Tidbits on October 31, 2018
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Wes Lavin's Peacham, Vermont Foliage Pictures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Lavin/PeachamAutumn/Set01.htm

 

Tidbits on October 31,, 2018
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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 Library of Congress Launches the National Screening Room, Putting Online Hundreds of Historic Films (some are home movies) --
http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/explore-free-downloadable-public-domain-treasures-library-congress-national-screening-room.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Why Should You Read Don Quixote?: An Animated Video Makes the Case ---
http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/read-don-quixote-animated-video-makes-case.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Why Read Waiting For Godot?: An Animated Case for Samuel Beckett’s Classic Absurdist Play ---
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgxvzLNVJGvkVVVmWqMmDWhRwfxWR

Stuff to Blow Your Mind (podcast on how science stuff works) --- www.stufftoblowyourmind.com

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

 


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 

 

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

Staggering photos show what daily life in the most crowded cities in the world is really like ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-daily-life-worlds-most-crowded-cities-2018-10

The Art Institute of Chicago Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Resolution ---
http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/art-institute-chicago-puts-44000-works-art-online-view-high-resolution.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The USS Missouri Was the Most Famous Battleship ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-uss-missouri-been-described-as-most-famous-battleship-ever-built-2018-10#the-mighty-mo-sailed-the-mediterranean-in-1946-in-a-show-of-force-against-soviet-incursion-four-years-later-in-september-1950-the-battleship-joined-missions-as-part-of-the-korean-war-7
But Bob Jensen's USS Wisconsin lasted the longest at sea ---
Oceans in My Life,  Including My Navy Days ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Ocean/Set01/OceanSet01.htm

WW II:  The bombing of ball-bearing plants around Schweinfurt, in south-central Germany ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/black-thursday-for-wwii-us-army-air-force-over-schweinfurt-germany-2018-10

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art --- https://nga.gov.au/collections/atsi/

Amazon is growing a massive, foul-smelling 'corpse flower' at its indoor rainforest — and it just bloomed for the first time ever ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-spheres-corpse-flower-bloom-photos-2018-10
Jensen Comment
We had a smaller "corpse flower" that smelled so bad we had to take it outside where winter eventually killed it ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/DeathBlossoms/StarFlowers.htm  

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

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


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

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

Why Should You Read Don Quixote?: An Animated Video Makes the Case ---
http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/read-don-quixote-animated-video-makes-case.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

T

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 31, 2018
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2018/TidbitsQuotations103118.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




It Was Bound to Happen:  Graduate Student Assistants’ ‘Fight for $15’ ---
Click Here

Jensen Comment
What's the difference between paying a student $3,000 per semester versus $15 per hour for 200 hours? The amount of time a student actually works each semester will probably vary greatly under either compensation contract.

Although I was fortunate to have a tuition plus room&board fellowship in my accountancy Ph.D. studies at Stanford for five years, I also taught (my own choice) an Economics Department undergraduate course on the side for extra cash. It would be very difficult to clock the hours it took to teach that course. I put in a lot of extra hours preparing to teach that class for the first time. But in subsequent semesters it took a whole lot less time to teach that course. Although all business and accounting doctoral students were given shared offices on campus (mine was in the computer center), as an economics instructor I was also given a private office on the Quad above the Economics Department. I had a desk in an entire attic amidst the rafters and  the pigeons.

Graduate assistant compensation is a very difficult payment system to implement. Graduate assistants usually don't punch time clocks. It's more like outsourcing where they're given  research assignments (such as searching for and making copies of articles) in duties that they mix in with other activities when they're in the library or on computers. Maybe they're asked to write some code or perform a statistical analysis. Those tasks vary in time, and it would be very difficult for the university to budget open-ended hourly payment systems.

Sometimes graduate student assistants are given opportunities to be co-authors in conducting research and publishing in journals that greatly enhance their careers later on. Even if they're not paid graduate assistants they are sometimes eager to be co-authors on papers with highly reputable professors.

Often their assistantships are fixed stipends per term. The hours they put in are often mixed with learning tasks that are difficult to partition from paid-work tasks. Is the system sometimes abused? Of course it's often abused with overwork or underwork, especially when the students are doing an assignment that could be imposed whether or not they're being paid.

Graduate student assistants who assist in courses have varying types of assignments. Sometimes they grade assignments or help write examinations. Sometimes they teach classes or recitation sections for lecture classes taught by professors. Their teaching roles may be part of a curriculum plan where they would have to teach some classes whether getting paid or not.

My point here is that often, not always, graduate assistant work is professional work that's difficult to meter on a time clock. What constitutes teaching versus learning to teach? What constitutes "preparation" to teach a class.

What constitutes research versus learning to do research?


Bayesian Probability --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability

How to Mislead Without Statistics:  A Challenge for Bayesians
Business Insider talked to psychologists to learn why people think they have a shot at winning, despite the near-impossible odds ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/powerball-odds-why-people-think-theyll-win-2018-10#even-when-we-lose-we-think-were-just-short-of-winning-3

Jensen Comment
Probably the biggest mistake is thinking a succession of losses increases the odds of winning --- thus keeping players clinging to a slot machine or throwing the dice until morning's daylight or buying more and more lottery tickets after a long string of losses.

There's a difference between buying a dream with one lottery ticket (and expecting to lose with near certainty) and buying 20+ lottery tickets (and expecting you're due to win for a change).

There is a way of winning with certainty in some games by more than doubling the bet with each succession of plays (known as the St. Petersburg Paradox), but casinos and home poker players ban this by placing upper limits on bets. In lotteries even millionaires cannot afford to follow a SPP strategy.

The only real winners over time in a casino are the owners of the casino, because odds always favor the casino over time.

The casino can of course lose to the one-time player who gets lucky one time.


Fair Use? GSU E-Reserves Case Goes On After Publishers Win Second Appeal  ---
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/78401-gsu-e-reserves-case-goes-on-after-publishers-win-second-appeal.html


These are IRS Scammers We Wish Would Rot in Cells Filled With Snakes and Rats
India-Based Fraud:  24 Defendants Sentenced in Multimillion Dollar India-Based Call Center Scam Targeting U.S. Victims ---
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/24-defendants-sentenced-multimillion-dollar-india-based-call-center-scam-targeting-us-victims


Challenge:  Is it possible to write a children's book on accountancy?

Answer
Bob Jensen thinks it's virtually impossible for children to grasp the concepts of contracting in terms of leases, derivatives, hedging, contingencies, Ponzi schemes, tax sheltering, blockchain, cryptocurrency, etc.?
It would be terrific somebody out there could prove him wrong.

From a Chronicle of Higher Education newsletter on October 18, 2018

Early in the semester, Stan Eisen presents students in his upper-level biology courses with an unusual choice: Would they prefer to take a final exam or write a children’s book?

“I see it as a tool to get students engaged so they see the topic as interesting, fascinating, and worthwhile,” Eisen, a professor of biology at Christian Brothers University, said of the book project. 

It’s also a means of achieving something that we described in last week’s newsletter: helping students construct knowledge. Or, as Eisen said: “You really don’t understand something until you can teach it to someone else.” 

He started offering them the option seven years ago, when his oldest granddaughter, who was his inspiration for the idea, was 4. The first book was called Don't Get Sick, Stan!, and students in his senior-level parasitology course wrote about the parasitic diseases that can fester in a school cafeteria and give a child abdominal distress or diarrhea.

It was self-published and made for an excellent – if unconventional – holiday gift, he says. There was even a book signing at a local shop.

Eisen said he had often come across scholarly articles about the importance of student engagement, which can be achieved through high-impact practices like experiential learning. In the natural sciences, he says, such practices tend to take the form of experiments or undergraduate research projects.

In contrast, he says, producing a narrative from the course material and explaining it to a child turns the project into a teaching tool. “As far as an experiential opportunity,” he said, “I was onto something.”

It also helps fulfill one of his larger teaching goals: for his students to leave his course different from how they were when they started it.

Since then, he’s offered the option to students in his course on invertebrate zoology, who produced an alphabetical coloring book, All Creatures Small and Smaller: The World of Invertebrates

When he presents the option to his students, he sticks to a few rules, borne of trial and error. The students must be unanimous in their decision. He tried allowing them to work in small groups on topics of their choosing, but he found that the results weren’t as good. Now Eisen assigns the topic, and the entire class of about 32 students works as a group. 

He also asks Samantha Alperin, chair of the education department, to give a presentation to his students on how to write for children. “If you can make a 7-year-old understand it,” he said, “you’ve accomplished something.”

The choice that Eisen gives his students is interesting, in part, because the options don’t necessarily achieve pedagogically similar goals. When I referred to the book project as an alternative assessment, he stopped me. An assessment like a multiple-choice test would help him gauge how well students can answer questions about, say, the life cycles of parasites.

The book project, though, is a teaching-and-learning tool. And it’s an experience in many senses of the word – one that alumni have told him they recall fondly. “Who remembers taking a final exam, a year or two or three years later?” he asked.

Have you replaced an exam with an unusual or creative assignment in your own course? What were the tradeoffs?


Externalities and How the Sears Catalog Changed America
My father's Uncle Martin owned a 200+ acre farm near Fenton, Iowa in the early 1900s. He ordered a large two-story ornate home from a Sears Catalog. The prefabricated pieces of this home were carried on a horse-drawn buckboard from the train depot to Uncle Martin's farm. My point here is that in hundreds (maybe thousands?) of farms and towns the Sears Catalog help to provide relatively high-quality homes to a developing America.

How the Sears Catalog Disrupted the Jim Crow South and Helped Give Birth to the Delta Blues & Rock and Roll ---
http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/sears-catalog-disrupted-jim-crow-south-helped-give-birth-delta-blues-rock-roll.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Sears Catalog:  Black shoppers, Hyman writes, "could order directly from the catalog and avoid getting gouged at the local stores, both in terms of price and in terms of condescending service."
From a Chronicle of Higher Education newsletter on October 17, 2018

You may have read that the once-mighty Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week. But before it began its long decline, the retailer helped undermine white supremacy in the rural South through its thriving mail-order business. Louis Hyman, an associate professor of labor relations, law, and history at Cornell University, makes his arguments in a series of Twitter threads.  Black shoppers, Hyman writes, "could order directly from the catalog and avoid getting gouged at the local stores, both in terms of price and in terms of condescending service."


July 2018 Massachusetts Bar Exam Results Are The Worst The 21st Century to Date ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/10/july-2018-massachusetts-bar-exam-results-are-the-worst-this-century.html

NY State Bar Exam Pass Rates Plummet ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/10/ny-state-bar-exam-pass-rates-plummet.html


Accountants on the AECM are kittens compared to snarling philosophers
When Argument Becomes Bloodsport:  Philosophy is mired in wanton (political) pugilism
---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/When-Argument-Becomes/244833?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=54ed8bea364f413ea644ce3942ff1b55&elq=445d5932d54b4b9a933f9ba98e6a7def&elqaid=21060&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9993

. . .

There are few weeds, though, in online philosophical discourse. There philosophers enact a scorched-earth policy. Philosophy’s online culture is driven largely by blogs, where scholars interact both under their own names and anonymously. The issues addressed are as varied as the discipline itself, but "dialogue" often descends into displays of social dominance, "conversation" naught but contest. Warring certainties rule the day. Those who participate most energetically tend not only to know exactly what they think but also to have concluded that thinking otherwise is downright wrong. And, indeed, that the wrongness is so egregious it must be forced back with an onslaught of scorn, derision, insult, and mockery. Thus, for example, when one of our most reputable blogs hosted a discussion of one philosopher’s effort to revise an introductory class to favor debates on contemporary justice, it generated anonymous commentary such as this:

How could anyone look at this syllabus and still wonder why the University has died? There are many fine philosophers who can’t secure employment anywhere, and all the while people teaching foolishness like this are granted a soapbox to propagandize impressionable youth with their warped perception of reality. If you can’t help yourself from cramming this nonsense down the students’ throats, at least take it over to one of the other Humanities departments, where you’ll fit right in.

Other commentators derided the course plan as "professional misconduct," "indoctrination," "threatening the very survival of our discipline in the academy"; it would turn "universities into social-justice madrasas." Of the professor who devised the course, it sufficed to damningly observe: "The proper emotion, having comported himself in this way, is shame." This is but one example, and not even a dramatic one — many are worse. The debates surrounding Rebecca Tuvel and the journal Hypatia, for instance, even made The New York Times. While the blog comments I quote feature anonymous abuse flowing from more conservative pedagogues to a more liberal one, eagerness to acidly assail and humiliate one’s opponents knows no ideological boundary, nor does it require anonymity, at least for philosophers with tenure.

Philosophers of all stripes wield the heavy weaponry of scorn, derision, and insult online. The rhetorical assaults take a couple of general forms: assailing the basic competence and intelligence of one’s opponent or assailing her moral scruples and humanity. Though the rhetoric typically includes lively flourishes, much of it amounts to slinging charges of stupidity or hatred back and forth. And, because this is philosophy, the slinging can go meta: Philosophers will not only rhetorically punch an opponent — when challenged they may justify their punching with elaborate claims that he needed punching and, by the by, if you’re doubting this, maybe you need punching, too. This is where our online conversations are most demoralizing: Certainty of one’s own views transforms into cruelty cast in self-valorizing terms. Cruelty becomes righteous, the cruel heroic.

The justifications offered for sneering condemnation of one’s colleagues are many and familiar. Some philosophers profess to be "speaking truth to power," never mind that online spaces lack clear registers for recognizing "power." Some claim that they merely do what is necessary in order to "hold people accountable," asserting quasi-judicial rectitude as reason to attack. Others elaborate an ethos of rhetorical combat, though the ethos given varies. There are those who restrict themselves to "punching up," aiming their blows at those perceived to be more powerful, and there are those who adopt an egalitarian attitude and punch all comers, with the logic that badness ought be rooted out wherever it originates.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Perhaps this bitter environment is partly to blame for the well-documented shortage of women faculty in philosophy. This is somewhat ironic since the shortage of women in some STEM fields gets most of the publicity.

Accounting is such a friendly discipline, which may be one of the reasons more women than men are now graduating and finding jobs in accountancy.


Norway's petabyte plan: Store (online) everything ever published in a 1,000-year archive ---
https://www.zdnet.com/article/norways-petabyte-plan-store-everything-ever-published-in-a-1000-year-archive/
With $1+ trillion in its oil fund Norway may be about the only nation that can afford this luxury
The term "ever published" is an exaggeration since many rare books will not be made available to Norway

Also I suspect Norway will face some of the same copyright issues (worse in Europe than the USA) as is faced by Google Books

Google Books: Ngram Viewer (25+ million books) --- https://books.google.com/ngrams 

Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm


Battle Over Fake News
Apple CEO Tim Cook demands Bloomberg retract its report on Chinese chip hacking: 'There is no truth in their story' ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-bloomberg-retract-story-chinese-chip-hacking-2018-10


Y Combinator --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator

Here is a list of the top 100 Y Combinator companies by valuation ---
http://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/

Jensen Comment
The challenge here is to find companies you recognize/use, especially if you're in the Baby Boomer generation.


Tablet Ownership is Declining, Millennials May Be to Blame ---
https://civicscience.com/tablet-ownership-is-declining-millennials-may-be-to-blame/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=04e009e8fb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_10_25_11_41&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-04e009e8fb-153727301


How to Use the Windows 10 Calculator (actually a super calculator for many things) ---
https://www.howtogeek.com/392134/how-to-use-the-windows-10-calculator/
Jensen Comment
I use the very lower left button on my Windows computer and choose "Calculator"


How to Write Math Expressions

Jensen Comment
For formal papers I formulate (with the option to calculate) math expressions in Wolfram Alpha ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Here's an article where I formed math equations and calculated answers using Wolfram Alpha ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

There are three ways to write math expressions with Windows 10 apps ---
https://www.itechtics.com/3-tools-write-math-expressions-windows-10/

A rather unusual Windows Accessory is called the Math Input Panel that lets you write math expressions (or even chemical expressions and art sketches) by dragging the mouse.
These can be embedded amidst text and printed with that text.
Such drawings would not be acceptable for journal submissions, but it can be used for working papers and course notes.
You can access Windows Accessories by using the bottom far left button on your Windows 10 screen.


Ten Learnings from Ten Years of Brain Pickings ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/23/10-years-of-brain-pickings/?mc_cid=c5657da9f1&mc_eid=4d2bd13843


Facebook gets maximum fine for the catastrophic Cambridge Analytica data breach ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-gets-top-fine-ico-cambridge-analytica-data-breach-2018-10


IBM’s all-new Cognos Analytics (using AI)  is helping businesses make the most of their data ---
Click Here


The Atlantic:  Fraud Market for Forged Antiquities ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/10/dead-sea-scrolls-forgery-museum-of-the-bible/573799/
Forgeries are often very difficult and costly to detect


Education Week:  How History Class Divides Us ---
https://www.edweek.org/ew/projects/how-history-class-divides-us.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news1&M=58649777&U=2290378&UUID=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f

Americans are increasingly polarized and public distrust in government is at record levels. What if the inability of Americans to agree on our shared history—and the right way to teach it—is a cause of our current polarization rather than a symptom?

I n September in a room where someone had conspicuously placed a Confederate flag for at least part of the proceedings, the Texas board of education sat through two days of public hearings on a “streamlining” of its 2010 social studies standards.

Panels of teachers had proposed hundreds of changes, but the most controversial was to delete a line of the standard on the Alamo referencing “all the heroic defenders who gave their lives there.” Swift condemnation from politicians and the public followed, forcing the panels to restore some of that language even before the hearings concluded.

Much has been written about the Alamo’s relative historic importance in the story of the United States, but that wasn’t even the point of this debate. What was truly at stake were the underlying values proponents felt it signaled: What defines American thought and action? What can students take pride in?

It’s easy to lose sight of the connection between what students learn in history and the civic ideals and values those topics communicate, especially since they tend to be treated as different disciplines in K-12 education.

But the Texas debate reminds us that history and civic values are deeply intertwined, and gives rise to this interesting question: What if the inability of Americans to agree on our shared history—and on the right way to teach it—is a cause of our current polarization and political dysfunction, rather than a symptom? It’s a question that gets right to the issues of what constitutes facts, how to interpret them, and how they inform contemporary debates, all of which are key themes as America experiences a kind of civic crisis.

Public trust in the government is near its historic low. And in 2017, Americans were far more politically polarized on topics like immigration and healthcare than in the early 2000s, according to Gallup. Journalists are now routinely assailed by politicians. The bruising confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court led The Washington Post to speculate that even “our least damaged institution” might now be viewed with increasing levels of skepticism.

“If this polyglot country doesn’t have a set of ideals and a broad narrative, we don’t have much of a hope,” said Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford University, whose recent volume attempts to connect the dots between history education and citizenship. “It is not popular to talk about in an era of identity politics, but history teaching in school has a civic purpose, not only a disciplinary purpose


Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I'm not sure that the debate over history is any more intense today than in the Viet Nam war years. In those days there was a debate over whether to leave the module in Texas history textbooks that claimed the USA dropped an atomic bomb in the Korean War.


Get Smart About Plan S (international initiative to cap scholarly journal subscription rates and promote more open sharing) ---
https://beyondthebookcast.com/transcripts/plan-s-lands-at-frankfurt/

Jensen Comment
This initiative could is serious because it's funded by 13 research funding agencies that have the power to require open sharing of funded research.

Bob Jensen's threads on how Commercial Scholarly and Academic Journals and Oligopoly Textbook Publishers Are Ripping Off Libraries, Scholars, and Students ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals


Harvard Trial Reveals What Admissions Deans Are Made Of: Contradictions ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Trial-Reveals-What/244880?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=0ae0e2a18c184ef6af8ff77544a9996e&elq=6a7b3cb94152437e92b91e72ffc98485&elqaid=21078&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=10006

Everyone wanted to hear what William R. Fitzsimmons had to say. In September 2017, hundreds of people packed a ballroom at the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference, in Boston. Some eager souls came an hour early to snag good seats, and many spectators had to stand or squat on the floor.

Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard University, was expected to give a sweeping speech about his profession’s past, present, and future. Yet “Fitz,” as he’s widely known, spoke for just a few minutes before ceding the stage to a racially diverse group of recent Harvard graduates he had invited. One by one, the former students described how the university and its generous scholarships had lifted them from humble beginnings.

As compelling as those stories were, some listeners were frustrated. Instead of hearing from the nation’s most famous admissions official, they got an hour of testimonials about the transformative power of Harvard. “This wasn’t what he was supposed to do,” one college counselor complained.

A few observers who know Fitzsimmons well later surmised that the dean, whom they described as unfailingly humble, had wanted to shine the spotlight on young people he admired. Still, one could have interpreted the moment as a shrewd attempt to shape the narrative about Harvard at the very moment it was bracing for unprecedented scrutiny. Fitzsimmons knew that a lawsuit filed in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions would soon lay bare the university’s secretive admissions process. And the details would confirm many people’s impression that the whole thing is unfair.

Last week, Fitzsimmons faced another attentive audience in Boston, but this time he wasn’t in charge of the script. He spent nearly four days in a wooden chair, a star witness answering questions from lawyers bent on winning a big-time trial. His testimony revealed a lot about how the university selects applicants. It also revealed something about the dean — and the complex job he has held for 32 years.

On every campus, admissions deans and enrollment chiefs are a walking bundle of contradictions. They must meet an array of competing institutional goals, some noble, some not. You don’t have to like that fact, but it’s worth understanding. To lead an admissions office is to manage trade-offs, 24/7.

“It’s really hard,” says Jerome A. (Jerry) Lucido, executive director of the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice at the University of Southern California. “You have to wear these many hats.”

Lucido, who previously led enrollment divisions at Southern California and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, thinks the Harvard trial could help illuminate the nuances of choosing a freshman class. “The public has a fundamental misunderstanding that individual admissions decisions are solely a single decision about a single applicant,” he says. “If I’m a student, that’s how it plays out for me. But it’s really about who you are as an individual, who you are among the applicant pool, and who you are in terms of what the college intends to accomplish and has to accomplish.”

Continued in article

Berkeley B-School Vows to Do Better on Diversity ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/10/23/berkeley-b-school-vows-do-better-diversity?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=f54e70366d-DNU20181022_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-f54e70366d-197565045&mc_cid=f54e70366d&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, is vowing to do a better job of recruiting minority students after enrolling a full-time M.B.A. class that many criticized for having only six black students in a class of 291. That's down from 10 black students who enrolled last year, in a smaller class of 282, and a peak in 2016 of 19 black students in a class of 252. A report issued by the business school said that it "failed to react quickly" as black enrollment numbers fell. New steps being taken include hiring a director of diversity admissions, adding scholarship dollars and using a "first-offer-best-offer" approach, and changing M.B.A. admissions criteria "to consider an applicant’s skillset and experience in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion."


Barry Ritholtz
https://ritholtz.com/2018/10/inside-teslas-model-3/

“The manufacturing analysts who spent 6,600 hours inside a warehouse north of Detroit picking apart a Model 3 have good news and bad news for Tesla Inc. The company now boasts the best technology of any electric car, with potential profit margins that would be the envy of most automakers. But Tesla is squandering that edge with wasted expenses linked to poor design and bloated manufacturing.”

The Model 3 costs about $2,000 more to produce than a similarly-priced BMW i3.

What Engineers Found When They Tore Apart Telsa’s Model 3


Top 3% of U.S. Taxpayers Paid Majority of Income Tax in 2016 ---
https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/top-3-of-u-s-taxpayers-paid-majority-of-income-taxes-in-2016#gs.A2jQfFU
Yeah I know! Other taxes like sales taxes are more regressive. Property taxes are not as regressive and pay for education in most states. But Individual income taxes, unlike corporate income taxes, are the largest source of federal revenues ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget


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

Smishing = SMS Phishing --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_phishing

Smishing:  What you need to know ---
http://blog.aicpa.org/2018/10/smishing-what-you-need-to-know.html#sthash.nzFxh0c5.dpbs


Math Scores Slide to a 20-Year Low on ACT ---
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/10/17/math-scores-slide-to-a-20-year-low.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2&M=58642884&U=2290378&UUID=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f

Jensen Comment
In this era of grade inflation even some of the A students do poorly on college admission tests. This kinda shows why we can no longer trust grades.


University of Tennessee Faculty Senate approves campus post-tenure policy, asks Board to reconsider system plan ---
https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/education/2018/10/15/ut-faculty-senate-post-tenure-review-policy/1605581002/

. . .

The policy, which the outgoing Board of Trustees approved in March, requires every tenured faculty member to undergo an additional post-tenure review at least every six years. Non-tenured faculty could also undergo review based on academic program reviews. Before the policy was approved in March, faculty and staff protested the proposal at the UT Knoxville campus.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Years ago my co-authors and I found that in accounting journals the majority of authors tended to be flashes in the pans with authorships falling off greatly after tenure. Of course there were noted exceptions, especially among authors who also supervised doctoral student theses.

"An Analysis of Contributors to Accounting Journals Part II: The Individual Academic Journals," (with Louis Heck and Philip Cooley), The International Journal of Accounting, Vol.26, 1991, pp. 1-17.
"An Analysis of Contributors to Accounting Journals. Part I: The Aggregate Performances," (with Louis Heck and Philip L. Cooley), The International Journal of Accounting, Vol.25, 1990, pp. 202-217. Released in 1991.

Post-tenure reviews do not have the same intense pressure to publish as pre-tenure reviews.


Philosophers Name the Best Philosophy Books: From Stoicism and Existentialism, to Metaphysics & Ethics for Artificial Intelligence ---
http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/philosophers-name-the-best-philosophy-books.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Bob Jensen's threads on philosophy ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social


How to Mislead With Statistics
From a MIT newsletter on October 23, 2018

Video doorbell firm Ring was bought by Amazon earlier this year for a reported $1 billion, partly thanks to claims its devices help cut crime. Evidence for that looks flimsy, however, in light of a new analysis conducted by MIT Technology Review.
Crime-fighting claims: Ring’s motion-sensing doorbells have been a hit since they were launched in 2013. An accompanying app means homeowners don’t need to be home to see and respond to visitors. When Amazon acquired the company, it claimed a study in Los Angeles  had found that Ring’s doorbells had reduced burglaries “by as much as 55%.”
City deals: Ring went on to assert that a drop in burglaries occurred after doorbells were installed on just 10% of homes. This helped convince over a dozen small US cities to subsidize discount programs so local residents would buy more doorbells.
The evidence:
It’s shaky, at best. The only study carried out independently of Ring found, for example, that neighborhoods without Ring doorbells were actually less likely to suffer break-ins than those with them.
Read the full story
here.

Jensen Comment
Homes are not fungible sampling items across greatly differing neighborhoods. Similar lessons have been learned by pollsters after repeated evidence of misleading polls. Neighborhoods can also change over time. When I was at the University of Maine years ago crime like car stealing and building break-ins were virtually unheard of before the part of a University's adjacent forest was donated for low-income housing. Then the crime commenced. My old reliable Oldsmobile was stolen on campus and later torched after the transmission gave out from wild joy riding. The teens who did this were late caught while burning down a camp (unoccupied at the time) for handicapped children. The teens who did this were all from the new single-parent homes in the UMO Forest.


How to Mislead With Statistics
Does Joining a Fraternity or Sorority Actually Improve Grades and Earnings After Graduation? No, a Study Finds ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Does-Joining-a-Fraternity-or/244890?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=a843f5d062714a6c9129459baa1c8036&elq=0b15c80bc2444a4ebdf14a2006f09188&elqaid=21105&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=10023

Jensen Comment
I'm in agreement that Greek Life probably hinders study and lowers grades, especially in the first year with Mickey Mouse pledge activities and later with temptations such as daily card playing, pool, and other diversionary activities including drinking parties.

I managed to maintain A-level grades in a fraternity house for two years at Iowa State University, but it was a huge struggle. When I transferred to Denver University in my third year the last thing I wanted to do was to affiliate with my fraternity on the DU campus.

It struck me that there are too many missing variables in the above study to relate correlation to cause, especially if it concluded (it didn't) that fraternity membership improves grades. In theory membership could help grades such as mentoring of brothers/sisters, but there are too many other missing variables and sample selection bias in the above study. Firstly, I think most fraternity members tend to be full-time students since most members would not have additional time for part-time jobs or varsity sports when they carry full course loads. Secondly, my anecdotal experience is that most brothers who really wanted to work for grades moved out of the fraternity house because they were too distracted by daily goings on in the house such as card games, group television/movie watching, and levels of noise with members coming and going at all hours of the day.

My point here is that when you sample fraternity members you're not sampling a homogeneous population. You're combining members who live in the fraternity house with members who live elsewhere and simply come around now and then at their own choosing. Those that live elsewhere such as in nearby apartments are not a whole lot different from non-members who live in the same apartment houses.

I did learn some non-academic things in my fraternity such as how to make small talk when meeting people for the first time. We had to wear coats and ties for evening meals and learned not to ignore guests. We always stood up when a woman entered a room --- which I guess is no longer such a politically correct thing to do. And my fraternity stressed that sexual harassment or even getting "fresh" was strictly verboten in our fraternity. Of course in those days fraternities were only for white males and sororities were only for white women. There were some silly rules. Back packs were acceptable, but no fraternity member would be caught dead with a brief case. Neckties had to be plain and narrow with no bright colors. Only dark blue or black was acceptable for blazers. Suits and socks and matching shoes had to be dark. Tennis shoes were not to be worn with suits or sport jackets.  Dress shirts had to be white. Tennis shoes and socks could only be white. Sweaters were not to have mixed colors and were worn only with dress shirts.

My fraternity life meant having to sacrifice sleep in order to maintain high grades. This was one of the reasons, certainly not the only reason, that made me want to change universities. Even back then I was bothered by the whiteness and snobbishness of fraternities and sororities.


How to Mislead With Statistics
However, due to a statistical quirk, the prediction models were unable to recognize the dropping support for Hillary Clinton just prior to the 2016 election ---
https://theconversation.com/how-the-polls-could-have-caught-surprise-victories-like-trumps-103823

. . .

Remember, poll aggregators must average several polls to make a good prediction. Due to sparse state-level polling, predictions were “stuck” on values from about two weeks prior to the election, when support for Clinton had been higher. Note that this sparse polling scenario indicates that polling methods are generally sound, although more frequent polling of swing states would be helpful.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This non-stationarity problem is somewhat similar to the "methodological deficiencies" in accountics research discussed by Dyckman and Zeff and the "temporal aggregation cointegration" problem discussed by David Giles.

From Two Former Presidents of the AAA
"Some Methodological Deficiencies in Empirical Research Articles in Accounting." by Thomas R. Dyckman and Stephen A. Zeff , Accounting Horizons: September 2014, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 695-712 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/acch-50818   (not free)

This paper uses a sample of the regression and behavioral papers published in The Accounting Review and the Journal of Accounting Research from September 2012 through May 2013. We argue first that the current research results reported in empirical regression papers fail adequately to justify the time period adopted for the study. Second, we maintain that the statistical analyses used in these papers as well as in the behavioral papers have produced flawed results. We further maintain that their tests of statistical significance are not appropriate and, more importantly, that these studies do not�and cannot�properly address the economic significance of the work. In other words, significance tests are not tests of the economic meaningfulness of the results. We suggest ways to avoid some but not all of these problems. We also argue that replication studies, which have been essentially abandoned by accounting researchers, can contribute to our search for truth, but few will be forthcoming unless the academic reward system is modified.

The free SSRN version of this paper was once available at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2324266

This Dyckman and Zeff paper is indirectly related to the following technical econometrics research:
"The Econometrics of Temporal Aggregation - IV - Cointegration," by David Giles, Econometrics Blog, September 13, 2014 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-econometrics-of-temporal.html 

Nature
Five ways to fix statistics

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07522-z

JEFF LEEK: Adjust for human cognition

. . .

BLAKELEY B. MCSHANE & ANDREW GELMAN: Abandon statistical significance

In many fields, decisions about whether to publish an empirical finding, pursue a line of research or enact a policy are considered only when results are ‘statistically significant’, defined as having a P value (or similar metric) that falls below some pre-specified threshold. This approach is called null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). It encourages researchers to investigate so many paths in their analyses that whatever appears in papers is an unrepresentative selection of the data. 

Worse, NHST is often taken to mean that any data can be used to decide between two inverse claims: either ‘an effect’ that posits a relationship between, say, a treatment and an outcome (typically the favoured hypothesis) or ‘no effect’ (defined as the null hypothesis). 

In practice, this often amounts to uncertainty laundering. Any study, no matter how poorly designed and conducted, can lead to statistical significance and thus a declaration of truth or falsity. NHST was supposed to protect researchers from over-interpreting noisy data. Now it has the opposite effect.

This year has seen a debate about whether tightening the threshold for statistical significance would improve science. More than 150 researchers have weighed in4,5. We think improvements will come not from tighter thresholds, but from dropping them altogether. We have no desire to ban P values. Instead, we wish them to be considered as just one piece of evidence among many, along with prior knowledge, plausibility of mechanism, study design and data quality, real-world costs and benefits, and other factors. For more, see our article with David Gal at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Christian Robert at the University of Paris-Dauphine and Jennifer Tackett at Northwestern University6.

For example, consider a claim, published in a leading psychology journal in 2011, that a single exposure to the US flag shifts support towards the Republican Party for up to eight months7. In our view, this finding has no backing from political-science theory or polling data; the reported effect is implausibly large and long-lasting; the sample sizes were small and nonrepresentative; and the measurements (for example, those of voting and political ideology) were noisy. Although the authors stand by their findings, we argue that their P values provide very little information.

Statistical-significance thresholds are perhaps useful under certain conditions: when effects are large and vary little under the conditions being studied, and when variables can be measured accurately. This may well describe the experiments for which NHST and canonical statistical methods were developed, such as agricultural trials in the 1920s and 1930s examining how various fertilizers affected crop yields. Nowadays, however, in areas ranging from policy analysis to biomedicine, changes tend to be small, situation-dependent and difficult to measure. For example, in nutrition studies, it can be a challenge to get accurate reporting of dietary choices and health outcomes.

Open-science practices can benefit science by making it more difficult for researchers to make overly strong claims from noisy data, but cannot by themselves compensate for poor experiments. Real advances will require researchers to make predictions more capable of probing their theories and invest in more precise measurements featuring, in many cases, within-person comparisons.

A crucial step is to move beyond the alchemy of binary statements about ‘an effect’ or ‘no effect’ with only a P value dividing them. Instead, researchers must accept uncertainty and embrace variation under different circumstances. 

 

DAVID COLQUHOUN: State false-positive risk, too

. . .

MICHČLE B. NUIJTEN: Share analysis plans and results

. . .

STEVEN N. GOODMAN: Change norms from within

 

Bob Jensen's threads on what went wrong with accountics science ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong


How to Mislead With Statistics
From the CFO Journal on October 18, 2018

New York taxpayers sent about $24 billion more to the U.S. government  last year than the state got back in federal spending, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reported Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.

Jensen Comment
What if all states expected to get at least the same amount back in federal spending as they paid into the USA treasury? Who would pay for the USA military and the gazillions more spent at the national level that only indirectly benefit individual states?
What a dumb expectation!


How to Mislead With Statistics
An Amazon staffer says over 450 employees wrote to Jeff Bezos demanding Amazon stop selling facial-recognition software to police ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-letter-jeff-bezos-facial-recognition-software-police-2018-10

Jensen Comment
The sample is entirely self-selecting and we have no idea how many Amazon employees with support selling facial-recognition software to employees. Amazon had 566,000+ employees in 2017. Divide 450 by 566,000.

Also selling software is a whole lot different that selling privacy data on actual faces.

I wonder how many of Amazon's 566,000+ employees would prefer that Amazon give the software to police for free!


How to Celebrate With Statistics
23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better
https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health-crime-literacy-good-news

Jensen Comment
Since Vox leans to the left this article surprised me. The selected charts provide positive trends of very important criteria (e.g., global poverty) in society. It's pretty easy to quibble with international comparisons data. But I decided to refrain from that this morning. Why not celebrate some good news for a change? I'll drink to that later in the day. I'll also drink later in the day because there's already snow on the ground on October 18, 2018


Not Made in America (actually some like Subaru may be assembled in America)
These are the 15 safest cars and SUVs money can buy for 2018 ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/safest-cars-america-iihs-crash-test-2018-2017-12


From a MIT Newsletter on October 18, 2018

The world is struggling to get online,

Billions are being frozen out of the digital revolution, a new report is due to show.
New data: Growth in global internet access fell from 19% in 2007 to less than 6% last year, according to UN data due to be published next month by the Web Foundation,
The Guardian reports today. The rate grew by 11% on average every year from 2005 to 2015 but has fallen sharply since 2015. Currently, 3.8 billion people remain unconnected.
Delayed deadlines: The UN had predicted half the world would be online by 2017, but that line will not be crossed until May 2019 because of the current slowdown. The UN defines being online as having accessed the internet at least once in the past three months.
Why it matters: The divide is increasing inequality. A large proportion of the people who remain unconnected are women and those living in rural areas, where it is more difficult and costly to hook up to the internet. Lack of internet access inevitably means people miss out on economic opportunities, but also government services and public debate, the report will say.

Jensen Comment
What's sad is that some developing countries are so corrupt that they resist low cost Internet efforts (think Google balloons) in an effort to line their own pockets. In general on most things the biggest barrier to development of the third world is local corruption and the AK-47 disease that keeps these nations in a constant state of revolt.


Whether you’re required to sign up for Medicare at 65 even if you’re working and have access to insurance will largely depend on the size of your employer. ---
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/17/putting-retirement-plans-on-hold-what-that-means-for-your-medicare.html


 




From the Scout Report on October 12, 2018

Seafile --- www.seafile.com 
Seafile is a cloud storage solution similar to Dropbox or Google Drive. However, unlike those services, the Seafile server is self-hosted on hardware controlled by the user. Users can interact with their files in two primary modes. In the first mode, using the Drive client, files are downloaded as needed without an initial synchronization step. Copies of files that are in use are stored locally, both for speed and to provide offline access, but users don't need to have space locally for all their cloud files. In Syncing mode, a library of files is synchronized to the local device. After the initial synchronization, only changed portions of files are sent over the network. In both modes, users may opt to enable client-side file encryption, which encrypts files prior to sending them to the server. Seafile desktop clients are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Mobile clients are available for Android and iOS devices. Seafile servers are available for Windows and Linux. Home users may be interested in the Raspberry Pi version.


digiKam --- www.digikam.org 
digiKam is a professional-quality photo management system. It supports a five-stage photographic workflow: import, organization, browsing, processing, and publishing. The import step is able to work with any digital camera supported by Gphoto2. This covers many hundreds of models, with a full list linked from the digiKam features page. The organize step allows users to group photos and videos into albums and sub-albums, each of which can carry comments and tags. The browsing mode supports lightbox-style side-by-side comparisons of pictures and offers a sidebar that displays comprehensive image metadata. Image processing support includes color correction and enhancement out of the box, with additional filters available as plugins. In the publication step, photos and albums can be exported to numerous services including Flickr, SmugMug, and Facebook. Additionally, albums can also be imported from Facebook and Shwup. digiKam executables are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux AppImage containers. Most Linux distributions also include a digiKam package. digiKam is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License. Instructions for obtaining source code are included on the download page


From the Scout Report on October 19, 2018

WAVE: Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool ---  http://wave.webaim.org/
One of the things a website designer or administrator needs to keep in mind is the user experience of their site's visitors, including those visitors who may have visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive difficulties. WAVE, a free web accessibility evaluation tool developed by WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind), provides a simple way to check the accessibility of a web page's content. After entering the URL of interest on WAVE's main page, WAVE will display the page marked up with embedded icons indicating potential accessibility errors, alerts, features, and other information. The left sidebar presents a summary of what WAVE detected on the entered page, and users can click the embedded icons or explore the sidebar for brief explanations of their meaning. WAVE is intended to facilitate human evaluation, and thus it does not provide a score or pass/fail metric, nor can it correct problems. For those wishing to check the accessibility of password-protected or otherwise sensitive pages, WAVE also offers browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox


SuperBetter --- www.superbetter.com 
SuperBetter is a free mobile app and web platform that aims to help build personal resilience by using a video game structure to encourage and reward users for positive behavior; or, in other words, for living "gamefully." Like many video games, SuperBetter uses Power-Ups, Quests, Bad Guys, and Allies to take players on an adventure towards achieving their Epic Win, but in this game each of those represents real-life actions players take to boost their health or moods, progress toward their goals, change bad habits into good, and support friends trying to do the same. Clinical trials conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and The Ohio State University found that SuperBetter has positive effects on its users' resilience and mental health. SuperBetter was created by Jane McGonigal, a game designer with a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and Director of Game Research and Development at Institute for the Future.

 


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


Education Tutorials

Understood (technology for the learning disabled) --- www.understood.org/en
Bob Jensen's threads on technology for disabled persons ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

Classroom Management: A Collection of Resources for Teachers Philosophy --- www.scholastic.com/teachers/collections/teaching-content/classroom-management-collection-resources-teachers

NewseumED: Decoding Elections: Process, Persuasion & Participation ---
https://newseumed.org/edcollection/decoding-elections-process-persuasion-participation

PLATO: Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization ---  http://www.plato-philosophy.org

Pew Research Center: A Majority of Teens Have Experienced Some Form of Cyberbullying ---
www.pewinternet.org/2018/09/27/a-majority-of-teens-have-experienced-some-form-of-cyberbullying

Chicago Shakespeare Theater: Teacher Handbooks --- www.chicagoshakes.com/education/teaching_resources/teacher_handbooks

RoboticsCourseWare.org (resources for teaching robotics) --- www.roboticscourseware.org

National Park Service: American Latino Heritage Theme Study --- www.nps.gov/subjects/tellingallamericansstories/latinothemestudy.htm

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

PLOS Blogs: Sci-Ed --- https://blogs.plos.org/scied/

Journal of Writing Research (Science of Writing) --- www.jowr.org

The task now is for scientists to figure out how to interpret this new breed of experiment ---
http://nautil.us/blog/can-analogies-reveal-the-laws-of-physics

Actuaries Climate Index --- http://actuariesclimateindex.org/home/
Bob Jensen's threads in weather, climate, and climate change ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#---ClimateChange

International Water Law Project --- www.internationalwaterlaw.org

Project FeederWatch (Birds) --- https://feederwatch.org/

Field Museum: Live Plant Photos  --- https://plantidtools.fieldmuseum.org/en/nlp/5304

Gastronomica (food) --- https://gastronomica.org/

RoboticsCourseWare.org (resources for teaching robotics) --- www.roboticscourseware.org

Stanford engineers study hovering bats and hummingbirds in Costa Rica ---
https://news.stanford.edu/2018/09/26/comparing-hovering-bats-hummingbirds/

Stuff to Blow Your Mind (podcast on how science stuff works) --- www.stufftoblowyourmind.com

Movebank (Animal Migrations) --- www.movebank.org

From the Scout Report on October 12, 2018

Fat Bear Week in Katmai National Park Crowns 2018 Champion

 

This is the very fattest bear in Katmai National Park
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/10/9/17955432/fat-bear-week-katmai-national-park-409-747-salmon

'Her Radiant Rolls' Put Her Over The Top: Alaska Park Names Its 'Fattest Bear'
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/10/655937903/alaska-national-park-declares-fattest-bear-winner

The Glory of Otis, Fattest of the Fat Bears
https://www.outsideonline.com/2348946/glory-otis-fattest-fat-bears

explore livecams: Brooks Falls Brown Bears
https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears/brown-bear-salmon-cam-brooks-falls

International Association for Bear Research & Management
https://www.bearbiology.org

Education World: Six Hibernation Lesson Plans for This Winter
https://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/hibernation_lesson_plans_winter.shtml

From the Scout Report on October 19, 2018

NASA Captures Photo of Rectangular Antarctic Iceberg

 

Rectangular iceberg calves Twitter spike
https://physicsworld.com/a/rectangular-iceberg-calves-twitter-spike

What's Going On With That Bizarre Rectangular Iceberg?
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659799976/whats-going-on-with-that-bizarre-rectangular-iceberg

This iceberg is perfectly rectangular--here's why
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/this-iceberg-is-perfectly-rectangular-explained

Operation IceBridge
https://icebridge.gsfc.nasa.gov

National Snow & Ice Data Center: Quick Facts on Icebergs
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/icebergs.html

The Antarctic Report
https://www.antarcticreport.com

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

Taking Pride: 150 Years of LGBT History ---
https://nyclpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=f56a0b10ac214b0a97f1cb7934f8ef49

New York Times: Retro Report (documents and films on history) --- www.nytimes.com/column/retro-report

National Geographic: Where we live, block by block --- www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/10/diversity-race-ethnicity-united-states-

African-American Intellectual History Society --- http://www.aaihs.org

NewseumED: Decoding Elections: Process, Persuasion & Participation ---
https://newseumed.org/edcollection/decoding-elections-process-persuasion-participation

Missing Migrants Project --- https://missingmigrants.iom.int/

Journal of Writing Research (Science of Writing) --- www.jowr.org

Pew Research Center: A Majority of Teens Have Experienced Some Form of Cyberbullying ---
www.pewinternet.org/2018/09/27/a-majority-of-teens-have-experienced-some-form-of-cyberbullying

The Opportunity Atlas (neighborhoods with best chance of rising out of poverty) --- www.opportunityatlas.org

National Park Service: American Latino Heritage Theme Study --- www.nps.gov/subjects/tellingallamericansstories/latinothemestudy.htm

Theodore Roosevelt Papers --- www.loc.gov/collections/theodore-roosevelt-papers/about-this-collection

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

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


Law and Legal Studies

International Water Law Project --- www.internationalwaterlaw.org

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


Math Tutorials

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

The Early Novels Database --- https://earlynovels.github.io/

National Geographic: Where we live, block by block --- www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/10/diversity-race-ethnicity-united-states-

African-American Intellectual History Society --- http://www.aaihs.org

New York Times: Retro Report (documents and films on history) --- www.nytimes.com/column/retro-report

Theodore Roosevelt Papers --- www.loc.gov/collections/theodore-roosevelt-papers/about-this-collection

Ten Learnings from Ten Years of Brain Pickings ---
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/10/23/10-years-of-brain-pickings/?mc_cid=c5657da9f1&mc_eid=4d2bd13843

Chicago Shakespeare Theater: Teacher Handbooks --- www.chicagoshakes.com/education/teaching_resources/teacher_handbooks

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore --- www.eapoe.org

Gastronomica (food) --- https://gastronomica.org/

Taking Pride: 150 Years of LGBT History ---
https://nyclpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=f56a0b10ac214b0a97f1cb7934f8ef49

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Different Ways, Revealing Six Different Books in One ---
http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/medieval-book-opens-six-different-ways-revealing-six-different-books-one.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Library of Congress Launches the National Screening Room, Putting Online Hundreds of Historic Films ---
http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/explore-free-downloadable-public-domain-treasures-library-congress-national-screening-room.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art --- https://nga.gov.au/collections/atsi/

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

Journal of Writing Research (Science of Writing) --- www.jowr.org

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/

October 17, 2018

October 18, 2018

October 19, 2018

October 20, 2018

October 22, 2018

October 24, 2018

October 25, 2018

 October 26. 2018

October 27, 2018

 

 

 

 


Medical Fraud:  Don’t Fall for Venus Flytrap Claims, Experts Say ---
https://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20181025/dont-fall-for-venus-flytrap-claims-experts-say


 

 


The Atlantic:  Women in the U.S. Can Now Get Safe Abortions by Mail ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/women-on-web-safe-abortion-mail/573322/


 

 


Humor for October 2018

Church Signs Forwarded by Paula

Jesus is coming --- Hopefully before the election

Now open between Christmas and Easter

Lent is coming --- Get your ash in the church

Don't criticize your wife's judgment --- Remember what she married

Now is a good time to visit the church --- Pastor on vacation

Forwarded by Paula

1) - This is a picture of an octopus. It has eight testicles. (Kelly, age 6) 

2) - Oysters' balls are called pearls. (Jerry, age 6)


3) - If you are surrounded by ocean, you are an island. If you don't

have ocean all round you, you are incontinent. (Mike, age 7)

4) - Sharks are ugly and mean, and have big teeth, just like Emily

Richardson . She's not my friend any more. (Kylie, age 6)

5) - A dolphin breaths through an asshole on the top of its head.

(Billy, age 8)

6) - My uncle goes out in his boat with 2 other men and a woman and

pots and comes back with crabs. (Millie, age 6)

7) - When ships had sails, they used to use the trade winds to cross the

ocean. Sometimes when the wind didn't blow the sailors would whistle
to make the wind come. My brother said they would have been better
off eating beans. (William, age 7)

8) - Mermaids live in the ocean. I like mermaids. They are beautiful and

I like their shiny tails, but how on earth do mermaids get pregnant? 
Like, really? (Helen, age 6)

9) - I'm not going to write about the ocean. My baby brother is

always crying, my Dad keeps yelling at my Mom, and my big sister has
just got pregnant, so I can't think what to write. (Amy, age 6)

10) - Some fish are dangerous. Jellyfish can sting. Electric eels can

give you a shock. They have to live in caves under the sea where I think
they have to plug themselves in to chargers. (Christopher, age 7)

11) - When you go swimming in the ocean, it is very cold, and it makes my 
willy small. (Kevin, age 6) 

12) - Divers have to be safe when they go under the water. Divers can't

go down alone, so they have to go down on each other. (Becky, age 8)

13) - On vacation my Mom went water skiing. She fell off when she was

going very fast. She says she won't do it again because water fired right
up her big fat ass. (Julie, age 7)

14) - The ocean is made up of water and fish. Why the fish don't drown

I don't know. (Bobby, age 6)

15) - My dad was a sailor on the ocean. He knows all about the ocean.

What he doesn't know is why he quit being a sailor and married my mom.
(James, age 7)

Forwarded by Paula

Is there life after death? Trespass here and find out.

Some people should use glue stick instead of chap stick.

Remember when we were young we wanted to grow up and do whatever we wanted.
How's that working out for you?

Lost my mind.
Half of it wandered off.
The other half went looking for it.

I thought growing old would take longer.

I just realized that people are prisoners to their phones.
That's why they're called "cell" phones.

I wonder why people who spell "U" in place of "You" do with all their spare time.

How many boxes of thin mints do I have to eat before seeing some results?

Bed is the magical place where I remember all the things I forgot to do.

Wolf:  When the groundhog said six more weeks of winter I said not for him.

 




Humor October 2018--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q4.htm#Humor1018.htm   

Humor September 2018--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q3.htm#Humor0918.htm 

Humor August 2018 --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q3.htm#Humor0818.htm  

Humor July 2018--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q3.htm#Humor0718.htm 

Humor June 2018--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q2.htm#Humor0618.htm

Humor May 2018--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q2.htm#Humor0518.htm

Humor April 2018--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q2.htm#Humor0418.htm

Humor March 2018--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q1.htm#Humor0318.htm 

Humor February 2018--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q1.htm#Humor0218.htm

Humor January 2018--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book18q1.htm#Humor0118.htm 

Humor December 2017--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q4.htm#Humor1217.htm

Humor November 2017--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q4.htm#Humor1117.htm

Humor October 2017--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book17q4.htm#Humor1017.htm

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 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

 




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