Tidbits on September 14, 2017
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Some Recent Photographs of Clouds Taken With My Old Sony Camera
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/CloudFavorites/Set06/Clouds06.htm

 

Tidbits on September 14, 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

NASA released a new video of Saturn — and the images are stunning ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-nasa-video-cassini-saturn-stunning-real-images-2017-8

An Animated Introduction to Ludwig Wittgenstein & His Philosophical Insights on the Problems of Human Communication ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/an-animated-introduction-to-ludwig-wittgenstein-his-philosophical-look-at-the-problems-of-human-communication.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Macaulay Library's Vast Archive of Natural Sounds Profiled in NSF Science Nation Video ---
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/macaulay-librarys-vast-archive-of-natural-sounds-profiled-in-nsf-science-nation-video/

The 100 Funniest Films of All Time, According to 253 Film Critics from 52 Countries ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/the-100-funniest-films-of-all-time-according-to-253-film-critics-from-52-countries.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

YouTube: Computer Chronicles Science (videos on the early days of computing) ---
www.youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT

YouTube: Genome TV Science --- www.youtube.com/channel/UCUp6Pd9fx8_UX7S38Ih_JqA


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 

Watch John Lennon’s Last Live Performance (1975): “Imagine,” “Stand By Me” & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/watch-john-lennons-last-live-performance-1975-imagine-stand-by-me-more.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Scroll down and click on the video screens.
Good songs, lousy voice.

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

50 stunning drone photos that will make you look at the world from a different angle ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/stunning-drone-photos-2017-8

From Dada to Surrealism: Jewish Avant Garde Artists From Romania, 1910-1938 ---
www.europeana.eu/portal/en/exhibitions/from-dada-to-surrealism

PsyArt Journal Social studies (psychology of the arts) --- www.psyartjournal.com

Stunning Images of Irma and Jose from Space ---
http://time.com/4937214/hurricane-irma-hurricane-jose-space/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017091220pm&xid=newsletter-brief

Incredible before and after images of Houston neighborhoods hit by Hurricane Harvey ---
https://qz.com/1068571/incredible-before-and-after-images-of-houston-neighborhoods-hit-by-hurricane-harvey/

The Creative Tension Between Vitality and Fatality: Illuminating the Mystery of Sylvia Plath Through Her Striking Never-Before-Revealed Visual Art ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/08/17/sylvia-plath-one-life-smithsonian-visual-art/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=b011384148-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-b011384148-234390133&mc_cid=b011384148&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/1000-year-old-illustrated-guide-to-the-medicinal-use-of-plants-now-digitized-put-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

New York Times Lens Blog ---
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/

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

Life Magazine:  Nancy Pelosi: Miss Lube Rack 1955 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/3582796/posts

Home Subjects Arts (art history in England) --- www.homesubjects.org

1843:  A new kind of vehicle has taken to the roads, and people aren’t sure what to make of it. Is it safe? Can it cope with other road users? Will it require a radical overhaul of the transport infrastruct…
https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/driving-lessons
Jensen Comment
A real safety hazard of the first horseless carriages was that they scared the horses on the road.
A real frustration of the first horseless carriages is that the tires flattened so easily that drivers carried hand pumps and tire repair kits to fix tires alongside the road.
In the really early days drivers went to drug stores for cans of gas.
Another frustration was that the engine heads had to be taken off an carbon scraped about every 100 miles (and now we think having to recharge batteries every 200 miles is a pain in the tail). Here's story about my father's first road trip (to Canada) as a young teenager. I say "road" trip loosely since the "roads" were mostly grass paths:

  My Dad's Story About His First Trip Away from the Farm
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/vernon.htm

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

Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1911-1922): A Digital Collection
Language Arts

First World War Poetry Archive Social studies --- www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit

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 September 14, 2017
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2017/TidbitsQuotations091417.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




Fall Foliage Prediction Map --- https://smokymountains.com/fall-foliage-map/
Push the slider across dates

Jensen Comment
The leaves are starting to change colors on some of our trees in the White Mountains of New Hampshire (the dark reds come first).
We've had cool nights a bit early this year (our furnace turned on every night this week before Labor Day 2017)


Lynda Barry on How the Smartphone Is Endangering Three Ingredients of Creativity: Loneliness, Uncertainty & Boredom ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/lynda-barry-on-how-the-smartphone-is-endangering-three-ingredients-of-creativity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


Smartphone --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone
This page needs to be updated for company sales rankings.

What two companies sell more smartphones than Apple?
http://www.businessinsider.com/huawei-second-biggest-smartphone-apple-counterpoint-research-2017-9

Jensen Comment
.My wife and I have no smartphones --- only emergency cell phones that we rarely use.
Hence we must be more creative than if we had smartphones.
Alas we have computers and smart TV to destroy creativeness.


The Latest Thing in Cheating:  Use Google Translate to Plagiarize

Google Translate --- https://translate.google.com/

Stacey Guney, assistant vice president for academic affairs at Aims Community College, in Fort Collins, Colo., wrote that students may use Google Translate to avoid plagiarism-detection software. Students start by translating the text into another language, and then back to English. After they clean up the result a bit, the text will be different enough to evade the software.
Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on September 1, 2017

Jensen Comment
Having grown up in Munich my wife speaks German. Yet whenever we went back to Germany years later she never could explain what I did for a living to her relatives (who don't speak English).

My point here is that it may be easier to get a decent translation of a history article in Google Translate than to get a translation of an accounting article. The reason is that translation software and even human translators generally have trouble translating articles where the vocabulary is quite technical and specialized. I speculate that college admissions essays are more apt to be plagiarized using Google Translate than will articles on accounting for interest rate swaps and other hedging transactions.

As for me I have a terrible time writing a mystery novel. Today I'm going to start translating my new novel.

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm


Are They Doing Their Own Work? ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1892-are-they-doing-their-own-work?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=3fcb1f4baeb0438dad920347e0156824&elq=7132b244c50e45faa21ffcc0a0e8493f&elqaid=15425&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6592

Rumor has it that a student at the University of Texas got an A in Chemistry 101 five times. There are divorce cases where it's been brought out that a spouse wrote her husband's term papers in college.

I had a student who complained about a F grade for a plagiarized term paper, because it was really the expert he hired to write the paper plagiarized the three main components of the paper.

Technologies work better at detecting plagiarized papers than for detecting who wrote the papers.

Examination papers could be tested for fingerprints but I doubt that universities test for fingerprints except in rare instances. Retinas could be scanned during examinations, but does any university perform such security measures?

Then there's the marginal types of cheating. A student might honestly write a paper but hire a grammar expert to clean up the writing. That student might even graduate summa cum laude and not be able to write a decent sentence in English.

Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers (and took two online courses for him)
The wife of a star University of South Florida linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud, the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, January 5, 2008 --
-
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at


The New York Times. September 1, 2017
Football Favoritism (read that academic cheating) at Florida State University:  The Price One Teacher Paid (with her life)
Hospitality Courses Replace Basket Weaving

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/sports/ncaafootball/florida-state-football.html

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As the Florida State University football team was marching to a national title in the fall of 2013, the school was investigating allegations of academic favoritism involving a half-dozen of its leading players, including one who scored the winning touchdown in the championship game.

The inquiry, previously unreported, stemmed from a complaint by a teaching assistant who said she felt pressured to give special breaks to athletes in online hospitality courses on coffee, tea and wine, where some handed in plagiarized work and disregarded assignments and quizzes. The assistant, a 47-year-old doctoral student named Christina Suggs, provided emails and other evidence in late August 2013 to the Florida State inspector general, an independent office. But her case was soon taken over by the university’s attorney.

The allegations were especially sensitive for Florida State, which had been stripped of 12 football victories four years earlier because of improper assistance to athletes in an online music course. The university was also at the time facing a scandal involving its star quarterback, Jameis Winston, who was accused of rape but never charged.

It is unclear if any of the conduct Ms. Suggs complained about resulted in athletes being improperly eligible to play. In a statement, the university said an outside consultant it hired to investigate found no wrongdoing. It refused to release any more information, saying that to do so would jeopardize the privacy of the students involved.

Even so, two things are certain: By the end of 2013, Florida State had tightened standards for the online hospitality courses. And Ms. Suggs had lost her job and left the school.

Continue reading the main story

The story of Ms. Suggs’s experience trying to hold athletes to the same standards as other students, pieced together from emails, other documents and interviews, came to light during research for a forthcoming book, “Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports” (W. W. Norton). It offers a case study of how academic and legal imperatives often collide with the pressures of big-time college sports, at a time when academic fraud and sexual assault scandals are roiling campuses across the country, from Baylor University in Texas to the University of Mississippi.

Florida State was the focus of reporting by The New York Times in 2014 that examined the mishandling of criminal allegations against members of the championship football team, including Mr. Winston.

One of the players involved in Ms. Suggs’s complaint was James Wilder Jr., who had been arrested three times in the previous year and was on track to get, at best, a grade of D in one course. He emailed his professor as the summer semester was ending to say he needed a B “to keep myself in good academic place with the school.” The professor, Mark Bonn, who ran the hospitality courses, instructed Ms. Suggs to work with Mr. Wilder — he referred to him as “a starting star running back,” before noting that all students should be treated equally — and give him a chance to make up past assignments and submit missing portions of his final project, even though it had already been graded.

Ms. Suggs wrote that Mr. Wilder “should have done the work like everyone else” and objected to granting him special treatment, telling a colleague, “I am not offering this opportunity to other students.” The colleague agreed, summing up their mutual concern about Professor Bonn: “Trying to put a stop to his favoritism for athletes once and for all.”

Friends of Ms. Suggs said she was painfully aware of the stakes involved in filing her complaint, including the possibility that athletes found in violation of academic standards might be ineligible to play under National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. All but one of the players identified in her emails went on to the National Football League.

“It was a huge heartache for her,” said Barbara Davis, a fellow doctoral student and close friend of Ms. Suggs. “She told me how there had been tremendous pressure on her to pass these football players, even though they didn’t deserve it.”

Plagiarized Work

In June 2013, administrators at Florida State’s Dedman School of Hospitality circulated a memo to teaching assistants. The school’s online courses in “beverage management,” the memo noted, were popular with “a large number of student athletes” who needed to be tracked closely.

“Like the on-ground classes, we’re asked to review athletes’ progress on a regular basis and report how they’re doing to their academic advisers,” the memo said.

. . .

As the 2013 fall semester came to a close and the Seminoles were preparing for the championship game, Ms. Suggs — who already had two master’s degrees — was informed that her job as a teaching assistant would not be renewed because she did not have enough business school credits. In an email to the inspector general, Ms. Suggs said that she believed she had lost her job “due to this unfortunate circumstance with Dr. Bonn and the investigation into the football players.”

Ms. Suggs decided to leave Florida State, after five years, with an education specialist degree — one step short of her doctorate. In her email to the inspector general, she added that she was “hoping just to put all of Florida State University behind me as I move forward with my life.”

Friends said her decision to leave took an enormous toll.

“I can’t stress enough how important this Ph.D. was to her,” said Melissa Isaak, another of her close friends, adding that next to raising her son, obtaining the advanced degree “was the single most important thing in her life.”

In the months that followed, in deteriorating health and deeply in debt with student loans, Ms. Suggs struggled to cobble together a steady income from online teaching jobs. She had back surgery in October 2014 and returned to her tiny rented condo in Panama City Beach, Fla., to recuperate.

Not long after, Ms. Suggs lay down for a nap while her mother took her son out to a restaurant. They returned to find her unresponsive, a trickle of blood seeping from her nose.

The medical examiner determined that she had died accidentally from a toxic combination of prescription medicines for pain, anxiety and depression.

Jensen Comment
Bob Jensen's threads on the many years of academic scandals of FSU football ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Athletics

Nothing, however, tops the 20 years of fake courses for athletes at the University of North Carolina ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/sports/ncaafootball/florida-state-football.html
The NCAA wnk winked in its accustomed reaction to academic scandals in the Top 20 Division 1 teams.

Why do Division 1 universities pretend that their star athletes are getting an education?
Just pay them to play and let them out of faking their educations.


Real Challenges of Life:  Third Down and 93 Yards to Go ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/louisiana-tech-fumble-third-down-and-93-2017-9


Boston Red Sox Used Apple Watches to Steal Signs Against Yankees ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/sports/baseball/boston-red-sox-stealing-signs-yankees.html

Jensen Comment
This must be a horrible trick to steal some of the cheating glory that, until now, was mostly claimed by the New England Patriots. In addition to Deflategate don't forget that fines were paid for "Patriotic" breaking of the code of opponents' signals across the football fields of play ---
http://yourteamcheats.com/NE
The Boston Red Sox appear to be more savvy on cheating technology than the Patriots who probably don't even own Apple Watches.

If the Red Sox can cheat with Apple Watches, think what your students can do this academic year with those watches.


Holland Implements the Future of Farming ---
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=cf160c9638-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-cf160c9638-153727301


How Labor Scholars Missed the Trump Revolt::We thought we knew the white working class. Then 2016 happened ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Labor-Scholars-Missed-the/241049?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=b44f5357d3404a349f448f3640956c27&elq=d5d986b392174f74b3b44e7844feda33&elqaid=15520&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6644

When the bottom fell out of the economy in 2008, many in and out of the academy were quick to wag a finger at economists and ask, "Why didn’t you guys see this coming?" Economists responded that the "science" of economics is not of the predictive kind — nor, for that matter, are a lot of the sciences. The economy might have been in unanticipated chaos, but the discipline of economics was still sound.

Others argued that the problem was in the methodology itself — the assumptions and premises that blind practitioners to even the possibility of crisis. The eight American and European scholars who wrote the "Dahlem report," a 2009 analysis of the economics profession, found it "obvious, even to the casual observer that these models fail to account for the actual evolution of the real-world economy." As a result, "in our hour of greatest need," we must fumble in darkness with no explanation, no theory, and no scholarly discipline prepared to answer the simple question: How did we get here?

I am a labor historian — or at least one in recovery. When my colleagues and I saw the financial crisis, our predominant response was something like an exhausted, cynical shrug: "Of course — what did you expect in an age of rampant deregulation and absurd economic inequality?" Yet when the next systemic paroxysm hit our nation — the wave of white, blue-collar rage that helped elect Donald Trump — my field seemed as ill-equipped to explain the "actual evolution of the real-world" situation as the science of economics had been to explain the crash in 2008. One could have polled the entire American Political Science Association and the Organization of American Historians in 2016 and found very few who would have predicted a Trump victory — unless Michael Moore (who nearly alone, in no uncertain terms, predicted a "Rust Belt Brexit," the last stand of the common white guy) happens to be an accidental member of one of those professional organizations.

Richard Hofstadter, the old grandmaster of American political history, laid clear the burdens of being a historian: "The urgency of our national problems seems to demand, more than ever, that the historian have something to say that will help us." The need for salient historical explanation seems more important now than ever, yet a lot of us are coming up empty. Most of what we seemed to know about how class works suddenly seems dated, or simply wrong. As with the economists of the past decade, we may have been blinded by the bedrock assumptions of our own field.

Most labor historians, one way or another, and whether or not they concede it, remain children of the "new labor history." The field emerged in the 1960s and ’70s from several sources: the political vision of the New Left, civil rights, and women’s movements; the rejection of the narrow trade-union economism of the "old" labor history; and, perhaps most important, the 1963 publication of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson famously rejected an analysis that addressed class as a "thing," arguing instead for a new analysis that approaches class as a "happening." Smashing icons across the intellectual spectrum, his book began a new age of rich and adventurous writing about the history of working people. He sent historians on a mission to figure out how class worked — without indulging the condescending, instrumental, or teleological traps of previous intellectual models.

 

In place of institutions and economics, the new breed of scholars put culture, consciousness, community, agency, and resistance at the center of their analyses. In rushed two generations of engaged scholarship, freeing workers from prisons of party, union, and state. No longer intellectual pawns, the working class could have its own voice and reveal its own rich complexity. Liberated history, so the assumption went, would lead to liberated workers. And liberation became the project of the new labor history.

But this paradigm never quite escaped its origins in the political romanticism of the New Left that gave birth to it. At its best, it opened up wide vistas of understanding of the entirety of American history; at its worst, it looked like a cultural whirlpool of radicals writing radical history for a radical audience

 

. . .

 

Historians need to reconcile their intellectual frameworks with a "real-world" America that is a messy stew of populist, communitarian, reactionary, progressive, racist, patriarchal, and nativist ingredients. Any historical era has its own mix of these elements, which play in different ways. We should embrace Thompson’s admonition to understand class as a continuing, sometimes volatile happening, and not be blinded by our love affair with dissent as a left-wing movement. Trump voters are dissenters, after all.

My generation’s historiographical compass is left spinning. North is gone. But the white working class is out there. And we still really need to understand it.

Jefferson Cowie is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University. His most recent book is The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Jensen Comment
In other words academic historians in ivory towers stayed aloof of the real world much like academic accountants stayed aloof of real world contracting that that became a messy stew of contingencies and uncertainties that bookkeepers just ignored in the ledgers and academics ignored in their analytical modesls and their empirical regression models. Where have business firms paid the least bit of attention to esoteric and irrelevant academic accounting research? (Yeah I know I'm exaggerating when I write "irrelevant," but I'm not exaggerating when I write that the business firms ignore the esoteric research of academic (accountics science) professors.

 


Nassim Talem:  The Logic of Risk Taking ---
https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf41029d3

Betting on Black Swans

From
The Golden State Warriors are really, really good — like, have flirted with perfection good. As such, the Westgate SuperBook in Las Vegas has them at 1-1,000 odds to make the NBA playoffs, meaning you would have to bet $100,000 to win $100 from the bookie ---
http://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/20498594/las-vegas-sportsbook-offers-1-1000-odds-golden-state-warriors-making-playoffs

Jensen Comment
It seems that somebody laying down $100 is really betting on a black swan event, probably without calculating probabilities since there are so many black swans with very, very, very small probabilities. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

What We Got Wrong About Technology ---
http://timharford.com/2017/08/what-we-get-wrong-about-technology/


Three Things That Undermine Social Security Benefits ---
https://money.usnews.com/investing/investing-101/articles/2017-09-05/3-things-that-undermine-social-security-benefits


Microsoft Excel: How to link text boxes to data cells ---
https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2017/sep/link-text-boxes-to-excel-data-cells.html?utm_source=mnl:cpald&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=08Sep2017


ACT scores are up this year, but the scores of black and Latino students and those who did not complete recommended college preparatory courses remain far behind those of other students.---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/07/act-scores-are-gaps-remain-preparation-and-raceethnicity?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b64cd21f52-DNU20170907&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b64cd21f52-197565045&mc_cid=b64cd21f52&mc_eid=1e78f7c952


The U.S. Asian population is growing faster than any other U.S. racial or ethnic group, climbing 72 percent between 2000 and 2015 according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. Asians Americans are projected to eclipse Hispanic Americans in 2055 to become the largest immigrant group in the country.
Pew Research Center ---
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/08/key-facts-about-asian-americans/?utm_content=buffera06c0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer


Jensen Comment
When reading the article below keep in mind the racial mix of the USA population---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States

72.4% White Only
12.6% Black or African American
  4.8% Asian
  0.9% Native American of Alaskan Natives
  0.2% Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders
  2.9% Two of More races
  6.2% Some Other Race
 16.3% Hispanic and Latino Americans (of any race): 16.3%

Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago
By JEREMY ASHKENAS, HAEYOUN PARK and ADAM PEARCE
The New York Times, AUG. 24, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html

. . .

Blacks and Hispanics remain underrepresented at other top universities, even as the share of white students at many of these schools has dropped, in some cases below 50 percent. The largest growth has often been among Asian students.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The article stresses that African Americans and Hispanics are more underrepresented today than they were in the 1980s. What is not stressed is that whites were overrepresented in the 1980s and are now highly underrepresented in terms of the 72.4% parameter in the USA's most prestigious universities such as the IVY League. Some of the flagship universities of the south are still running higher than 72.4% white. They probably defend admissions outcomes based on SAT and ACT scores.

Please do not take this as meaning I'm shedding a tear for the under representation of whites in prestigious universities focused on in the above article. Nor do I want to shame Asians who have the talent and the motivation to displace many of the white students admitted to these universities. I'm no expert on the complications of admission trends in the USA.

One thing not mentioned in the article is that, in the highly prestigious universities, children of families earning less than $60,000 are attending free or nearly free such that income is not the major barrier to admission into those universities. What is a barrier, however, are admission standards based upon intense competition where Asians have been soaring over the past three decades. For African Americans and Hispanics this is an enormous problem because they are much more likely to have graduated from poorly performing high schools in the USA, especially in outlier school districts that are very large or very, very small.

I might note that the percentages of whites at the University of Texas is only 44% with 23% Hispanic. This in large measure is probably due to the 10% Rule that in Texas law that requires accepting (in all state universities) the top 10% of applicants from each public high school in the State of Texas. This eliminates much of the discrimination caused by having weak Hispanic and African American high schools in central urban districts and heavily Hispanic or Black rural districts. Many (most?) of the top graduates in Hispanic and Black high schools in Texas opt for the flagship campuses of the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at College Station.

If Louisiana and Alabama had a 10% Rule it's certain that LSU and the University of Alabama would have many more African Americans and Hispanics. The 10% Rule trumps SAT and ACT scoring for admissions. I like the 10% Rule because it's driven by motivation of applicants to learn. The President of the University of Texas at one time complained that UT was overwhelmed by the 10% Rule in that almost all discretion in admissions was taken out of the hands of university officials. This led to UT imposing some restrictions on the rule ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/01/texas

Big is not always better.
My advice to top graduates of minority-dominated high schools is to apply to some small colleges and universities where class sizes are much smaller than in flagship universities. The surprise will be that nearly all colleges have funding available for free rides of some African American and Hispanic students. My daughter Lisl graduated in in biology from the University of Texas. She grew weary of enormous classes having hundreds of students. The Jester Center dormitory complex is so huge it has two mailing zip codes. She said the noise level in Jester is loud or louder 24/7. It's much more peaceful and quiet in urban zoos ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jester_Center


U of Arizona professor’s Ph.D. is withdrawn (by Ohio State University) after her findings on violent video games are questioned. Some wonder why her mentor and co-author, a senior scholar, has not shared the blame ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/01/ohio-state-revokes-arizona-professors-phd-questioning-her-findings-video-games?mc_cid=63f0c1e942&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

Ohio State University took the extraordinary step of revoking a graduate’s doctorate last week. Now her future at the University of Arizona, where she is an assistant professor of communication, is unclear.

Jodi Whitaker’s problems started in 2015, after scholars in two countries noticed irregularities in the data in her 2012 paper on video games. The study in Communication Research, called “‘Boom, Headshot!’ Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy,” found that playing a violent video game improved real-life shooting skills. Initially, it was something of a boon for both Whitaker, then still a graduate student at Ohio State, and her co-author and dissertation committee chair, Brad J. Bushman, the Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication there. That’s because Bushman served on President Obama’s committee on gun violence and his research challenges what he calls myths about violence, including that violent media have a trivial effect on aggression.

But Patrick Markey, a professor of psychology at Villanova University -- whose own findings on video games clash with Bushman’s -- soon challenged the paper, as did Malte Elson, a postdoctoral researcher in educational psychology at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Together they alerted the Committee of Initial Inquiry at Ohio State to what they called irregularities in some of the variables of the data set. The values of questioned variables could not be confirmed because the original research records were unavailable, according to Communication Research, which in 2016 decided that a retraction was warranted.

Bushman was cleared of wrongdoing by Ohio State, but he agreed to the retraction. He also agreed to the retraction of another paper in which Whitaker was not involved -- one finding that watching violent cartoons inhibits children's learning -- earlier this year, as reported by Retraction Watch. Data on a second 2016 paper by Whitaker and Bushman (on which Bushman was the lead) also have been corrected; that study found that "catharsis beliefs" attract people to violent video games.

But Whitaker, the 2012 paper’s lead author, was found responsible for the errors. And Ohio State’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously last week to revoke her doctorate, granted in 2013.

Benjamin Johnson, a spokesman for Ohio State, said he was limited about what he could reveal about the case, due to federal laws governing the privacy of students. In general, though, he said via email, the university's Committee on Academic Misconduct investigates allegations. That committee can then recommend to the executive vice president and provost that a degree be revoked, he said. And if the provost agrees, the recommendation goes to the Board of Trustees.

It’s impossible to know exactly how often doctorates are revoked, but it is extremely rare. Ohio State, for example, revokes about one degree every two years. But that’s all degrees, not just Ph.D.s.

Bushman referred a request for comment to another spokesperson for Ohio State, who said via email that the university “determined that there was no evidence that Bushman participated in, or was aware of, inappropriate data manipulation.” Communication Research’s editorial note about “Boom, Headshot” says that a replication of the study by Bushman is in review.

Whitaker did not respond to requests for comment. Both her current department chair and a spokesperson for Arizona declined comment on her status there, saying it’s a private personnel issue. Whitaker’s faculty profile remains active. It includes a link to her curriculum vitae, which lists her doctorate from Ohio State.

In a joint statement to Retraction Watch, Markey and Elson seemed to suggest that Whitaker had been thrown under the bus.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm


August 29, 2017 message from Dennis Huber

House flippers triggered the US housing market crash, not poor subprime borrowers.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/house-flippers-triggered-us-housing-175705459.html      

Dennis

August 30, 2017 reply from Bob Jensen

The article is suspect because it relies on fraudulent credit scoring data in the economic boom preceding the crash of 2008. In other words the credit scoring outfits were giving high credit scores to individuals and companies that should have had very low scores. Credit scoring companies later paid fines for their criminal activities, and their credit scoring databases leading up to the crash are virtually worthless.

 

 

The article is also misleading because it plays down the huge amounts of fraud taking place in conspiracies between mortgage brokers (most any criminal could be a mortgage broker selling inflated mortgages to Freddie and Fannie), unethical property value appraisers, and borrowers greedy for cash.

 

 

A perfect example is the case of Marvene written up by the WSJ. Marvene was a woman on welfare who owned a shack she bought for a little over $3,000 in Phoenix. A criminal mortgage broker and a criminal appraiser teamed up with her to get Marvene a mortgage for over $100,000 that was sold to Fannie.

 

 

Marvene then bought a $60,000 truck and some other things with the fraudulent loan proceeds --- while never going off welfare and food stamps. After the foreclosure neighbors bought the shack for a pittance and tore it down. Fannie ate the loss and billions more in losses  like this that were caused by criminals teaming up with poor people like Marvene.

 

 

You can read about Marvene and similar mortgage broker frauds using poor people like Marvene at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze 

 

 Garbage articles today are politically biased and try to gloss over just how much criminal activity was taking place around the turn of the Century. Flipped houses were only part of a very fraudulent landscape made possible because it was so easy to milk Freddie and Fannie. It was so easy because the originating lender/broker bore zero percent of the risk of fraudulent mortgages sold upstream to Freddie and Fannie.

Selling mortgages without recourse would not have been such an economic disaster if the collageral value exceeded the loan value. In tens of millions of instances, however, the crooked real estate appraisers allowed inflated loan porceeds  to greatly exceed genuine property values.

Bob
 



As college costs continue to rise, outstanding student debt has ballooned to an all-time high of $1.4 trillion ---
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/student-loan-balances-jump-nearly-150-percent-in-a-decade.html


Amazon Opens Search for Amazon HQ2 – A Second Headquarters City in North America ---
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2299039&utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=a8ea6b5aab-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-a8ea6b5aab-153727301

Jensen Comment
Now is the time for academics to begin to seriously speculate as to the reasons, possibly reasons behind forthcoming excuses from Amazon. My best guess is flexibility in the face of potential taxes and unfriendly legislation. Seattle is circling its biggest and best wagons with threats of such things as a high income surtax. The State of Washington is contemplating a gross revenue tax (for public schools) that might catch on in Blue states. There have already been big headquarters moves such as GE's recent move from Connecticut to Boston. I'm amazed that there have not been more threatened moves by big companies out of New York City and Chicago.

If Amazon has two headquarters it can virtually shut down one of them on short notice. Compounding the incentives for two or more headquarters is that cities, states, and labor unions will make enormous deals to retain and attract businesses. Exhibit A is the recent tax break of $3+ billion to Foxconn by the State of Wisconsin.

Where will Amazon build a second HQ in North America?
It's anybody's guess, but I would not count out the Dallas region for many reasons such as the DFW airport, no income tax, large pool of high quality employees, nearness to Mexico, and a business-friendly legislature. But who can predict anything in the future of Jeff Bezos?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos


Guaranteed (Universal) Minimum Income --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income
Milton Friedman called it a negative income tax. Conservatives are often supportive of the negative income tax if other forms of safety nets such as welfare, food stamps, housing subsidies, and unemployment benefits are eliminated.
Liberals are sometimes opposed because when given discretionary support in place of other benefits (like food stamps) the money may be wasted on booze, drugs, entertainment, gambling, and other diversions from needy children and elderly dependents.
The experimental amounts Europe are usually quite modest to date  such as in Finland ($580 per month) where only 2,000 citizens remained additionally on other forms of public assistance due to unemployment.

From MIT

A study from the Roosevelt Institute has concluded exactly that. It suggests that a government handout to every American of $12,000 a year, no strings attached, would boost the U.S. economy to the tune of 12.5-13% over eight years.
 The report also says it would create more jobs. Unsurprisingly, this view is highly controversial, as are guaranteed incomes as a whole. For more, check out our in-depth analysis of the idea -
--
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601499/basic-income-a-sellout-of-the-american-dream/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=05b835a50e-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-05b835a50e-153727301

The New York Times:  Why Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Isn’t Working ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/opinion/finland-universal-basic-income.html?mcubz=0

Jensen Comment
Decades ago I was supportive (in theory) of the negative income tax minimum level of income. In theory it sounded great because of efficiencies that reduced the bureaucracy cost and fraud in the safety nets of welfare, food stamps, public housing, etc.

But to the extent that parents (think drug addicts and alcoholics) will waste discretionary funds while depriving their children of basics like food, shoes, medicine, and education perhaps the paternalistic safety nets are more likely to benefit needy children and elderly dependents. Keeping all the safety nets plus giving something like $12,000 per year minimum income is probably too burdensome for taxpayers. There's also the problem of inflation. What's to keep landlords from raising rents if tenants each have $1,000 more per month?

Plus there's the problem of incentives.
Cuba's great experiment with free housing, free education, free health care, free transportation and relatively generous free ration books was eventually viewed by Castro as not working for various reasons, the main one being that it destroyed incentives to work when combined with a rather stingy maximum wage of $20 per day. Why slave as a hotel maid or farm worker when all basic needs are provided free without working? What happened was that an underground economy emerged to pay workers above the maximum wage in order to get work done.

"Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work," by Paul Haven. Associated Press, Yahoo News, September 8, 2010 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100908/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_cuba_fidel_castro_5

Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.

The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

He said Castro made the comment casually over lunch following a long talk about the Middle East, and did not elaborate. The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Goldberg's account.

Since stepping down from power in 2006, the ex-president has focused almost entirely on international affairs and said very little about Cuba and its politics, perhaps to limit the perception he is stepping on his brother's toes.

Goldberg, who traveled to Cuba at Castro's invitation last week to discuss a recent Atlantic article he wrote about Iran's nuclear program, also reported on Tuesday that Castro questioned his own actions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, including his recommendation to Soviet leaders that they use nuclear weapons against the United States.

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba has clung to its communist system.

The state controls well over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing. At least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.

President Raul Castro and others have instituted a series of limited economic reforms, and have warned Cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from the government. But the president has also made it clear he has no desire to depart from Cuba's socialist system or embrace capitalism.

Fidel Castro stepped down temporarily in July 2006 due to a serious illness that nearly killed him.

He resigned permanently two years later, but remains head of the Communist Party (until he died). After staying almost entirely out of the spotlight for four years, he re-emerged in July and now speaks frequently about international affairs. He has been warning for weeks of the threat of a nuclear war over Iran.

Castro's interview with Goldberg is the only one he has given to an American journalist since he left office.

Added Jensen Comment

In the 21st Century we're seeing a combination of robots taking away jobs combined with weakened job protection powers of labor unions. We can expect increasing unemployment in almost every economic sector and income level. This will increase the clamor for minimum basic income or it's equivalent in increasingly expensive safety nets such as suspension of mortgage payments, property tax payment relief, suspension of rent payments, suspension of car lease payments, and free food and training between jobs.

More research is needed, and we should definitely track the existing experiments in Europe ---
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income


1,600 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in September: Enroll Today ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/1600-moocs-massive-open-online-courses-getting-started-in-september-enroll-today.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Includes six courses in financial and forensic accounting


Everything we're expecting Apple to launch on September 12 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-event-preview-iphone-8-apple-watch-apple-tv-2017-8

15 Gadgets Every Student Needs (maybe and maybe not) ---
http://time.com/4913866/best-student-gadgets/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017090212pm&xid=newsletter-brief


Why Students (and their parents) Need Better Protections Against Loan Fraud ---
https://theconversation.com/why-students-need-better-protection-from-loan-fraud-82723

Jensen Comment
Actually it's more than just protection against loan fraud. Students and parents need better knowledge of finance to protect against consumer fraud in general.

This summer a supposedly respected Chevrolet dealer tried to defraud me on a car leasing deal. The average buyer might have fallen for the shady deal.

How do car dealers commit fraud?
The most common way is to lie about the value of the car being purchased or leased. Inflated values make leasing or borrowing rates appear lower than they really are relative to the true value of the car. The best protection is to pretend that you want to pay cash for the car up front and that you are shopping around among other car sellers (especially online sellers). Say the dealer claims the value of the car is $31,000. By the time you negotiate a cash price it may well drop down by 10% or more --- say to $27,600. Then use Excel or a finance calculator to compute the true financing or leasing rate based on the $27,600 price rather than the phony $31,000 price.

There are also other ways dealers try to screw customers. The Chevy dealer in my case tried to sell me on a 39-month lease rather than the standard 36-month lease. Of course the lease payments are somewhat lower on a 39-month lease.

When it comes to home buying there are many ways sellers and their relaters can be deceptive.

There are also many ways telephone companies and credit card companies are deceptive about charges.

Stop graduating finance ignoramuses from high schools and colleges. Grab the brass ring to promote financial literacy in our K-16 schools.

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


ScienceOpen Has a Collection of Papers on How to Fix the Replicability Crisis ---
https://replicationnetwork.com/2017/08/25/fyi-science-open-has-a-collection-of-papers-on-how-to-fix-the-replicability-crisis/

Jensen Comment
Because accountant researchers are more honest and accurate than most other researchers, accounting journal editors generally don't encourage or publish replication reports that don't have extended research findings ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Have there been any accounting research journal retractions other than the many retractions of the notorious James Hunton articles that allegedly contained fabricated data?


New analysis finds the number of doctorates awarded keeps going up, even as number of job openings is going down. ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/28/more-humanities-phds-are-awarded-job-openings-are-disappearing?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=e546a3205d-DNU20170828&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-e546a3205d-197565045&mc_cid=e546a3205d&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

. . .

One analysis released Sunday looked at completions of doctoral degrees. Humanities programs awarded 5,891 doctoral degrees in 2015. That is the largest number recorded back to the start of collection of such information in 1987. The figure was only 3,110 in 1988, then rose steadily to 4,994 in 2000, dipped to about 4,700 from 2002 to 2007, and then started going up again, year after year.

The long period of time it takes to earn humanities doctorates (8-10 year time to completions are not uncommon) makes it difficult for prospective graduate students to calculate job prospects when they are likely to complete their degrees. But the period covered by the study included the economic downturn of 2008 and the years after. And in that period of time, there has never been a truly healthy job market for humanities Ph.D.s seeking faculty jobs.

Jensen Comment
It's mystifying that the demand for accounting doctorates is increasing while the annual supply is decreasing. In 2015 the number of accounting doctoral degrees from universities having AACSB accreditation was 174 (down from 186 awarded in 2013) ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf
We may well hit a point in the future where adjuncts teaching accounting without doctorates exceeds the number of accounting professors with doctorates. Should we entitle this a return to the 1950s before the Ford Foundation put millions into prestigious USA university accountancy doctoral programs? ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm

I'm told there's an even bigger supply problem of doctorates in criminology. although the job market is probably better for undergraduate majors in accounting.


A first-time author unwittingly exposed the house of cards beneath “bestseller” books (such as NYT "bestsellers") ---
https://qz.com/1062280/a-first-time-author-unwittingly-exposed-the-house-of-cards-beneath-bestseller-books/

Jensen Comment
Something similar has been taking place for years in academic fraud. For-profit journal publishers commonly phony up citation counts in a number of devious ways, including demanding that authors add unneeded citations as a condition to getting their articles accepted for publication.


Online Colleges in the Georgia System ---
http://www.schools.com/online-colleges/georgia

The University System of Georgia (USG) is one of the largest in the country, with a total full-time enrollment of more than 320,000 students at 29 campus locations. What's more, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) counts 39 additional public and private non-profit schools where students can earn a campus-based or online bachelor's degree in Georgia.

Figuring out which traditional and online colleges in Georgia might be right for you can be a daunting task. What are the differences between the main campus of a large university and its satellite locations? Are you looking for a school that makes it easy for students to transfer class credits earned in a community college program? Which schools have the state's top programs for your major? Information like this can be hard to find, especially if you don't have time to hunt up all the facts you need.

We gathered data on from the NCES and other U.S. Department of Education sources on 50+ schools in Georgia and analyzed it with our 13-point methodology. Schools that stood out in multiple categories earned the right to be called the best campus-based and online colleges in Georgia.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on distance higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm

MOOCs --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

The number of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offered worldwide grew by more than 2,000 in the past 2016-17 academic year (most from very prestigious universities) ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Cumulative-Growth-in-Number-of/240707?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=1194edeba9b24ecd8e702fd6dbedb792&elq=196b4a5a57064d3487e7f609e4f5f157&elqaid=15351&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6550

Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs (MOOC courses are free by definition although students wanting transcript credit must pay fees) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


A security flaw in keycard door locks was a nightmare for hotels—but a dream for the criminal who used it to steal $500,000-worth of goods ---
https://www.wired.com/2017/08/the-hotel-hacker/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=7ea65602e3-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-7ea65602e3-153727301


Question
What is a publisher's formal "Expression of Concern?"

Answer
It appears to be in the gray zone expression of concern between no comment about criticisms and retraction of a publication.
In some ways it flags attention to the need for more research.

A publisher has issued an expression of concern (EoC) about a study that claimed children with same-sex parents were at greater risk of depression and abuse, after posters using statistics from the paper to support a homophobic message appeared in Australia and the US ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/08/25/publisher-flags-paper-sex-parenting-neo-nazi-group-cites/


Lowest Paying Jobs for College Graduates ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/15e3341c00ad5fcf


The lucrative business of bail bonds ---
http://www.expressnews.com/business/business_columnists/michael_taylor/article/The-lucrative-business-of-bail-bonds-11956711.php

Jensen Warnings
These are the opinions of one newspaper columnist in San Antonio, Texas,
Don't rely on his opinions without further investigating the financial risks, especially in other parts of Texas and the USA.

Remember if something sounds too good to be true it probably is too good to be true.

One of the things to investigate are the databases on suspects who failed to show up in court. San Antonio is only about three hours from where its pretty easy to wade across the Rio Grande.

Another thing to investigate is portfolio diversification, collateral, and competition in this business.


France, Germany, Italy, Spain seek tax on digital giants' revenues ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-tax-digital/france-germany-italy-spain-seek-tax-on-digital-giants-revenues-idUSKCN1BK0HX
Jensen Comment
Revenue tax (read that sales tax) is extremely regressive --- which means poor people bear a relatively larger proportion of the tax than they do with income taxes. Between the sales tax and a business income tax there's a business VAT tax that's also regressive in terms of raising the prices that consumers pay. How much business taxes stifle economic growth depends a lot on the amount of the taxes themselves. If sales and VAT taxes vary between states it can lead to a lot of cheating. Exhibit A is the way residents of Vermont literally flock to New Hampshire to avoid sales taxes on big ticket items like computers, TVs, furniture, tires appliances, lumber, cases of liquor, etc. Wal-Mart does not build stores in Vermont. Rather it builds stores in New Hampshire close to the borders of Vermont and Massachusetts. Keep in mind that there are no border checkpoints between USA states or between European nations such that nothing prevents going to low sales tax states to spend a lot of money.


Free Business School MOOCs

One tip to keep in mind. If you want to take a course for free, select the "Full Course, No Certificate" or "Audit" option when you enroll. If you would like an official certificate documenting that you have successfully completed the course, you will need to pay a fee. Here's the list:

·  Business Foundations - University of British Columbia

·  Influencing People - University of Michigan

·  Introduction to Negotiation: A Strategic Playbook for Becoming a Principled and Persuasive Negotiator - Yale University

·  Selling Ideas: How to Influence Others, and Get Your Message to Catch On - University of Pennsylvania/Wharton Business School

·  Effective Problem Solving and Decision Making - University of California-Irvine

·  Design Thinking for Innovation - University of Virginia

·  Project Management: The Basics for Success - University of California-Irvine

·  Work Smarter, Not Harder: Time Management for Personal & Professional Productivity - University of California-Irvine

·  Becoming an Entrepreneur - MIT

·  Competitive Strategy - Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)

·  Financial Markets - Yale University (taught by Nobel Prize Winning Economist Robert Shiller)

·  Finance for Non-Financial Professionals - University of California-Irvine

·  Introduction to Corporate Finance - University of Pennsylvania/Wharton Business School

·  Introduction to Financial Accounting - University of Pennsylvania/Wharton Business School

·  Introduction to Marketing - University of Pennsylvania/Wharton Business School

·  Managing the Value of Customer Relationships - University of Pennsylvania/Wharton Business School

·  Marketing in a Digital World - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

·  Analytics in Python - Columbia University

·  Introduction to User Experience - University of Michigan

Data Science Essentials - MIT & Microsoft


Redefine Statistical Significance
David Giles:  Econometrics Reading List for September 2017---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2017/09/econometrics-reading-list-for-september.html

A little belatedly, here is my September reading list:
  • Benjamin, D. J. et al., 2017. Redefine statistical significance. Pre-print.
  • Jiang, B., G. Athanasopoulos, R. J. Hyndman, A. Panagiotelis, and F. Vahid, 2017. Macroeconomic forecasting for Australia using a large number of predictors. Working Paper 2/17, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics, Monash University.
  • Knaeble, D. and S. Dutter, 2017. Reversals of least-square estimates and model-invariant estimations for directions of unique effects. The American Statistician, 71, 97-105.
  • Moiseev, N. A., 2017. Forecasting time series of economic processes by model averaging across data frames of various lengths. Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, 87, 3111-3131.
  • Stewart, K. G., 2017. Normalized CES supply systems: Replication of Klump, McAdam and Willman (2007). Journal of Applied Econometrics, in press.
  • Tsai, A. C., M. Liou, M. Simak, and P. E. Cheng, 2017. On hyperbolic transformations to normality. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 115, 250-266,



From the Scout Report on September 1, 2017

Bloomz Educational Technology --- www.bloomz.net
Bloomz is a unified platform for teachers to connect, coordinate, and communicate with the parents of their students. It can send class updates to all parents, optionally including photos and videos. It includes a class calendar, complete with reminders, conference scheduling, and volunteer and item signups. And it provides real-time communication features including one-on-one messaging, student timelines, and student behavior tracking. Bloomz is free for teachers and invitation-only for parents. It can be accessed on the web or using smartphone apps for Android or iOS. Parents may also opt to receive notifications from Bloomz via text message.


Bluefish Science ---  bluefish.openoffice.nl 
Bluefish is a lightweight yet powerful text editor written for programmers and web developers. It seeks to fill the niche between simple text editors (Notepad, Text Edit) and full-fledged integrated development environments (Eclipse, IntelliJ). Because of its small resource footprint, Bluefish can simultaneously work across many dozens of files even on very modest hardware like netbooks. It has integrated support for editing remote files using a number of protocols (FTP, SFTP, WebDav, and others). Bluefish includes syntax highlighting and in-line language reference information for HTML, CSS, Javascript, and many common (and not so common) programming languages. Additionally, Bluefish allows users to define 'snippets' -- frequently repeated stanzas of text -- and connect them to keyboard shortcuts. Bluefish is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux


Found: A star that last dazzled astronomers in 1437 ---
http://www.popsci.com/astronomers-find-star-nova-1437 

Solving a 600-Year-Old Cosmic Mystery ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/a-cosmic-whodunit/538482

Casting Light on the Mystery of a Star that Vanished After 14 Days ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/science/nova-stars-korea.html

Proper- motion age dating of the progeny of Nova Scorpii AD 1437 ---
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v548/n7669/full/nature23644.html

YouTube: What is a Nova? How Does it Compare to a Supernova? ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZKiWGT4Za4

Digitizing the Harvard Observatory Plate Collection ---
http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/plates/presentations/DigitizingPlates3.pdf


From the Scout Report on September 8, 2017

Hugo Science --- https://gohugo.io/
It can be difficult to create a website without sinking into the technological ooze. Even rather spartan sites can involve large amounts of complex CSS and Javascript. Content Management Systems (like Drupal, Wordpress, or Joomla) simplify creation of web pages. These CMSes also provide the ability to generate pages customized to particular users. But, in turn, they need more expensive hosting along with ongoing upgrades. Sites that don't need custom page generation of a CMS might consider Hugo as an alternative. Hugo is a static website generator. A Hugo user creates pages in a text editor using Markdown, a lightweight markup language. They also specify a theme, either creating their own or using one of the hundreds of themes available. When Hugo runs, it creates a set of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. These files can be used with any hosting provider and do not need any special software on the web server to work. Hugo is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.


Treesnap --- https://treesnap.org/
Invasive diseases and pests threaten the health of America’s forests. Scientists are working to understand what allows some individual trees to survive, but they need to find healthy, resilient trees in the forest to study. That’s where concerned foresters, landowners, and citizens (you!) can help. Tag trees you find in your community, on your property, or out in the wild using TreeSnap! Scientists will use the data you collect to locate trees for research projects like studying the genetic diversity of tree species and building better tree breeding programs.


Pluto: dwarf planet's surface features given first official names
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/07/pluto-dwarf-planets-surface-features-given-first-official-names  

Pluto's pits, ridges, and famous plain get official names
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/pluto-pits-ridges-plain-get-official-names  

Pluto features given first official names
http://www.seti.org/Pluto-features-given-first-official-names

The Voyage of New Horizons: Jupiter, Pluto, and Beyond
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/07/the-voyage-of-new-horizons-jupiter-pluto-and-beyond/398408

Report from the Planetary Frontier: The Latest from New Horizons at Pluto
https://www.astrosociety.org/uncategorized/report-from-the-planetary-frontier-the-latest-from-new-horizons-at-pluto

Reflections on Clyde Tombaugh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crbi2in-PHc




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


Education Tutorials

Higher Learning Commission: Collection of Papers Educational Technology --- http://cop.hlcommission.org/

The New Science Teacher Science --- http://tnst.randolphcollege.edu/

Science Learning Center at Western Illinois University ---
https://sites.google.com/site/scilearncenter514/home

Association for Psychological Science: Classroom Resources Social studies ---
www.psychologicalscience.org/members/teaching/classroom-resources

Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion: Teaching Tactics Religion --- www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/resources/ttr/read-the-journal/teaching-tactics

Library of Congress Magazine Social studies --- www.loc.gov/lcm

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 21 best science movies and shows streaming on Netflix that will make you smarter ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-science-documentaries-movies-shows-netflix-2017-5

Think Like a Scientist --- http://tlas.nautil.us/

NASA released a new video of Saturn — and the images are stunning ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-nasa-video-cassini-saturn-stunning-real-images-2017-8

Clear Sky Chart Science (astronomy) --- www.cleardarksky.com/csk

YouTube: Genome TV Science --- www.youtube.com/channel/UCUp6Pd9fx8_UX7S38Ih_JqA

Tolkien's Plant Passion Moves Botanist To Create Guide To Middle Earth ---
 http://lisnews.org/tolkiens_plant_passion_moves_botanist_to_create_guide_to_middle_earth

Fire Ants Form Giant Rafts to Survive Floods ---
https://theconversation.com/how-do-fire-ants-form-giant-rafts-to-survive-floods-80717

The New Science Teacher Science --- http://tnst.randolphcollege.edu/

MIT:  A radical new natural gas power plant could capture carbon at nearly no cost.---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608755/potential-carbon-capture-game-changer-nears-completion/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=5d3fd3be8d-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-5d3fd3be8d-153727301

Scientists have been using quantum theory for almost a century now, but embarrassingly they still don’t know what it means. An informal poll taken at a 2011 conference on Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality showed that there’s still no consensus on what quantum theory says about reality—the participants remained deeply divided about how the theory should be interpreted. Some physicists just shrug and say we have to live with the fact that quantum mechanics is weird. So particles can be in two places at once, or communicate instantaneously over vast distances.
Physicists Want to Rebuild Quantum Theory From Scratch
https://www.wired.com/story/physicists-want-to-rebuild-quantum-theory-from-scratch/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities Science --- http://hekint.org/

Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Social Science and Economics Tutorials

PEW Research Center: State of the News Media --- www.pewresearch.org/topics/state-of-the-news-media

Association for Psychological Science: Classroom Resources Social studies --- www.psychologicalscience.org/members/teaching/classroom-resources

PsyArt Journal Social studies (psychology of the arts) --- www.psyartjournal.com

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Law and Legal Studies

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


Math Tutorials

Estimation 180 Mathematics Tutorials --- www.estimation180.com

Nassim Talem:  The Logic of Risk Taking ---
https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf41029d3

Betting on Black Swans

From
The Golden State Warriors are really, really good — like, have flirted with perfection good. As such, the Westgate SuperBook in Las Vegas has them at 1-1,000 odds to make the NBA playoffs, meaning you would have to bet $100,000 to win $100 from the bookie ---
http://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/20498594/las-vegas-sportsbook-offers-1-1000-odds-golden-state-warriors-making-playoffs

 

Jensen Comment
It seems that somebody laying down $100 is really betting on a black swan event. With the myriad of black swans that  that can keep the Warriors out of the playoffs it would seem that the odds would not be this long amidst the black swans ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

 

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

Gauguin’s Stirring First-Hand Account of What Actually Happened the Night Van Gogh Cut off His Own Ear ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/08/23/gauguin-van-gogh-ear/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=c9a992db9d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-c9a992db9d-234390133&mc_cid=c9a992db9d&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Erstwhile: A History Blog Social studies --- https://erstwhileblog.com/

Wisconsin 101: Our History in Objects Social studies --- www.wi101.org

Teaching History with 100 Objects --- http://www.teachinghistory100.org

Home Subjects Arts (art history in England) --- www.homesubjects.org

An Animated Introduction to Ludwig Wittgenstein & His Philosophical Insights on the Problems of Human Communication ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/an-animated-introduction-to-ludwig-wittgenstein-his-philosophical-look-at-the-problems-of-human-communication.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Society for U.S. Intellectual History --- https://s-usih.org/

Science Friday: The Scientific Tale of Author Beatrix Potter ---
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/the-scientific-tale-of-author-beatrix-potter/

New York Times Lens Blog ---
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/

1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/1000-year-old-illustrated-guide-to-the-medicinal-use-of-plants-now-digitized-put-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

YouTube: Computer Chronicles Science (videos on the early days of computing) ---
www.youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT

WyoHistory.org Social studies (Wyoming) --- www.wyohistory.org

Yale University Libraries: Free Web Resources on Religion ---
http://guides.library.yale.edu/c.php?g=295851&p=1972637

First World War Poetry Archive Social studies --- www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit

Grandma's Project (recipies) --- http://grandmasproject.org/

Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1911-1922): A Digital Collection
Language Arts

From Dada to Surrealism: Jewish Avant Garde Artists From Romania, 1910-1938 ---
www.europeana.eu/portal/en/exhibitions/from-dada-to-surrealism

New York Public Library Recommendations ---
www.nypl.org/collections/nypl-recommendations/lists

Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities Science --- http://hekint.org/

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

A Colorful Map Visualizes the Lexical Distances Between Europe’s Languages: 54 Languages Spoken by 670 Million People ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/a-colorful-map-visualizes-the-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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


Music Tutorials

How to Listen to Music: A Free Course from Yale University ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/how-to-listen-to-music-a-free-course-from-yale-university.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

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/

August 29, 2017

August 30, 2017

August 31, 2017

September 2, 2017

September 5, 2017

September 6, 2017

September 7, 2017

September 8, 2017

September 9, 2017

September 12,2017

September 14, 2017

 


Drug Research --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_development

How to Mislead With Statistics
Freakonomics:  Bad Medicine, Part 2: (Drug) Trials and Tribulations --
-
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/bad-medicine-part-2-drug-trials-tribulations-rebroadcast/

How do so many ineffective and even dangerous drugs make it to market? One reason is that clinical trials are often run on “dream patients” who aren’t representative of a larger population. On the other hand, sometimes the only thing worse than being excluded from a drug trial is being included. Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript.

Jensen Comment
As Jagdish Gangolly pointed out to me Big Pharma does not conduct its own drug and medical device testing trials in the USA. These are mostly conducted by medical schools and independent research labs. Hence many flaws in clinical testing can be traced back to either faulty medical school research or medical schools that did not act independently regarding inadequate funding or failure to be completely independent of restrictions placed by Big Pharma on those test. Approval of new medicines is the responsibility of government.

Faulty drug and medical device tests are common in other nations. Exhibit A is Thalidomide that led to many deformed babies in Germany rather than the USA. Of course the most unethical testing is done in poor nations where Big Pharma is known to sometimes conduct tests to either save money or submit patients to dangers not permitted in the USA and/'or some states within the USA. Hollywood frequently makes villains out of big pharmaceutical companies. Some stories are based on fact, others are pure fiction.

The classical ethical dilemma is that of sacrificing a few to save many. The classic ethics paradox is called the Trolley Problem ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

At the suggestion of Dan Stone, I'm now reading
Why They Did It:  Inside the Mind of the White Collar Criminal
by Harvard's Eugene Soltes, 2016

On Page 16 Professor Soltes refers to the Trolley Problem on Page 16. There' not much controversy about diverting the wayward trolley to sacrifice one person to save five persons.

With little hesitation, the vast majority of people --- almost 90% in one large survey --- say ""yes.," they would flip the switch. To most, saving five people, and the expense of killing one, seems quite sensible.

But consider your judgment in another scenario. Suppose you're the surgeon and five patients are acutely in need on one organ each. Tow patients need a lung, two need a kidney, and one requires a heart. Allfive will die today if they do not get these organs, but there's little chance that matching donor organs can be found int time. Coincidentally, your nurse calls to say that another patient has arrived at your clinic for his routine annual checkup. The nurse's preliminary examination shows that he's a perfect donor. (I think you see how the scenario proceeds with almost zero percent of people surveyed willing to make such a sacrifice.) 

Helen Mirren stars in similar film entitled "Eye in the Sky: where the top general must make a decision of whether to sacrifice an innocent child with a bomb that will also destroy terrorists about to kill nearly 100 innocent people in a Kenyan shopping mall ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_in_the_Sky_(2015_film)

. . .

Seeking authorisation to execute the strike, Powell orders her risk-assessment officer to find parameters that will let him quote a lower 45% risk of civilian deaths. He re-evaluates the strike point and assesses the probability of Alia's death at 45–65%. She makes him confirm only the lower figure, and then reports this up the chain of command. The strike is authorised, and Watts fires a missile. The building is destroyed, with Alia injured but unconscious. However, Danford also survived. Watts is ordered to fire a second missile, which strikes the site just as Alia's parents reach her. Her parents suffer some injuries and rush Alia to a hospital, where she dies.

In the London situation room, the under-secretary tearfully berates Benson for killing from the safety of his chair. Benson counters that she watched while having coffee and biscuits, while he has been on the ground at five suicide bombings and adds: "Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war."

The end credits begin rolling back to the beginning of the movie, with Alia shown twirling her hula hoop.

 


1,000-Year-Old Illustrated Guide to the Medicinal Use of Plants Now Digitized & Put Online ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/1000-year-old-illustrated-guide-to-the-medicinal-use-of-plants-now-digitized-put-online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29




Humor for September 2017

Watch Steve Martin Make His First TV Appearance: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1968) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/watch-steve-martin-make-his-first-tv-appearance-on-the-smothers-brothers-comedy-hour-1968.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

10 Funniest Tweets About Texas A&M Blowing a 34-Point Lead to UCLA ---
http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaafb/10-funniest-tweets-about-texas-aandm-blowing-a-34-point-lead-to-ucla/ar-AAreOVa?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp


The 100 Funniest Films of All Time, According to 253 Film Critics from 52 Countries ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/the-100-funniest-films-of-all-time-according-to-253-film-critics-from-52-countries.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


 

An old geezer became very bored in retirement and decided to open a medical clinic. He put a sign up outside that said: "Dr.Geezer's clinic. Get your treatment for $500, if not cured, get back $1,000."

Doctor "Young," who was positive that this old geezer didn't know beans about medicine, thought this would be a great opportunity to get $1,000. So he went to Dr.Geezer's clinic.

Dr. Young: "Dr.Geezer, I have lost all taste in my mouth. Can you please help me?" Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in Dr. Young's mouth."

Dr. Young: Aaagh! -- "This is Gasoline!" Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your taste back.That will be $500."

Dr. Young gets annoyed and goes back after a couple of days figuring to recover his money. Dr. Young: "I have lost my memory, I cannot remember anything." Dr. Geezer: "Nurse, please bring medicine from box 22 and put 3 drops in the patient's mouth." Dr. Young: "Oh, no you don't, -- that is Gasoline!" Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You've got your memory back.

That will be $500."

Dr. Young (after having lost $1000) leaves angrily and comes back after several more days.

Dr. Young: "My eyesight has become weak --- I can hardly see anything!"

Dr. Geezer: "Well, I don't have any medicine for that so, " Here's your $1000 back." (giving him a $10 bill)

Dr. Young: "But this is only $10!"

Dr. Geezer: "Congratulations! You got your vision back! That will be $500." Moral of story -- Just because you're "Young" doesn't mean that you can outsmart an "old Geezer"

Remember: Don't make old people mad. We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to piss us off.


 

 




Humor August 2017--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q3.htm#Humor0817.htm

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