when they have a
choice. A NY garage builder who currently fully reports and pays taxes on his
$200,000 net profit now has an incentive to offer cash discounts for some of his
jobs. This is how entitlements programs become moral hazards such as when
Grandma's estate is bled out to heirs in advance so she can get free nursing
care paid for fully by Medicaid.
Disciplines With the Most New Assistant Professor Hires ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/06/new-cupa-hr-study-looks-faculty-hiring-pay-chairs-and-adjuncts-and-more?goal=0_1fcbc04421-8999f22be2-197565045&mc_cid=8999f22be2&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
Keep in mind that these are results of a survey. There are many more hires in
all or most of these disciplines.
Bob Jensen's threads on careers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Apple and Amazon Are Hiring a Ton of MBAs ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-amazon-hiring-mbas-2017-4
Supreme Court nominee Gorsuch lifted from earlier works in
his scholarly papers: Report ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/05/supreme-court-nominee-gorsuch-lifted-earlier-works-scholarly-papers-report/
Other celebrates who plagiarized including Jane Goodall, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Vladimir Putin, Mexico’s President (Enrique Peña Nieto),
Arianna Huffington, Seinfeld's wife, Fareed Zakaria, etc. ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/05/supreme-court-nominee-gorsuch-lifted-earlier-works-scholarly-papers-report/
When making excuses for plagiarism, celebrities and others
usually assert that their assistants or ghost writers did the plagiarizing,
although taking credit for writings of others without acknowledgement is
equally unethical since the 19th century when academics commonly took credit for
works of their students without acknowledgement ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/05/supreme-court-nominee-gorsuch-lifted-earlier-works-scholarly-papers-report/
I've not seen where Judge Gorsuch is making such a claim when confronted with
the recent allegations, but this may well be the reason. I flunked a student who
complained that his employee who wrote the term paper did the plagiarizing.
An Introduction to Game Theory & Strategic Thinking: A Free Online Course
from Yale University ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/an-introduction-to-game-theory-strategic-thinking-a-free-online-course-from-yale-university.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
MOOC ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
Your Daily Briefing From the Chronicle of Higher Education on April 6,
2017
Free MOOCs of a
Different Type from edX
Not your grandfather's MOOCs.
Thought the heyday of the MOOC was over? Think again,
says Anant Agarwal, chief executive of the online-learning platform edX. Mr.
Agarwal dropped by The Chronicle's offices
on Wednesday from
Boston to tell us about "MOOCs 2.0" and edX’s latest venture:
MicroMasters.---
https://www.edx.org/micromasters?elqTrackId=b6015d29443a487eaf9fccefcade9470&elq=593f76a27b5749cab26a00152b1a6b3a&elqaid=13337&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5538
Offered in 40 different topics, MicroMasters are designed with job-seekers
in mind and are the equivalent of 25 to 50 percent of a full master’s
degree. While learning is free, paying $1,000 gets you an accreditation from
a top-tier university like MIT or Columbia. A MicroMasters can help you get
a job, or be counted as credit on a full master’s course if you want to keep
studying.
Backing from big-name employers like IBM and Walmart, and built-in integrity
mechanisms to prevent cheating, mean those online courses are wholly
different creatures from the MOOCs of four or five years ago, Mr. Agarwal
said. —
Lindsay McKenzie
The MOOC Model Revisited
"Massive Open Online Courses: How: 'The Social” Alters the Relationship
Between Learners and Facilitators'," by Bonnie Stewart, Inside Higher Ed,
April 30, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/massive-open-online-courses-how-%E2%80%9C-social%E2%80%9D-alters-relationship-between
Steve Martin Will Teach His First Online Course in Comedy
---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/steve-martin-will-teach-his-first-online-course-on-comedy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Steve could also teach an advanced course on how to play the banjo
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006
Paperback – September 30, 2008 by The New Press (Compiler)
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595584099/bpnl-20?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=d1933e19f4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_31&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-d1933e19f4-234390133&mc_cid=d1933e19f4&mc_eid=4d2bd13843
Among the many Nobel Laureates who have spoken on the campus of Trinity
University (where I taught for 24 years) nearly all the Economics Nobel
Laureates have been on campus speaking on the theme "My Evolution as an
Economist" ---
https://inside.trinity.edu/economics/nobel-economists-lecture-series
Transcripts
of the first 23 lectures appear in the sixth edition of the 2014 MIT Press
volume, Lives
of the Laureates, edited by professors Roger W. Spencer and David A.
Macpherson ---
https://www.amazon.com/Lives-Laureates-Thirteen-Nobel-Economists/dp/0262023911/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1491131133&sr=1-1&keywords=Roger+W.+Spencer
One memorable take away when I listened to Franco Modigliani speak was that
he did some of his best research while teaching five courses per semester back
in the days when professors were not given so much relief from teaching to do
their research and writing. I struck me that that perhaps professors like me who
only taught two courses in five hours of class time per week were perhaps given
too much relief from teaching. I don't recall ever having a class with more than
twenty students in my 40 years as a full-time professor at four different
universities. Perhaps I'd have been a better researcher with five classes per
semester.
How to Mislead With Statistics
Doctors' Incomes Are on the Rise: Medscape Physician Compensation
Report 2017 ---
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/878129?faf=1
Jensen Comment
I assume the data are net of expenses like malpractice insurance, office staff
salaries, rent, utilities, depreciation, etc. But there's more financial risk is
such compensation than for physicians that are paid by clinics and the
government that pays physicians without charging them for malpractice insurance,
office staff salaries, etc. Also a doctor working out of her or his own office
(such as a general practitioner) may pay all such expenses whereas an emergency
room doctor may pay for some expenses like malpractice insurance but not
expenses for nurses, technicians, office space, etc.
Personally, I think it's very difficult to make physician compensation
comparisons across a myriad business models that deal with their differing
expenses while practicing their craft.
It's also difficult to make comparisons with other professions such as
accounting. A CPA in general probably borrowed much less in student loans before
going to work full time relative to a brain surgeon who may have ad to borrow
across 10-15 years of college and sacrificed other years of full income during
internship and residency years. These complicate compensation comparisons
across professions.
Slide Show: From disused stadiums to deserted airports:
Billion-dollar wastes of money (most were wasted taxpayer dollars) ---
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/from-disused-stadiums-to-deserted-airports-billion-dollar-wastes-of-money/ss-AAogvsq?ocid=spartanntp
The 5 best e-readers you can buy ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-ebook-readers-kindles
Bob Jensen's neglected threads about e-readers (informative for history
buffs) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
Unlocking Excel's Hidden Powers ---
https://www.intheblack.com/articles/2017/02/27/influencing-with-excel
Allan
Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American
Mind ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind
Heather Mac Donald ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Mac_Donald
Another Speech Shut Down
Protest outside event at Claremont McKenna prevents Heather Mac Donald event
from having an in-person audience. Question period of appearance at UCLA is
disrupted as well ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/10/protest-over-speakers-views-race-and-crime-prevents-event-taking-place-planned?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=40d4220488-DNU20170410&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-40d4220488-197565045&mc_cid=40d4220488&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
"The
Coddling of the American Mind: In the name of emotional well-being, college
students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t
like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health," by Greg
Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, September 2015 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
Jonathan Haidt on the Cultural Roots of Campus Rage An unorthodox
professor explains the ‘new religion’ that drives the intolerance and violence
at places like Middlebury and Berkeley ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jonathan-haidt-on-the-cultural-roots-of-campus-rage-1491000676?mod=djemMER
When a mob at Vermont’s Middlebury College
shut down a speech by social scientist Charles Murray a few weeks ago, most
of us saw it as another instance of campus illiberalism. Jonathan Haidt saw
something more—a ritual carried out by adherents of what he calls a “new
religion,” an auto-da-fé against a heretic for a violation of orthodoxy.
“The great majority of college students want
to learn. They’re perfectly reasonable, and they’re uncomfortable with a lot
of what’s going on,” Mr. Haidt, a psychologist and professor of ethical
leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells me
during a recent visit to his office. “But on each campus there are some true
believers who have reoriented their lives around the fight against evil.”
These believers are transforming the campus
from a citadel of intellectual freedom into a holy space—where white
privilege has replaced original sin, the transgressions of class and race
and gender are confessed not to priests but to “the community,” victim
groups are worshiped like gods, and the sinned-against are supplicated with
“safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”
The fundamentalists may be few, Mr. Haidt
says, but they are “very intimidating” since they wield the threat of public
shame. On some campuses, “they’ve been given the heckler’s veto, and are
often granted it by an administration who won’t stand up to them either.”
. . .
Today’s college students also are tomorrow’s
leaders—and employees. Companies are already encountering problems with
recent graduates unprepared for the challenges of the workplace. “Work
requires a certain amount of toughness,” Mr. Haidt says. “Colleges that
prepare students to expect a frictionless environment where there are
bureaucratic procedures and adult authorities to rectify conflict are very
poorly prepared for the workplace. So we can expect a lot more litigation in
the coming few years.”
If you lean left—even if you adhere to the
campus orthodoxy, or to certain elements of it—you might consider how the
failure to respect pluralism puts your own convictions at risk of a
backlash. “People are sick and tired of being called racist for innocent
things they’ve said or done,” Mr. Haidt observes. “The response to being
called a racist unfairly is never to say, ‘Gee, what did I do that led to me
being called this? I should be more careful.’ The response is almost always,
‘[Expletive] you!’ ”
He offers this real-world example: “I think
that the ‘deplorables’ comment could well have changed the course of human
history.”
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Wake Forrest's Politically Correct Faculty Want No Part of "Sneaking
Capitalist Ideas" Into the University by Way of Koch Brothers' Millions
An Anti-Koch Meltdown at Wake Forest ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-anti-koch-meltdown-at-wake-forest-1491521075?mod=djemMER
Denizens of
the ivory tower are rarely nuanced in their statements about Charles and
David Koch. But the professorial ruminations published last month at Wake
Forest University break new ground by showing that disdain for conservatives
weighs more heavily on faculty minds than academic freedom.
About two
years ago, Wake Forest professor James Otteson came to the administration
with an idea: a new center devoted to the study of happiness. Such programs
are all the rage in psychology departments, but Mr. Otteson, a scholar of
classical philosophy who has written books on Adam Smith, offered a unique
interdisciplinary approach. Planning began for a center that draws scholars
from across the university to study the political, economic, moral and
cultural institutions that encourage human happiness. It was named the
Eudaimonia Institute, after Aristotle’s term for flourishing.
None of this
elicited objections from the faculty until last September, when the
university announced it had accepted $3.7 million from the Charles Koch
Foundation to support the institute over five years. The faculty senate then
formed two committees to investigate Eudaimonia: one to report on the
institute itself and another to study Wake Forest’s policies related to Koch
Foundation funding.
The first
committee, in a report published last month, urged Wake Forest to “SEVER ALL
CONNECTIONS TO THE CHARLES KOCH FOUNDATION.” The original text, which went
on at some length, was also in boldface and underlined. Where, one wonders,
were the exclamation points and angry emojis?
The
other committee concluded that the foundation’s “parasitical” behavior
threatened Wake Forest’s “academic integrity, financial autonomy, and
institutional governance.” The faculty worrying about the Kochs’ fortune
seem to have forgotten that their campus exists in large part thanks to
donations from the family behind
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco
Co.
The situation
was deemed so grave that the latter committee recommended canceling the
Eudaimonia Institute’s April conference, freezing all hiring, and requiring
that its publications and presentations be reviewed by another group of
faculty ahead of time. Earlier this year the faculty announced they would
not give credit to students taking a business class taught by Mr. Otteson—even
though the course had nothing to do with Eudaimonia or the Koch Foundation.
According to Daniel Hammond, a Wake Forest economics professor, the course
would have earned students credit only if they remained business majors. If
they changed their major, it would not count for graduation. Under pressure,
the business school dropped the class as a prerequisite for majors.
Citing the
New Yorker magazine writer Jane Mayer’s investigations into the Koch family,
both committees concluded that Eudaimonia is really
a way of sneaking capitalist ideas into the university.
Never mind the ample evidence that the Koch brothers, who are open about
their own ideas, are interested in exploring other points of view. The
report even includes links to a public forum held by the Charles Koch
Institute with guests from liberal organizations such as the Brookings
Institution.
The
controversies over Koch cash—stoked in many cases by the George Soros-funded
campus organization UnKoch My Campus—are not new. Faculty at the Catholic
University of America complained last year that a $10 million donation from
the Charles Koch Foundation would undermine the school’s religious
teachings. The United Negro College Fund was roundly criticized after it
took $25 million of Koch money in 2014.
But the
professors at Wake Forest have hit a new low. On March 15 the faculty senate
passed a nonbinding resolution against the Koch funding by a vote of 17-9.
The provost offered only a lukewarm defense of Eudaimonia. “I have faith,”
he wrote to me, “in our faculty and administrative practices that protect
faculty research, creative work and teaching from any improper influence.”
Eudaimonia
already has safeguards in place to ensure intellectual freedom. Even before
the Koch money was pledged, it had published a “Declaration of Research
Independence,” which states that the institute “maintains sole control over
the selection of researchers, the composition of research teams, or the
research design, methodology, analysis, or findings of EI research projects,
as well as the content of EI-sponsored educational programs.”
Ana Iltis, a
Wake Forest bioethicist and faculty adviser to Eudaimonia, told me this week
that she was surprised by her colleagues’ “unwillingness to look at the work
we’re doing and take it seriously.” She noted that the institute’s board
includes people from a variety of religious, political, racial and academic
backgrounds. Bill Leonard —another board member and a former dean of the
Divinity School—led the fight for gays and lesbians to be admitted to the
Baptist graduate school.
The
controversy is even more ridiculous when considering the differences between
the Eudaimonia Institute and other Wake Forest centers. Take the Pro
Humanitate Institute, whose executive director, Melissa Harris-Perry, made a
name for herself as a progressive activist on MSNBC. That institute does not
pretend to ask life’s big, open-ended questions. Rather, its mission
statement declares that its purpose is “connected to clear practices with
meaningful social justice outcomes.”
No matter what these institutes focus on, the idea that other faculty might
want to censor their work is worrying. Even more troubling is the notion
that professors from one department could determine that courses taught in
another department are not worthy of credit toward graduation.
Professors opposed to this madness are finally
speaking up. A new petition has been circulating among the faculty objecting
to the proposed censorship. Citing
the recent statement regarding “truth-seeking” by Robert P. George and
Cornel West, the signers note, “We stand in
support of diversity and inclusion of all opinions and ideologies at Wake
Forest University and celebrate such diversity as the character of our
community.”
Continued in article
Harvard and Princeton Leading Scholars Argue
for "Truth Seeking"---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/16/ideological-odd-couple-robert-george-and-cornel-west-issue-joint-statement-against?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=bdb7326f2a-DNU20170316&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-bdb7326f2a-197565045&mc_cid=bdb7326f2a&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Stylistically and politically, Robert P. George
and Cornel West don’t have much in common. George, McCormick Professor of
Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals
and Institutions at Princeton University, is one of the country’s most
prominent conservative intellectuals. West, a professor of the practice of
public philosophy and African and African-American studies at Harvard
University, is a self-described “radical Democrat” who, in addition to many
books, once released a spoken-word album.
So when George and West agree on something and lend their names to it,
people take notice -- as they did this week, when the pair
published a statement in support of “truth
seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” It’s a politely
worded denunciation of what George and West call “campus illiberalism,” or
the brand of thinking that led to this month’s incident at Middlebury
College, where students prevented an invited speaker from talking and a
professor was physically attacked by some who were protesting the
invitation.
“It is all too common these days for people to
try to immunize from criticism opinions that happen to be dominant in their
particular communities,” reads the statement. “Sometimes this is done by
questioning the motives and thus stigmatizing those who dissent from
prevailing opinions; or by disrupting their presentations; or by demanding
that they be excluded from campus or, if they have already been invited,
disinvited.”
Sometimes, it says, “students and faculty
members turn their backs on speakers whose opinions they don’t like or
simply walk out and refuse to listen to those whose convictions offend their
values. Of course, the right to peacefully protest, including on campuses,
is sacrosanct. But before exercising that right, each of us should ask:
Might it not be better to listen respectfully and try to learn from a
speaker with whom I disagree? Might it better serve the cause of truth
seeking to engage the speaker in frank civil discussion?”
All of us “should be willing -- even eager --
to engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of
truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence and making
arguments,” George and West wrote. “The more important the subject under
discussion, the more willing we should be to listen and engage -- especially
if the person with whom we are in conversation will challenge our deeply
held -- even our most cherished and identity-forming -- beliefs.”
Such “an ethos,” they conclude, “protects us
against dogmatism and groupthink, both of which are toxic to the health of
academic communities and to the functioning of democracies.”
George said in an interview Wednesday that
signatures for the statement were flowing in at rate of several per minute,
and that the names reflect all points of the ideological spectrum. “We’re
gratified,” he said, adding that the statement aims to “encourage -- put the
courage in -- people to stand up for themselves” and for the values of the
academy.
“The goal is a heightened sense among faculty,
administrators and students -- all three categories -- that they must refuse
to tolerate campus illiberalism,” George said. “It’s a shared responsibility
of everybody to not only refuse to participate in it but to refuse to accept
it. In order for colleges and universities to fulfill their missions, there
has to be an ethos, an atmosphere, an environment, in which people feel free
to speak their minds -- where people are challenging each other, and thus
learning.”
The immediate impetus for the statement was indeed
the shouting down of Murray, author of the
controversial book The Bell Curve, at Middlebury; the professor who
was injured at the protest is the next signatory, after George and West. But
the authors say they’ve long been concerned with a turning tide on colleges
campuses that’s led to the shouting down and disinvitation of invited
speakers, and other forms of what is arguably intellectual censorship.
They’ve been trying to model the kind of civil dialogue they’re advocating
for several years, teaching and speaking together publicly about the
benefits of a liberal arts education -- including recently at the American
Enterprise Institute.
Yet college illiberalism continues to grow, in
their view. Just recently, for example, George said, Peter Singer, Ira W.
DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton, who has argued in favor of
abortion and euthanasia for severely disabled infants in some instances, was
interrupted by disability rights protesters throughout an appearance via
Skype at the University of Victoria in Canada.
George blamed the phenomenon on a campus
culture of rightful inclusion that has been somehow “corrupted into the idea
that people have the right to be free from hearing positions they disagree
with.” That’s exacerbated, he said, by an emergent “consumer model” of
education, in which colleges and universities competing for
enrollments don’t want to offend their “customers,” even if the product --
higher education -- is supposed to be “challenging students’ deeply held
convictions and helping them to lead examined lives.”
Singer announced on Twitter that he’d signed
the petition. George pointed out that Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand
Professor of Law at Harvard University and former U.S. ambassador to the
Holy See, who is anti-abortion and in many ways Singer’s ideological
opposite, also signed on.
Continued in article
Huffington Post: The 10 Worst Colleges For Free Speech: 2017 ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/58ac64bfe4b0417c4066c2f1?elqTrackId=e6013aed3e714a68b6f615c1f42a77d6&elq=04bd27bfa8ef476da32226ccf2ad9f5a&elqaid=12695&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5199
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Download The Chronicle's special (free) issue of Digital Campus
---
http://results.chronicle.com/DigitalCampus-2017-LF
NY Times: Student Loan Forgiveness Program Approval Letters May Be
Invalid ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/04/ny-timesstudent-loan-forgiveness-program-approval-letters-may-be-invalid.html
New Byzantine Airline Accountancy: Extremely technical rules require voo doo and crystal
ball estimation under the new revenue recognition standard
Airlines Make More Money Selling Miles Than Seats: The golden goose isn’t
your ticket or bag fee—it’s the credit card you use to collect frequent flier
miles ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-31/airlines-make-more-money-selling-miles-than-seats?cmpid=BBD033117_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170331&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily
. . .
Investors have failed
to appreciate how crucial these programs are to airline profitability amid
the stability consolidation brought, said Joseph DeNardi, a senior airline
analyst with Stifel Financial Corp. in Baltimore. Since August, he’s
issued a steady stream of client notes arguing that the market has
undervalued the five largest airlines.
DeNardi has
repeatedly explained that investors have little insight into the billions of
dollars large banks pay for these affiliations. At each airline investor
call or conference, DeNardi has steadfastly prodded executives for greater
reporting detail.
In many ways, the Big
Three U.S. airlines have organized themselves into two distinct businesses.
There’s the traditional activity—the one with jets—which involves pricing
seats for as much as possible, collecting a bag fee, and selling some food
and drinks while keeping a close eye on costs. The other business is the
sale of miles—mostly to the big banks, but also to companies that range from
car rental firms to hotels to magazine peddlers.
The latter has
expanded so much that it accounts for more than half of all profits for some
airlines, including American Airlines Group Inc., the world’s largest.
Jensen Comment
Accounting for frequent flier awards and "sales of miles" has always been problematic due to time
differences between award dates and when customers book flights and
uncertainties whether the awards will expire without being used by customers.
This entails something akin to technical voo doo and crystal ball
estimation.
From
The Wall Street Journal
Accounting Educators' Reviews on June 20, 2002
TITLE: Frequent-Flier Programs Get an Overhaul
REPORTER: Ron Lieber
DATE: Jun 18, 2002
PAGE: D1 LINK:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1024344325710894400.djm,00.html
TOPICS: Frequent-flier programs, Accounting
SUMMARY: Many frequent-flier programs are
offering alternative rewards in exchange for frequent-flier miles. Questions focus on
accounting for frequent-flier programs and redemption of miles.
QUESTIONS:
1.) What is a frequent-flier program? List three possible ways to account for
frequent-flier miles awarded to customers in exchange for purchases. Discuss the
advantages and disadvantages of each accounting method.
2.) Why are companies offering alternative
rewards in exchange for frequent-flier miles? How is the redemption of miles reported in
the financial statements? Discuss accounting issues that arise if the miles are redeemed
for awards that are less costly than originally anticipated.
3.) The article states that the 'surge in
unredeemed points is causing bookkeeping headaches.' Why would unredeemed points cause
bookkeeping headaches? Would companies be better off if the points were never redeemed? If
a company created a liability for awarded points, in what circumstances could the
liability be removed from the balance sheet?
4.) Refer to the related article. Describe Jet
Blue's frequent-flier program77. How does stipulating a one-year expiration on
frequent-flier points change accounting for a frequent-flier program?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode
Island
Reviewed By: Benson Wier, Virginia Commonwealth University
Reviewed By: Kimberly Dunn, Florida Atlantic University
--- RELATED ARTICLES ---
TITLE: JetBlue Joins the Fray But With Big Caveat: Miles Expire in a Year
REPORTER: Ron Lieber
PAGE: D1
ISSUE: Jun 18, 2002
LINK:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB102434443936545600.djm,00.html
New Byzantine Airline Accountancy: Extremely technical rules require voo doo and crystal
ball estimation under the new revenue recognition standard
Book:
Foundations of Airline Finance
by Bijan Vasigh et al.
Routledge, Second Edition, 2015
Beginning on Page 154:
Note the illustrations
https://books.google.com/books?id=FVRWBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA167&lpg=PA167&dq=GAAP+%22Frequent+Flier+Miles%22&source=bl&ots=EzGeMCTu9n&sig=u90HFsYsQ0mLbmF_k0Xm4bVWlKs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwil-M7f2IHTAhWW3oMKHeJGASc4ChDoAQgqMAM#v=onepage&q=GAAP%20%22Frequent%20Flier%20Miles%22&f=false
This is an excellent illustration how accounting is more than counting beans
and how specialized airline accountants and auditors must become in extremely
technical issues.
How to Avoid Making Inheritance Mistakes ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/newsletters/2017/apr/avoid-inheritance-mistakes.html?utm_source=mnl:cpald&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=06Apr2017
Test your Social Security knowledge in this five-question quiz ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2017/mar/social-security-quiz.html?utm_source=mnl:globalcpa&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29Mar2017
Jensen Comment
Check your full retirement age as calculated by the government ---
https://www.ssa.gov/planners/retire/1960.html
Circumstances can vary with respect to various things like wealth, health, and
job satisfaction, but my advice for most people is to not start your SS income
until you reach the full retirement age or later. This does not mean that you
cannot "retire" or shift to part-time work before full retirement age. You
should, however, read abouit details in the law regarding full retirement age.
For more details first go to
https://www.ssa.gov/planners/index.html
Then discuss all your retirements options with an expert that is often provided
free by your employer or other retirement plan employee. Outfits like TIAA and
Fidelity usually have campus visits by retirement planners that provide free
services to college employees.
In some course on campus try to make financial literacy part of the
curriculum, including retirement and tax alternatives.
Time Magazine: Ranking of the 50 States as to Retirement Living (Say
what?) ---
http://time.com/money/4714381/best-state-retire-study/?xid=newsletter-brief
Jensen Comment
I don't think the folks that ranked New Hampshire at Number One visited The
Granite State this winter. After the blue bonnets fade in Texas and the azaleas
blossom in Florida we'll still have a foot of snow on the ground. Erika
and I picked New Hampshire for our retirement. We wanted four seasons, low
taxes, no traffic, mountain views, cool summers, and a small village
environment. We're not disappointed here, but what we wanted for our retirement
certainly will not suit most retirees, including those up here that choose to
move south from New Hampshire for their retirement. I suspect what the majority
of people want most in retirement is closeness to family. My cousins and friends
in Iowa prefer to retire near family in Iowa. They head south (Florida, Texas,
Arizona, California, etc.) for a couple of months in the winter, but they choose
to retire where they've lived most of their lives and raised their children ---
Iowa.
Our children were spread from California to Wisconsin to Maine. So we decided
to make them visit us. But most other retirees probably prefer to live closer to
at least some of their children.
MIT: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s suggestion that job loss due
to automation is 50 years off is laughable (or cryable) ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604005/actually-steve-mnuchin-robots-have-already-affected-the-us-labor-market/?set=603998
Richard Feynman ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
Richard Feynman’s “Notebook Technique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at
School, at Work, or in Life ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/richard-feynmans-notebook-technique-will-help-you-learn-any-subject.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Jensen Comment
In many ways this is similar to creating a Web module for a topic that you want
to learn or learn more about. One "page" in the module might be a glossary of
terms related to the topic. Other pages are created over the years as you
stumble upon new parts of the topic that you learned or created. One such module
is my huge module on accounting for derivative financial instruments and hedging
activities (ala FAS 133). As I was invited to speak about this topic at
universities and consult about the topic with accounting firms and companies I
kept adding new documents to the module ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm
How Wonderful
A Treasure Trove of Lithium Discovered Near the Megafactory Where Elon Musk will
Turn Litium Into Millions Upon Millions of Batteries ---
The Great Nevada Lithium Rush to Fuel the New Economy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-29/the-great-nevada-lithium-rush-to-fuel-the-new-economy?cmpid=BBD032917_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170329&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily
Jensen Comment
And maybe Apple will no longer have to rely on the Chinese to make so many of
it's iPhones.
How much credit for all of this should we give to President Trump?
Do we really know what Musk talked about in his private talks with Donald Trump?
I certainly don't know anything about anything except what I read on the Web.
How to Mislead With Statistics
Does it Pay to Get a Double Major in College?
https://theconversation.com/does-it-pay-to-get-a-double-major-in-college-74420
Jensen Comment
The article is misleading in that the most important variables leading to
advantages of double majoring are so dependent upon circumstances. For example.
top medical schools, law schools, graduate business schools, etc. lean toward
accepting applicants who double majored such as a major in computer science and
engineering or a major in mathematics and computer science. My point is that a
double major can help get you into a prestigious graduate school that, in turn,
opens doors to career opportunities that are difficult to get if you did not get
a graduate degree (say a law degree) from a prestigious university.
Secondly, even if you did not get into a prestigious graduate school the
knowledge you gained in selected double majors can become important factors to
performance success and opportunities later in life. Some of my accounting
graduates who also double majored in Spanish or Chinese found that they could
get opportunities in Mexico and China not available to some of their peers who
did not know Spanish or Chinese. Spanish was especially important to my students
who worked for the Big Four CPA firms in Texas where there are usually a high
concentration of clients doing business south of the Rio Grande.
Less than 25% of the hires of large CPA firms eventually become partners in
those firms for various reasons. A double major, however, might increase the
odds in particular circumstances. I had an accounting student who I thought had
very little chance of making partner in the Houston office of a Big Four
accounting program. However, since he'd double majored in accounting and Russian
he was given an opportunity to transfer to the Moscow office of his firm.
Working in Russia, in my opinion, is one of the main reason he became a partner.
If he'd stayed in the Houston Office I doubt that he'd have become a partner in
the firm.
My point is that double majoring may not pay off across many combinations of
majors, but it often pays off in selected combinations in particular
circumstances where the payoffs are averaged out in large studies of many
combinations of double majors.
If you did not double major you may become a specialist with self study. I
had a student who listened to me when I suggested that learning more and more
about financial instrument derivative contracts and FAS 133 rules beyond what
he'd learned in my theory course might give him an edge in his career. He took
me up on it and spent week ends and summers becoming more expert on accounting
for derivative financial instruments and hedging activities. When his
supervisors in a Houston Office of a Big Four firm discovered he had this
knowledge, he was assigned to some really big bank audits entailing billions of
dollars in derivatives contracts. This allowed him to leap frog over his peers
who did not have his exceptional knowledge. Many factors led to his success, but
I like to think becoming a self-study expert on the really tough FAS 133 helped
him a lot in life.
Dan Meyer's Popular Math Blog: 1,000 Math Teachers Tell Me
What They Think About Calculators in the Classroom ---
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/2017/1000-teachers-tell-me-what-they-think-about-calculators-in-the-classroom/
Replication ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication
Robustness ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robust_statistics
What Matters for Replication ---
https://replicationnetwork.com/2017/02/17/mueller-langer-fecher-harhoff-wagner-what-matters-for-replication/
Replication Versus Robustness in the American Economic Review ---
Is the AER Replicable? And is it Robust? Evidence from a Class Project
https://replicationnetwork.com/2016/12/27/campbell-is-the-aer-replicable-and-is-it-robust-evidence-from-a-class-project/
MIT: Perverse Incentives and Replication in Science ---
http://infoproc.blogspot.ru/2017/02/perverse-incentives-and-replication-in.html
From Retraction Watch on March 28, 2017
SCOPUS, the
publication database maintained by Elsevier, has
discontinued nearly 300 journals since 2013, including multiple journals
published by OMICS Publishing Group.
Although the reasons the widely used
database gives for discontinuing journals often vary, in all cases OMICS
journals were removed over “Publication Concerns.”
Here’s
what SCOPUS said recently about how it vets
journals.
Two biologists guilty of misconduct, says University investigation ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/03/31/two-biologists-guilty-misconduct-says-university-investigation/
Five retractions for engineering duo in South Korea over duplication,
fraudulent data ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/03/five-retractions-engineering-duo-south-korea-duplication-fraudulent-data/
The Academy Created a Monster: Fraudulent Journals
A fictitious scientist called Anna O. Szust applied to join the editorial
boards of 360 journals—and 48 accepted: Journals without standards harm
science and universities that count them toward tenure and promotion
---
http://www.nature.com/news/predatory-journals-recruit-fake-editor-1.21662
Author Surprised by Unannounced Retraction of Three Papers (for extensive
duplication of her own work)
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/12/author-surprised-publisher-pulls-three-papers/
Book Review/Interview on Retraction Watch ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/03/29/course-deception-scientists-novel-takes-research-misconduct/#more-49016
Jana Rieger is a
researcher in Edmonton, Alberta. And now, she’s
also a novelist. Her new book, “A
Course in Deception,” draws on her experiences in
science, and weaves a tale of how greed and pressures to publish can lead to
even worse outcomes than the sort we write about at Retraction Watch. We
interviewed Rieger about the novel.
Another retraction for medical student who confessed to
cooking data ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/13/another-retraction-student-confessed-cooking-data/
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads on Replication ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Retraction Watch: “Strange. Very strange:” Retracted nutrition study
reappears in new journal ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/03/28/strange-strange-retracted-nutrition-study-reappears-new-journal/#more-48713
Busted: Researcher used fake contact info for co-authors ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/10/researcher-gave-fake-contact-info-co-authors-submit-papers-without-consent/
A Replications Research Reading List ---
https://replicationnetwork.com/research-on-replications/
Bob Jensen's Lament on the Tendency for Academic Accounting Research to
Not be Replicated/Validated ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Video: Congress just voted to allow your internet provider to sell
your online history and data — here are various ways that might protect your
privacy ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/hide-invisible-internet-web-activities-traffic-tor-vpn-2017-3
These days nothing's guaranteed on the Internet
But did Congress really allow your internet provider to sell your online
history and data? It's complicated!
The Phony Internet Privacy Panic: The GOP reverses a rule intended to
help Google and Amazon, not you ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-phony-internet-privacy-panic-1491000504?mod=djemMER
Perhaps
you’ve read that Congress voted to empower cable providers to collect your
personal information and sell it, unraveling “landmark” privacy protections
from the Federal Communications Commission. The partisans and reporters
pumping this claim are—let’s be kind—uninformed, so allow us to add a few
facts.
The
House voted this week to rescind an Obama Administration regulation
requiring that cable customers “opt in” to allow data mining of their
preferences, which allows companies to feature targeted ads or improve
service. The rule passed in a partisan FCC vote last year but never took
effect. This belies the idea that
Comcast
and other invented villains will have some “new freedom” to auction off your
data. President Trump is expected to sign the bill, which already passed the
Senate. The result will be . . . the status quo.
The FCC
didn’t roll out these rules in response to gross privacy invasions. The
agency lacked jurisdiction until 2015 when it snatched authority from the
Federal Trade Commission by reclassifying the internet as a public utility.
The FTC had punished bad actors in privacy and data security for years, with
more than 150 enforcement actions.
One best
privacy practice is offering customers the choice to “opt out”—most
consumers are willing to exchange their viewing habits for more personalized
experiences, and the Rand Pauls of the world can elude collection. Cable
customers have this option now. For sensitive information like Social
Security numbers, consumers have to opt in. This framework protected privacy
while allowing innovation.
The FCC
ditched this approach and promulgated a rule that, curiously, did not apply
to companies like Google or Amazon, whose business model includes monetizing
massive data collection—what panda videos you watch or which gardening tools
you buy. The rule was designed to give an edge to
Twitter
and friends in online advertising, a field already dominated by Silicon
Valley.
The crew
pushing the rule say cable companies deserve scrutiny because it is easy to
change websites but hard to change internet-service providers. The reality
is the reverse: The average internet user connects through six devices,
according to a paper last year from Georgia Tech, and moves across locations
and networks. But which search engine do you use, whether on your home
laptop or iPhone at work? Probably Google. Plus: Encryption and other
technology will soon shield some 70% of the internet from service providers.
What this
week’s tumult means for your privacy online is nothing. FCC Chairman Ajit
Pai and FTC Chairwoman Maureen Ohlhausen issued a joint statement saying
they’d work together to build a “comprehensive and consistent framework” for
privacy that doesn’t favor some tech companies over others. The interim is
governed by FCC guidelines that have been in place for years.
These details haven’t stopped headlines like “How the Republicans Sold Your
Privacy to Internet Providers.” That one ran atop a piece by President
Obama’s FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who continues to shore up his legacy as a
partisan. The misinformation campaign is an attempt to bully Republicans and
Chairman Pai out of reversing eight years of capricious regulation. Both
deserve credit for not buckling amid the phony meltdown.
Educational Sabotage: New Required School Policies Allow Lawlessness in
Schools
by former ghetto student Walter E. Williams (now an economics professor)
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2017/03/29/educational-sabotage-n2304817?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Jensen Comment
Minority students are not be short changed nearly as much in terms of money
spent per child as they are being short changed in terms of safety and emotional
environment.
Fired Because He Wouldn't Dumb Down a Course?
AAUP report concludes that a professor at Community College of Aurora was likely
fired for refusing to compromise on rigor in his courses as part of a "student
success" initiative.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/29/aaup-report-says-adjunct-professor-was-likely-fired-insisting-rigor-courses?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=094f010213-DNU20170329&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-094f010213-197565045&mc_cid=094f010213&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
There are always exceptions, but in general tough academic courses get lower
student evaluations. Exhibit A contains the "Level of Difficulty" ratings among
the top teachers on RateMyProfessors.com ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/blog/toplist/highest-rated-university-professors-of-2015-2016
Also see
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/blog/toplist/highest-rated-junior-and-community-college-professors-of-2015-2016
The State of Personal Finance, Faculty-Staff Edition:
Survey of campus employees finds professors focus on saving for retirement and
doubt their financial literacy; administrative staff worry more about the near
term ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/28/professors-worry-about-retirement-staff-save-pay-debt?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=13ae309b00-DNU20170328&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-13ae309b00-197565045&mc_cid=13ae309b00&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
What many workers in general forget is that the Federal Reserve virtually
eliminated low risk, safe financial savings that in the past paid upwards of six
percent per year in interest and now pay very close to zero interest. This means
that savers must take on more financial risk to get decent returns on savings,
particularly now that employers are shying away from fixed-benefit retirement
plans.
Bob Jensen's free helpers on personal finance are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers
I'm a long-time advocate that financial literacy should be added to the
common core of skills in higher education. For example, the most common cause in
breakdowns in relationships like marriage is ignorance about finance at the
heart of relationships.
California newborns would get state-seeded college savings accounts under
bill ---
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article141118218.html
Jensen Comment
Families can elect to opt out of the program. Maine, Nevada and Rhode Island
have somewhat similar opt-out savings programs. The California program may be
more controversial with a potentially very expensive matching program over the
years for amounts contributed into the 529 Plans that defer taxes. Presumably
there are no penalties over the years for leaving the states.
These programs suffer from other dangerous entitlements programs in that they
are not sufficiently funded such that as they exponentially grow in obligations
over the years they burden future taxpayers with promises that those taxpayers
have little or no control over because they operate like contracts over time.
Future taxpayers are obligated to make good on promises (think matching funds
obligations promised today for future years) made by their ancestors who were
not taxed at the time of their promises.
Until current interest rates grow much more these 529 plans earn almost no
interest income annually, thereby making them lousy savings plans relative to
more risky equity investments unless mutual fund plans are available. They also take money away from people least
likely to save enough for retirement.
Time Magazine: The Way We Teach Math Is Holding Women Back ---
http://motto.time.com/4717463/jo-boaler-women-stem-ivanka-trump-betsy-devos/?xid=newsletter-brief
MIT: The Road to Clean Liquid Fuels Has Speed Bumps
These days, it can seem that the only path toward a
clean-energy future is to go all-electric. But many
researchers are still interested in the idea of
developing liquid fuels that can be burned without
the same damage to the environment caused by setting
fire to gasoline. Here, we take a look through the
MIT Technology Review archive to see how the
quest to create them refuses to dry up. |
|
For a while back there, America was totally
obsessed with biofuels. But as well as
providing only marginal environmental
benefits, the rush to turn corn into fuel
saw over-eager investors
ignoring some obvious economic problems, too. |
|
|
Nature is already able to create its own
fuel from the simplest of ingredients. Back
in 2008, we
spoke with MIT chemist Daniel Nocera,
who had successfully mimicked one of the
steps in photosynthesis when plants split
water into oxygen and hydrogen. |
|
|
Over time, scientists have gradually tried
to streamline the concept of artificial
photosynthesis. Seven years after Nocera
showed off his attempts to mimic nature,
Peidong Yang from the University of
California, Berkeley,
took the process to the nanoscale. |
|
|
|
If you get one you get them all, because they all look alike in terms of top
SAT scores
Is the Ivy League’s Admission Bias a ‘Trade Secret’?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-ivy-leagues-admission-bias-a-trade-secret-1490740763?mod=djemMER
Fired Because He Wouldn't Dumb Down a Course?
AAUP report concludes that a professor at Community College of Aurora was likely
fired for refusing to compromise on rigor in his courses as part of a "student
success" initiative.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/29/aaup-report-says-adjunct-professor-was-likely-fired-insisting-rigor-courses?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=094f010213-DNU20170329&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-094f010213-197565045&mc_cid=094f010213&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
There are always exceptions, but in general tough academic courses get lower
student evaluations. Exhibit A contains the "Level of Difficulty" ratings among
the top teachers on RateMyProfessors.com ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/blog/toplist/highest-rated-university-professors-of-2015-2016
Also see
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/blog/toplist/highest-rated-junior-and-community-college-professors-of-2015-2016
NYT: How to Con Black Law
Students ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/03/ny-times-op-edhow-to-con-black-law-students.html
Jensen Comment
A 25% pass rate on the CPA examination may sound pretty good to a graduate
school of accountancy, but a 50% pass rate on the bar exam is a kiss of death
for a law school where a 75% passage rate is considered marginal.
I don't know that there's good
research on why accounting school expectations are so low relative to law
schools in this regard. I can think of possible reasons off the top of my head.
-
Law schools entail an equivalent
of three years of post-graduate full time study preparing for the bar
examination. Students sometimes earn masters of accounting degrees with only
two or three semesters of graduate study.
-
CPA exams have fewer prerequisites
for sitting for the exam. Law students must take a law school curriculum at
a law school to sit for the bar exam. Students that take the limited number
of prerequisites to sit for the CPA examination don't even have to earn a
masters of accounting degree. They can get an MBA or nursing degree. They
only have to have 150 hours of college credit, some of which have to be
prerequisites required by a State Board of Accountancy. CPA exam takes don't
even have to earn a masters degree or even take an entrance examination for
a masters program such as the GMAT or GRE examinations.
-
I like to think the CPA
examination is a tougher examination, but lawyers may beg to differ. I'm
told that the CFA exam is tougher than the CPA examination or bar
examination. But "toughness" is a lot like beauty --- it's in the eyes of
the beholder.
The bottom line is that certification
examination success depends upon a great deal on the years of preparation
required. Perhaps a 98% passage rate to become board certified in brain surgery
sounds impressive (easy?), but after all the years of medical school blood,
sweat, and tears most candidates to become brain surgeons could write the
certification examinations.
There also is a difference in learning
aptitudes.
In the tower student housing apartments at Stanford University years ago
my good friend from France got a PhD in physics in record time. However, he had
a learning block for Russian when we were taking the same course together as
part of the language requirement (I'm not sure why he had to take a language
beyond French and English). I tutored him and discovered that he really had a
learning block for Russian. He had to take the course twice. I like to think I
was brilliant, but in fact I had over two years of Russian before going to
graduate school. This was because in my first two years of college I aspired to
become an Admiral on a full Navy scholarship during the Cold War. I was a
midshipman on a battleship during the summers when we played ocean hide and seek
an tag with Russian submarines.
Interesting News from the 5:38 Blog on March 29, 2017
$4.5 million
A
massive gold coin was stolen from the Bode Museum in Germany on Monday. The
“Big Maple Leaf” has a face value of 1 million Canadian dollars ($750,000),
but the gold it’s made of is worth about $4.5 million. Based on weight alone
— this thing is 221 pounds of nearly pure gold — the theft is being
investigated as a multi-person job.
[ABC
News]
45 million
Number
of British one-pound coins that are suspected to be fake. The Royal Mint is
rolling out 1.5 billion new coins with a whole suite of security features to
cut back on counterfeiting. The new coins enter circulation today.
[Bloomberg]
"The Academy’s Assault on Intellectual Diversity," by Robert Boyers,
Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, March 19, 2017 ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academy-s-Assault-on/239496?key=JQfw5xpCetCwuacmaap92Bzb0ARlrgGe6ByF4T0gSt3g5KNYYPD5R-hD829-mBenc3pNcUxfZWRXQUdPOHlUcXoyLVhzSDlxanpGdEV1Ym1XWVpZZTlSa1lpTQ
It is tempting to
describe the battles convulsing American campuses with epithets like "the
politics of hysteria." More than a bit of hysteria was unleashed at
Middlebury College this month, when protesters prevented Charles Murray from
delivering a scheduled lecture. In spite of eloquent rebukes delivered by
the college president and several prominent faculty members, some on the
Middlebury campus defended the protest by citing the poisonous views
expressed by Murray in his ugly and notorious book, The Bell Curve.
Though it’s a violent instance of so-called free-speech controversies lately
ignited on the nation’s campuses, the Middlebury incident doesn’t begin to
reveal the depth or virulence of the opposition to robust discussion within
the American professoriate, where many self-described liberals continue to
believe that they remain committed to "difference" and debate, even as they
countenance a full-scale assault on diversity of outlook and opinion.
Confront contemporary
left-liberal academics — I continue to regard myself as a member of that
deeply troubled cohort — with a familiar passage from John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty, and they will be moved at once to proclaim that Mill
espouses what virtually all of us have long taken for granted. Of course
we understand that "the tyranny of the majority" must be guarded against —
even when it is our majority. Of course we understand that "the
peculiar evil of silencing"— or attempting to silence — "the expression of
an opinion is, that it is robbing … posterity as well as the existing
generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who
hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of
exchanging error for truth: If wrong, they lose … the clearer perception and
livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."
What can be more
obvious than that? Of course we understand that there is danger in
abiding uncritically with the views of one’s own "party" or "sect" or
"class." Who among us doesn’t know that even ostensibly enlightened views
cannot entitle us to think of those views, or of those who hold them, as
"infallible"?
And yet a good
many liberal academics are not actually invested in the posture to which
their avowals ostensibly commit them. Mill noted among his own
contemporaries, more than 150 years ago, what is very much in evidence in
our own culture: that certain opinions have come to seem so important "to
society" that their usefulness cannot be legitimately challenged. Thus a
great many contemporary liberals subscribe to the belief — however loath
they may be to acknowledge it — that certain ideas are "heretical" or
"divisive" and that those who dare to articulate them must be, in one way or
another, cast out. The burning desire to paint a scarlet letter on the
breast of those who fail to observe the officially sanctioned view of things
has taken possession of many ostensibly liberal people in academe, which has
tended more and more in recent years to resemble what the Yale English
professor David Bromwich calls "a church held together by the hunt for
heresies."
When Mill wrote of the
threat to liberty of "thought and discussion," he was responding, at least
in part, to Tocqueville’s idea that in modern societies the greatest dangers
to liberty were social rather than legal or political. Both men believed
that the pressures to conform, and the pleasures associated with conformity,
were such that these societies would not find it necessary to burn heretics
at the stake. Mill explained:
And thus is kept up a
state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the
unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all
prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely
interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady
of thought. … But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification,
is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. A state of
things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring intellects
find it advisable to keep the genuine principles and grounds of their
convictions within their own breasts.
Sad to say,
however, the expectations nowadays enforced with increasing and punishing
severity in the academy are the basis for something rather more alarming
than the regime Mill described. While dissentient views are today not always
"absolutely" interdicted, and we do not hear of persons who are imprisoned
for espousing incorrect views, we do routinely observe that "active and
inquiring intellects" are cast out of the community of the righteous by
their colleagues and formally "investigated" by witch-hunting faculty
committees and threatened with the loss of their jobs. One need only mention
the widely debated eruptions at
Oberlin College,
or
Northwestern University,
or others, to note that this is by no means a phenomenon limited to a
handful of institutions.
The fact that these
eruptions have drawn wildly inaccurate and misleading coverage in the
right-wing media should not distract us from the serious implications of the
kinds of intolerance promoted by ostensibly liberal faculty. Such
show-trial-like events are the leading edge of efforts to create the kind of
total cultural environment the critic Lionel Trilling described as built
upon "firm presuppositions, received ideas, and approved attitudes."
What does such a
total cultural environment look like? In the university it looks like a
place in which all constituencies have been mobilized for the same end, in
which every activity is to be monitored to ensure that everyone is "on
board." Do courses in all departments reflect the commitment of the
institution to raise "awareness" about all of the approved hot-button
topics? If not, something must be done. Are all incoming freshmen assigned a
suitably pointed, heavily ideological summer-reading text that tells them
what they should be primarily concerned about as they enter? Check. Does the
college calendar feature carefully orchestrated consciousness-raising
sessions led by "human resources" specialists trained to facilitate
"dialogues" leading where everyone must agree they ought to lead? Check. Is
every member of the community primed to invoke the customary terms —
"privilege," "power," "hostile," "unsafe" — no matter how incidental or
spurious they seem in a given context? Essential.
Though much of
the regime instituted along these lines can seem kind and gentle in its
pursuit of what many of us take to be a well-intentioned indoctrination, the
impression that control and coercion are the name of the game is really hard
to miss.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Philosophy Took Kit ---
https://aeon.co/essays/with-the-use-of-heuristics-anybody-can-think-like-a-philosopher?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2641c6cfe7-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_04_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-2641c6cfe7-68951505
Learn to think like a philosopher.
Quickies
138 Short Animated Introductions to the World’s Greatest Ideas: Plato, Michel
Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/138-short-animated-introductions-to-the-worlds-greatest-ideas.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Econometrics: Is it Time for a Journal of Insignificant Results ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-journal-of-insignificant-economic.html
P-Value --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value
ASA = American Statistical Association
The ASA's statement on p-values: context, process, and purpose ---
http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108
Learn to p-Hack Like the Pros! ---
https://replicationnetwork.com/2016/10/19/schonbrodt-p-hacking-for-pros/
"Lies, Damn Lies, and Financial Statistics," by Peter Coy, Bloomberg,
April 10, 2017 ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-06/lies-damn-lies-and-financial-statistics
Early in January in a Chicago hotel, Campbell Harvey
gave a rip-Harvey’s term for torturing the
data until it confesses is “p-hacking,” a reference to the p-value,
a measure of statistical significance. P-hacking
is also known as overfitting, data-mining—or data-snooping, the coinage of
Andrew Lo, director of MIT’s Laboratory of Financial Engineering. Says Lo:
“The more you search over the past, the more likely it is you are going to
find exotic patterns that you happen to like or focus on. Those patterns are
least likely to repeat.”snorting presidential address to the American
Finance Association, the world’s leading society for research on financial
economics. To get published in journals, he said, there’s a powerful
temptation to torture the data until it confesses—that is, to conduct round
after round of tests in search of a finding that can be claimed to be
statistically significant. Said Harvey, a professor at Duke University’s
Fuqua School of Business: “Unfortunately, our standard testing methods are
often ill-equipped to answer the questions that we pose.” He exhorted the
group: “We are not salespeople. We are scientists!”
The problems Harvey
identified in academia are as bad or worse in the investing world.
Mass-market products such as exchange-traded funds are being concocted using
the same flawed statistical techniques you find in scholarly journals. Most
of the empirical research in finance is likely false, Harvey wrote in a
paper with a Duke colleague, Yan Liu, in 2014. “This implies that half the
financial products (promising outperformance) that companies are selling to
clients are false.”
. . .
In the wrong hands, though, backtesting can go
horribly wrong. It once found that the best predictor of the S&P 500, out of
all the series in a batch of United Nations data, was butter production in
Bangladesh. The nerd webcomic xkcd by Randall Munroe captures the
ethos perfectly: It features a woman claiming jelly beans cause acne. When a
statistical test shows no evidence of an effect, she revises her claim—it
must depend on the flavor of jelly bean. So the statistician tests 20
flavors. Nineteen show nothing. By chance there’s a high correlation between
jelly bean consumption and acne breakouts for one flavor. The final panel of
the cartoon is the front page of a newspaper: “Green Jelly Beans Linked to
Acne! 95% Confidence. Only 5% Chance of Coincidence!”
It’s worse for financial data because researchers
have more knobs to twist in search of a prized “anomaly”—a subtle pattern in
the data that looks like it could be a moneymaker. They can vary the period,
the set of securities under consideration, or even the statistical method.
Negative findings go in a file drawer; positive ones get submitted to a
journal (tenure!) or made into an ETF whose performance we rely on for
retirement. Testing out-of-sample data to keep yourself honest helps, but it
doesn’t cure the problem. With enough tests, eventually by chance even your
safety check will show the effect you want.
Continued in article
GELMAN: Some Natural Solutions to the p-Value Communication Problem—And Why
They Won’t Work ---
https://replicationnetwork.com/2017/03/23/gelman-some-natural-solutions-to-the-p-value-communication-problem-and-why-they-wont-work/
Blake McShane and David Gal recently wrote two articles (“Blinding
us to the obvious? The effect of statistical training on the evaluation of
evidence”
and “Statistical significance and the dichotomization of evidence”) on the
misunderstandings of p-values that are common even among supposed experts in
statistics and applied social research.
The
key misconception has nothing to do with tail-area probabilities or
likelihoods or anything technical at all, but rather with the use of
significance testing to finesse real uncertainty.
As John Carlin and I write in our
discussion of McShane and Gal’s second paper (to
appear in the Journal of the American Statistical Association):
Even
authors of published articles in a top statistics journal are often confused
about the meaning of p-values, especially by treating 0.05, or the range
0.05–0.15, as the location of a threshold. The underlying problem seems to
be deterministic thinking. To put it another way, applied researchers and
also statisticians are in the habit of demanding more certainty than their
data can legitimately supply. The problem is not just that 0.05 is an
arbitrary convention; rather, even a seemingly wide range of p-values such
as 0.01–0.10 cannot serve to classify evidence in the desired way.
In
our article, John and I discuss some natural solutions that won’t, on their
own, work:
–
Listen to the statisticians, or clarity in exposition
–
Confidence intervals instead of hypothesis tests
–
Bayesian interpretation of one-sided p-values
–
Focusing on “practical significance” instead of “statistical significance”
–
Bayes factors
You can read our
article for
the reasons why we think the above proposed solutions won’t work.
From
our summary:
We
recommend saying No to binary conclusions . . . resist giving clean answers
when that is not warranted by the data. . . . It will be difficult to
resolve the many problems with p-values and “statistical significance”
without addressing the mistaken goal of certainty which such methods have
been used to pursue.
P.S. Along
similar lines, Stephen Jenkins sends along the similarly-themed article,
“‘Sing Me a Song with Social Significance’: The (Mis)Use of Statistical
Significance Testing in European Sociological Research,” by Fabrizio
Bernardi, Lela Chakhaia, and Liliya Leopold.
Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political
science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia
University. He blogs at
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Bayes Factors Versus P-Values ---
https://replicationnetwork.com/2017/03/22/bayes-factors-versus-p-values/
In a
recent article in PLOS One,
Don van
Ravenzwaaij and John Ioannidis argue that Bayes factors should be preferred
to significance testing (p-values) when assessing the effectiveness of new
drugs. At his blogsite
The 20% Statistician,
Daniel Lakens argues that Bayes factors suffer from the same problems as
p-values. Namely, the combination of small effect sizes and sample sizes
leads to inconclusive conclusions no matter whether one uses p-values or
Bayes factors. The real challenge facing decision-making from statistical
studies comes from publication bias and underpowered studies. Both
significance testing and Bayes factors are relatively powerless (pun
intended) to overcome these more fundamental problems. To read more,
click here.
The ground is shaking beneath the accountics science
foundations upon which all accounting doctoral programs and the prestigious
accounting research journals are built. My guess is, however, that the
accountics scientists are sleeping through the tremors or feigning sleep
because, if they admit to waking up, their nightmares will become real!
"A Scrapbook on What's Wrong with the Past, Present and Future of Accountics
Science"
by Bob Jensen
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccounticsWorkingPaper450.pdf
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 differences 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 againand 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
Significance Testing: We Can Do Better
Abacas, June 13, 2016
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/abac.12078/full
This is not a free article
Author
Thomas R. Dyckman Professor Emeritus Cornell University
Abstract
This paper advocates abandoning null hypothesis
statistical tests (NHST) in favor of reporting confidence intervals. The
case against NHST, which has been made repeatedly in multiple disciplines
and is growing in awareness and acceptance, is introduced and discussed.
Accounting as an empirical research discipline appears to be the last of
research communities to face up to the inherent problems of significance
test use and abuse. The paper encourages adoption of a meta-analysis
approach which allows for the inclusion of replication studies in the
assessment of evidence. This approach requires abandoning the typical NHST
process and its reliance on p-values. However, given that NHST has deep
roots and wide “social acceptance” in the empirical testing community,
modifications to NHST are suggested so as to partly counter the weakness of
this statistical testing method.
Extended Quotation
. . .
2. Why The Frequentist Approach (NHSTs) Should be Abandoned in Favor of a
Bayesian Approach
Frequentist Approach:
The frequentist NHST relies on rejecting a null hypothesis of no effect or
relationship based on the probability, or “p-level”, of observing a specific
sample result X equal to or more extreme than the actual observation X₀,
conditional on the null hypothesis H₀ being true. In symbols, this
calculation yields a p-level = Pr(X≥X₀|H₀), where ≥ signifies “as or more
discrepant with H₀ than X₀”. The origin of the approach is generally
credited to Karl Pearson (1900), who introduced it in his χ²-test (Pearson
actually called it the P, χ²-test). However, it was Sir Ronald Fisher who is
credited with naming and popularizing statistical significance testing and
p-values as promulgated in the many editions of his classic books
Statistical Methods for Research Workers and The Design of Experiments. See
Spielman (1974), Seidenfeld (1979), Johnstone et al. (1986), Barnett (1999),
Berger (2003) and Howson and Urbach (2006) on the ideas and development of
modern hypothesis tests (NHST).
The Bayesian Approach:
Probabilities, under the Bayesian approach, rely on informed beliefs rather
than physical quantities. They represent informed reasoned guesses. In the
Bayesian approach, the objective is the posterior (post sample) belief
concerning where a parameter, β in our case, is possibly located. Bayes’
theorem allows us to use the sample data to update our prior beliefs about
the value of the parameter of interest. The revised (posterior) distribution
represents the new belief based on the prior and the statistical method (the
model) applied, and calculated using Bayes theorem. Prior beliefs play an
important role in the Bayesian process. In fact, no data can be interpreted
without prior beliefs (“data cannot speak for themselves”).
Bayesians emphasize the unavoidably subjective
nature of the research process. The decision to select a models and specific
prior or family of priors is necessarily subjective, and the sample data are
seldom obtained objectively (Basturk et al., 2014). Indeed, data quality has
become a major problem with the advent of “big data” and with the
recognition that the rewards for publication tend to induce gamesmanship and
even fraud in the data selected for the study.
When the investigator experiences difficulty and
uncertainty in specifying a specific prior distribution, the use of diffuse
or “uninformative” prior is typically adopted. The idea is to impose no
strong prior belief on the analysis and hence allow the data to have a
bigger part in the final conclusions. Ultimately, enough data will “swamp”
any prior distribution, but in reality, where systems are not stationary and
no models is known to be “true”, there is always subjectivity and room for
revision in Bayesian posterior beliefs.
The Bayesian viewpoint is that this is a fact of
research life and needs to be faced and treated formally in the analysis.
Objectivity is not possible, so there is no gain from pretending that it is.
Formal Bayesian methods for coping with subjectivity are easy to understand.
For example, one approach is to ask how robust the posterior distribution of
belief about β is to different possible prior distributions. If we can say
that we come to essentially the same qualitative belief over all feasible
models and prior distributions, or across the different priors that
different people hold, then that is perhaps the most objective that a
statistical conclusion can claim.
Continued in article
Academic psychology and medical testing are both dogged by unreliability.
The reason is clear: we got probability wrong ---
https://aeon.co/essays/it-s-time-for-science-to-abandon-the-term-statistically-significant?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b8fc3425d2-Weekly_Newsletter_14_October_201610_14_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-b8fc3425d2-68951505
. . .
For one, it’s of little use to say that your
observations would be rare if there were no real difference between the
pills (which is what the p-value tells you), unless you can say whether or
not the observations would also be rare when there is a true difference
between the pills. Which brings us back to induction.
The problem of induction
was solved, in principle, by the Reverend Thomas Bayes in the middle of the
18th century. He
showed how to convert the probability of the observations given a hypothesis
(the deductive problem) to what we actually want, the probability that the
hypothesis is true given some observations (the inductive problem). But how
to use his famous theorem in practice has been the subject of heated debate
ever since.
Take the proposition that the Earth goes round the
Sun. It either does or it doesn’t, so it’s hard to see how we could pick a
probability for this statement. Furthermore, the Bayesian conversion
involves assigning a value to the probability that your hypothesis is right
before any observations have been made (the ‘prior probability’). Bayes’s
theorem allows that prior probability to be converted to what we want, the
probability that the hypothesis is true given some relevant observations,
which is known as the ‘posterior probability’.
These intangible probabilities persuaded Fisher
that Bayes’s approach wasn’t feasible. Instead, he proposed the wholly
deductive process of null hypothesis significance testing. The realisation
that this method, as it is commonly used, gives alarmingly large numbers of
false positive results has spurred several recent attempts to bridge the
gap.
There is one
uncontroversial application of Bayes’s theorem: diagnostic screening,
the tests that doctors give healthy people to detect warning signs of
disease. They’re a good way to understand the perils of the deductive
approach.
In theory, picking up on the early signs of illness
is obviously good. But
in practice there are usually so many false positive diagnoses that it just
doesn’t work very well. Take dementia. Roughly
1 per cent of the population suffer from mild cognitive impairment, which
might, but doesn’t always, lead to dementia. Suppose that the test is quite
a good one, in the sense that 95 per cent of the time it gives the right
(negative) answer for people who are free of the condition. That means that
5 per cent of the people who don’t have cognitive impairment will test,
falsely, as positive. That doesn’t sound bad. It’s directly analogous to
tests of significance which will give 5 per cent of false positives when
there is no real effect, if we use a p-value of less than 5 per cent to mean
‘statistically significant’.
But in fact the screening test is not good – it’s
actually appallingly bad, because 86 per cent, not 5 per cent, of all
positive tests are false positives. So only 14 per cent of positive tests
are correct. This happens because most people don’t have the condition, and
so the false positives from these people (5 per cent of 99 per cent of the
people), outweigh the number of true positives that arise from the much
smaller number of people who have the condition (80 per cent of 1 per cent
of the people, if we assume 80 per cent of people with the disease are
detected successfully). There’s a YouTube video of my attempt to explain
this principle, or you can read my recent paper on the subject.
Notice, though, that it’s possible to calculate the
disastrous false-positive rate for screening tests only because we have
estimates for the prevalence of the condition in the whole population being
tested. This is the prior probability that we need to use Bayes’s theorem.
If we return to the problem of tests of significance, it’s not so easy. The
analogue of the prevalence of disease in the population becomes, in the case
of significance tests, the probability that there is a real difference
between the pills before the experiment is done – the prior probability that
there’s a real effect. And it’s usually impossible to make a good guess at
the value of this figure.
An example should make the idea more concrete.
Imagine testing 1,000 different drugs, one at a time, to sort out which
works and which doesn’t. You’d be lucky if 10 per cent of them were
effective, so let’s proceed by assuming a prevalence or prior probability of
10 per cent. Say we observe a ‘just significant’ result, for example, a P =
0.047 in a single test, and declare that this is evidence that we have made
a discovery. That claim will be wrong, not in 5 per cent of cases, as is
commonly believed, but in 76 per cent of cases. That is disastrously high.
Just as in screening tests, the reason for this large number of mistakes is
that the number of false positives in the tests where there is no real
effect outweighs the number of true positives that arise from the cases in
which there is a real effect.
In general, though, we don’t know the real
prevalence of true effects. So, although we can calculate the p-value, we
can’t calculate the number of false positives. But what we can do is give a
minimum value for the false positive rate. To do this, we need only assume
that it’s not legitimate to say, before the observations are made, that the
odds that an effect is real are any higher than 50:50. To do so would be to
assume you’re more likely than not to be right before the experiment even
begins.
If we repeat the drug calculations using a
prevalence of 50 per cent rather than 10 per cent, we get a false positive
rate of 26 per cent, still much bigger than 5 per cent. Any lower prevalence
will result in an even higher false positive rate.
The upshot is that, if a scientist observes a ‘just
significant’ result in a single test, say P = 0.047, and declares that she’s
made a discovery, that claim will be wrong at least 26 per cent of the time,
and probably more. No wonder then that there are problems with
reproducibility in areas of science that rely on tests of significance.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Especially note the many replies to this article
. . .
David Colquhoun
https://aeon.co/conversations/what-should-be-done-to-improve-statistical-literacy#
I think that it’s quite hard to find a really good practical guide to
Bayesian analysis. By really good, I mean on that is critical about priors
and explains exactly what assumptions are being made. I fear that one reason
for this is that Bayesians often seem to have an evangelical tendency that
leads to them brushing the assumptions under the carpet. I agree that
Alexander Etz is a good place to start. but I do wonder how much it will
help when your faced with a particular set of observations to analyze.
Henning Strandin ---
https://aeon.co/users/henning-strandin
Thank you for a good and useful article on the pitfalls of ignoring the
baseline. I have a couple of comments.
Bayes didn’t resolve the problem of induction, even in principle. The
problem of induction is the problem of knowing that the observations you
have made are relevant to some set of (perhaps as-yet) unobserved events. In
his Essay on Probabilities, Laplace illustrated the problem in the same
paragraph in which he suggests . . .
Karl Young
Nice article; as a Bayesian who was forced to quote p values in a couple of
medical physics papers for which the journal would have nothing else, I
appreciate the points made here. But even as a Bayesian one has to
acknowledge that there are a number of open problems besides just how to
estimate priors. E.g. what one really wants to know is given some
observations, how one’s hypothesis fares against as complete a list of
alternative hypothesis as can be mustered. Even assuming that one could come
up with such a list, calculating the probability that one’s hypothesis best
fits the observations in that case requires calculation of a quantity called
the evidence that is generally extremely difficult (the reason that the
diagnostic examples mentioned in the piece lead to reasonable calculations
is that calculating the evidence for the set of proposed hypotheses, that
either someone in the population has a disease or doesn’t, is
straightforward). So while I think Bayes is the philosophically most
coherent approach to analyzing data (doesn’t solve the problem of induction
but tries to at least manage it) there are still a number of issues
preventing it
Comments Continued at
https://aeon.co/conversations/what-should-be-done-to-improve-statistical-literacy
"Drawing Inferences From Very Large Data-Sets," by David Giles, Econometrics
Beat: Dave Giles� Blog, University of Victoria, April 26, 2013 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.ca/2011/04/drawing-inferences-from-very-large-data.html
. . .
Granger (1998; 2003) has
reminded us that if the sample size is sufficiently large, then it's
virtually impossible not to
reject almost any hypothesis. So,
if the sample is very large and the p-values
associated with the estimated coefficients in a regression model are of the
order of, say, 0.10 or even 0.05, then this really bad news.
Much, much, smaller p-values
are needed before we get all excited about 'statistically significant'
results when the sample size is in the thousands, or even bigger. So, the p-values
reported above are mostly pretty marginal, as far as significance is
concerned. When you work out the p-values
for the other 6 models I mentioned, they range from to 0.005 to 0.460. I've
been generous in the models I selected.
Here's another set of results taken from a second, really nice, paper by Ciecieriski et
al. (2011) in the same issue of Health
Economics:
Continued in article
"Not Even Scientists Can Easily Explain
P-values," by Christie Aschwanden, Nate
Silver's 5:38 Blog, November 30, 2015 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/not-even-scientists-can-easily-explain-p-values/
P-values have
taken quite a beating lately. These widely used and commonly misapplied
statistics have been blamed for giving a veneer
of legitimacy to dodgy study results,
encouraging bad
research practices and
promotingfalse-positive
study results.
But after
writing about p-values again and again, and recently issuing a correction on
a nearly
year-old story over
some erroneous information regarding a study’s p-value (which I’d taken from
the scientists themselves and their
report), I’ve come to think that the most
fundamental problem with p-values is that no one can really say what they
are.
Last week, I
attended the inaugural METRICS
conference at Stanford, which
brought together some of the world’s leading experts on meta-science, or the
study of studies. I figured that if anyone could explain p-values in plain
English, these folks could. I was wrong.
Continued in article
More on statistical
mistakes
Bob Jensen's threads on Common Accountics Science and Econometric Science
Statistical Mistakes ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsScienceStatisticalMistakes.htm
The fall from grace of Accountics Science Sacred Cows --- P-Values
Beginning in the 1960s. academic accounting research commenced to rely mostly on
the general linear (regression) model applied to purchased databases like CRSP,
Compustat, AuditAnalitics, etc. Elite academic journals like TAR, JAR, and JAE
ceased accepting any submissions that did not have equations. Either the
equations were analytical based upon unrealistic economic assumptions or
empirical based upon dubious assumptions of efficient markets and the unreliable
Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). Down deep researchers knew correlation was
not causation but results usually ignored this in the conclusions of the GLM
model applications. Errors in the purchased databases were overlooked by journal
editors and referees. The accounting profession virtually lost interest in the
tenure game being played by academic accounting (accountics) researchers ---
Keep scrolling down this module for details.
Question
Is accounting research stuck in a rut of repetitiveness and irrelevancy?
"Accounting
Craftspeople versus Accounting Seers: Exploring the Relevance and Innovation
Gaps in Academic Accounting Research," by William E. McCarthy, Accounting
Horizons, December 2012, Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 833-843 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/acch-10313
Is accounting research stuck in a rut of
repetitiveness and irrelevancy?
I (Professor
McCarthy) would
answer yes, and I would even predict that both its gap in relevancy and its
gap in innovation are going to continue to get worse if the people and the
attitudes that govern inquiry in the American academy remain the same.
From my perspective in accounting information systems, mainstream accounting
research topics have changed very little in 30 years, except for the fact
that their scope now seems much more narrow and crowded. More and more
people seem to be studying the same topics in financial reporting and
managerial control in the same ways, over and over and over. My suggestions
to get out of this rut are simple. First, the profession should allow itself
to think a little bit normatively, so we can actually target practice
improvement as a real goal. And second, we need to allow new scholars a
wider berth in research topics and methods, so we can actually give the kind
of creativity and innovation that occurs naturally with young people a
chance to blossom.
"The new astrology: By fetishising mathematical models, economists
turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience," by Alan Jay
Levinovitz, AEON, May 2016 ---
https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers
Since the
2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased
pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest. In 2009,
Washington State University announced it would eliminate the department
of theatre and dance, the department of community and rural sociology,
and the German major – the same year that the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette ended its philosophy major. In 2012, Emory University in
Atlanta did away with the visual arts department and its journalism
programme. The cutbacks aren’t restricted to the humanities: in 2011,
the state of Texas announced it would eliminate nearly half of its
public undergraduate physics programmes. Even when there’s no
downsizing, faculty salaries have been frozen and departmental budgets
have shrunk.
But despite the funding crunch, it’s a bull market
for academic economists. According to a 2015 sociological study in
the Journal
of Economic Perspectives, the median salary of economics
teachers in 2012 increased to $103,000 – nearly $30,000 more than
sociologists. For the top 10 per cent of economists, that figure jumps
to $160,000, higher than the next most lucrative academic discipline –
engineering. These figures, stress the study’s authors, do not include
other sources of income such as consulting fees for banks and hedge
funds, which, as many learned from the documentary Inside
Job (2010), are
often substantial. (Ben Bernanke, a former academic economist and
ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, earns $200,000-$400,000 for a single
appearance.)
Unlike
engineers and chemists, economists cannot point to concrete objects –
cell phones, plastic – to justify the high valuation of their
discipline. Nor, in the case of financial economics and macroeconomics,
can they point to the predictive power of their theories. Hedge funds
employ cutting-edge economists who command princely fees, but routinely
underperform index funds. Eight years ago, Warren Buffet made a 10-year,
$1 million bet that a portfolio of hedge funds would lose to the S&P
500, and it looks like he’s going to collect. In 1998, a fund that
boasted two Nobel Laureates as advisors collapsed, nearly causing a
global financial crisis.
The failure of the field to predict the 2008
crisis has also been well-documented. In 2003, for example, only five
years before the Great Recession, the Nobel Laureate Robert E Lucas Jr told the
American Economic Association that ‘macroeconomics […] has succeeded:
its central problem of depression prevention has been solved’.
Short-term predictions fair little better – in April 2014, for instance, a
survey of
67 economists yielded 100 per cent consensus: interest rates would rise
over the next six months. Instead, they fell. A lot.
Nonetheless, surveys
indicate that
economists see their discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social
sciences’. What is the basis of this collective faith, shared by
universities, presidents and billionaires? Shouldn’t successful and
powerful people be the first to spot the exaggerated worth of a
discipline, and the least likely to pay for it?
In the
hypothetical worlds of rational markets, where much of economic theory
is set, perhaps. But real-world history tells a different story, of
mathematical models masquerading as science and a public eager to buy
them, mistaking elegant equations for empirical accuracy.
Real Science versus Pseudo Science ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm#Pseudo-Science
Jensen Comment
Academic accounting (accountics) scientists took economic
astrology a step further when their leading journals stopped encouraging and
publishing commentaries and replications of published articles ---
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
Times are changing in social science research (including
economics) where misleading p-values are no longer the Holy Grail. Change
among accountics scientist will lag behind change in social science research
but some day leading academic accounting research journals may publish
articles without equations and/or articles of interest to some accounting
practitioner somewhere in the world ---
See below
Academic accounting researchers sheilded themselves from validity challenges
by refusing to publish commentaries and refusing to accept replication studies
for publication ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Stanford University 2017 Update: Fixing Big Data’s Blind Spot Susan Athey
wants to help machine-learning
applications look beyond correlation and into root causes ---
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/fixing-big-datas-blind-spot?utm_source=Stanford+Business&utm_campaign=afd09dc9c1-Stanford-Business-Issue-108-3-19-2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b5214e34b-afd09dc9c1-70265733&ct=t(Stanford-Business-Issue-108-3-19-2017)
Accountics Science: What Went Wrong?
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
This is a big document that loads slowly
From the Scout Report on April 1, 2017
Jotterpad ---
https://2appstudio.com/jotterpad
Many writers are on the hunt for a writing tool
that will help spur creativity. Luckily, Jotterpad, a text editor for
Android devices, was designed with the creative writer in mind. Like other
options out there, this writing tool aims to reduce distraction and promote
writing through a crisp, clean typing interface. What sets it apart, are the
details. Typeface options have been selected with ease of use in mind; fonts
are easy on the eye and readable on multiple devices. Tech-savvy users may
even import custom typeface, should the desire arise. Additionally,
Jotterpad includes a Night mode to facilitate working in the evenings. Other
highlights include a built-in dictionary, thesaurus, and rhyming dictionary
for those poets among us. Finished products may be exported in PDF, RTF,
HTML, DOCX, or plain text file formats.
I Can't Wake Up ---
http://kogcreations.com
Do you have trouble getting up each morning? Are
you guilty of hitting snooze multiple times before starting your day? If so,
this application may be for you. I Can't wake up, an app for Android and iOS
devices, functions as an alarm clock specifically for those who struggle to
get out of bed. This particular alarm clock requires users to perform a
basic task, such as a math problem, before they are able to hit snooze or
turn off their alarm. In fact, the alarm actually gets louder the longer
users procrastinate on doing the task. The basic version of this application
is free.
New Research Suggests that Access to
Food Determines Lamprey Sex
Growth spurts may determine a lamprey's sex
http://www.nature.com/news/growth-spurts-may-determine-a-lamprey-s-sex-1.21724
Sex-shifting fish: Growth rate could determine sea lamprey sex
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-sex-shifting-fish-growth-sea-lamprey.html
Sex of Fish Determined by Access to Food, Surprised Researchers Say
http://acsh.org/news/2017/03/29/sex-fish-determined-access-food-surprised-researchers-say-11065
Parasitic fish offer evolutionary insights
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170320143828.htm
USGS: Sea Lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) FactSheet
https://nas.er.usgs.gov/queries/factsheet.aspx?SpeciesID=836
Sex Determination: Why so Many Ways of Doing It?
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001899
From the Scout Report on April 14, 2017
Bear --- http://www.bear-writer.com
Bear is a note taking application for iOS devices
that allows users to sort notes by categories and create to-do lists. This
application will likely most appeal to iCloud users who want to quickly
access notes across iOS devices. Bear allows users to organize notes through
hashtags, or quickly reorganize to do lists with a "pin top" option. In
addition, users can check off boxes on to-do lists and use a strikethrough
feature to edit their thoughts. Users can also import notes from Evernote.
Loom (screen capture pictures and
video) ---
https://www.useloom.com
Readers looking for a new screen recording tool may
want to check out Loom, a free Google Chrome browser extension that allows
users to capture what they see on their screen and easily share with others.
Once downloaded, the tool requires a Google or Microsoft account to get
started. Users then have the option to simply capture what is on the screen,
or use microphone audio and webcam features for more detailed annotation.
Saved videos may be shared with other users, downloaded, or posted to social
media accounts. Loom is currently only available for Google Chrome, but may
soon be available for other browsers.
Free Online Tutorials, Videos, Course Materials, and
Learning Centers
Education Tutorials
Visionlearning (Science) ---
http://www.visionlearning.com/en
How to Learn Math: For Students ---
https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Education/EDUC115-S/Spring2014/about
Seeing Theory (probability and statistics) ---
http://students.brown.edu/seeing-theory
Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) ---
https://vads.ac.uk
TeachMeAnatomy ---
http://teachmeanatomy.info
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
Visionlearning (Science) ---
http://www.visionlearning.com/en
OVA: Treasures of the Earth: Gems ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/treasures-earth-gems.html
Kew: State of World Plants
https://stateoftheworldsplants.com
TeachMeAnatomy ---
http://teachmeanatomy.info
National Geographic Society: Gray Wolf Educator's Guide ---
http://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/gray-wolf-educator-guide
The Wall of Birds ---
https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/features/wallofbirds
David and Gladys Wright House (Frank Lloyd Wright) ---
http://davidwrighthouse.org
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 Hastings Center (health ethics) ---
http://www.thehastingscenter.org
Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering
---
https://nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/
Documenting Hate ---
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/hatecrimes
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
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to Law
Math Tutorials
Dan Meyer's Popular Math Blog: 1,000 Math Teachers Tell Me
What They Think About Calculators in the Classroom ---
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/2017/1000-teachers-tell-me-what-they-think-about-calculators-in-the-classroom/
YouTube: Math Mornings at Yale ---
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqHnHG5X2PXBVZsf_rvAwGnUgZ-mGdqCy
YouTube: Infinite Series (infinity) ---
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs4aHmggTfFrpkPcWSaBN9g
How to Learn Math: For Students ---
https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Education/EDUC115-S/Spring2014/about
Seeing Theory (probability and statistics) ---
http://students.brown.edu/seeing-theory
Fermat's Library
http://fermatslibrary.com
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to Mathematics and Statistics
Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
History Tutorials
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Ethics ---
http://www.iep.utm.edu/ethics
Amazon's List of 100 Books to Read in Your Lifetime (not many ancient
classics or free books in this listing)---
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-100-best-books-to-read-in-your-lifetime-2017-3
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Abhidharma (historical Buddah)
---
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abhidharma/
Museum of Obsolete Media ---
http://www.obsoletemedia.org
DPLA: A History of U.S. Libraries
https://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/history-us-public-libraries
Center for the Future of Libraries ---
http://www.ala.org/transforminglibraries/future
Future Library: 2014-2114 ---
https://www.futurelibrary.no
Library 2.0 ---
http://www.library20.com
Internet Archive Wayback Machine
https://web-beta.archive.org
The Invisible Library ---
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/the-invisible-library
Library of Congress Online Catalog ---
https://catalog.loc.gov
New York Public Library Visual Materials ---
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/new-york-public-library-visual-materials
Little Free Library ---
https://littlefreelibrary.org
Debates in the Digital Humanities ---
http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
Thinkers and Tinkers ---
http://hernbergm.wixsite.com/maker-movement
Bob Jensen's Philosophy Links ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to "Philosophy"
Marginalia Review of Books ---
http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org
David and Gladys Wright House (Frank Lloyd Wright) ---
http://davidwrighthouse.org
Download 437 Issues of Soviet Photo Magazine, the Soviet Union’s Historic
Photography Journal (1926-1991) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/03/download-437-issues-of-soviet-photo.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Umbra Search African American History ---
https://www.umbrasearch.org
Home Front: California During WWII ---
https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/FQISpwnUy6rKKg
China Biographical Database Project ---
http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb
Historic Threads: Three Centuries of Clothing (fashion) ---
http://www.history.org/history/museums/clothingexhibit
Musee des Beaux-Artes: Collections (art works) ---
http://mbarouen.fr/en/collections
Books As Medicine ---
http://booksasmedicine.com
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to History
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
Learn 48 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/freelanguagelessons
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#Languages
Music Tutorials
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to Music
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
University of Illinois: The Center for Writing Studies ---
http://www.cws.illinois.edu
Dictionary of the Bood ---
http://lisnews.org/the_dictionary_of_the_book
Meet the “Grammar Vigilante,” Hell-Bent on Fixing Grammatical Mistakes on
England’s Storefront Signs ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/04/grammar-vigilante.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
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/
Shots: NPR Health News ---
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
March 28, 2017
March 29, 2017
March 30, 2017
March 31, 2017
April 1, 2017
April 3, 2017
April 4, 2017
April 5, 2017
April 6, 2017
April 7, 2017
April 8m 2017
April 10, 2017
April 12, 2017
April 13, 2017
April 14, 2017
April 15, 2017
Is There An Awareness Behind Vegetative States?
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-there-awareness-behind-vegetative-states
Books As Medicine ---
http://booksasmedicine.com
The Hastings Center (health ethics) ---
http://www.thehastingscenter.org
Lauren Marks: What My Stroke Taught Me ---
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/what-my-stroke-taught-me
. . .
We are rarely
prepared for the next stages in our lives, and we lurch forward into
positions we are not equipped for, without the expertise we might sorely
need. With that in mind, perfection can never be the goal. But fluidity
might be. And sometimes without exactly realizing it, in the process of
doing what we are doing, we become the people who are capable of doing it.
Language was
both my injury and the treatment of that injury, and in many ways, I have
been writing my way back to fluency. I suspect I will continue to keep
reaching out for language, even when it falls short. Speech, overt or
covert, can be such a gift, but sometimes it is at its best when it isn’t
being used at all.
How beautiful
a word can be. Almost as beautiful as the silence that precedes it.
Mapping Alzheimers ---
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/mapping-alzheimers
Lyme disease is set to explode and we still don’t have a
vaccine ---
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431195-800-lyme-disease-is-set-to-explode-and-you-cant-protect-yourself/
University of California researchers are trialling a
vaccine that could be a game-changer for anyone with acne ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/acne-vaccine-trial-university-of-california-2017-4
From a MIT Newsletter on April 8, 2017
We’ve long known that feeding the world poses problems.
This
excerpt from a 1965 article suggests a number of
possible solutions—including a meal “adequate for all human
needs” made from one-third processed oilseed meal and
two-thirds cereal grain. (Subscribers can
read the
whole thing here.) |
|
|
Fortunately for our taste buds, thinking moved on in
subsequent decades. In 2003, we investigated whether new
kinds of crops that were genetically engineered to reproduce
through cloning
could
feed the world’s poor. |
|
|
More recently, biologists have tried to boost the yield of
individual plants. By tweaking the method through which
crops create energy for themselves, researchers reckon, they
could
boost
rice yields by as much as 50 percent. |
|
|
Even so, the prospect of widespread GMO use has proved
contentious. But with increasing demand for food, regular
crops look unlikely to keep us all sated. We looked at the
numbers to show that
engineered crops will be vital in the future. |
|
|
How FDA Rules Made a $15 Drug Cost $400 ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-fda-rules-made-a-15-drug-cost-400-1491434230?mod=djemMER
For many older medicines, government
forces the original, name-brand version off the market (after its patent
expires)
The
theory is that generic drugs should be less expensive than the original. By
the time a generic hits the market, the drug’s patent has expired, allowing
competition from companies that didn’t spend millions of dollars to develop
it. As more options become available, prices are supposed to drop. But
because of quirks in America’s regulatory system, it doesn’t always work out
this way.
In 2009
the Food and Drug Administration approved a new version of colchicine, which
treats symptoms of gout. Prices rose from 25 cents to $6 per pill. Two years
later, the agency approved a new hydroxyprogesterone, which helps prevent
premature births. It went from $15 to $400 an injection. In 2014 the FDA
approved a generic of the man-made hormone vasopressin. Prices jumped from
$11 to $138 for an injection.
What
explains the counterintuitive price increases? All these prescription drugs
fall under a category known as DESI drugs, named for their inclusion in an
FDA program called Drug Efficacy Study Implementation. These drugs came to
market before 1962, when getting FDA approval for a drug required proving
its safety but not its efficacy. Such drugs, manufactured under expired
patents, are used by millions of Americans today.
But once
the FDA approves a new-drug application for a DESI drug, the existing drug
can be pulled from the market. The “new” drug is treated as a material
advance because it underwent testing for safety
and
efficacy—even though the DESI version was
proved safe and effective over decades of actual use. The developer of the
new drug may also get a new period of market exclusivity that lasts three
years.
This
makes little sense. Market exclusivity should let pharmaceutical companies
recoup their often enormous investments in genuinely new drugs. Giving
monopoly protection for what is essentially a generic version of a DESI drug
merely enriches sharp-dealing companies while injuring patients.
Another reason generics often face no competition was described by Scott
Gottlieb, President Trump’s nominee for FDA commissioner, in
these pages
last year. He noted that a generic-drug application can cost as much as $15
million. This high upfront cost is part of why would-be manufacturers of
generics often pass on the opportunity to compete against branded drugs with
smaller markets. This has allowed many pharmaceutical companies to raise
prices with impunity.
Overhauling the drug-approval process will take time. But there are already
tools to help ensure reasonable prices for the
estimated 17%
of U.S. drugs that lack competition.
The Drug
Quality and Security Act of 2013 was designed to ensure that companies can
quickly respond to a drug shortage by allowing a new type of drug maker,
called an “outsourcing facility,” to enter the market. It copies an
FDA-approved product, regardless of exclusivity, provided that it
manufactures the drug in an FDA-registered and -inspected facility using
FDA-approved ingredients. American companies, including mine, have invested
in such facilities.
Yet the
potential of this legislation remains untapped. The FDA should clearly
define “drug shortage” to include a lack of access due to abnormally high
prices. With this simple change, FDA-registered outsourcing facilities could
quickly bring sky-high prices for monopoly generics with expired patents
back to earth.
At the
same time, the Trump administration should authorize Medicare and Medicaid
to pay for compounded drugs made in outsourcing facilities, which currently
aren’t covered. Right now government policy forces Medicare to pay Turing
Pharmaceuticals, the brainchild of the notorious “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli,
$750 for a single Daraprim pill. Instead Medicare should be able to choose
my company’s Daraprim alternative, priced at 99 cents a pill, which has been
safely dispensed to thousands of patients nationwide.
Continued in article
A senator found Medicare blowing hundreds of millions on
a loser drug — and no one even got a slap on the wrist ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-scott-letter-on-acthar-and-medicare-waste-2017-4
Humor for April 2017
Forwarded by Bob Blystone
The World According to Student Bloopers ---
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/info/people/fcc/humor/history.html
Forwarded by Scott Bonacker
Tax Rackets ---
https://www.flake.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=1102AA3C-75E7-4E77-8B3D-2DB5682A32A9
P.G. Wodehouse, Great American Humorist?
https://daily.jstor.org/p-g-wodehouse-great-american-humorist/
Granny's Magic Trick for Grandpa ---
http://www.craveonline.com/mandatory/1244105-grandma-pranks-husband-hilarious-video-making-everyone-want-relationship
Forwarded by Paula
YMOC Feel Good ---
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8G2Mwid5GrCTkhuVHk1Vk5BTUk/view
One liners orwarded by Paula (some have been around for a while; some are new
to me)
Just read that 4,153,237 people got married
last year, not to cause any trouble but shouldn't that be an even number?
Today a man knocked on my door and asked
for a small donation towards the local swimming pool. I gave him a glass of
water.
I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like
my grandfather. Not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.
If I had a dollar for every girl that
found me unattractive, they would eventually find me attractive.
I find it ironic that the colors red,
white, and blue stand for freedom until they are flashing behind you.
When wearing a bikini, women reveal 90% of
their body... men are so polite they only look at the covered parts.
A recent study has found that woman who
carry a little extra weight, live longer than the men who mention it.
Relationships are a lot like algebra. Have
you ever looked at your X and wondered Y?
America is a country which produces
citizens who will cross the ocean to fight for democracy but won't cross the
street to vote.
You know that tingly little feeling you
get when you like someone? That's your common sense leaving your body.
Did you know that dolphins are so smart
that within a few weeks of captivity, they can train people to stand on the
very edge of the pool and throw them fish?
My therapist says I have a preoccupation
with vengeance. We'll see about that.
I think my neighbor is stalking me as
she's been googling my name on her computer. I saw it through my telescope
last night.
Money talks ...but all mine ever says is
good-bye.
You're not fat, you're just... easier to
see.
If you think nobody cares whether you're
alive, try missing a couple of payments.
I always wondered what the job application
is like at Hooters. Do they just give you a bra and say, “Here, fill this
out?”
I can’t understand why women are okay that
JC Penny has an older women’s clothing line named, “Sag Harbor.”
My therapist said that my narcissism
causes me to misread social situations. I’m pretty sure she was hitting on
me.
My 60 year kindergarten reunion is coming
up soon and I’m worried about the 175 pounds I’ve gained since then.
Denny’s has a slogan, “If it’s your
birthday, the meal is on us.” If you’re in Denny’s and it’s your birthday,
your life sucks!
The pharmacist asked me my birth date
again today. I’m pretty sure she’s going to get me something.
On average, an American man will have sex
two to three times a week. Whereas, a Japanese man will have sex only one or
two times a year. This is very upsetting news to me. I had no idea I was
Japanese.
The location of your mailbox shows you
how far away from your house you can be in a robe before you start looking
like a mental patient.
I think it's pretty cool how Chinese
people made a language entirely out of tattoos.
Money can’t buy happiness, but it keeps
the kids in touch!
The reason Mayberry was so peaceful and
quiet was because nobody was married. Andy, Aunt Bea, Barney, Floyd, Howard,
Goober, Gomer, Sam, Earnest T Bass, Helen, Thelma Lou, Clara and, of course,
Opie were all single. The only married person was Otis, and he stayed
drunk.
On the first day of
school, the children brought gifts for their teacher. The supermarket
manager's daughter brought the teacher a basket of assorted fruit. The
florist's son brought the teacher a bouquet of flowers. The candy-store
owner's daughter gave the teacher a pretty box of candy. Then the
liquor-store owner's son brought up a big, heavy box. The teacher lifted it
up and noticed that it was leaking a little bit. She touched a drop of the
liquid with her finger and tasted it."Is it wine?" she guessed. "No," the
boy replied. She tasted another drop and asked, "Champagne?" "No," said the
little boy, "It's a puppy."
Humor March
2017 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q1.htm#Humor0317.htm
Humor February
2017 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q1.htm#Humor0217.htm
Humor January
2017 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q1.htm#Humor0117.htm
Humor December 2016 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q4.htm#Humor1216.htm
Humor November 2016 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q4.htm#Humor1116.htm
Humor October 2016 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q4.htm#Humor1016.htm
Humor September 2016 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q3.htm#Humor0916.htm
Humor
August 2016
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book16q3.htm#Humor083116.htm
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
Tidbits Archives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
Update in
2014
20-Year Sugar Hill Master Plan ---
http://www.nccouncil.org/images/NCC/file/wrkgdraftfeb142014.pdf
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
-
With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
- With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors
Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
- With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of
Accountancy Ignores TAR
- With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research
into Undergraduate Accounting Courses
The Cult of Statistical Significance:
How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm
How Accountics Scientists Should Change:
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review
I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral
Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH
CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and
Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the
vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
CPA Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle ---
http://cpareviewforfree.com/
Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at
http://iaed.wordpress.com/
Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social
Networking ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at
http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting
educators.
Any college may post a news item.
Accounting and Taxation News Sites ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for
free) go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM
(Educators)
http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.
Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for
accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting
education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial
accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing,
doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics)
research, publication, replication, and validity testing.
|
CPAS-L
(Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/ (Closed
Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo (Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB
and the International Accounting
Standards Board on this financial
reporting blog from Financial Executives
International. The site, updated daily,
compiles regulatory news, rulings and
statements, comment letters on
standards, and hot topics from the Web’s
largest business and accounting
publications and organizations. Look for
continuing coverage of SOX requirements,
fair value reporting and the Alternative
Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such
as the subprime mortgage crisis,
international convergence, and rules for
tax return preparers. |
|
|
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker
[lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as
well as a practicing CPA)
I found another listserve
that is exceptional -
CalCPA maintains
http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/
and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.
There are several highly
capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and
the answers are often in depth.
Scott
Scott forwarded the following message from Jim
Counts
Yes you may mention info on
your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any
CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is
possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not
have access to the files and other items posted.
Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in
top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and
in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I
will get the request to join.
Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage
people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then
via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in
your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the
inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.
We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in
California.... ]
Please encourage your members
to join our listserve.
If any questions let me know.
Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk
|
Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Some
Accounting History Sites
Bob Jensen's
Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
Sage Accounting History ---
http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269
A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of
thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional
Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005
---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 ---
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm
A nice
timeline of accounting history ---
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING
From Texas
A&M University
Accounting History Outline ---
http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html
Bob
Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds
History of
Fraud in America ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's
Threads ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and
Stories
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
All
my online pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu