Tidbits on August 15, 2017
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Wes Lavin's Artistic Photographs of Our Lupine This Year
http://cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Lavin/2017WesLavinCD/Lupines2017/2017Lupine.htm

 

 

Tidbits on August 15, 2017
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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/ ubl




Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio

The Inn on Sunset Hill (just down from our cottage) ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5cqUX0LcbU&t=9s

Birth of a Bee---
https://aeon.co/videos/from-egg-to-the-air-21-days-of-bee-development-condensed-into-one-mesmerising-minute?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9470756e7c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-9470756e7c-68951505

ReadWriteThink: Videos (k-12 English) --- http://www.readwritethink.org/videosbv

TED-Ed: Math in Real Life Video Series --- https://ed.ted.com/series/?series=math-in-real-life

Institute of Arts and Ideas (like TED in philosophy) --- https://iai.tv

Sloan Science and Film (film making) --- http://scienceandfilm.org


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 

Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica --- http://www.musicalpassage.org

Watch the Earliest Known Footage of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (February, 1967) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/watch-the-earliest-known-footage-of-the-jimi-hendrix-experience-february-1967.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

What Makes John Bonham Such a Good Drummer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inimitable Style ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/what-makes-john-bonham-such-a-good-drummer.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vintage Recording from 1913 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/hear-debussy-play-debussy-a-vintage-recording-from-1913.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

Time: The 100 Most Influential Images of All Time --- http://100photos.time.com/   
 

Leonardo da Vinci’s Visionary Notebooks Now Online: Browse 570 Digitized Pages ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/leonardo-da-vincis-visionary-notebooks-now-online-browse-570-digitized-pages.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The British Museum Creates 3D Models of the Rosetta Stone & 200+ Other Historic Artifacts: Download or View in Virtual Reality ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/the-first-3d-scan-of-the-rosetta-stone-now-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Time Magazine:  Best Space Pictures of the First Half of 2017 ---
http://time.com/4877412/best-astronomy-pictures/?xid=newsletter-brief

Chrome Experiments: Land Lines (images from Google Maps) --- https://lines.chromeexperiments.com

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: RumiNations --- http://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/ruminations

Picturing America (K-12 art education resources) --- https://picturingamerica.neh.gov

Winners of the 2017 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/08/winners-of-the-2017-national-geographic-travel-photographer-of-the-year-contest/535572/

Climate Change is Everywhere ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/544571/witnessing-climate-change-everywhere/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=94b075950e-Weekend_Reads&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-94b075950e-153727301&mc_cid=94b075950e&mc_eid=fe7f400ea3

Ghost Town in Canada ---
http://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/smart-living/ghost-town-incredible-images-capture-a-city-overrun-by-nature/ss-BBEqEfN?ocid=spartandhp#image=1

Heart and Soul: Quebec Folk Art ---
http://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/arts/art-quebec/art-quebec1-e.shtml

Cindy Sherman’s Instagram Account Goes Public, Revealing 600 New Photos & Many Strange Self-Portraits ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/cindy-shermans-instagram-account-goes-public-revealing-600-new-photos-many-strange-self-portraits.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Weird!

The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial of 1623 --- http://amboyna.org

Bob Jensen's threads on art history ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#ArtHistory

Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History


Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

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

When J.M. Coetzee Secretly Programmed Computers to Write Poetry in the 1960s ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/when-j-m-coetzee-secretly-programmed-computers-to-write-poetry-in-the-1960s.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Poetry Break --- http://wvpublic.org/programs/poetry-break

Hear a Rare Recording of Flannery O’Connor Reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1959) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/hear-a-rare-recording-of-flannery-oconnor-reading-a-good-man-is-hard-to-find-1959.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entirety by Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, John Waters & Others ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/hear-moby-dick-read-in-its-entirety-by-tilda-swinton-stephen-fry-john-waters-others.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Haiku: Poetry of the Samurai Warrior --- https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/unit-plans/teaching-content/haiku-poetry-samurai-warrior

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 August 15, 2017
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2017/TidbitsQuotations081517.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




WebMD:  Student Motivation 101: There's an App for That ---
http://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20170804/student-motivation-101-theres-an-app-for-that


New Deep Learning Courses Released on Coursera, with Hope of Teaching Millions the Basics of Artificial Intelligence ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/new-deep-learning-courses-released-on-coursera.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


Sageworks:  Private businesses that offer accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping or payroll services had the highest profits over the past year, with margins of 18.4% ---
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/08/07/most-profitable-private-companies-in-2017.html


Microsoft's Surface devices are 'significantly less reliable' than other laptops, says Consumer Reports ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-microsoft-surface-devices-fail-on-reliability-consumer-reports-2017-8

Jensen Comment
And I prefer Dell tech supposrt any day of the week.


Harvard Goes Outside:   To Go Online With With edX  to Start a Technical Business Analytics Certificate Program (heavy in math and statistics) ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/08/harvard-teams-corporate-partner-offer-online-business-analytics-program?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=2e2909c6fa-DNU20170808&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-2e2909c6fa-197565045&mc_cid=2e2909c6fa&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

Three schools at the oldest university in the United States team up with 2U to start an online program in an emergent field.

If any American university might be positioned to begin a new online program all by itself, Harvard University -- with its world-famous brand, many-billion-dollar endowment and founding relationship with the online course provider edX -- might be it. But the university announced Monday that three of its schools would create a new business analytics certificate program with 2U, the online program management company.

A collaboration between 2U and professors at the Harvard Business School, the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the department of statistics in Harvard's main college, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the program will teach students how to leverage data and analytics to drive business growth.

Aimed at executives in full-time work, the course will be delivered through 2U’s online platform and will feature live, seminar-style classes with Harvard faculty members. The course will cost around $50,000 for three semesters, with an estimated time requirement of 10 hours per week.

Continued in article

Also see
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/08/09/inside-digital-learning-experts-weigh-harvard-2u-opm-deal?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=d46e7c64f9-DNU20170809&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-d46e7c64f9-197565045&mc_cid=d46e7c64f9&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

Jensen Comment
Unlike most MOOC courses from prestigious universities (including Harvard) this expensive certificate program is not free on a non-credit basis.

Bob Jensen's threads on free MOOC courses (with added fees for students who want transcript credits or certificates) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


What Herman Melville Can Teach Bob Dylan about Plagiarism ---
https://daily.jstor.org/herman-melville-can-teach-bob-dylan-plagiarism/


The 15 US cities with the absolute worst traffic ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-cities-ranked-worst-traffic-2017-8/#15-austin-received-a-score-of-25-meaning-it-took-commuters-25-more-time-to-travel-anywhere-in-the-city-thats-a-3-increase-from-2016-showing-traffic-conditions-have-worsened-1


How to Mislead With Statistics

2018 Princeton Review's Best 382 Colleges ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/08/2018-princeton-reviews-best-382-colleges.html

Jensen Comment
As with most all conclusions in logic, math, and statistics, conclusions and rankings generally depend upon underlying assumptions that are almost always suspect when investigating how well they map to the real world.

For example, Rice ranks best in terms of "quality of life." Who's life? For example, if your number one recreation in life is downhill skiing then I think your quality of life might be better at a university much closer to great ski resorts. If your number one interest is in live theatre then a college in Manhattan may be better for you. Houston has great opera but at the same time some students at Rice think Houston is a terrible city with a really lousy climate. And Rice football. Yeah right!

I could go on and on here, but I think you get the point regarding most any rankings of universities, professors, students, supervisors, former employers, former lovers, or whatever.


Graphic Shows the House Plants That Naturally Clean the Air in Your Home, According to a NASA Study ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/graphic-shows-the-house-plants-that-naturally-clean-the-air-in-your-home.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Jensen Comment
I don't think we have any of these in our cottage, so I'm showing the graphic to Erika. She does, however, tend a lot of indoor plants.

One indoor plant that I most certainly do not recommend ---
Blossoms That Made Our Cottage Smell Like a Death House With a Maggot-Infested Rotting Corpse
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/DeathBlossoms/StarFlowers.htm  


The Man Who Wrote Those Password Rules Has a New Tip: N3v$r M1^d! ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-man-who-wrote-those-password-rules-has-a-new-tip-n3v-r-m1-d-1502124118?elqTrackId=9b6bd59f5f5b4190a30aeacdee593dfa&elq=8ad324afbe4e4a32af47d72bf62e211b&elqaid=15059&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6399&mg=prod/accounts-wsj

Bill Burr’s 2003 report recommended using numbers, obscure characters and capital letters and updating regularly—he regrets the error

The man who wrote the book on password management has a confession to make: He blew it.

Back in 2003, as a midlevel manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Bill Burr was the author of “NIST Special Publication 800-63. Appendix A.” The 8-page primer advised people to protect their accounts by inventing awkward new words rife with obscure characters, capital letters and numbers—and to change them regularly.

The document became a sort of Hammurabi Code of passwords, the go-to guide for federal agencies, universities and large companies looking for a set of password-setting rules to follow.

The problem is the advice ended up largely incorrect, Mr. Burr says. Change your password every 90 days? Most people make minor changes that are easy to guess, he laments. Changing Pa55word!1 to Pa55word!2 doesn’t keep the hackers at bay.

Also off the mark: demanding a letter, number, uppercase letter and special character such as an exclamation point or question mark—a finger-twisting requirement.

“Much of what I did I now regret,” said Mr. Burr, 72 years old, who is now retired.

In June, Special Publication 800-63 got a thorough rewrite, jettisoning the worst of these password commandments. Paul Grassi, an NIST standards-and-technology adviser who led the two-year-long do-over, said the group thought at the outset the document would require only a light edit.

“We ended up starting from scratch,” Mr. Grassi said.

The new guidelines, which are already filtering through to the wider world, drop the password-expiration advice and the requirement for special characters, Mr. Grassi said. Those rules did little for security—they “actually had a negative impact on usability,” he said.

Long, easy-to-remember phrases now get the nod over crazy characters, and users should be forced to change passwords only if there is a sign they may have been stolen, says NIST, the federal agency that helps set industrial standards in the U.S.

Amy LaMere had long suspected she was wasting her time with the hour a month it takes to keep track of the hundreds of passwords she has to juggle for her job as a client-resources manager with a trade-show-display company in Minneapolis. “The rules make it harder for you to remember what your password is,” she said. “Then you have to reset it and it just makes it take longer.”

When informed that password advice is changing, however, she wasn’t outraged. Instead, she said it just made her feel better. “I’m right,” she said of the previous rules. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Academics who have studied passwords say using a series of four words can be harder for hackers to crack than a shorter hodgepodge of strange characters—since having a large number of letters makes things harder than a smaller number of letters, characters and numbers.

In a widely circulated piece, cartoonist Randall Munroe calculated it would take 550 years to crack the password “correct horse battery staple,” all written as one word. The password Tr0ub4dor&3—a typical example of a password using Mr. Burr’s old rules—could be cracked in three days, according to Mr. Munroe’s calculations, which have been verified by computer-security specialists.

Continued in the Wall Street Journal
The Man Who Wrote Those Password Rules Has a New Tip: N3v$r M1^d!
By Robert McMillan
Aug. 7, 2017 12:41 p.m. ET

 


The 5 sneakiest new scams to watch out for right now in 2017 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/sneakiest-new-scams-to-watch-out-for-in-2017-2017-8


Helping Community College Graduates Find Careers ---
The Community-College Employer Connection ---
https://www.brookings.edu/podcast-episode/the-community-college-employer-connection 

Bob Jensen's Career Helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers


Do celebrity hero's ever stand the test of time?
The Toscanini Wars -
--
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/the-toscanini-wars


Harvard:  Tesla Shows How Traditional Business Metrics are Outdated ---
https://hbr.org/2017/08/tesla-shows-how-traditional-business-metrics-are-outdated?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=dailyalert&referral=00563&spMailingID=17840070&spUserID=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&spJobID=1080537238&spReportId=MTA4MDUzNzIzOAS2

Jensen Comment
The above article stresses how the Tesla is not just an electric car --- it's also a luxury car that this carving out a bigger share of the luxury car market. What the above article fails to stress is that Tesla is also a taxpayer-subsidized luxury car. Those subsidies come in several direct and indirect forms.

Direct subsidies include the taxpayer-funded purchase subsidy. They also include the free-ride Tesla and other electric car vehicles get in terms of paying little or nothing for road construction and maintenance funded mostly with gasoline and diesel taxes.

Indirect subsidies include all the subsidies taxpayers are paying towards electric power used to charge the batteries of electric cars. For example, taxpayers are now subsidizing solar and wind power being sold to the grid.

My point is that non-traditional metrics proposed in the above article overlook that failure to factor in taxpayer subsidies biases the metrics towards products being subsidized at taxpayer expense.

Without such subsidies (that may be soon reduced or eliminated entirely in the current political environment, including states growing weary of giving the 1% free roadways) the business metrics may be misleading. Investors in Tesla shares are taking tremendous risk relative to investors in their traditional competitors. Tesla is making very uncertain promises of making 500,000 vehicles in a few years. General motors alone is currently making over 10 million vehicles per year, including a very promising electric car called the Bolt that many think is a far better deal than the Tesla Model 3.

The bottom line is that I think the above article is more of a PR article for Elon Musk than a academic article worthy of an academic journal. Elon Musk is brilliant in a lot of ways where one way has been to figure out how to bilk taxpayers. Try to build that into a business metric. That of course is not to say that  energy, pharmaceutical, and defense industries are not also very good at bilking taxpayers.


Tesla Burning Through Cash as Always ---
http://professorelam.typepad.com/my_weblog/2017/07/tsla-burning-through-cash-as-always.html

Junk Bonds --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-yield_debt

Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) said on Monday it would raise about $1.5 billion through its first-ever high-yield junk bond offering, as the U.S. luxury electric car maker seeks fresh sources of cash to ramp up production of its new Model 3 sedan. ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-offering-idUSKBN1AN13I?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=ca121e8058-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-ca121e8058-153727301

Jensen Comment
When all else fails corporations sometimes turn to junk bonds when they're desperate for cash. Junk bonds are commonly issued by companies in financial distress ---
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/109/3/625/1838275
Tesla is clearly having a cash crisis, although it's not on the verge of bankruptcy. It could probably solve many of its troubles by selling its car manufacturing business at a rather healthy profit to a more traditional manufacturing firm in need of electric car models.

It Might Be Time for Tesla to Get Out of the Car Business ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/it-might-be-time-for-tesla-to-get-out-of-the-car-business-2017-6

Personally, I don't think Elon Musk wants to get out of the electric car business and will do most anything to hang on to Tesla.
It's now up to the financial markets to give him his last-ditch chance with junk bonds.
Existing stockholders will be nervous since high yield junk bonds will bring down future profits of Tesla.
Profits could also be dragged down by increased competition (think Chevy Bolt), elimination of taxpayer purchase price subsidies, and increased licensing fees to help pay for roads and bridges (think Oregon).
There are some advantages in Elon Musk's plan for Tesla, including quality reputation and defying unions with heavy use of robotics to cut labor costs.
The disadvantages for Tesla are that its competitors have lots of cash and can exploit their existing economies of scale worldwide. Tesla's Asian markets are tenuous with increased foreign competition.


Crytocurrency --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency

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

From MIT

What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters

First, here’s your primer: what the cryptocurrency is, how it works, and why the hell people seem to like it so much. If you prefer, you can also check out our 2-minute explainer video on blockhain.

Technical Roadblock Might Shatter Bitcoin Dreams

 

The root of this week’s fork was a software limitation in Bitcoin that limited the currency to a paltry seven transactions per second. That essentially crippled its chances for growth.

 

 

A Weekend in Bitcoin City: Arnhem, the Netherlands

 

What’s it like to actually live on Bitcoin? Our writer sweated through huge swings in the currency’s value and endured strange looks from shopkeepers when he toured one of Europe’s most Bitcoin-friendly cities.

 

 

Leaderless Bitcoin Struggles to Make Its Most Crucial Decision

 

The decentralized nature of Bitcoin, often seen as a strength, posed a real headache when it came to making an upgrade to boost transaction rates—because nobody could decide what to do.

 

 

Bitcoin Transactions Get Stranded as Cryptocurrency Maxes Out

 

Then the theoretical problem started to became a painful reality: Bitcoin got so popular that that transactions starting queuing up. It was time for the cryptocurrency community to do or die.

 

 

Wait, Bitcoin Just Did What?

 

Which brings us right up to this week, when an upgrade to its software caused Bitcoin to split in two. But for now, we simply don’t know what it means for the future of the currency.

 

 

Can Bitcoin Be the Foundation of a Fairer Financial System?

 

Still, even if Bitcoin falters, its legacy may live on. As the first successful cryptocurrency, it could inspire whole new ways of running the world’s financial systems
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604217/can-bitcoin-be-the-foundation-of-a-fairer-financial-system/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=4b206523c3-Weekend_Reads&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-4b206523c3-153727301&mc_cid=4b206523c3&mc_eid=fe7f400ea3 .


Microsoft Excel: How to evaluate complex formulas ---
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2017/jun/how-to-evaluate-complex-excel-formulas.html?utm_source=mnl:globalcpa&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=02Aug2017

Jensen Comment
When it comes to formula evaluation (and printing) never forget
Wolfram Alpha --- http://www.wolframalpha.com/

I was not aware until this morning how the wonderful Wolfram Alpha site has added topics other than mathematics.


Getting Divorced? How to avoid tax pitfalls when splitting up retirement accounts ---
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/getting-divorced-how-to-avoid-tax-pitfalls-when-splitting-up-retirement-accounts-2017-08-01

Bob Jensen's personal finance helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#InvestmentHelpers


The Hijacking of the Brillante Virtuoso ---
A mysterious assault. An unsolved murder. And a ship that hasn’t given up all its secrets
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2017-hijacking-of-brillante-virtuoso/

Jensen Comment
This is long and fascinating article how the Somali pirates were seemingly blamed for an oil tanker hijacking that looks more and more insurance fraud that staged a pirate takeover.

It would seem that screenplay for a thriller movie could almost be taken directly from court documents and this article.

The article also illustrates the immense complexity of accounting for the historic insurance company called Lloyd's of London ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_of_London
There's no concise way of disclosing the contingent liability of insurance cases like the Brillante Viruoso Case.
Bob Jensen's threads on accounting for contingencies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#TheoryDisputes


Are Lefty Quarterbacks Going Extinct?
The Weird 1/786 TD Pass Statistic
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-lefty-quarterbacks-going-extinct/

Number of touchdown passes last year that were thrown from the right arm of a passer was 785. For a little context, last year there were … 786 total touchdown passes. The left-handed TD pass was on a trick play. This dearth of lefty passers is weird.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Only about 10% of the world's population is estimated to be left handed ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handedness
In part this is due to efforts of parents to turn lefties into righties in very young children.
Read the section on "Health" in the above link.

Unlike football there is some evidence that left handers have an advantage in baseball ---
http://www.newsweek.com/science-why-lefties-make-better-baseball-players-92783 


This Can Get Really Complicated When Clients (students?) Live in Certain States While the Service Provider Does Much of the Work in Another State

INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAX INSIGHTS: INCOME TAX CONSEQUENCES OF NONRESIDENT TELECOMMUTING ---
https://www.bna.com/individual-income-tax-b73014462883/

Jensen Comment
For tax purposes will it be necessary for the pilots on a cross-country flight to announce each time a working stiff on the plane crosses state borders.

The above comment was expected to be facetious. Not so facetious is the fact that there are two extremes of working. There's relaxed working where a worker is sort of thinking about a problem --- say when going to sleep or waking up. Then there's intense working where nearly every part of the worker's brain is focused on doing a task such as computing the amount of estate tax due for a wealthy client who recently died or writing the text of a report. The problem is that much of the value of work may come from the relaxed working efforts where innovative solutions often turn on like light bulbs.

If you're a telecommuter the IRS wants to be the Big Brother watching down over you at every moment.

September 10, Reply from Hossen Nouri

There are errors in the article. The article gives the following example:

 

Take the situation where a taxpayer is employed for a company located in New York and lives in Connecticut. If the taxpayer physically commutes to the office in New York 60 percent of the time, works from home in Connecticut the remaining 40 percent, and does so for his own convenience and not out of necessity to the employer, then he could be subject to double taxation. Because he telecommuted for his own convenience, 100 percent of his income would be subject to New York income tax. Additionally, because Connecticut uses the physical apportionment method, he would also be subject to Connecticut income tax for the 40 percent of the time he physically worked at his home in Connecticut.

 

First, since the taxpayer's home is in CT, s/he is a resident of CT and is subject to 100% of his or her income from all sources in CT. The taxpayer, however, gets credit for taxes paid in other states. Therefore, the taxpayer may end up paying nothing or the difference between the CT tax rate and NY tax rate if CT tax rate is higher. Second, this is not double taxation as the taxpayer, under the worst scenario, pays the difference between home state tax rate and the other state's tax rate.

 

Hossein Nouri


Index Funds --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fund
Especially note the advantages and disadvantages

The Atlantic:  Are Index Funds Evil?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fund


How Americans Get Health Insurance ---
http://ritholtz.com/2017/08/americans-get-health-insurance/
Only 43.3 million are on Medicare (not free even in retirement) whereas 62.4 million have Medicaid (free for basics)
https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nhe-fact-sheet.html

Historical NHE (National Health Expenditures), 2015:

·         NHE grew 5.8% to $3.2 trillion in 2015, or $9,990 per person, and accounted for 17.8% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

·         Medicare spending grew 4.5% to $646.2 billion in 2015, or 20 percent of total NHE.

·         Medicaid spending grew 9.7% to $545.1 billion in 2015, or 17 percent of total NHE.

·         Private health insurance spending grew 7.2% to $1,072.1 billion in 2015, or 33 percent of total NHE.

·         Out of pocket spending grew 2.6% to $338.1 billion in 2015, or 11 percent of total NHE.

·         Hospital expenditures grew 5.6% to $1,036.1 billion in 2015, faster than the 4.6% growth in 2014.

·         Physician and clinical services expenditures grew 6.3% to $634.9 billion in 2015, a faster growth than the 4.8% in 2014.

·         Prescription drug spending increased 9.0% to $324.6 billion in 2015, slower than the 12.4% growth in 2014.

·         The largest shares of total health spending were sponsored by the federal government (28.7 percent) and the households (27.7 percent).   The private business share of health spending accounted for 19.9 percent of total health care spending, state and local governments accounted for 17.1 percent, and other private revenues accounted for 6.7 percent.

·         For further detail see NHE Tables in downloads below.

Projected NHE, 2016-2025:

·         National health spending is projected to grow at an average rate of 5.6 percent per year for 2016-25, and 4.7 percent per year on a per capita basis.

o    Health spending is projected to grow 1.2 percentage points faster than Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per year over the 2016-25 period; as a result, the health share of GDP is expected to rise from 17.8 percent in 2015 to 19.9 percent by 2025.

o    Throughout the 2016-25 projection period, growth in national health expenditures is driven by projected faster growth in medical prices (from historically low growth in 2015 of 0.8 percent to nearly 3 percent by 2025). This faster expected growth in prices is partially offset by projected slowing growth in the use and intensity of medical goods and services.

·         Although the largest health insurance coverage impacts from the Affordable Care Act’s expansions have already been observed in 2014-15, the insured share of the population is projected to increase from 90.9 percent in 2015 to 91.5 percent in 2025.

o    This expectation is mainly a result of continued anticipated growth in private health insurance enrollment, in particular for employer-sponsored insurance, during the first half of the decade in response to faster projected economic growth.

·         Health spending growth by federal and state & local governments is projected to outpace growth by private businesses, households, and other private payers over the projection period (5.9 percent compared to 5.4 percent, respectively) in part due to ongoing strong enrollment growth in Medicare by the baby boomer generation coupled with continued government funding dedicated to subsidizing premiums for lower income Marketplace enrollees.

·         National health spending growth is projected to have decelerated from 5.8 percent in 2015 to 4.8 percent in 2016 as the initial impacts associated with the Affordable Care Act’s major coverage expansions fade. Medicaid spending growth is projected to have decelerated sharply from 9.7 percent in 2015 to 3.7 percent in 2016 as enrollment growth in the program slowed significantly. Similarly, private health insurance spending growth is projected to have slowed from 7.2 percent in 2015 to 5.9 percent in 2016 (also largely attributable to slowing expected growth in enrollment).

·         Health spending is projected to grow 5.4 percent in 2017 related to faster growth in Medicare and private health insurance spending.

·         Health expenditures are projected to grow at an average rate of 5.9 percent for 2018-19, the fastest of the sub-periods examined, as projected spending growth in Medicare and Medicaid accelerates.

·         Through the second half of the projection (2020-25), increasing medical prices are offset by projected decelerations in growth in the use and intensity of medical goods and services, leading to average growth of 5.8 percent per year for national health expenditures.

For further detail see NHE projections 2016-2025 in downloads below.

NHE by Age Group and Gender, Selected Years 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012:

·         Per person personal health care spending for the 65 and older population was $18,988 in 2012, over 5 times higher than spending per child ($3,552) and approximately 3 times the spending per working-age person ($6,632).

·         In 2012, children accounted for approximately 25 percent of the population and slightly less than 12 percent of all PHC spending.

·         The working-age group comprised the majority of spending and population in 2012, almost 54 percent and over 61 percent respectively.

·         The elderly were the smallest population group, nearly 14 percent of the population, and accounted for approximately 34 percent of all spending in 2012.

·         Per person spending for females ($8,315) was 22 percent more than males ($6,788) in 2012.

·         In 2012, per person spending for male children (0-18) was 9 percent more than females.  However, for the working age and elderly groups, per person spending for females was 28 and 7 percent more than for males.

For further detail see health expenditures by age in downloads below.

NHE by State of Residence, 1991-2014:

·         In 2014, per capita personal health care spending ranged from $5,982 in Utah to $11,064 in Alaska.   Per capita spending in Alaska was 38 percent higher than the national average ($8,045) while spending in Utah was about 26 percent lower; they have been the lowest and highest, respectively, since 2012.

·         Health care spending by region continued to exhibit considerable variation. In 2014, the New England and Mideast regions had the highest levels of total per capita personal health care spending ($10,119 and $9,370, respectively), or 26 and 16 percent higher than the national average.   In contrast, the Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions had the lowest levels of total personal health care spending per capita ($6,814 and $6,978, respectively) with average spending roughly 15 percent lower than the national average.

·         For 2010-14, average growth in per capita personal health care spending was highest in Alaska at 4.8 percent per year and lowest in Arizona at 1.9 percent per year (compared with average growth of 3.1 percent nationally).

·         The spread between the highest and the lowest per capita personal health spending across the states has remained relatively stable over 2009-14. Accordingly, the highest per capita spending levels were 80 to 90 percent higher per year than the lowest per capita spending levels during the period.

·         Medicare expenditures per beneficiary were highest in New Jersey ($12,614) and lowest in Montana ($8,238) in 2014.

·         Medicaid expenditures per enrollee were highest in North Dakota ($12,413) and lowest in Illinois ($4,959) in 2014.

For further detail, see health expenditures by state of residence in downloads below.

NHE by State of Provider, 1980-2014:

·         Between 2009 and 2014, U.S. personal health care spending grew, on average, 3.9 percent per year, with spending in North Dakota growing the fastest (6.7 percent) and spending in Rhode Island growing the slowest (2.5 percent).

·         In 2014, California’s personal health care spending was highest in the nation ($295.0 billion), representing 11.5 percent of total U.S. personal health care spending. Comparing historical state rankings through 2014, California consistently had the highest level of total personal health care spending, together with the highest total population in the nation. Other large states, New York, Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania, also were among the states with the highest total personal health care spending.

·         Wyoming’s personal health care spending was lowest in the nation (as has been the case historically), representing just 0.2 percent of total U.S. personal health care spending in 2014. Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota were also among the states with the lowest personal health care spending in both 2014 and historically. All these states have smaller populations.

·         Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by state measures the value of goods and services produced in each state. Health spending as a share of a state’s GDP shows the importance of the health care sector in a state’s economy. As a share of GDP, Maine ranked the highest (22.3 percent) and Wyoming ranked the lowest (9.3 percent) in 2014.  

For further detail, see health expenditures by state of provider in downloads below.


Compare Reviews for Textbook Rental Companies ---
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/education/textbook-rental/#


This Math Puzzle Will Help You Plan Your Next Party ---
https://theconversation.com/this-math-puzzle-will-help-you-plan-your-next-party-80256

Jensen Comment
My former economist colleague Bill Breit (no deceased) who was a master of conversations and questions had this favorite job interview question:
If you could have any dinner guest of your choosing, who would you invite?
There are of course modifications of this question such as living versus deceased and prescribed topical areas of conversation.
Finding a mix of ideal guests is much more complicated.


Freakonomics:  The Stupidest Think You Can Do With Your Money ---
http://ritholtz.com/2017/07/stupidest-thing-can-money/
This podcast has some academic heavyweights in the world of economics and finance.


50 Must-have Tech Accessories Under $50 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-tech-accessories-under-50-dollars-2016-7

Jensen Comment
Be leery of the phrase "must-have." Basements and attics are full of a lot of "must-have" things that weren't.


The new astrology:  By fetishising mathematical models, economists turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience ---
https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers

Jensen Comment
Academic accounting and finance professors followed like lemmings ---

Accountics Science Became a Cargo Cult
"How Can Accounting Researchers Become More Innovative? by Sudipta Basu, Accounting Horizons, December 2012, Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 851-87 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm#CargoCult
Scroll down for excerpts from Sudipta's excellent paper


Statisticians Are Ringing the Death Knell for P-Values:  It will be much harder to call new findings ‘significant’ if this team gets its way ---
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/it-will-be-much-harder-call-new-findings-significant-if-team-gets-its-way?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=33147f2854-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-33147f2854-153727301

A megateam of reproducibility-minded scientists is renewing a controversial proposal to raise the standard for statistical significance in research studies. They want researchers to dump the long-standing use of a probability value (p-value) of less than 0.05 as the gold standard for significant results, and replace it with the much stiffer p-value threshold of 0.005.

Backers of the change, which has been floated before, say it could dramatically reduce the reporting of false-positive results—studies that claim to find an effect when there is none—and so make more studies reproducible. And they note that researchers in some fields, including genome analysis, have already made a similar switch with beneficial results.

“If we’re going to be in a world where the research community expects some strict cutoff … it’s better that that threshold be .005 than .05. That’s an improvement over the status quo,” says behavioral economist Daniel Benjamin of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, first author on the new paper, which was posted 22 July as a preprint article on PsyArXiv and is slated for an upcoming issue of Nature Human Behavior. “It seemed like this was something that was doable and easy, and had worked in other fields.”

But other scientists reject the idea of any absolute threshold for significance. And some biomedical researchers worry the approach could needlessly drive up the costs of drug trials. “I can’t be very enthusiastic about it,” says biostatistician Stephen Senn of the Luxembourg Institute of Health in Strassen. “I don’t think they’ve really worked out the practical implications of what they’re talking about.”

A fraught value

The p-value is a notoriously elusive concept for nonstatisticians. Too often, it is misinterpreted to be the probability that the hypothesis being tested is true, says Valen Johnson, a statistician Texas A&M University in College Station and an author on the new paper. The reality is more complicated. For a test of a new drug in a clinical trial, for example, a p-value of 0.05 really means the results observed—or even more extreme results—would occur in one in 20 trials if the drug really had no benefit over the current standard of care. But it’s often wrongly described as a 95% chance that the drug actually works.

To explain to a broader audience how weak the .05 statistical threshold really is, Johnson joined with 71 collaborators on the new paper (which partly reprises an argument Johnson made for stricter p-values in a 2013 paper). Among the authors are some big names in the study of scientific reproducibility, including psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who led a replication effort of high-profile psychology studies through the nonprofit Center for Open Science, and epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, known for pointing out systemic flaws in biomedical research.

The authors set up a scenario where the odds are one to 10 that any given hypothesis researchers are testing is inherently true—that a drug really has some benefit, for example, or a psychological intervention really changes behavior. (Johnson says that some recent studies in the social sciences support that idea.) If an experiment reveals an effect with an accompanying p-value of .05, that would actually mean that the null hypothesis—no real effect—is about three times more likely than the hypothesis being tested. In other words, the evidence of a true effect is relatively weak.

But under those same conditions (and assuming studies have 100% power to detect a true effect)—requiring a p-value at or below .005 instead of .05 would make for much stronger evidence: It would reduce the rate of false-positive results from 33% to 5%, the paper explains.

“The whole choice of .05 as a default is really a kind of numerology—there’s no scientific justification for it,” says Victor De Gruttola of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. The paper “exposes that there can be a false sense of security with the .05 default.” He doubts the results will be news to statisticians, “but I think a lot of investigators whose primary focus is not on these kinds of issues may be surprised.”

Significant, or just suggestive?

The authors are careful not to endorse the use of p-values as the ultimate measure of significance; many scientists have argued that they should be abolished altogether. But in the many fields where a p-value below .05 has become a gold standard, the authors propose a rule of thumb for new findings: “Significant” results should require a p-value below .005; results with p-values below .05 but above .005 should be called merely “suggestive.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
As long as multiple regression software packages keep cranking out p-values accounting research journals will still be worshipping at the alter of p-values. The reason is that taking a way p-values adds immensely to the labor of research.

The quickest way to change data analysts is for the software packages to stop computing the p-values. But there will be ice skating in Hell before that happens.

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)

July 28, 2017 reply from Dan N. Stone

The problem isn't that p values are set at the wrong the level, the problem is that p
values tell us almost nothing that is useful. The way forward is to report useful
statistics rather than mostly irrelevant ones. See the large, emerging literature on the
so, called "new statistics".

I have a paper that, I hope, will soon be forthcoming at Accounting Horizons that
addresses this issue. Here's the title and current abstract of that paper:

Title: The “New Statistics” and Nullifying the Null: Twelve Actions for Improving
Quantitative Accounting Research Quality and Integrity

Abstract: Leveraging accounting scholars’ expertise in the integrity of information
and evidence, and in managers’ self-interested discretion in information collection
and reporting, offers the possibility of accounting scholars creating, promoting, and
adapting methods to ensure that accounting research is of exemplary integrity and
quality. This manuscript uses the six principles from the recent American Statistical
Association (ASA) report on p-values as an organizing framework, and considers
some implications of these principles for quantitative accounting research. It also
proposes twelve actions, in three categories (community actions, redefining research
quality, and ranking academic accounting journals) for improving quantitative
accounting research quality and integrity. It concludes with a clarion call to our
community to create, adopt and promote scholarship practices and policies that lead
in scholarly integrity

August 5, 2015 reply from Bob Jensen

Tidying Up Previously-Published P-Values
Some of you younger researchers may want to test out this new R aoo (Tidypvals) in some previously published accounting articles. Here are the results for some other disciplines ---

Bob Jensen's threads on p-values ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong


"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.

 

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.


PLOS ONE retracts paper after researcher admits to fabricating data ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/07/26/plos-one-retracts-paper-researcher-admits-fabricating-data/


Publisher won’t retract two papers, despite university’s request ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/08/04/publisher-wont-retract-two-papers-despite-universitys-request/


UC-Irvine Withdraws 500 Admissions Offers 2 Months Before Fall Term ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/uc-irvine-withdraws-500-admissions-offers-two-months-before-fall-term/119473?cid=db&elqTrackId=6658026846b44593930dcec6003f8723&elq=29841fbc5856457b9d2e601c33f4f61a&elqaid=14946&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6332

The University of California at Irvine apologized on Friday for rescinding 500 offers of admission just before the start of the fall term. The Los Angeles Times reported that the last-minute reversals had elicited criticism from prospective students on social media.

The campus said the offers had been withdrawn because of transcript problems and bad senior-year grades, but students writing on social media said the reasons provided to them had been insufficient or nonexistent.

The Times reported that 7,100 of the 31,103 freshmen who were offered admission to UC-Irvine had accepted it by May. That put the university 850 students over its planned freshman class of 6,250.

Continued in article

After negative publicity and lawsuit threats UC-Irvine will admit the 500 students ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/08/03/uc-irvine-admits-those-whose-offers-were-revoked?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=75303539b2-DNU20170803&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-75303539b2-197565045&mc_cid=75303539b2&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

Jensen Comment
I recall one Texas state university that rented local motels when dorms started out filled to capacity.


Cal State plans to drop placement exams in math and English as well as the noncredit remedial courses that more than 25,000 freshmen have been required to take each fall — a radical move away from the way public universities traditionally support students who come to college less prepared than their peers.
LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-cal-state-remedial-requirements-20170803-story.html

Cal State wants to double its graduation rate by 2025 ---
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-cal-state-meeting-20160920-snap-story.html

Jensen College
Diplomas at Cal State might well become like blue ribbons in a Kindergarten pet show. Every admission gets one. What this does is cheapen the currency.
Gresham's Law ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law 
What will prevent the bifurcation of college diplomas in California into premiere diplomas from the senior universities (like UC Berkeley and Irvine) versus the junk degrees from the California State Universities? Only the academic standards of faculty can prevent this, and the era of grade inflation reveals that there's not much grading integrity left in USA higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor


‘Dictionary of American Regional English’ Speaks! ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2017/08/01/dictionary-of-american-regional-english-speaks/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=c6f9fa9d54774effb9b046edfe290e72&elq=98f44e159d534e2ea1feed9de631f428&elqaid=14990&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6357

If you read my posts, you may be familiar by now with the grand six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English, completed in print in 2013, but continuing to live beyond that date in quarterly updates on the internet.

Now DARE  has come to life in another way. It’s not just in writing that the dictionary tells us about the different ways we talk in this vast country. DARE  is speaking up!

Now we can hear the recorded voices of some 1,800 people in 1,002 communities in all 50 states who were interviewed between 1965 and 1970 by field workers driving “word wagons” with bulky recording equipment. The researchers used a lengthy paper questionnaire to note what people said, but they also asked if the interviewees would allow taped recordings, and the great majority did.

You don’t have to go to DARE  headquarters at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to hear these recordings, and you don’t have to pay for them either. Just follow the link to the university’s Digital Collection Center, and see for yourself ---
https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/amerlangs/

Continued in article


Approximately $158 million has now been awarded to 46 whistleblowers who voluntarily provided the SEC with original and useful information that led to a successful enforcement action ---
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2017-134


Tulane Named Top Party School ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/08/01/tulane-named-top-party-school?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=1b0d729230-DNU20170801&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-1b0d729230-197565045&mc_cid=1b0d729230&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
With West Virginia and Bucknell still hanging in there.


After 35 years, philosophy journal corrects article…by a cat ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/08/01/35-years-philosophy-journal-corrects-article-cat/


Nearly Every Sugar Hill Road Damaged by an Early July Storm ---
http://www.wmur.com/article/nearly-every-sugar-hill-road-damaged-by-saturdays-storms/10255696
The video is updated daily and does not discuss the storm.

Two days after wild storms rocked the Granite State, some communities are still facing massive cleanup efforts.

One such community is Sugar Hill, which is no stranger to which damaged roads.

Sugar Hill Fire Chief Allan Clark said nearly every road in town is damaged and that much of the damage could have been prevented.

“It’s a waste of money is the problem. If you're going to fix something, you should fix it right,” Clark said.

Evidence of repairs completed just after Hurricane Irene are still visible on Carpenter Road.

The chief said that they could have predicted this would happen, and he blamed culverts that are just too small, despite the town's efforts to replace them.

“But they're restricted in the size of their culverts by (the Department of Environmental Services), so it can't be any larger than 25 percent of the culvert they're replacing. The problem with that is some of these culverts were very old and are grossly undersized,” Clark said.

“The real stress is knowing that you're stranded. You've got this big cavern between your driveway and the road, and the road is pretty much completely gone,” said Jeff Mealey, who was home when the storm hit.

Mealey said the experience was stressful, especially when a tree caught fire.

“The roots all got washed out, hit the wire and lit on fire. The next one lit on fire and I’d say in about 20-25 minutes, it all went out,” he said.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The storm also damaged the part of our roof under the widow's walk.


How I Taught My Computer to Write Its Own Music ---
http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-i-taught-my-computer-to-write-its-own-music-rp


Advice For Professors For The First Class Of Their Law School Course ---
https://law.uoregon.edu/images/uploads/entries/Grant.pdf 

Jensen Comment
It might be interesting to examine how much this advice depends upon academic discipline (such as law versus Spanish language courses), class size (such a 20 versus 980), student diversity, etc.

Especially note the numerous footnotes in this article. Thesea are an academic plus.


Officials say a Spirit Airlines flight leaving Las Vegas was briefly delayed after a passenger removed all their clothes while boarding and approached a flight attendant ---
http://nypost.com/2017/07/30/naked-passenger-delays-flight-in-las-vegas/

Jensen Comment
I included this tidbit only to illustrate how politically correct grammar is becoming more mainstream. The intent in this case is to never identify in the gender of the passenger.
I might add that the New York Post's political reputation is conservative compared to much more liberal newspapers.

Authors of academic articles and books need to be aware of this new political correctness grammar ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness


More About Fortune Cookies Than You Really Want to Know ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fortune-cookie-math/


The 25 Highest-Paying Internships In America ---
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2017/05/02/the-25-highest-paying-internships-in-america/#4c3610c72c67

Jensen Comment
Internships are increasingly important for attracting students to elect particular majors.

When CPA Examination candidates had to take an added 30 credits to sit for the exam (most now get accountancy masters degrees) accounting would've become far less attractive as a major unless accounting and business firms commenced to had many, many more internships. Accounting firm internships are not the highest paying in terms of the above Top 25. But accountancy is arguably the college major with the highest proportion of internships (apart from student teaching in education). Accounting internships also tend to be shorter --- often only half-semester internships. This is why accounting curricula now frequently have a half-semester on-campus program for nine credits. One of the most important reasons accounting internships are popular is that students return to campus with job offers in hand before they enter their masters programs.


For-Profit Graduate Schools Popular With Black Women ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/25/black-women-graduate-students-enroll-higher-numbers-profits?mc_cid=7d3cdbaefa&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

Jensen Comment
The most popular graduate programs among black women are graduate programs in "Business Administration and Management, General." Nothing is said about accounting graduate programs, but I suspect that accounting graduate programs taken by black women are the more traditional nonprofit graduate programs.

Most students in accountancy graduate programs are enrolled to qualify for taking the CPA examination. Some CPA State Societies (think the Texas) officially discourage for-profit undergraduate and graduate accountancy programs. They make it even more difficult by limiting the number of online courses that can be taken to qualify for the requirements to sit fo the CPA Examination.


Becoming an FBI Agent --- Part 1
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/becoming-an-agent-part-1

Becoming an FBI Agent --- Part 2
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/becoming-an-agent-part-2

Becoming an FBI Agent --- Part 3
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/becoming-an-agent-part-3


Google Launches Free Course on Deep Learning: The Science of Teaching Computers How to Teach Themselves ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/google-launches-free-course-on-deep-learning.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Bob Jensen's links to over 1,000 free courses from the most prestigious universities in the world (there are added fees for students who want transcript credits or participation certificates) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Summer Reading: The Fangs Of Freelance (Fred, The Vampire Accountant, Book 4) ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/07/summer-reading-the-fangs-of-freelance-fred-the-vampire-accountant-book-4.html


A.I. Is the New T.A. in the Classroom ---
https://howwegettonext.com/a-i-is-the-new-t-a-in-the-classroom-dedbe5b99e9e

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm


Apple must pay $506M for infringing university’s patent ---
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/judge-orders-apple-to-pay-506m-to-university-for-patent-infringement/


Math Journal Editors Quit for Open Access ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/31/math-journal-editors-resign-start-rival-open-access-journal?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=39a1c96eb1-DNU20170731&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-39a1c96eb1-197565045&mc_cid=39a1c96eb1&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

The four editors in chief of the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics have informed their publisher, Springer, of their intention to launch a rival open-access journal to protest the publisher’s high prices and limited accessibility. This is the latest in a string of what one observer called

Bob Jensen's threads on for-profit publishing oligopolies ripping off campus libraries ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals


From David Giles
August 2017 Econometrics Reading List

Calzolari, G., 2017. Econometrics exams and round numbers: Use or misuse of indirect estimation methods? Communications in Statistics - Simulation and Computation, in press.

Chakraborti, S., F. Jardim, & E. Epprecht, 2017. Higher order moments using the survival function: The alternative expectation formula. American Statistician, in press.

Clarke, J. A., 2017. Model averaging OLS and 2SLS: An application of the WALS procedure. Econometrics Working Paper EWP1701, Department of Economics, University of Victoria.

Hotelling, H., 1940. The teaching of statistics, Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 11, 457-470.

Knaeble, B. & S. Dutter, 2017. Reversals of least-square estimates and model-invariant estimation for directions of unique effects. American Statistician, 71, 97-105.

Megerdichian, A., 2017. Further results on interpreting coefficients in regressions with a logarithmic dependent variable. Journal of Econometric Methods, in press.


Sex Dolls Are Getting Smarter. Don't Be Alarmed.---
http://reason.com/blog/2017/08/01/sex-robots-are-getting-smarter

Jensen Comment
It's time to follow this technology more closely when they can also become more proficient as job assistants than as sex dolls --- a companion you can take to work. Of course those will probably be the ugly variety with wrinkles and warts that your spouse sees in the corner of your home office.


Business MIS professor let's students choose their own grades for stress reduction --- http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=9551

A University of Georgia professor has adopted a “stress reduction policy” that will allow students to select their own grades if they “feel unduly stressed” by the ones they earned.

Similarly, students who feel stressed by "group dynamics" are allowed to walk away from their groups without explanation, and will only be graded on "non-group work."

The professor acknowledges that "this policy might hinder the development of group skills and mastery of the class material," but says this is each student's own responsibility.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
It would be interesting to compare his secret grades with the grades some students choose for themselves. My guess is that there many students will choose to grade themselves on effort rather than performance.

I don't like this idea for a number of reasons, one of which is that in most careers in life success generally entails not running away from stress. Stress is something professionals learn to deal with, and much of their learning begins in college.

If accounting, law, medicine, nursing, and engineering students could grade themselves for stress reduction it seems highly likely that they will not be as prepared for stressful licensure examinations in their professions.

There also is a possible problem that some (not all) students who gave themselves grades higher than they know were deserved may one day be haunted by their own consciences.

Why not reduce stress by giving every student who completes the course an A grade? This is what a lot of professors are doing these days in order to buy better teaching evaluations from their students.
But giving all students A grades may make them more prone to cheating (as in the case of over 60 expelled Harvard students who were assured of A grades if they made a legitimate effort on homework) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#UVA
In other words, why make an effort if you get an A grade for zero effort?

U. of Georgia Prevents Professor From Including ‘Stress-Reduction Policy’ in Syllabus ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-georgia-prevents-professor-from-including-stress-reduction-policy-in-syllabus/119614?cid=db&elqTrackId=90201717065c4c02b2de4fb9cf1e15cc&elq=867f479a5f5e4bea8353e6436cd6ed1b&elqaid=15073&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6412




From the Scout Report on July 28, 2017

Piwik --- https://piwik.org 

Tools to monitor website traffic are important for website managers to see how their websites are reaching their audience. Many websites rely on Google's free Analytics service to fill this role. However, concerns about Google's wide reach across the internet have caused some website managers to seek an alternative. Piwik aims to be that alternative, with analytics capability similar to what Google Analytics provides in a package that website managers can install and run on their own server. It also provides a number of unique privacy features, such as opt-out and support for do-not-track. Similar to Google Analytics, Piwik is added to a website by placing a snippet of code in the header of all pages. Plugins to add this code are available for most common website platforms (Drupal, Wordpress, phpBB, Magento, etc). Piwik requires a web server that provides PHP and either MySQL or MariaDB. Piwik is also available as a hosted service for a monthly fee.


Notion --- https://www.notion.so 

Teams that use online tools for collaboration often need to stitch together several different tools to handle sharing files, managing documentation, and task tracking. Notion provides a unified platform for all three of these. File sharing works with a user-friendly drag and drop interface that supports over 30 common content types. Notion's documentation editor uses a unique "nested pages" system to keep all documents organized and discoverable. And for task management, Notion provides a drag and drop editor similar to the "task board" provided by trello. Additionally, Notion supports integration with the Slack chat service to notify team members as Notion content is updated. Notion can be accessed online or offline using desktop clients for macOS and Windows. Notion's free tier includes 300 content blocks for individuals and 600 content blocks for teams, both with a 5 MB maximum file size.


New Exhibit Celebrates the Interplay between Art and Science
Is It Art or Is It Science?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/is-it-art-or-is-it-science

BioArtography combines science and art at Ann Arbor Art Fair
http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2017/07/bioartography_combines_science.html

Biologist takes artistic view of science - and the results are stunning
https://news.usc.edu/125103/biologist-takes-artistic-view-of-science-and-the-results-are-stunning

How Edward Munch's Pioneering Use of Color Science Put Art on the Road to
Abstraction
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/edvard-munch-color-science-1017026

Art and Science Journal
http://www.artandsciencejournal.com

12 Ways to Integrate Science and Art
http://artcuratorforkids.com/12-ways-to-integrate-science-and-art-activities


From the Scout Report on August 4, 2017

Memrise --- https://www.memrise.com 

Are you looking to learn a new language, or to brush up your skills on a language you are studying? If so, Memrise offers online learning opportunities that may be of interest. Memrise offers courses in numerous languages, including Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and American Sign Language. The team behind Memrise designed these courses to center on elaborate encoding, a strategy that places new words in a context that may remind language learners of similar words in their native language. (For example, "aburrido," the Spanish word for "bored," is presented to English language speakers in the sentence, "It is boring to eat a burrito everyday.") While most courses center on language (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, take note: the site includes a course on common words on the TOEFL exam), Memrise also includes a few courses on other topics. To access these courses, users must first create a free account. Memrise is also available as an iOS or Android application. Some features are only available with the premium version.


The Whole Story --- https://thewholestoryproject.com

Launched in April 2017, the Whole Story is a citizen historian project dedicated to making the accomplishments and contributions of women a visible part of public history. As the team behind the Whole Story points out, statues around the world honor "a staggering amount of men, but very few women." This free mobile application (available for both Android and iOS devices), invites "artists, coders, historians, and everybody else" to create virtual statues that celebrate influential women throughout history wherever a statue of a famous man currently exists. These virtual statues of historical women are then placed on an interactive map. When visitors are physically at the same location as one of these virtual statues, they will be able to view the new statue via augmented reality on their phone or personal device. For example, visitors at Mount Rushmore will be able to view a statue honoring Sacagawea, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, and Florence Nightingale via the Whole Story app.


Scientists Successfully Edit Gene Mutation from Human Embryo, Provoking
Hope and Concern
In Breakthrough, Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation From Genes in Human
Embryos
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/science/gene-editing-human-embryos.html

Scientists Precisely Edit DNA In Human Embryos to Fix A Disease Gene
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/02/540975224/scientists-precisely-edit-dna-in-human-embryos-to-fix-a-disease-gene

Deadly gene mutations removed from human embryos in landmark study
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/02/deadly-gene-mutations-removed-from-human-embryos-in-landmark-study

Correction of a pathogenic gene mutation in human embryos
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature23305.html?foxtrotcallback=true

TED: CRISPR
https://www.ted.com/topics/crispr

GeneEd: Teacher Resources
https://geneed.nlm.nih.gov/specialty.php?spageID=2


From the Scout Report on August 11, 2017

Firefox Send --- https://send.firefox.com 

It can be frustratingly difficult to send large files over the internet using email or instant messaging. Many email providers impose attachment size limitations. In part, they do this because the email system was not designed to move large quantities of data and often does not perform well when forced to do so. Many instant messaging systems were designed with large file transfers in mind, but these transfers are often thwarted by firewalls. Firefox Send is a new and easy-to-use solution to this problem. It leverages the encryption support in modern browsers to encode files before upload to Mozilla's servers. When the upload is complete, users receive a download URL that they may share over IM, email, etc. These URLs include the encryption key necessary to decode the file, but they place it in the 'fragment' section of the URL which is never sent to the server. Mozilla's servers will delete their encoded copy of the data after one download or after 24 hours. Source code for Firefox Send is available on github, allowing more technical users to host their own Send servers.


NewsBlur --- https://newsblur.com 

So much news and information is available online that it can be difficult to keep up. NewsBlur is a personal news reader that aggregates stories from multiple sites into a single summary page. This summary page is updated in real time as new stories become available. Users may train NewsBlur by highlighting stories of particular interest or hiding those that are less interesting. This training data will then be used to automatically highlight or hide future stories. For example, this feature can be used to select only some authors from a multi-author weblog. NewsBlur is available on the web, as an iOS app, and as an Android app. It also supports integration with other feed reader software like Reeder, ReadKit, Unread, and others. Users on NewsBlur's free tier may monitor up to 64 sites. Premium accounts can monitor unlimited sites and have some additional features


On the Island of New Caledonia, Pollution Causes the Turtle-Headed Sea
Snake to Change Color
City-dwelling sea snakes are changing colors for a strange reason
http://www.popsci.com/city-dwelling-sea-snakes-changing-skin-colors

Sea snakes lose their stripes to deal with pollution
http://www.nature.com/news/sea-snakes-lose-their-stripes-to-deal-with-pollution-1.22441

How Humans Turned a Sea Snake to the Dark Side
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/seasnake-peppered-moth-industrial-melanism/536382

YouTube: Industrial Melanism in a Seasnake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Neg6GldQlMg

The Garden of Our Neglect: How Humans Shape the Evolution of Other Species
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-humans-shape-evolution-other-species

Peppered Moth Simulation
https://www.biologycorner.com//worksheets/pepperedmoth.html




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


Education Tutorials

AASL: Best Websites for Teaching and Learning 2017 --- http://www.ala.org/aasl/standards/best/websites/2017

NEA Big Read --- http://www.neabigread.org
National Endowment for the Arts Recommended Book List

Saint Paul Public Library: Northstar Learning Guide (basics in computing and networking) ---
http://guides.sppl.org/Northstar/Home

The Kitchen Pantry Scientist (learning science) --- http://kitchenpantryscientist.com

Classroom Law Project: Resources (K-12) --- http://www.classroomlaw.org/resources

ReadWriteThink: Videos (k-12 English) --- http://www.readwritethink.org/videosbv

Picturing America (K-12 art education resources) --- https://picturingamerica.neh.gov

TeachingEnglish: Resources --- https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teaching-resource

TryComputing.org (K-12 teaching resources) --- http://www.trycomputing.org

Chrome Experiments: Land Lines (images from Google Maps) --- https://lines.chromeexperiments.com

PBS NewsHour Special: How to Use Social Media for Social Good --- http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/lessons_plans/lesson-plan-how-to-use-social-media-for-social-good

The Community-College Employer Connection --- https://www.brookings.edu/podcast-episode/the-community-college-employer-connection

National Portrait Gallery: Interactive Classroom Activities (Enland) --- http://www.npg.org.uk/learning/digital/interactive-classroom-activities

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

The Newton Project (Sir Isaac Newton's Papers Archive) --- http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk

PLOS Currents (Public Library of Sciences) --- http://currents.plos.org

ScienceAlert (Australia) --- http://www.sciencealert.com

The Kitchen Pantry Scientist (learning science) --- http://kitchenpantryscientist.com

Science Ambassador Fellowship Lesson Plans (public health) --- https://www.cdc.gov/careerpaths/scienceambassador/resources/lesson-plans

PANGAEA (earth scoence data) --- https://www.pangaea.de

Curtis Botanical Images --- http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/search/collection/curtis

Atlas Obscura: Ranking the Pain of Stinging Insects, from 'Caustic' to 'Blinding' ---
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-colorful-pain-index-of-the-stinging-ants-bees-and-wasps-around-the-world

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

Sapiens (anthropology) --- http://www.sapiens.org

Belt Magazine (Rust Belt Cities) --- http://beltmag.com

Science Ambassador Fellowship Lesson Plans (public health) --- https://www.cdc.gov/careerpaths/scienceambassador/resources/lesson-plans

. PBS NewsHour Special: How to Use Social Media for Social Good --- http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/lessons_plans/lesson-plan-how-to-use-social-media-for-social-good

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

Classroom Law Project: Resources (K-12) --- http://www.classroomlaw.org/resources

ReadWriteThink: Videos (k-12 English) --- http://www.readwritethink.org/videosbv

Wall Street Journal: Law Blog --- http://blogs.wsj.com/law

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


Math Tutorials

TED-Ed: Math in Real Life Video Series --- https://ed.ted.com/series/?series=math-in-real-life

Problem Strings: A Lesson Format for All Students (mathematics)  ----
https://www.bigmarker.com/GlobalMathDept/Problem-Strings-A-Lesson-Structure-for-All-Students

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

Leonardo da Vinci’s Visionary Notebooks Now Online: Browse 570 Digitized Pages ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/leonardo-da-vincis-visionary-notebooks-now-online-browse-570-digitized-pages.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The British Museum Creates 3D Models of the Rosetta Stone & 200+ Other Historic Artifacts: Download or View in Virtual Reality ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/the-first-3d-scan-of-the-rosetta-stone-now-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Institute of Arts and Ideas (like TED in philosophy) --- https://iai.tv

Philosophy for Beginners --- https://mariannetalbot.co.uk/about/podcasts/philosophy-for-beginners

Time: The 100 Most Influential Images of All Time --- http://100photos.time.com100

Victorian Valentines: Intimacy in the Industrial Age --- http://www.americanantiquarian.org/valentinesephemera

The Open Anthology of Literature in English (1650-1800) --- http://virginia-anthology.org

The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial of 1623 --- http://amboyna.org

When J.M. Coetzee Secretly Programmed Computers to Write Poetry in the 1960s ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/when-j-m-coetzee-secretly-programmed-computers-to-write-poetry-in-the-1960s.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

NEA Big Read --- http://www.neabigread.org
National Endowment for the Arts Recommended Book List

Haiku: Poetry of the Samurai Warrior --- https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/unit-plans/teaching-content/haiku-poetry-samurai-warrior

The Newton Project (Sir Isaac Newton's Papers Archive) --- http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk

Georgetown University: Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation --- http://slavery.georgetown.edu

Jewish Warsaw --- http://warsze.polin.pl/en

Belt Magazine (Rust Belt Cities) --- http://beltmag.com

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: RumiNations --- http://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/ruminations

A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War --- http://huntington.org/civilwar

American Indians in Children's Literature --- http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com

Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica --- http://www.musicalpassage.org

Sloan Science and Film (film making) --- http://scienceandfilm.org

The Poetry Break --- http://wvpublic.org/programs/poetry-break

Sapiens (anthropology) --- http://www.sapiens.org

Why the Germans Blew It at Dunkirk ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-24/why-the-germans-blew-it-at-dunkirk

The Yellow Nineties Online (UK in the Roaring 1890s) --- http://www.1890s.ca

National Portrait Gallery: Interactive Classroom Activities (Enland) --- http://www.npg.org.uk/learning/digital/interactive-classroom-activities

Heart and Soul: Quebec Folk Art ---
http://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/arts/art-quebec/art-quebec1-e.shtml

 

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

ReadWriteThink: Videos (k-12 English) --- http://www.readwritethink.org/videosbv

King's College London: Portuguese Language Resources ---
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/mlc/lrc/language-resources/portuguese.aspx

From the Scout Report on August 4, 2017

Memrise --- https://www.memrise.com 

Are you looking to learn a new language, or to brush up your skills on a language you are studying? If so, Memrise offers online learning opportunities that may be of interest. Memrise offers courses in numerous languages, including Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and American Sign Language. The team behind Memrise designed these courses to center on elaborate encoding, a strategy that places new words in a context that may remind language learners of similar words in their native language. (For example, "aburrido," the Spanish word for "bored," is presented to English language speakers in the sentence, "It is boring to eat a burrito everyday.") While most courses center on language (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, take note: the site includes a course on common words on the TOEFL exam), Memrise also includes a few courses on other topics. To access these courses, users must first create a free account. Memrise is also available as an iOS or Android application. Some features are only available with the premium version.

From the Scout Report on July 29, 2016

Duolingo --- https://www.duolingo.com 

Duolingo is a mobile app designed to help people learn and practice a new language. Users can select any one of 36 languages and practice reading, listening, and speaking this language. The app works by introducing users to new vocabulary and grammar rules through a series of short levels. The goal? Users will learn by seeing words and grammar modeled. Next, users can try their hand at interpreting written and spoken sentences and then speaking them out loud, allowing for pronunciation practice. When users are able to successfully complete these tasks they move onto higher levels with new vocabulary. Duolingo is designed to be of use to individuals brand new to a language as well those looking to brush up an already familiar one, as users can chose to test out of levels. Best of all, Duolingo is free. Users can also "compete" against friends using the app if they wish, providing additional motivation and accountability.

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#Languages


Music Tutorials

Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica --- http://www.musicalpassage.org

Vienna and New York: 175 Years of Two Philharmonics --- http://www.noasarai.com/NYP-VPO/

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

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/

July 27, 2017

July 28, 2017

July 29, 2017

July 31, 2017

August 2, 2017

August 3, 2017

August 4, 2017

August 5, 2017

August 7, 2017

August 8, 2017

August 10, 2017

August 11, 2017

August 12, 2017

 


Time Magazine:  Cancer's Newest Miracle Cure ---
http://time.com/4895010/cancers-newest-miracle-cure/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017081212pm&xid=newsletter-brief


Time Magazine:  Woman Can Move Again After a Breakthrough Stroke Treatment ---
http://time.com/4875505/deep-brain-stimulation-stroke-movement-recovery/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017081017pm&xid=newsletter-brief


The Wheat Disease Threatening Asia's Food Supply ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/cereal-killer/535911/


Robotic suit promotes normal walking in stroke patients ---
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/07/with-exosuit-technology-post-stroke-patients-may-regain-their-normal-gait/


A startling lawsuit against CVS could blow up what you thought you knew about drug prices ---
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/a-startling-lawsuit-against-cvs-could-blow-up-what-you-thought-you-knew-about-drug-prices/ar-AApJAeh?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp


Four Ways Going to the Doctor is Radically Changing ---
http://time.com/4887525/digital-doctors-telemedicine/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017080911am


Why can't we have the male pill? ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-03/why-we-can-t-have-the-male-pill?cmpid=BBD080317_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170803&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily


Queen Elizabeth Has Four Cocktails a Day
What's in them and What Times of Day Does She Partake?
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/08/queen-elizabeth-four-cocktails-a-day

She also like's a chocolate with wine at the end of her lunch.

To make this tidbit more worthwhile I will add some science


Which Type of chocolate is best for your health?
Here's the science
---
https://theconversation.com/which-type-of-chocolate-is-best-for-your-health-heres-the-science-81120


Growing Teeth in Mouth Using Stem Cell Implants ---
https://prescouter.com/2015/07/growing-new-teeth-in-the-mouth-using-stem-cell-dental-implants/


Removing iron “rust” from our brains could delay the effects of Alzheimer’s ---
https://qz.com/1040310/removing-iron-rust-from-our-brains-could-delay-the-effects-of-alzheimers/

 




Humor for August 2017

If your like me you have trouble remembering the names of many people you've been casually introduced to at parties, receptions, bars, etc.
What I have noticed is that some people have names that are just easier to remember than most other names.
In my next life I want the name Christopher Paul Bacon and will choose the nickname Chris.
Jewish people and Moslems will especially remember my name.


"So long, Mom, I'm Off to Drop the Bomb" - Tom Lehrer for Man from Uncle ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxRVaWTW_wo&list=PLYTtL1FB2XCrBNlw5Qp6SsMz_5J7fSg7m&index=2
Not quite so funny in 2017

 


Forwarded by Scott Bonacker

Why did the auditor get run over crossing the road?
Auditors never actually do the risk assessment well until after the
accident happens.


There was an accountant named Phil, 
his clients he'd overbill, 
He charged them all double, 
and if they caused trouble, 
he'd add $100 more for a thrill.


Q: Why did the auditor cross the road?
A: Because it was in prior year workpapers.


What do cannibal auditors do after their Office Christmas dinner?
Toast Their Clients.,


Forwarded by Tina

Subject: Fwd: The "Learning" curve explained.

You start with a cage containing four monkeys, and inside the cage you
hang a banana on a string,

and then you place a set of stairs under the banana.

    Before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana.

      You then spray ALL the monkeys with cold water.

   After a while, another monkey makes an attempt. As soon as he
touches the stairs, you spray ALL the monkeys with cold water again.

     Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the
other monkeys will try to prevent it.

   Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and
replace it with a new monkey.

The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs. To
his shock, ALL of the other monkeys beat the crap out of him. After
another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the
stairs he will be assaulted.

    Next, remove another of the original four monkeys, replacing it
with a new monkey. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked.
The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment – with enthusiasm
-- because he's now part of the "team."

   Then, replace a third original monkey with a new monkey, followed
by the fourth. Every time the newest monkey

takes to the stairs, he is attacked.

     Now, the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they
were not permitted to climb the stairs. Neither do they know why they
are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. Having replaced
all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have
ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, not one of the
monkeys will try to climb the stairway for the

banana

.



     Why, you ask? Because in their minds, that is the way it has always been!

This is how today's Congress and Senate operates, and this is
why, from time to time, ALL of the monkeys need to be REPLACED..... AT
THE SAME TIME!

 


Forwarded by Paula:  Oldies About Oldies

IF WALKING IS GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH, THE POSTMAN WOULD BE IMMORTAL. 



A WHALE SWIMS ALL DAY, ONLY EATS FISH, AND DRINKS WATER, BUT IS STILL FAT. 



A RABBIT RUNS AND HOPS AND ONLY LIVES 15 YEARS, WHILE A TORTOISE DOESN'T RUN AND DOES MOSTLY NOTHING, YET IT LIVES FOR 150 YEARS. AND THEY TELL US TO EXERCISE? I DON'T THINK SO.

NOW THAT I'M OLDER, HERE'S WHAT I'VE DISCOVERED: 



1. I STARTED OUT WITH  NOTHING, AND I STILL HAVE MOST OF IT. 



2. MY WILD OATS ARE MOSTLY ENJOYED WITH PRUNES AND ALL-BRAN. 



3. FUNNY, I DON'T REMEMBER BEING ABSENT-MINDED. 



4. FUNNY, I DON'T REMEMBER BEING ABSENT-MINDED. 



5. IF ALL IS NOT LOST, THEN WHERE THE HECK IS IT? 



6. IT WAS A WHOLE LOT EASIER TO GET OLDER THAN IT WAS TO GET WISER. 



7. SOME DAYS, YOU'RE THE TOP DOG, SOME DAYS YOU'RE THE HYDRANT. 



8. I WISH THE BUCK REALLY DID STOP HERE, I SURE COULD USE A FEW OF THEM. 



9. KIDS IN THE BACKSEAT CAUSE ACCIDENTS. 



10. ACCIDENTS IN THE BACK SEAT CAUSE KIDS. 



11. IT IS HARD TO MAKE A COMEBACK WHEN YOU HAVEN'T BEEN ANYWHERE. 



12. THE WORLD ONLY BEATS A PATH TO YOUR DOOR WHEN YOU'RE IN THE BATHROOM. 



13. IF GOD WANTED ME TO TOUCH MY TOES, HE'D HAVE PUT THEM ON MY KNEES. 



14. WHEN I'M FINALLY HOLDING ALL THE RIGHT CARDS, EVERYONE WANTS TO PLAY CHESS. 



15. IT IS NOT HARD TO MEET EXPENSES...THEY'RE EVERYWHERE. 



16. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A RUT AND A GRAVE IS THE DEPTH. 



17. THESE DAYS, I SPEND A LOT OF TIME THINKING ABOUT THE HEREAFTER.  


17A. I GO SOMEWHERE TO GET SOMETHING, AND THEN WONDER WHAT I'M "HERE AFTER". 



18. FUNNY, I DON'T REMEMBER BEING ABSENT-MINDED. 



19. IT IS A LOT BETTER TO BE SEEN THAN VIEWED. 



20. HAVE I SENT THIS MESSAGE TO YOU BEFORE OR DID I GET IT FROM YOU?

 

 




Humor July 2017--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q3.htm#Humor0717.htm

Humor June 2017--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q2.htm#Humor0617.htm

Humor May 2017--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q2.htm#Humor0517.htm

Humor April 2017--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q2.htm#Humor0417.htm

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

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron" enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and other universities is at http://www.searchedu.com/

Online Distance Education Training and Education --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray Zone of Fraud  (College, Inc.) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm

The Cult of Statistical Significance: How Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/DeirdreMcCloskey/StatisticalSignificance01.htm

How Accountics Scientists Should Change: 
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm 

What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?  ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong

The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm

Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So

Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews

 

World Clock --- http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/

Interesting Online Clock and Calendar --- http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones --- http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) --- http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
         Also see http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
        
Facts about population growth (video) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth --- http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq --- http://www.costofwar.com/ 
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons --- http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.

Free (updated) Basic Accounting Textbook --- search for Hoyle at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

CPA Examination --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
Free CPA Examination Review Course Courtesy of Joe Hoyle --- http://cpareviewforfree.com/

Rick Lillie's education, learning, and technology blog is at http://iaed.wordpress.com/

Accounting News, Blogs, Listservs, and Social Networking ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting educators.
Any college may post a news item.

Accounting  and Taxation News Sites ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

 

For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to   http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators) http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.

Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing, doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics) research, publication, replication, and validity testing.

 

CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/  (Closed Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.
Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.
AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1 
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.
Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com 
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM
FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm
FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog

Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board on this financial reporting blog from Financial Executives International. The site, updated daily, compiles regulatory news, rulings and statements, comment letters on standards, and hot topics from the Web’s largest business and accounting publications and organizations. Look for continuing coverage of SOX requirements, fair value reporting and the Alternative Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such as the subprime mortgage crisis, international convergence, and rules for tax return preparers.
The CAlCPA Tax Listserv

September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as well as a practicing CPA)

I found another listserve that is exceptional -

CalCPA maintains http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/  and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.

There are several highly capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and the answers are often in depth.

Scott

Scott forwarded the following message from Jim Counts

Yes you may mention info on your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not have access to the files and other items posted.

Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I will get the request to join.

Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.

We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in California.... ]

Please encourage your members to join our listserve.

If any questions let me know.

Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk

 

 

 

 

Many useful accounting sites (scroll down) --- http://www.iasplus.com/links/links.htm

 

Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Some Accounting History Sites

Bob Jensen's Accounting History in a Nutshell and Links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
 

Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

Sage Accounting History --- http://ach.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/11/3/269

A nice timeline on the development of U.S. standards and the evolution of thinking about the income statement versus the balance sheet is provided at:
"The Evolution of U.S. GAAP: The Political Forces Behind Professional Standards (1930-1973)," by Stephen A. Zeff, CPA Journal, January 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/105/infocus/p18.htm
Part II covering years 1974-2003 published in February 2005 --- http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2005/205/index.htm 

A nice timeline of accounting history --- http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2187711/A-HISTORY-OF-ACCOUNTING

From Texas A&M University
Accounting History Outline --- http://acct.tamu.edu/giroux/history.html

Bob Jensen's timeline of derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#DerivativesFrauds

History of Fraud in America --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm
Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

More of Bob Jensen's Pictures and Stories
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm

All my online pictures --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone:  603-823-8482 
Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu