Tidbits on October 17, 2017
Bob Jensen at Trinity University
 

Set 11 of My Favorite Foliage Photographs
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Foliage/Set20/FoliageSet11.htm

 

Tidbits on October 17, 2017
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Bob Jensen's Tidbits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

For earlier editions of Fraud Updates go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 
Bookmarks for the World's Library --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm 

Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations   

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

Bob Jensen's Home Page is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/

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

Updates from WebMD --- Click Here

Google Scholar --- https://scholar.google.com/

Wikipedia --- https://www.wikipedia.org/

Bob Jensen's search helpers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

Bob Jensen's World Library --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

USA Debt Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/ ubl




Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio

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

Scientists Have Solved One of Pluto's Most Puzzling Mysteries ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/pluto-mystery-solved-giant-ice-spike-formation-2017-9

How did Egyptians make mummies?
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/how-did-the-egyptians-make-mummies-an-animated-introduction-to-the-ancient-art-of-mummification.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


Free music downloads --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm 

A Massive 55-Hour Chronological Playlist of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 Tracks ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/a-massive-55-hour-chronological-playlist-of-bob-dylan-songs-stream-763-tracks.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Note that where this page says advertisement it is just that --- an advertisement.
To play the full track of a song you need a Spotify app (the article provides links)

A 17-Hour, Chronological Journey Through Tom Petty’s Music: Stream the Songs That Became the Soundtracks of Our Lives ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/a-17-hour-chronological-journey-through-tom-pettys-music.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The History of Hip Hop Music Visualized on a Turntable Circuit Diagram: Features 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/the-history-of-hip-hop-music-visualized-on-a-turntable-circuit-diagram.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Jensen Comment
Like hard rock and even some country music musicians some hip hop musicians became millionaires without even being able to read music. Most have been self-taught poets.

Web outfits like Pandora, Foneshow, Stitcher, and Slacker broadcast portable and mobile content that makes Sirius look overpriced and stodgy ---
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090327_877363.htm?link_position=link2

Pandora (my favorite online music station) --- www.pandora.com
TheRadio
(online music site) --- http://www.theradio.com/
Slacker (my second-favorite commercial-free online music site) --- http://www.slacker.com/

Gerald Trites likes this international radio site --- http://www.e-radio.gr/
Songza:  Search for a song or band and play the selection --- http://songza.com/
Also try Jango --- http://www.jango.com/?r=342376581
Sometimes this old guy prefers the jukebox era (just let it play through) --- http://www.tropicalglen.com/
And I listen quite often to Soldiers Radio Live --- http://www.army.mil/fieldband/pages/listening/bandstand.html
Also note
U.S. Army Band recordings --- http://bands.army.mil/music/default.asp

Bob Jensen's threads on nearly all types of free music selections online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm


Photographs and Art

Time Magazine:  Possible Places to Add to Your Bucket List ---
http://time.com/4953715/25-trips-lifetime/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017092817pm&xid=newsletter-brief

Glenn Ligon’s “Blue Black” Exhibits the History of Race in America ---
https://daily.jstor.org/race-color-history-and-art-in-glenn-ligons-blue-black/

Before-and-after photos show how California's wineries have been devastated by fires ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/napa-sonoma-wineries-that-burned-in-the-fires-2017-10

Photos show how California's fires gave Disneyland an apocalyptic glow ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/california-wildfires-eerie-photos-of-disneyland-2017-10

The Art of Philosophy: Visualising Aristotle in Early 17th-Century Paris ---
http://publicdomainreview.org/2017/08/30/the-art-of-philosophy-visualising-aristotle-in-early-17th-century-paris/

The Smithsonian Presents a Gallery of 6,000+ Rare Rock ‘n Roll Photos on a Crowdsourced Web Site, and Now a New Book ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/the-smithsonian-presents-a-huge-gallery-of-rare-rock-n-roll-photos-on-a-crowdsourced-web-site.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

New Museum Digital Archive (Art Museum in New York) --- https://archive.newmuseum.org/

Google Arts and Culture: Latino Cultures in the U.S. --- www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/project/uslatinocultures

Photos of the First Week of October ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/10/photos-of-the-week-930106/542316/

Photos show deadly wildfire raging through California's wine country ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-fire-in-santa-rosa-northern-california-2017-10

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

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


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

The Philosophical Appreciation of Rocks in China & Japan: A Short Introduction to an Ancient Tradition ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/the-philosophical-appreciation-of-rocks-in-china-japan.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Seattle Poetic Grid --- https://seattlepoeticgrid.com/

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

Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Other Great Works by Shakespeare, Dante & Coleridge ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/hear-benedict-cumberbatch-read-john-keats-ode-to-a-nightingale.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

An Animated Introduction to “the World’s Most Mysterious Book,” the 15th-Century Voynich Manuscript ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/an-animated-introduction-to-the-the-worlds-most-mysterious-book-the-15th-century-voynich-manuscript.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Read the 10 best short stories Playboy ever published ---
http://lithub.com/read-10-of-the-best-stories-ever-published-in-playboy/
Jensen Comment
Note that I don't particularly recommend these over the many great short stories linked at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Google Books: Explore Banned Books Language Arts books.google.com/googlebooks/banned
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/banned/

The Birth of Pulp Fiction Language Arts ---
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/pulps-big-moment

Banned Book
The Price of Suffering: William Pynchon and The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption ---
https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/11/11/the-price-of-suffering-william-pynchon-and-the-meritorious-price-of-our-redemption/

Bannned Books
The Comstock Act in Philadelphia Social studies ---
www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/7wKCMJMEV_jlIg

 

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 October 17, 2017
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2017/TidbitsQuotations101717.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




Why Colleges Are (Dangerously) Borrowing Billions  ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/10/why-colleges-are-borrowing-billions/542352/

Jensen Comment
This article is about college investments that dangerously assumed those investments would boost tuition-paying enrollments. For example, many investments in online technology for expanding distance education and programs to attract more diverse types of students (think older students) have are not even breaking even. Some investments in country-club dorms are not breaking even since many children of higher-income families are seeking colleges with the highest academic rankings rather than country-club living. The only way to repay the debt on country-club dorms may be to lower admission standards to admit rich playboys and playgirls not much interested sweating over the hard work of learning.

Many (most?) universities (think Yale) had horrible deferred maintenance policies, but the smartest and most fortunate universities (again think Yale) finally diverted gifts and tuition revenue into those needed expenditures for infrastructure instead of borrowing renovation funds. This, however, sometimes results in less financial aid to attract higher numbers of academic achievers.

Some colleges justified borrowing on an assumption of cashing in on low interest rates following the 2007 recession This "financial leverage" often works great in for-profit businesses that can raise prices enough to cover interest costs. Colleges and universities, however, find themselves in times of having to freeze prices due to competition pricing of other colleges and/or political pressures to hold back on tuition increases. Interest on debt is now dragging down on annual cash flows of colleges that took on too much debt.

Thus colleges find themselves needing more endowment gifts at a time when their images of among prospective donors and alumni are tarnished by "scandals" of free speech suppression, drinking scandals (including death), and media sensationalism of outlier outlandish faculty who are not really in the mainstream of the Academy. These are especially hard financial and student admission times for colleges with low or non-existent US News rankings.


From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on October 11, 2017

Professors under fire.

Earlier this year we noticed that professors who had made radical or ideologically extreme statements on social media were drawing increased criticism — from outside observers and their own universities. The pace of such incidents has hardly let up. On

Tuesday the following incidents were in the news:

A professor at Drexel University was put on leave after he said on Twitter that last week's Las Vegas mass shooting was a result of "white supremacist patriarchy."

The University of Nevada at Las Vegas condemned as "insensitive" the remarks of a professor who appeared to blame the Vegas shooting on the election of President Trump. (The White House had suggested that the university "look into" the professor.)

                Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University, criticized a faculty member in a direct letter for his alleged association with "antifa" groups

From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on October 11, 2017

UNC fake course 20-year scandal's conclusion?

Sometime soon, possibly this week, the National Collegiate Athletic Association will impose penalties on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a long-running academic scandal in which more than 3,000 students, disproportionately athletes, were allowed to attend “paper classes” that did not meet and that served primarily to ensure the athletes’ eligibility to compete. The scheme, which was masterminded by officials in the university’s department of African-American studies, went on for almost two decades and was discovered only after an outside investigation, whose report was released in 2014.

It’s difficult to tell what penalties the university might face, but the duration of the cheating and the number of athletes who benefited from it suggest the sanctions could be severe. To help you gauge them when they are issued, here’s a summary of key actors in the scandal and highlights of the investigation’s findings. Along with the usual assortment of venal coaches and officials, the saga features two unforgettable figures: Mary C. Willingham, a tutor for athletes who blew the whistle on the scandal, and Jeanette M. Boxill, an ethicist who steered athletes into the no-show classes.


How would you rank the following G-7 nations in terms of worker productivity growth?

Canada
France
Germany
Italy
Japan
UK
USA

Hints
If you put Germany at Rank 1 you're wrong.
If you put the USA at Rank 1 you're right.

Answers
https://www.theatlas.com/charts/B1HMHCN2W


Soda taxes are good for health. But are they good for local economies such as in Chicago?
Answer
http://reason.com/blog/2017/10/09/cook-county-will-repeal-soda-tax
Jensen Comment
In fairness, soda taxes might generate more revenue if it were not so easy to to store soda and haul it in from suburbs where it's not taxed so greatly. The same applies to liquor taxes in Massachusetts and Maine when it's so easy to haul in tax-free liquor from New Hampshire.


Everything Google announced at its big hardware event ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-event-pixel-2-home-max-buds-october-4-2017-10


A startup born at MIT has created a wheel that can make any bike electric — and now it's coming to Europe ----
http://www.businessinsider.com/superpedestrians-copenhagen-wheel-europe-expansion-2017-10

Jensen Comment
My question is how much weight this power system adds?

It would seem that the cheater electric motors used in bike racing are much lighter, but these are probably much more limited due to smaller batteries.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-investigates-hidden-motors-and-pro-cycling/


If These Blackboards Could Talk: The Crit Classroom, a Battlefield ---
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2677336


Russian hackers have stolen NSA cyber defense details . . . Or as Slate puts it: "The U.S. can’t trust its own spy agency." ---
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/10/05/another_nsa_contractor_stole_documents_and_now_the_russians_have_more_u.html?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=ed0b38bade-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-ed0b38bade-153727301


Library of Congress Labs --- https://labs.loc.gov/

Tools and interesting visualizations of the archives of the library

Labs will have a growing and changing selection of experiments, projects, events and resources to encourage creative use and connections with the Library of Congress. This is a space for us to try things in public, create community, and invite you to experiment, too. Some projects will turn into production applications, some will be retired, and some will get picked up, repurposed, and shared. Either way, please expect hiccups, mistakes, and impermanence.


With the holiday season in the horizon here are 12 recommended Amazon 2017 gadgets ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazonbasics-tech-gadgets-worth-buying-2016-8/#surge-protectors-11

Jensen Comment
You may prefer to skip directly to AmazonBasics at
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_3_7?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=amazonbasics&sprefix=AmazonB%2Caps%2C195&crid=32PLULKFJ61CS

This is the MacBook accessory that’ll make getting work done on your laptop a lot easier ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-macbook-accessory-landing-zone-dock-20-review-2016-7

Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Technology


China is expected to capture 65% of the battery market by 2021, with much of what remains left for Europe ---
https://www.magzter.com/article/News/Time/Charged-up-Batteries-are-the-next-target-in-Chinas-clean-energy-conquest
Jensen Comment
Increasingly the USA will be at the mercy of foreign manufacturers of batteries for cars, trucks, homes, and businesses.


The Hammer Seemed About to Fall
Essential Reading on the Chapel Hill (20-Year Fake Course and Grade-Change) Scandal ---

http://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/Essential-Reading-on-the/153?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=d245eee9a11b45cda56ee0c39b7c6844&elq=074c6636557b4ab2b63fe4574819de79&elqaid=16058&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6930

The Hammer Did Not Fall:  NCAA Aacademic Standards are a Sick Joke ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/ncaa-unc-academic-scandal-investigation-2017-10

Bob Jensen's threads on this and other collegiate athletics scandals ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Athletics


Cornell's Great Pumpkin Tale Remains a Long-Time Mystery

From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter, October 13, 2017 (Friday the 13th)

The best mysteries are the ones that remain unsolved. Twenty years ago students at Cornell University spotted a pumpkin atop the campus's 173-foot-tall bell tower. No one knew how it had gotten there, or even if it was a real pumpkin. Administrators figured it would rot and fall down on its own if it was real. But 158 days later, the gourd, now frozen, was still there. Don M. Randel, the university's provost at the time, prepared to bring it down manually, with the help of a crane bucket. Moments beforehand, through, the crane nudged the pumpkin off its spire.

Plant-biology professors later proved skeptics wrong, confirming that it was indeed a pumpkin. Still, 20 years later, no one knows who mounted it on the tower, although several ingenious theories have been offered.

The mystery is right up there with the phantom University of Iowa fight song that tortured Niagara Falls residents for months. Maybe academe has a devoted prankster.
 Looking at you,
Ted Mitchell.

Jensen Comment
This was before the days of drones that might now deliver a pumpkin to the top of a tower or nudge a pumpkin off a tower.


Serious Quality Control Scandals in Japanese Companies
Japanese Firm Faked Data About Large Amounts of Steel Used in Popular Planes and Cars ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-10/kobe-steel-untraded-amid-deluge-of-sell-orders-on-data-scandal

Jensen Comment
What's sad is that this is not the only Japanese company that falsified quality data of it's products (as noted near the end of the above article). Not long after WW 2 Japan factories had a horrible reputation for quality that eventually was turned around into making Japan noteworthy for highest quality. Sadly, this high reputation is fading away in the 21st Century for some Japanese companies. And the impacts are sequential such as when Toyota and Mitsubishi (probably unknowingly) buys defective steel from Kobe. The land of pride and honor no longer sets the standards for pride and honor.

It's time for Japan to renew it's commitment to William Edwards Deming ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
Also see
http://maaw.info/DemingMain.htm


These USA Cities Have the Worst Traffic ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-traffic-spots-us-cities-2017-ranked-2017-9/#25-santa-barbara-california-1

Jensen Comment
But traffic is much worse in big cities outside the USA, especially where traffic laws are poorly enforced such as in Rome and Mexico City.

Great public transportation can make a huge difference such as in the subway system of Moscow and London. But subway and train systems are best for people who are also great at walking from stations to their destinations.


1,000+ MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) Getting Started in October: Enroll Today (over 2,000 courses started in September)---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/1000-moocs-massive-open-online-courses-getting-started-in-october-enroll-today.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Challenge for Accounting Course Seekers
What MOOCs are available in basic accounting, financial accounting, and forensic accounting?


Making Your Vehicles Last Longer
This  is a link from a promotional message sent to me by my insurance agent.
I thought it might be of interest to you in terms of the longest lasting cars ---  in terms of "mileage" in their class and how to make your car last longer.
Up here in the mountains cars don't last as long due to road salt, but I learned that my Subaru cars (I have two Forresters) take the salt a whole lot better than my rusted out Jeep Cherokee that folded after 75,000 costly  miles (in terms of drive train repairs even before the warranty expired).
https://blog.nationwide.com/how-long-cars-last-infographic/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NI&utm_source=exacttarget&utm_content=Brand:na:na:na:na:ERM80817&utm_term=198232.31911002&WT.dcsvid=31911002


Microsoft Excel is about to get a lot smarter ---
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/26/microsoft-excel-is-about-to-get-a-lot-smarter/


Stanford Teacher:  Math Class Doesn’t Work. Here’s the Solution ---
http://time.com/4970465/how-to-improve-math-class/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017100517pm&xid=newsletter-brief

Jensen Comment
I most certainly don't buy into the idea that when any subject is difficult for students that not assigning grades will make them learn better. That's baloney. Grades in my opinion after 40 years of teaching are the primary motivator for college students to spend more time, blood, sweat, and tears learning at the college level. This may not be quite as true with younger children where I think how a subject is taught is of greater importance. At the collegiate level, time and time again it's been shown that good students will adapt to differences in pedagogy to compete for grades under most any circumstances.

In fairness I never really dealt with many unmotivated students, so perhaps I should not be so critical of the above article.

I did find that I became a better math student when I was older and more exposed to math simultaneously in a variety of courses both inside and outside the Mathematics Department. I did not take advanced calculus, linear algebra, and more advanced mathematics until I was in Stanford's Ph.D. program where I simultaneously was also taking mathematical programming (think integer programming and dynamic programming) along with mathematical statistics, econometrics and operations research. With all this math thrown at me from departments outside Stanford's business school it was either sink or swim with majors in those departments. What I discovered to my happy surprise is that I was better off taking all of this concurrently while competing with some former math majors who had forgotten much of the math they learned in earlier years and had to struggle more since they were not as current with some the math as me in the doctoral program.

My point is that a lot of students having trouble with mathematics suffer from not having enough of it to make them sink or swim. To be better math students need to be required to learn more math --- not just math from the Mathematics Department. Since doctoral programs in accounting, finance, and other business disciplines are now almost all mathematics in one form or another (think data analytics) students who struggled in math before entering a doctoral program sometimes find mathematics much easier because they are suddenly getting so much of it all at the same time.

Can you teach calculus, regression analysis, statistical sampling, and linear programming in the seventh grade? I think you can with clever use of visual aids, practical problems, and competition for grades.


Harvard's Bogus ExxonMobil Study ---
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/10/harvards_bogus_exxonmobil_study.html


Mayo Clinic --- http://www.mayoclinic.org/about-mayo-clinic/quality/top-ranked

Social Media Importance at the Mayo Clinic --- http://www.mayoclinic.org/search/search-results?q=Social Media Importance

Which Law School Will Become The Mayo Clinic Of Legal Education Via The Dean And Faculty's Use Of Social Media? ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/10/which-law-school-will-become-the-mayo-clinic-of-legal-education-through-the-dean-and-facultys-use-of.html

Jensen Comment
The same question could be asked about accountancy schools, but at present I don't think there's an accountancy school even close in terms of faculty use of the Social Media. Sadly, most academic accounting bloggers (think The Grumpy Old Accountants and Accounting Education News)  have shut down.

Bob Jensen's New Bookmarks accounting education blog ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm


Politically Correct Rudeness in Academe:  ACLU Speaker Shouted Down at William and Mary ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/05/aclu-speaker-shouted-down-william-mary?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=948d0f34e9-DNU20171005&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-948d0f34e9-197565045&mc_cid=948d0f34e9&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
Are civil liberties coming to an end in higher education?

Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness and the "Closing of American Minds" ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness


The Closing of the American Mind:  What Allan Bloom Got Right ---
 By Todd Gitlin
Chronicle of Higher Education
October 8, 2017
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Allan-Bloom-Got-Right/241375?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=5f4ce19f63264c9ca99a1bcc8e8dcff7&elq=3cc5401748ab40a085486b07961176fc&elqaid=15963&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6887

"You can slam its young people into universities with their classrooms and laboratories, and when they come out all they can talk about is Babe Ruth. America is a hopeless country for intellectuals and thinking people." Babe Ruth is the giveaway. These words were spoken in 1923, and the speaker was Theodore Dreiser, who had dropped out of Indiana University after one year.

So it is not a new thought that American universities are nests of self-betrayal and triviality where inquiring minds trade the nobility of their tradition for cheap trinkets and the promise of pieces of silver to come. Indeed, five years before Dreiser popped off, Thorstein Veblen was denouncing "the higher learning in America" for having surrendered to business domination, ditched the pure pursuit of knowledge, cultivated "conspicuous conformity to the popular taste," and pandered to undergraduates by teaching them "ways and means of dissipation." "The conduct of universities by business men," to borrow from Veblen’s subtitle, had rendered university life "mechanistic." Veblen anticipated that the academy would wallow in futility when it was not prostrating itself at the feet of the captains of finance. His original subtitle was A Study in Total Depravity. Veblen having dropped it, Allan Bloom should have picked it up.

Veblen thought the university had been seized by "pecuniary values." To Bloom, whose bestselling book, The Closing of the American Mind, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, something much worse had happened: The university had been seized by the absence of values. "The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a democracy of the disciplines. … This democracy is really an anarchy, because there are no recognized rules for citizenship and no legitimate titles to rule. In short there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is."

A horde of bêtes noires had stampeded through the gates, and the resulting noise had drowned out the proper study of both nature and humanity. Nihilism had conquered. Its chief forms were cultural relativism, historicism, and shopping-mall indifference, the humanities’ lame attempts at a holding action that "flatters popular democratic tastes." Openness was the new closure; elitism had become the worst of all isms.

Just how this happened, however, Bloom was uncertain. He was not a stickler for historical causation. When in doubt, he pounded the table and ranted about his next talking point, dotted with references to Great Books. Closing read more dyspeptic than lamentational. But the lamentational note was there. Once the university had been a crucible of truth; then it had been seized by, or sold to, the utilitarians; finally, it had collapsed in the face of nihilism. (Never mind that universities were training schools before they were Platonic academies.)

Bloom, who died in 1992, pulled no punches, even those that pummeled his own argument, and the nonstop crescendo of his rant made it easy for campus leftists to dismiss the book rather casually — too casually.

For some five years after publication, Closing helpedinspire an assault on "political correctness" and the putative left-wing takeover by "tenured radicals" that roiled the campuses and flowed into the political arena via William Bennett and Lynne Cheney, among others. Most of the assault came from the right, of course, though I, among others, contributed my own variant from the left. But coiled inside Bloom’s polemic, drowned out by his own thunder, was an inconvenient truth all the more worth taking seriously30  years later.

Continued in article

"The Coddling of the American Mind:  In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health," by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, September 2015 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

 

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”

This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job

The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on "The Closing of the American Mind" ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness


Inside the factory using robots to build running shoes ---
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/adidas-speedfactory-made-for-london-trainers?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=08c3dc39b0-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-08c3dc39b0-153727301

Jensen Comment
Adidas discovered that using robots for manufacturing frees up more human resources for paying bribes to coaches and athletes ---  https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/26/ncaa-basketball-officials-arrested-on-fraud-and-corruption-charges.html


Nudge Theory --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory

Mental Accounting --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_accounting

University of Chicago’s Richard H. Thaler, Famed for "Nudge’ Theory" and "Mental Accounting," Wins Nobel Economics Prize ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-09/richard-h-thaler-wins-2017-nobel-economics-prize

University of Chicago’s Richard H. Thaler, one of the founders of behavioral finance, was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for shedding light on how human weaknesses such as a lack of rationality and self-control can ultimately affect markets.

The 72-year-old “has incorporated psychologically realistic assumptions into analyses of economic decision-making,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on Monday.

“By exploring the consequences of limited rationality, social preferences, and lack of self-control, he has shown how these human traits systematically affect individual decisions as well as market outcomes,” it said.

Thaler developed the theory of “mental accounting,” explaining how people make financial decisions by creating separate accounts in their minds, focusing on the narrow impact rather than the overall effect.

His research on “fairness,” which showed how consumer concerns may stop firms from raising prices in periods of high demand, but not in times of rising costs, has also been influential, according to the Swedish academy. He shed light on how people succumb to short-term temptations, which is why many people fail to plan and save for old age.

Read more: Psychology of Decision-Making: How It Impacts Markets

Thaler’s body of work includes insights on the ways in which limited rationality, social preferences and a lack of self control affect decisions that shape market outcomes. His best-known work, “Nudge,” written together with Cass R. Sunstein, explored the concept of tackling societal hurdles by applying behavioral economics. Other books include “Quasi-Rational Economics,” “The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life” and “Advances in Behavioral Finance.”

Read more: Thaler: Trump Is a Classic ’Thinking With Your Gut’ Candidate

Born in New Jersey, Thaler graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Case Western Reserve University in 1967. He received a master’s degree from the University of Rochester in 1970 and a doctorate in 1974, also from Rochester. Thaler joined the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 1995.

The academy said his work has “built a bridge between the economic and psychological analyses of individual decision-making.”

Continued in article


Publishing was invented to cure academe of patronage and patrimony. It’s failed ---
How the Academic Elite Reproduces Itself ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-the-Academic-Elite/241374?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=fbb7ecfe968c44c38afcd477c21e7bd6&elq=d6851fa126b24dc6a121db1f9e863cb7&elqaid=15961&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6885

. . .

R ecent studies have shown a high degree of concentration in hiring from a small number of Ph.D.-granting institutions. One 2015 study of placement data on nearly 19,000 tenure or tenure-track faculty members in history, business, and computer-science departments found that just 25 percent of institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty. The top 10 institutions produced 1.6 to 3.0 times more faculty than the second 10. A 2012 study of Ph.D.-granting programs in political science found that the top five programs placed 20 percent of all positions at the most research-intensive institutions.

How does institutional prestige carry on after new faculty members are hired? Are there similar patterns in publishing with respect to institutional affiliation? Do prestigious publications show similar levels of institutional concentration? More fundamentally, is the modern research university simply organized around a different kind of patronage and patrimony?

We conducted a study to find out. We examined publication data from four leading journals in the humanities — New Literary History, PMLA, Critical Inquiry, and Representations ­— that, taken together, span over 45 years (1969-2015), drawing on metadata provided by JSTOR’s Data for Research service. Each author-article pair was then hand-tagged for the author’s Ph.D. institution, institutional affiliation at the time of publication, and gender. Together, our data encompass over 5,000 articles by more than 3,000 authors representing more than 300 Ph.D.-granting institutions and 700 authorial institutions — the author’s affiliation at the time of the publication.

We found that, as with hiring, there is a strongly unequal distribution of Ph.D.-granting institutions represented in the publication data. The top 25 percent of institutions account for 89 percent of the articles, while the top 10 (Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, Chicago, Cornell, Stanford, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Cambridge), which represent less than 3 percent of the total number of Ph.D.-granting institutions in our data set, account for just over half of all articles published. Authors with Ph.D.s from just two universities, Yale and Harvard, accounted for one-fifth of all articles. The data on authorial institutions also reflect an overrepresentation of elite universities, if not quite as pronounced.

Some of this is surely the effect of the hiring skew reported by other studies. Since so few institutions train such an outsized proportion of those graduate students who get jobs, it makes sense that we would see something similar when it comes to publication. And yet, broadly, our study suggests that the concentration of power and prestige intensifies as we move from hiring to publishing. (Our data also show that gender equality in academic journals is moving slowly toward parity, yet all four journals have a history of publishing articles primarily by male contributors. Patrimony and prestige have a way of going hand in hand.)

It appears that the hegemony of a few elite institutions continues well beyond who gets the prized tenure-track jobs right out of graduate school. If graduates from a few elite institutions account for an outsized proportion of high-profile published work, it stands to reason that their work will exercise more influence in the field. The result is that institutions like Harvard and Yale, which have unparalleled financial means to shape higher education, also have an outsized influence on what counts as knowledge.

In the 2015 hiring study, researchers concluded that such highly concentrated and unequal patterns have profoundly negative "implications for the free exchange of ideas." By framing academic hiring in terms of intellectual equity, the study’s authors raise fascinating, confounding questions: What would a more equitable distribution in knowledge production look like? Is "epistemic equality" a coherent concept, and is it something that we should aspire to?

F or many in the academy, epistemic inequality — understood here as disproportional institutional representation in publishing — would surely be as undesirable as economic inequality. In fact, most of us would presume a relationship between the two. The inequitable distribution of various kinds of goods tends to offend our egalitarian sensibilities. But the reflexive distaste for inequality of all kinds belies the very character of the modern university, and the central role that prestige plays within it.

It could be argued that prestigious universities are simply fulfilling their cultural role by filtering out inferior knowledge. In this sense universities are akin to institutional search engines: They produce the people who produce knowledge, and thus their, perhaps undemocratic, epistemic effects help organize and sort knowledge. Google’s search engine would be useless were it to treat all links equally. According to this line of thinking, the concentration of knowledge within elite institutions may even be a sign of the system’s health.

Harvard, Yale, and other elite institutions surely train talented and highly qualified academics. But the hierarchies that we observed in our study are so pronounced that it would be naïve to assume that elite institutions are so overwhelmingly, disproportionally superior at filtering knowledge, compared with all other universities. We suspect these levels of influence and control adversely affect the broader system of scholarly communication. By limiting the circulation of ideas to a precious few institutional frameworks, the academy’s potential to create and share different kinds of knowledge, new kinds of knowledge, and more diverse kinds of knowledge is necessarily going to be inhibited.

But how to evaluate the quality of university-based knowledge is both a conceptually and historically daunting challenge. How can we be certain that such imagined epistemic quality — judgments of value and worth — is not in some way contaminated by the very networks of influence and patronage that produce it? Scholarly notions of quality and excellence, which continue to perpetuate enormous institutional imbalances, are themselves products of the norms, practices, and values that organize the system.

For many in the humanities, it is precisely the process of Weberian rationalization, embodied above all in counting mechanisms like the UK’s Research Excellence Framework or Academic Analytics that has contributed to the ills of the current system. But the history of scholarly publication tells a different story: The recourse to measurability in exercises like the REF is not something new. It is part of a much longer attempt to undo ensconced systems of patronage and loosen forms of institutional favoritism and cultural capital. The appeal to accounting for publication by Humboldt and his 19th-century epigones was carried out in the spirit of transparency and intellectual openness.

Continued in article

 

Jensen Comment
Exhibit A is "Accountics Science" that took over academic accounting doctoral programs and research publishing beginning in the 1960s ---
- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.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


The basketball world is convinced that the bribery scandal engulfing college basketball comes down to paying players ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/college-basketball-bribery-scandal-paying-players-2017-9

September 29, 2017 reply from Paul Williams at UNC

Bob,
The astonishing thing about it is that Louisville's coach is an outstanding coach -- a Hall of Famer -- who could recruit all the talent he would need to put a competitive team on the court without paying bribes. Young men with pro aspirations would flock to him, like they do the coaches at UNC and Duke because they are great coaches. NC State recently signed a contract with adidas and we were victimized by them because one of our star recruits bailed out and went to Louisville because his parents received a six figure "gift". There is far too much pressure from wealthy alums who invest millions in sport facilities, scholarship programs, etc. to have national championship teams. Here is an argument for graduated income taxes because they aren't using their wealth to create jobs (our football stadium is used 6 times this year -- not an asset that employs too many people) but are using it to corrupt college athletics. Most student athletes participate because they love the sport they play. No one on our rifle team aspires to a professional career because there isn't one. Same is true for most Olympic sports where the prospects of a lucrative post-college career are even less probable than NBA or NFL careers. Maybe we should make coaches part of the faculty like it used to be (a good conservative solution) and pay them accordingly so that their role is that of educator (as our legendary coach Kay Yow always characterized herself).

Paul


One-Armed Bandit
For real, a woman with one arm tried to rob a bank
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/04/cops-one-armed-woman-fails-in-pennsylvania-bank-robbery-try.html
Jensen Comment
With one arm it's hard to hold the gun and loot while opening the door of the get-away-car.


Celebrate Banned Books Week ---
https://daily.jstor.org/celebrate-banned-books-week/


David Giles:  How Good is That Random Number Generator?
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2017/09/how-good-is-that-random-number-generator.html



Sherwood Anderson --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherwood_Anderson

If These Blackboards Could Talk: The Crit Classroom, a Battlefield

9 Charleston Law Review 305 (2015)

SSRN
29 Pages Posted: 13 Sep 2017  
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2677336

Aníbal Rosario Lebrón

Howard University School of Law

Date Written: 2015

Abstract

“You hear it said that fathers want their sons to be what they feel they themselves cannot be, but I tell you it also works the other way.” With those simple words in one of the most heartfelt self-discovery stories in “American” literature, Sherwood Anderson subtly unmasked how yearnings and aspirations are a two-way street. As parents project their aspirations upon their children, so do their children upon them. The same holds true for teachers and students, especially in legal academia. As law professors, we have a specific idea of what type of learners and legal professionals law students should be; but just as daughters and sons, law students also have in their minds an ideal law professor. However, when these aspirations and ideals do not correspond with each other, conflict usually ensues, as it did for the young man in Sherwood Anderson's Discovery of a Father. This conflict puts a strain on any relationship and creates a tense atmosphere that can dampen communication. In the case of parents and their children, this might be resolved with time or a serendipitous event that reopens the communication channels and sheds light on the reasonableness of their yearnings--as a young Sherwood discovered himself. Yet, in the classroom, time is always pressing and those types of serendipitous events are scarce. Nonetheless, most of us who have been in a classroom feel that students and professors must find a way to deal with their mismatched ideals. We believe that otherwise the classroom would become a minefield in which tensions and conflict fly and explode, leaving learning eroded In some instances, as it happened during Greg Mankiw's 2011 Introductory Economics class at Harvard, such explosions take very tangible forms such as a staged walkout to demonstrate the disconnect between the professor's vision of the class and the profession vis-à-vis the students'. In most instances, however, both sides subtly express their discomfort daily, in ways that could be thought to discourage the parties from engaging in the learning process or distract them from the pedagogic endeavor. These inevitable subtle confrontations and understated discomforts, however, are seldom memorialized except for students' evaluations, which are archived and used strategically to grant tenure or not. Most of the time, we experience them as derisory remarks such as, “You don't do things like most professors or like X professor (the epitome of the ideal law professor),” or, “You should take this matter seriously even if it won't be tested on the bar; it will be important in your lives as attorneys,” that are said and disregarded as they do not seem to pertain to the teaching or learning experience. Rarely, we read accounts in the legal pedagogy scholarship about the customary confrontations between students and professors predicated on their divergent visions of the Law, the profession, and pedagogic practices. Most of the scholarship in this area is dedicated to apolitical/neutral issues such as teaching effectiveness, practice-ready attorneys, bar passage rate, job placement, and student satisfaction. Seldom do legal scholars problematize these accounts of confrontation and delve into what they mean in terms of our didactic practices. Instead, students' voices are buried in the bureaucratic exercise of collecting complaints and accolades to measure effectiveness, and professors' accounts are left for side faculty meeting conversations and building camaraderie by sharing war stories. This is why the Economics 101 walkout was so pivotal in triggering this article's reflection about what the Law-Crit classroom is and what it should be. In a rare turn of events, we were witnesses to both the professor's and the students' versions of on-going class conflicts that were prompted by their mismatched philosophical and pedagogical views. The students alleged that they were discontent with the inherent bias in their introductory economics course that did not include a critical perspective that would allow them to assess the flaws and benefits of prevailing economic models and alternative ones. As a way to express their discontent in a more tangible manner, they staged a walkout. When I read the news about their walkout, I was envious of Professor Mankiw. As a teacher that self-identifies as a Crit scholar and professor, I had wished many times for students like Mankiw's discontented pupils. I constantly long for students who would appreciate the value of a critical education instead of discarding it as a futile exercise or describing it as a political agenda that has no room in the classroom, and who would go the extra mile to defend it. However, as a teacher I felt for Mankiw and wondered how I would react if I have to face such a confrontation. Many times I have faced the students' rejection of the discussion of critical scholarship, the inclusion of non-canonical narratives, or the use of critical pedagogical strategies. Those moments of confrontation have been definitely unpleasant, disruptive, and, in some cases, hard to manage. Therefore, I empathized with Mankiw and for a moment felt that the way in which his discontented students transformed the classroom into a battlefield was not necessarily the best approach. However, his response to his students' actions left me with a bad taste in my mouth. First, Mankiw dismissed his students' walkout by explaining how it made him feel nostalgic about when he was in college and student activism was more common. Then, he told the New York Times' readership that he was sad because the students who orchestrated the walkout were poorly informed (ignorant), as their complaints were “a grab bag of anti-establishment platitudes without much hard-headed analysis or clear policy prescriptions.” And finally, he defended the way he decided to structure his course, as he “do[es not] view the study of economics as laden with ideology.” In simple words, his defense was that he does not believe himself to have any political agenda, that his job as a professor is not to engage in any type of social change, that his studies provide him with the legitimacy to impose a particular curriculum, and that in no way are such didactic practices ideological but merely part of his expertise. Thus, it seems natural for Mankiw to reject the idea of the classroom as a battlefield and see the walkout as disruptive to the learning process. He does not ascribe any political value to teaching and learning. Yet for me, as a Crit-teacher who is constantly thinking about how the content of the classes I teach can better reflect the tenets of critical theory and how my pedagogic practices could be more effective at teaching the law and advancing my social change project, Mankiw's response stands on the complete opposite side of the spectrum of what higher education should be. I try every day to demystify the assumption that traditional and canonical professors do not have a political agenda, as opposed to Crit-professors like me. I firmly believe that part of my job as a law professor is to advance an agenda of social change. I try not to present myself to the students as an infallible expert who is there to teach what they ignore. I am well aware that teaching and learning are political. Nonetheless, like Mankiw, I have always tried to keep conflict to a minimum in the classroom, supposedly as a way to enhance learning. Then it hit me that a strategy that fits so well for attaining the opposite objectives obviously cannot and should not be a pedagogical tool in the repertoire of a Crit-professor. As years have passed after Mankiw's reaction to his class walkout, I have continued to reflect on my teaching and my pedagogical philosophy. Informed by my own teaching experiences and those of my colleagues, I have wondered more and more whether the strategy of minimizing conflict is an incorrect approach to advancing my pedagogical project. As a corollary, I ponder about the best formulation of the classroom that would allow me to effectively teach the law and at the same time serve my transformative agenda. Is it that of a laboratory? That of the classical agora? Or, for a Crit-professor, should the classroom indeed be a battlefield? The following is my modest attempt at answering these inquiries by looking at the challenges that critical educators face each day in the classroom and their particular needs. More importantly, it is an invitation to ponder as a community of teachers our didactic practices and whether they are in sync with our political, pedagogical, and social stances.

Wells Fargo bank teller stole nearly $200,000 from a customer and spent it on a down payment for his home and several vacations ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/wells-fargo-bank-teller-stole-185000-from-homeless-customer-2017-9


The Booth Business School --- https://www.chicagobooth.edu/

The Rich Get Richer
A $75 Million Gift to the University of Chicago's Booth Business School
http://www.uchicago.edu/features/alumni_amy_and_richard_wallman_give_75_million_to_support_chicago_booth/

Jensen Comment
Doctoral programs at the Booth Business School are free for five years (including living costs). A wide array of fellowships are available for MBA students, including diversity fellowships. Like all prestigious schools of business the primary barriers to entry are academic barriers amidst heavy competition for admission. The curriculum is more technical than most other business schools, especially in data analytics, finance, and economics. The Booth School is very competitive in terms of faculty salaries and research support.

The Booth Business School reaches out for purposes of diversity (race, age, income, etc.) more than most prestigious schools of business by offering both evening and weekend MBA programs. There also is heavy financial aid for MBA students on a need basis.


David Giles: 
Recommended Econometrics Reading for October

Andor, N. & C. Parmeter, 2017. Pseudolikelihood estimation of the stochastic frontier model. Ruhr Economic Papers #693.

Chalak, K., 2017. Instrumental variables methods with heterogeneity and mismeasured instruments. Econometric Theory, 33, 69-104.

Kim, J. H. & I. Choi, 2017. Unit roots in economic and financial time series: A re-evaluation at the decision-based significance levels. Econometrics, 56 (3), 41.

Owen, A. B., 2017. Statistically efficient thinning of a Markov chain sampler. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 26, 738-744. 

Owen, P. D., 2017. Evaluating ingenious instruments for fundamental determinants of long-run economic growth and development. Econometrics, 5 (3), 38.

Richard, P., 2017. Robust heteroskedasticity-robust tests. Economics Letters, 159, 28-32.


Wells Fargo offering refunds nationwide for improper mortgage fees ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/wells-fargo-refunds-improper-mortgage-fees-2017-10

. . .

Wells Fargo estimates that about 110,000 borrowers between Sept. 16, 2013, and February 28, 2017, were assessed $98 million in mortgage interest-rate-lock extension fees. Without specifying the number of victims, it said that not all of those customers were charged improperly. Before Sept. 16, 2013, the bank had paid all rate-lock extension fees.

The bank has been conducting an internal review, and has let go several top mortgage executives. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s investigationinto the practice continues.

Wells Fargo has been dogged by numerous scandals, regulatory action and Congressional scrutiny in recent years. In September 2016, it was fined $185 million for illegally opening as many as 2 million deposit and credit card accounts without customers’ knowledge.


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

Eight Things Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts Probably Won’t Tell You ---
http://www.ofnumbers.com/2017/09/21/eight-things-cryptocurrency-enthusiasts-probably-wont-tell-you/


With regard to copying entire Websites Richard Campbell stated the following:

If that person owns the site and all its content, it is a trival task to backup the site via the internet host's software.

If he doesn't own the site, it is a copyright violation.

 

Actually it's much more complicated than that in the USA due mostly to Section 107 (Fair Use) of The U.S Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright

By way of illustration let me focus on an excellent Website that is now defunct but has a copyright owned by Professor Ed Ketz of Penn State University. Most of the articles in the archives of that site were written by Ed, although a few  were written by Tony Catanach at Villanova. The now-defunct Grumpy Old Accountants (GOA) Website was mainly comprised of analyses of published financial statements (much in a the critical style of the Barron's articles by Abe Briloff) . I think it would've been perfectly legal under the DMCA for me to have downloaded and stored, for my private use, the entire GOA Website while it was still online. The analogy here is downloading hundreds Hollywood movies online and storing one copy of if each film for private use. I may not, however, show an entire free copyrighted film in class without permission. Under Section 107, however, I can show very short clips of that free film in class without permission of the copyright holder. Your campus library, however, has an archive of purchased movies that can be shown in entirety to a class of students. When in doubt as a librarian whether you can show an entire film in class.

Section 107 of the DMCA also allows me to publish (say on my own active Website) legal quotations from the GOA site. I do not need to contact Professor Ketz for permission to quote him as long as the quotations conform to Section 107 guidelines. However, I must attribute his words to him in the quotation marks/indents and any implication that his writing is my writing is plagiarism. He could sue me for plagiarism not protected under Section 107 of the DMCA. Many quotations from the excellent GOA site are available at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Search for "Ketz" or "Catanach"
I did seek permission from Ed if I served up an entire article but I did not have to seek permission for reasonable quotations under Section 107 of the DMCA.

Serving up very long quotations or entire articles or the entire GOA Website  is not protected under Section 107, and I would need permission from Professor Ketz to do so until his copyright to the GOA site expires. After Professor Ketz's copyright expires I'm free to serve up part or all of my stored version of his GOA Website without permission from Ed Ketz or his estate. I'm still liable for plagiarism, however, if I imply any of his writing is my writing. I must attribute his writing to him. The analogy here is Google's archives of millions upon millions of scanned books. Google is not allowed to serve up those archived books in most cases until copyrights expire. After copyrights expire Google serves up, for free, millions upon millions of books at its own Website. There's a gray zone of Google court cases regarding some books with unexpired copyrights, but this is too complicated to discuss here.

What is a legal quotation under Section 107 of the DMCA?
II don't think there is a definitive definition that does not entail some judgment as to what is "reasonable." When in doubt, your campus library usually has an expert on copyright law who might be willing to help you in a specific situation. I take quotation length liberties on my Website that I would not take in a published article or book because I don't want to involve my publisher in complaints from copyright holders. I've really only had one complaint from an author after providing hundreds of thousands of quotations on my Website. I immediately removed the quotation in question, and later on the author contacted me once again and asked me to restore the quotation. Beware of quoting from articles that may be owned by copyright trolls. This is a risk, for example, when quoting from articles in small town newspapers or from books where the authors own the copyrights. Of course you're almost always entitled to very short quotations that even the trolls aren't going to complain about. You can read about copyright trolls at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_troll

Suppose you want to make a published journal article available to each of your students in a course.
There are various options available to you even when the copyright to that article has not expired. The American Accounting Association, for example, gives blanket permission for use of articles for education purposes. I was on the AAA Executive Committee years ago when we chose to make it possible for an instructor to photocopy an AAA journal article for each student in a class without having to get permission from the AAA each time an article is used for educational purposes in courses. Thus an instructor can now serve up a TAR article in a Blackboard or Moodle server that can be accessed by her or his students but not the world. An AAA journal article may not be served up on a Website freely available to the world.

Most copyright holders are not as generous with blanket permissions as the AAA is for educational purposes. The Wiley Online Library, for example, does not give similar blanket permission to make copies of article from the Journal of Accounting Research (JAR) freely available to each of your students. However, most colleges pay for electronic subscription services that, in turn, allow faculty and students free access for downloading personal copies of JAR articles. For example, JSTOR is one such subscription service available on virtually all campuses. Permission from the JAR copyright holder need not be sought out to allow each student to download a copy of a JAR article from JSTOR. However, a university must restrict access to JSTOR to students and employees and cannot give out JSTOR passwords to the general public.

Very current articles from JAR may not be available from JSTOR due to a lag time, but usually the library has other subscription services that make more current issues available (maybe not the very latest issues). Once again I remind you that Section 107 of the DMCA does allow you to quote from JAR and other articles without permission from copyright holders as long as the quotations are within guidelines of Section 107. By the way, one of the reasons for this is not to allow authors to shield themselves from literary criticism with copyright law. An author cannot refuse to allow a legal quotation by an analyst who wants to criticize that quotation.

My main point is that in the USA you can personally copy and store most any facsimile. The issues of copyright come in to play regarding sharing of your copy with anybody else. Sharing rights are complicated under Section 107 of the DMCA ---  especially in this era of high technology when copies of television shows are available for sale the instant a show is aired. For example, as soon as CBS Sixty Minutes airs a module that module is available for sale, unlike in the old days when there was a Section 107 Fair Use lag between when a show was aired and a videotape of that show could be purchased. Such Section 107 lag times no longer exist in most instances. You probably can no longer legally play an entire CBS Sixty Minutes module in your class unless you purchased that module or your campus library purchased that module.




From the Scout Report on October 6, 2017

Pure Chat

 

https://www.purechat.com/

Sometimes website owners just want a simple way to chat with their users. Something that just works without needing a lot of complicated setup. Pure Chat is a service designed to scratch that particular itch. Sites running on WordPress, Shopify, or Weebly can use the service by installing the Pure Chat plugin. For other sites, it can be integrated into an existing site simply by pasting in a bit of HTML. Step-by-step guides for how to do this for numerous hosting providers can be located in the Pure Chat documentation. Once installed on your site, Pure Chat will create a 'live chat' button. Site users need only to be using any relatively recent web browser. Pure Chat's free tier provides unlimited live chat sessions on up to three websites. The administrative interface includes transcripts of previous chats and also a record of which pages a user has visited prior to starting a chat. Site admins can accept chats either through the Pure Chat web dashdoard or through a mobile app. When no admins are available to accept chats, Pure Chat's 'live chat' button transforms into an email contact form.


 

TypeRacer

 

http://play.typeracer.com

As with everything else, touch typing improves with regular practice. TypeRacer is a browser-based multiplayer typing game that can provide such practice - it claims to be the very first. Rather than typing repetitive patterns (gh gh gh, etc) or randomly generated sequences of letters, TypeRacer presents users with short passages from popular songs, films, and books. As users accurately enter text, they advance a small icon of a vehicle along a race track, racing against other users working on the same text. TypeRacer keeps detailed typing statistics so that users may track their progress over time. Users may also contribute additional passages to TypeRacer's collection of exercises. TypeRacer works in any modern browser.


 

 

 


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


Education Tutorials

Lesson Plans to Embrace Family Diversity Social studies ---
www.welcomingschools.org/resources/lesson-plans/diverse-families/diverse-families-with-books

Language and Power in The Handmaid's Tale and the World Language Arts ---
www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/language-power-handmaid-tale-1161.html?tab=4#tabs

The Hummingbird Whisperer: Meet the UCLA Scientist Who Has Befriended 200 Hummingbirds ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/meet-the-ucla-scientist-who-has-befriended-200-hummingbirds.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

Imperial College of London: Mechatronics in Medicine --- www.imperial.ac.uk/mechatronics-in-medicine

Influenza Encyclopedia --- www.influenzaarchive.org

PEW Research Center: Science News and Information Today Science --- www.journalism.org/2017/09/20/science-news-and-information-today

NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory Science --- www.glerl.noaa.gov

Kew Science Blog (Botany) --- www.kew.org/blogs/kew-science

Real Science About Bird Brains ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609032/scientists-can-read-a-birds-brain-and-predict-its-next-song/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=0c7320d6f0-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-0c7320d6f0-153727301

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

Language and Power in The Handmaid's Tale and the World Language Arts ---
www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/language-power-handmaid-tale-1161.html?tab=4#tabs

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

The Dissenting Academies Project Social studies (United Kingdom History of Religion) ---
www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/research/the-dissenting-academies-project

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

Game Theory:  The Famously Controversial “Monty Hall Problem” Explained: A Classic Brain Teaser ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/the-famously-controversial-monty-hall-problem-explained-a-classic-brain-teaser.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

How did Egyptians make mummies?
http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/how-did-the-egyptians-make-mummies-an-animated-introduction-to-the-ancient-art-of-mummification.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Before the Bookmobile: When Librarians Rode on Horseback to Deliver Books to Rural Americans During the Great Depression ---
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/before-the-bookmobile-when.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Shakeosphere allows users to visualize, map, and explore these social networks in Shakespeare's England and beyond, from 1473-1800. Our goal is to make it easy and intuitive to see and search the ways that books, letters, and other documents connected readers, writers, printers, publishers, and booksellers around the globe.
Shakeosphere --- https://shakeosphere.lib.uiowa.edu/

The Southern Foodways Alliance --- www.southernfoodways.org

The Birth of Pulp Fiction Language Arts ---
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/pulps-big-moment

Banned Book
The Price of Suffering: William Pynchon and The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption ---
https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/11/11/the-price-of-suffering-william-pynchon-and-the-meritorious-price-of-our-redemption/

Bannned Books
The Comstock Act in Philadelphia Social studies ---
www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/7wKCMJMEV_jlIg

Google Books: Explore Banned Books Language Arts books.google.com/googlebooks/banned
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/banned/

The Art of Philosophy: Visualising Aristotle in Early 17th-Century Paris ---
http://publicdomainreview.org/2017/08/30/the-art-of-philosophy-visualising-aristotle-in-early-17th-century-paris/

American Veterans Oral History --- www.americanveteranscenter.org/category/videos/veterans-oral-histories

Empire and Apocalypse: Savonarola and Apocalypticism in Renaissance Florence ---
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/rel414w15drreis/savonarola/

New Museum Digital Archive (Art Museum in New York) --- https://archive.newmuseum.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

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


Music Tutorials

 

Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to Music

Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm


Writing Tutorials

Language and Power in The Handmaid's Tale and the World Language Arts ---
www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/language-power-handmaid-tale-1161.html?tab=4#tabs

Google Books: Explore Banned Books Language Arts books.google.com/googlebooks/banned
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/banned/

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/

September 27, 2017

September 28, 2017

September 30, 2017

October 2, 2017

October 4, 2017

October 5, 2017

October 6, 2017

October 7, 2017

October 9, 2017

October 10, 2017

October 11, 2017

Ocober 13, 2017

October 14, 2017

 

 

 

 


Teen depression and suicide rates are climbing, as more kids than ever use cellphones. Here's what new research says about the connection ---
http://time.com/4974863/kids-smartphones-depression/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017101011am&xid=newsletter-brief

Jensen Comment
To compound the felony, kids seem to be losing interest in face-to-face conversation and interaction. Not long ago my wife and I sat across from six teens in a restaurant. I don't recall the teens saying one word to each other as they stared constantly into their smartphones texting and playing games. Is that a healthy lifestyle?


The Southern Foodways Alliance --- www.southernfoodways.org


 

 


 

Having It Out with Melancholy: Amanda Palmer Reads Jane Kenyon’s Stunning Poem About Life With and After Depression ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/09/27/having-it-out-with-melancholy-jane-kenyon-amanda-palmer/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=7d7ba39fed-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-7d7ba39fed-234390133&mc_cid=7d7ba39fed&mc_eid=4d2bd13843


Here and Now: 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' Health (women) --- www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2016/06/02/our-bodies-ourselves


Compare Long-Term Care Costs Across the USA ---
https://www.genworth.com/about-us/industry-expertise/cost-of-care.html
Thank you for the heads up Scott Bonacker

Jensen Comment
This is an example of how to mislead with statistics. The main problem is that there are such variable alternatives for long-term care costs in any state, and the pricing may or may not vary greatly.
https://www.genworth.com/about-us/industry-expertise/cost-of-care.html
Even more variable than pricing is quality of care. Rural nursing centers often rely on minimum-wage workers who are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of skills and attitude. Many can't get local jobs anywhere else. Nursing homes are often booked to capacity such that it's necessary to travel to other towns to find an available bed. My mother had short stays in three different small Iowa town nursing centers. The fees were roughly the same for greatly (I mean GREATLY) differing quality of care. Some minimum wage workers are very caring and terrific nursing home workers. Others are lousy. Interestingly, the locals seem to know which centers to avoid but you have to dig to get those locals to reveal what they know. One problem is that often patients cannot reveal quality of care issues unless you look for their bruises and sniff for their body odors. They typically just don't know where they're living. My mother was quite bruised before we got her out of one facility. In many ways it was a relief that she passed on after only six months in nursing homes. At the time my father had to deal with troublesome issues since I was living in Texas at the time. Fortunately he himself never had to live in one of those places.


 




Humor for October 2017

Science Humor:  The Ig Nobles
https://daily.jstor.org/ig-nobels-lighter-side-scientific-research/

Jerry Seinfeld Breaks Down a Joke ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jerry-seinfeld-breaks-down-a-joke-1506164405

Humor Forwarded by Scott Bonacker

CALLER: Is this Gordon's Pizza?

 

GOOGLE: No sir, it's Google Pizza.

 

CALLER: I must have dialed a wrong number. Sorry.

 

GOOGLE: No sir, Google bought Gordon’s Pizza last month.

 

CALLER: OK. I would like to order a pizza.

 

GOOGLE: Do you want your usual, sir?

 

CALLER: My usual? You know me?

 

GOOGLE: According to our caller ID data sheet, the last 12 times you called you ordered an extra-large pizza with three cheeses, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and meatballs on a thick crust.

 

CALLER: OK! That’s what I want …

 

GOOGLE: May I suggest that this time you order a pizza with ricotta, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and olives on a whole wheat gluten free thin crust?

 

CALLER: What? I detest vegetables.

 

GOOGLE: Your cholesterol is not good, sir.

 

CALLER: How the hell do you know?

 

GOOGLE: Well, we cross-referenced your home phone number with your medical records. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years.

 

CALLER: Okay, but I do not want your rotten vegetable pizza!  I already take medication for my cholesterol.

 

GOOGLE: Excuse me sir, but you have not taken your medication regularly. According to our database, you only purchased a box of 30 cholesterol tablets once, at Drug RX Network, 4 months ago.

 

CALLER: I bought more from another drugstore.

 

GOOGLE: That doesn’t show on your credit card statement.

 

CALLER: I paid in cash.

 

GOOGLE: But you did not withdraw enough cash according to your bank statement.

 

CALLER: I have other sources of cash.

 

GOOGLE: That doesn’t show on your last tax return unless you bought them using an undeclared income source, which is against the law.

 

CALLER: WHAT THE HELL?

 

GOOGLE: I'm sorry, sir, we use such information only with the sole intention of helping you.

 

CALLER: Enough already! I'm sick to death of Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and all the others. I'm going to an island without internet, cable TV, where there is no cell phone service and no one to watch me or spy on me.

 GOOGLE: I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport first.  It expired 6 weeks ago…

 

 




Humor September 2017--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q3.htm#Humor0917.htm

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 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