Tidbits on September 26 2019
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Set 2 of Renate's Pictures From Germany
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Renate/2019September/Renate02.htm

Tidbits on September 26, 2019
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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 

My Latest Web Document
Over 400 Examples of Critical Thinking and Illustrations of How to Mislead With Statistics ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/MisleadWithStatistics.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

Human Population Over Time on Earth ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE 

Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio

Ted Talk:  Free World Needs Satire ---
https://www.ted.com/talks/patrick_chappatte_a_free_world_needs_satire?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2019-09-20&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=talk_of_the_week_image

Ted Talk:  Four Questions You Should Always Ask Your Doctor
https://www.ted.com/talks/christer_mjaset_4_questions_you_should_always_ask_your_doctor?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2019-09-20&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=bottom_right_button

Video:  There’s a lost continent 1,000 miles under Europe Scientists have tracked down the last remnants of Greater Adria ---
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a35kgz/theres-a-lost-continent-1000-miles-under-europe?utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=76870798&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9VujTcfuBpRY3fjRSFY-zTMLHyat8y68SrWKkpESDMsy622KwODAdbvCzlqDWNQ-lhp3jz-Pr7CF5rQQA0RbaYosaXXQ&_hsmi=76870798

Watch Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig Taking Batting Practice in Strikingly Restored Footage (1931) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2019/09/watch-babe-ruth-and-lou-gehrig-taking-batting-practice-in-strikingly-restored-footage-1931.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Sunset Hill House Hotel (near our cottage) ---
https://www.thesunsethillhouse.com/
Watch the video
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 

Mother Secretly Records Her Autistic Son Singing for the First Time ---
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7476573/Nine-year-old-boy-autism-gains-viral-rendition-Alexandra-Burkes-Hallelujah.html

Bob Moog Demonstrates His Revolutionary Moog Model D Synthesizer ---
http://www.openculture.com/2019/09/bob-moog-demonstrates-his-revolutionary-moog-model-d-synthesizer.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Creative World of Music Parodies ---
https://jborden.com/2019/09/16/music-monday-the-creative-world-of-music-parodies/

Fall in Philadelphia (Hall & Oates) ---
https://jborden.com/2019/09/23/music-monday-fall-in-philadelphia-hall-oates/

Bob Jensen's Links to Free Music
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm

Photographs and Art

The Amazon Rain Forest Is Nearly Gone ---
https://time.com/amazon-rainforest-disappearing/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=20190914&xid=newsletter-brief
Amazon rainforest fires: Everything we know and how you can help ---
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/amazon-rainforest-fire-whats-happening-now-and-how-you-can-help-update-indigenous-tribes/
If forests go up in smoke, so can carbon offsets ---
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/13/20859156/forests-fires-carbon-offsets-amazon-california

Media Reporting of the Saudi Oil Facilities Was Awful
The Strike On Saudi Oil Facilities Was Unprecedented And It Underscores Far Greater Issues ---
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29874/the-strike-on-saudi-oil-facilities-was-unprecedented-and-it-underscores-far-greater-issues

American Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Angeles & Detroit Look Today, Compared to the 1930s and 1940s ---
http://www.openculture.com/2019/09/american-cities-then-now.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Philosophy @ the Virtual Museum (philosophy visualization) --- https://commons.mtholyoke.edu/philosophyatthemuseum/

Saturn's rings shine in Hubble's latest portrait ---
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-saturn-hubble-latest-portrait.html

Epic Photographs of Oktoberfest ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/oktoberfest-photos-prove-its-more-than-a-debaucherous-drinking-fest-2018-9

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

How to Download the Books That Just Entered the Public Domain ---
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvq99b/how-to-download-the-books-that-just-entered-the-public-domain

John Milton’s Hand Annotated Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio: A New Discovery by a Cambridge Scholar ---
http://www.openculture.com/2019/09/john-miltons-hand-annotated-copy-of-shakespeares-first-folio.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Questioning the Dogma of Banned Books Week ---
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/2102/

Free Electronic Literature --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Now in Another Tidbits Document
Political Quotations on September 26, 2019
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2019/TidbitsQuotations092619.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

The Amazon Rain Forest Is Nearly Gone ---
https://time.com/amazon-rainforest-disappearing/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=20190914&xid=newsletter-brief

Amazon rainforest fires: Everything we know and how you can help ---
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/amazon-rainforest-fire-whats-happening-now-and-how-you-can-help-update-indigenous-tribes/

There Are More Fires Burning in Africa Than Anywhere on Earth ----
https://time.com/5665794/africa-forest-fires-amazon/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=20190901&xid=newsletter-brief

If forests go up in smoke, so can carbon offsets ---
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/13/20859156/forests-fires-carbon-offsets-amazon-california

We Need to Talk About Authorship Abuse (gaming) ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/09/12/academe-must-develop-greater-sense-ethical-responsibility-dealing-authorship-abuse

Abuse of authorship is increasingly common in higher education. For example, too many academics are either listing the names of people on papers who have not contributed to those papers or they are not including the names of those who have.

As a result, authorship has become a false signifier of intellectual productivity and authority. And if we allow such authorship abuse to continue unabated, we are abdicating our responsibilities as scholars, furthering distrust in educational institutions and delegitimizing our ability to make knowledge claims that can enable us to effect change.

Simply put, an author is a person who has contributed real and identifiable intellectual labor to earn their position on a paper. Giving credit to those who do not deserve it -- or, equally problematic, not crediting those who have done work -- compromises the trustworthiness of our research and our honor as scholars. The perversion of authorship is being reproduced through unreflective practice, apprenticeship into inappropriate practices and, at times, outright dishonesty, facilitated by the growing use of problematic metrics of scholarship.

Over the past century, authorship has come to matter enormously in higher education. Getting and keeping a faculty position relies on it. Salaries depend on it, as scholars' annual evaluations focus on "productivity" measured in manuscripts. Program ratings are linked to it. Quantitative measures of the impact of authorship drive how our peers, institutions and funding agencies value our work. The desire for status, power and resources has added to perversions of authorship for students and faculty members.

Perhaps the most well-known form of authorship abuse comes from using power to insert oneself as an author on a paper. Informal and formal interactions with colleagues at conferences, dissertation proposal hearings, and reappointment and tenure meetings have revealed how networks of collaboration, reciprocity and bullying shape decisions about who becomes an author. The story of advisers who insist on being listed on students' papers without contributing directly to the work has been repeated so much as to have become a trope.

Abuses of power are not required, however, to gain unwarranted authorship. With increased pressure for doctoral students to have publications before going on the job market, it is not uncommon to hear students making quid pro quo arrangements in which one will list another on a paper and expect the same in turn. We need to ask ourselves: What do we want our students to learn about authorship?

Ironically, scholars' efforts to be "nice" or "generous" can also lead to problematic authorship practices. "Gift authorship," defined as authorship given to a person who has not contributed significantly to the production of a manuscript, is a particularly insidious form of authorship abuse in this respect. Listing someone on a paper who has not contributed significantly to its development may seem like a pro-social activity, a gift, but authorship is not meant to be determined by niceties.

We need to be aware that niceness is a discursive strategy that defends the status quo while cloaking itself in morality. The desire to be nice in situations that depend upon honest assessments is especially worrisome as it inappropriately serves to uphold powerful social networks, which in academe tend to be dominated by white men. The combination of niceness and the maintenance of those social networks thus carries the strong possibility of reproducing and furthering inequities related to race, gender, sexual orientation, class and place of origin.

Fighting a Hydra-Headed Problem

What are we as an academic community to do about proliferating authorship abuses? To avoid situations where we are making subjective decisions based on sympathy or generosity, we should rely on published guidelines for authorship. Our common sense cannot be the sole basis for such decisions. Whom we view as making a significant contribution, whom we think is deserving of the "gift" of authorship, or whom we think could benefit us in the future is shaped through implicit biases and stereotypes based on characteristics including a person's race and gender. In short, inequity begets inequity.

To fight the hydra-headed problem of authorship abuse, we do not need to develop new standards and procedures; we have them. For example, organizations including the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors have provided nearly identical guidance when it comes to determining who is an author, who is not and who deserves formal acknowledgment. Journals also refer to such authorship guidelines on their websites and publications. Tools have also been developed to determine how to apply those standards in real-world, complex situations. Steadfastly following the standards and guidelines can help us treat people fairly and protect those who are most vulnerable from harm.

Continued in article

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

Is This the Key to Motivating My Students? No More Mr. Nice Guy?!
https://jborden.com/2019/09/21/is-this-the-key-to-motivating-my-students-no-more-mr-nice-guy/

Read about Randy Pausch and Coach Graham at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#Randy
Scroll down to "Randy Pausch"
Randy claims Coach Graham was the most critical of players he respected the most on the team. He sort of ignored the ones he valued the least.

Herman Hollerith (1860-1929)  is widely regarded as the father of modern automatic computation ---
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/hollerith.html

Bob Jensen's threads on computing and networking history ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#---ComputerNetworking-Includin

Open Syllabus Project: Co-Assignment Galaxy ---
http://galaxy.opensyllabus.org/

Jensen Comment
I find the graphic hard to use, but the search engine is great. For example, search for "Accounting."

Open Textbook Library --- https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks

Example:  There are a surprising number of accounting textbooks available
 

Jensen Comment
The problem with open textbooks is the lack of incentive to invest in high quality end-of-chapter materials (cases and problems) along with the incentives for multimedia supplements that accompany the top commercial textbooks (yeah, I know that usually these aren't so great, but sometimes they're terrific). Much depends on the activism of faculty users of open textbooks to contribute new materials. Ideally open textbooks become a lot like Wikipedia. If they don't catch on with active wiki-like additions and corrections, quality probably varies alot by discipline. I suspect that math open textbooks are much more enduring than financial accounting textbooks because rules of financial accounting change so frequently (weekly) that even commercial textbooks are obsolete when each new edition is announced. Unless they are wiki-like it's hard to keep new open book editions rolling out annually.

The wonderful thing about free textbooks is that when their quality improves commercial publishers must invest more to stay ahead of the free textbooks available. This includes more frequent updated editions, higher quality supplementary materials (like cases and problems), and online services.

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

For example, here's what's available and planned for accountancy ---
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Accountancy

SDG Academy --- https://sdgacademy.org/
Free educational resources (including prestigious MOOC courses)  from the world’s leading experts on sustainable development

US Census Bureau:  Statistics in Schools: History Activities Social studies ---
www.census.gov/programs-surveys/sis/activities/history.html

Media Reporting of the Saudi Oil Facilities Was Awful
The Strike On Saudi Oil Facilities Was Unprecedented And It Underscores Far Greater Issues ---
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29874/the-strike-on-saudi-oil-facilities-was-unprecedented-and-it-underscores-far-greater-issues

The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer ---
https://medium.com/@samo.burja/the-youtube-revolution-in-knowledge-transfer-cb701f82096a

Growing up as an aspiring javelin thrower in Kenya, the young Julius Yego was unable to find a coach: in a country where runners command the most prestige, mentorship was practically nonexistent. Determined to succeed, he instead watched YouTube recordings of Norwegian Olympic javelin thrower Andreas Thorkildsen, taking detailed notes and attempting to imitate the fine details of his movements. Yego went on to win gold in the 2015 World Championships in Beijing, silver in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and holds the 3rd-longest javelin throw on world record. He acquired a coach only six months before he competed in the 2012 London Olympics — over a decade after he started practicing.

Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit knowledge transmission which is historically unprecedented, facilitating the preservation and spread of knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery.

Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written books about it. Further, tacit knowledge serves as an obstacle to centralization, as its local transmission provides an advantage for decentralized players that can’t be replicated by a central authority. The center cannot appropriate what it cannot access: there will never be a state monopoly on plumbing or dentistry, for example.

Some will object that tacit knowledge acquisition must be possible without close observation of a skilled practitioner; otherwise we would never see skilled autodidacts. It’s true that some are able to acquire tacit knowledge by directly interacting with the object of mastery and figuring out things on their own, but this is very difficult. True autodidacts who can invent their own techniques are rare, but many can learn by watching and imitating.

The scarcity of people who can truly learn from what they’re given is why the massive open online courses of the early 2010s didn’t work out, with 95% of enrolled students failing to complete even a single course, and year-on-year student retention rates below 10%. Learners who wish to acquire tacit knowledge, but who are unable to figure things out on their own, are therefore limited by their access to personal observation of skilled people.

Massively available video recordings of practitioners in action change this entirely. Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of access range from the specialized trades, where electricians illustrate how to use multimeters and how to assess breaker boxes, to less specialized domestic activities, where a novice can learn basic knife-handling techniques from an expert. YouTube reports that searches in the “how-to” category has grown 70% year-on-year.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Two days ago a replacement gasket for an Amana lower freezer door arrived (from Amazon). When I commenced to take the old gasket off I discovered that replacing the old gasket was going to be a bit trickier than I realized for a very old refrigerator that came with our house when we purchased the house 15 years ago. I had no original refrigerator manual and most likely would have to spend hours locating the manual if I had one in the first place. So I went to YouTube and in seconds found dozens of helper videos for replacing Amana freezer door gaskets. I watched one of these videos and discovered how to take out 32 panel screws to remove the inner door panel and how to heat my new gasket in a clothes dryer to get it to shape properly for replacement.

The training needed to do the job took me less than ten minutes on YouTube. Millions of similar training videos are available for fixing almost anything imaginable and addressing a myriad of health issues should the need ever arise.

My point here is that YouTube makes it easy to find just-in-time training modules in a matter of seconds.

For education modules my first approach is usually to look in Wikipedia. However, some educational modules are better in video. This morning Tyler Hall made reference to the well-known Monte Hall game theory problem ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/09/the-intuitive-monty-hall-problem.html

Over the years I've occasionally written tidbits about the Monte Hall problem. But it helps to renew my old memory on this and other technical education issues that come up every day. First thing I went to Wikipedia ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

Then for added kicks I went to a sampling of the many YouTube modules on the Monte Hall problem (search for Monte Hall) at www.youtube.com

My point here is that YouTube is truly amazing for training and education needs. It's better than Wikipedia in terms of coverage of topics like freezer door gasket replacements or replacing the starter cord on Toro lawn mower (which was also a problem for me this summer).

Of course YouTube now has amazing free education channels maintained by top educators (think complete course modules for many disciplines)---
https://www.youtube.com/edu

My point here is that YouTube is evolving to a point where it's easy to lose sight of the many wonderful ways you can learn from YouTube. It's not the YouTube you forgot to follow closely over the last 10 years even though you used it for specific needs quite often.

Some of the most wonderful things in life really are free. Activists seeking to break up giant tech companies like Amazon and Google should keep one thing in mind. Those tech companies can bring us a lot of wonderful things for free or with ease because of the ability to cover losses in one area with profits in another area. What would happen to the many wonderful free videos we get on YouTube or the free or very cheap books that can be downloaded from Amazon if we tear those companies apart?

Sure we can take all the videos about repairing freezer gaskets (so I would have to phone for a maintenance technician) and videos of the Monte Hall problem away from the public. And sure we can restore some shopping in malls (think bookstores) by banning online shopping from Amazon. And we make it a lot more expensive to file tax returns by removing all the tax helper videos from YouTube.

But in this regard I would like you to watch Milton Friedman's lesson on "spoons" ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/08/spoons-are-in-aisle-9.html
Chopsticks would be even better

New Mexico unveils a plan to give its residents free college (irrespective of family income) ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/New-Mexico-Governor-Unveils/247175?cid=db&source=ams&sourceId=296279
Children of millionaires are will be eligible for free college, leaving more money for fancy cars and luxury condos.

. . .

The plan, which requires approval and funding by the Democratic-controlled Legislature to take effect, would allow in-state students to receive free tuition and fees at any of New Mexico’s 29 public two- and four-year colleges, beginning next fall. Students would have to maintain a 2.5 grade-point average to remain eligible. Recent graduates of high schools and high-school-equivalency programs could receive four years of free tuition at any public institution. Adults who had been out of school for a while would get two years of free community-college tuition. If approved, the plan would make New Mexico the 21st state to cover two years of tuition at community colleges, the governor’s announcement said.

“This program is an absolute game-changer for New Mexico,” Lujan Grisham wrote. “Higher education in this state, a victim of the recession, has been starved in recent years. We are pivoting to a robust reinvestment in higher learning — specifically and directly in our students.” In the short term, she said, the program will increase college enrollments and success rates. “In the long run, we’ll see improved economic growth, improved outcomes for New Mexican workers and families and parents, a better-trained and better-compensated work force.” Students would be eligible regardless of their immigration status.

. . .

‘A Terrible Idea’

Wesley R. Whistle, a senior adviser with New America’s education-policy program, argued that a last-dollar approach — which fills in only where other grants and scholarships leave off — isn’t the best way to help the neediest students. He prefers first-dollar approaches, like Indiana’s 21st Century Scholarship Program. They pay scholarships on top of any other aid students might get. That means students can use Pell Grants and other scholarships to cover tuition and fees, which Whistle said account for just under half of all college costs. The additional state money can go toward living and other expenses so students can graduate debt-free, or close to it.

Whistle also said that if a state is spending money to cover tuition but not enough to enhance academic and advising programs, graduation rates will continue to lag. “If you’re sending students to schools that are under-resourced, you aren’t setting them up for success,” he said.

Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College, called free tuition “a terrible idea” in an opinion essay published last week by The Chronicle. He argued that the main beneficiaries of such programs are students who are relatively well off. A sharp increase in applications as a result of the programs could make colleges more selective, he wrote, hurting the disadvantaged students the policies are supposed to help. Graduation rates at less-selective colleges could decline even further, he argued.

He’s among those who argue that a more-equitable approach would be to increase the size of the federal Pell Grant, available for students whose annual family income is under $50,000. But the Pell’s purchasing power has been eroded by inflation.

Even if last-dollar free-college programs offer more limited financial benefits to some low-income students, the message they send — that college is attainable and valuable — is worth their cost, according to Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University, and Michelle Miller-Adams, a professor of political science at Grand Valley State University. They wrote, in another opinion piece in The Chronicle, that programs that benefit all students are more likely to attract the political support they need to succeed.

Jensen Comment
To the extent that flagship universities are required to meet in-state demand this could virtually eliminate enrollments of out-of-state and international tuition-paying applicants.

Unanswered is how this new program will affect classroom, faculty and dorm capacity and funding for graduate programs.

It would seem that flagship universities will also have to put up admission barriers (think reading, writing, and arithmetic) or have an open door program with new funding for teaching remedial  reading, writing, and arithmetic.

There's also the definitional issue with what constitutes a "resident." Presumably all of New Mexico's undocumented residents now will get free college such that remedial courses must be offered in languages other than English like Spanish and Chinese.

The cost of this new program is mind-boggling unless economized with high admission standards (which is how other nations ration free college to the top 1/3 of the intellectually elite) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Tertiary

The 2.5 grade average stipulation in this new program is a sham since the median gpa across the USA is an A- and a C is tantamount to a failing grade ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Also what happens to a poor-family student who falls into a 2.3 grade average? That becomes tantamount to literally flunking out. How many teachers will bump grades to prevent this from happening? Kiss academic standards goodbye!

Also unanswered is how this will affect job availability for residents of all ages who do not have college diplomas. Will all the McJobs be taken up by the many New Mexico college graduates.

Universities and grad schools in the US with zero tuition ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-universities-graduate-schools-military-academies-no-tuition
Keep in mind that virtually all universities have some full-ride funding for selected (usually low-income) students, and some graduate programs are "free" such as most accountancy doctoral programs (although some work-study is required such as serving teaching and research assistants). Typically in accountancy doctoral programs tuition, room, and board is covered with work-study until the dissertation stage when full-ride fellowships become available. It's also somewhat common for accounting doctoral students to get full-ride fellowships throughout the program (which I was fortunate to get for five years at Stanford). The KMPG Foundation has a full-ride fellowship program for minority students in selected accounting doctoral programs.

Some states have virtually free community colleges, and New Mexico will offer four-year tuition-free college to all state residents if its legislature comes up with the funding ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/09/19/doubt-and-hope-about-new-mexicos-free-tuition-plan?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c60cb5f662-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c60cb5f662-197565045&mc_cid=c60cb5f662&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

How to Mislead With Statistics

Monumental Global MBA Career Shifts and Successes ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/business-schools/2018/insights/alumni-career-path/
Jensen Comment
The global success of prestigious MBA degrees does not mean that the same successes are filtering down to MBA programs in less-prestigious colleges and universities (or their undergraduate business programs). Prestigious MBA programs succeed heavily because their admission standards correlate heavily with with prestigious admission credentials.

Correlation is not necessarily causation. I once heard a Dean from MIT say (in a speech) that MIT students will generally success as long as MIT doesn't stand in their way.

Reproducibility and Replicability in Science --- www.nap.edu/catalog/25303/reproducibility-and-replicability-in-science

Contributors

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences; Policy and Global Affairs; Committee on National Statistics; Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences; Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board; Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics; Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics; Committee on Science, Engineering, Medicine, and Public Policy; Board on Research Data and Information; Committee on Reproducibility and Replicability in Science

Description

One of the pathways by which the scientific community confirms the validity of a new scientific discovery is by repeating the research that produced it. When a scientific effort fails to independently confirm the computations or results of a previous study, some fear that it may be a symptom of a lack of rigor in science, while others argue that such an observed inconsistency can be an important precursor to new discovery.

[read full description]

Topics

• Surveys and Statistics
• Policy for Science and Technology — Research and Data
• Policy for Science and Technology

Suggested Citation

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25303.

Bob Jensen's threads on the lack of replication in academic accounting research ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm

Free Speech Laws Mushroom in Wake of Campus Protests ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/09/16/states-passing-laws-protect-college-students-free-speech?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=358aa6240a-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-358aa6240a-197565045&mc_cid=358aa6240a&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

College is more expensive than ever, but 'almost no one' is paying sticker price ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/college-expensive-most-students-dont-pay-full-cost

Cut Too Deep? Tuition Discounting at a Crossroads ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/09/23/cut-too-deep-tuition-discounting-crossroads?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c87d143421-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c87d143421-197565045&mc_cid=c87d143421&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

There are so many things that are more important in university education than tuition cost
Arizona State Business School Abandons Tuition-Free MBAs After Rankings Boost Fades ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/09/arizona-state-business-school-abandons-tuition-free-mbas-after-rankings-boost-fades.html

Arizona State University’s business school used a $50 million donation to bet on a future where its M.B.A. is free. Four years after slashing tuition costs for full-time students to zero, the dean says the cost is still too high for many people.

Turns out, luring talented graduate students to a two-year degree program in the current hot job market requires even more creative financing, says Amy Hillman, dean of ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business. The sticker price of business school, which can add up to six figures, is just one of several factors that keep millennials from pursuing an M.B.A.

“We thought by announcing that everyone would be getting the same deal on a world-class education, we’d get a very different class,” she says. “We didn’t know how much scholarships were being used by our peer schools” to lure the same small pool of talent.

In 2015 when the university launched its novel experiment to draw a more diverse M.B.A. class, the news of free M.B.A.s for everybody accepted was met with a flood of interest. Admissions officers were inundated with a record number of applications for the inaugural class of fully funded business-school candidates.

The scholarship program successfully paved a path for many early-career workers in the nonprofit sector and education, Ms. Hillman says. But school leaders underestimated the fierceness of the competition from other M.B.A. programs.

Many universities have started to heavily subsidize the cost of a degree—which can top $200,000 with living expenses at highly ranked programs such as Harvard Business School and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania—by awarding millions of dollars in scholarships and financial aid each year. Ms. Hillman says schools like hers, regarded among the nation’s top 50 programs by academic-rankings publishers, attract thousands of candidates eager to pursue an M.B.A. at a fraction of the prices those elite schools charge.

Free tuition alone doesn’t provide a strong enough incentive to return to school for some prospects who might need two years’ worth of living expenses to attend full-time, she says. Other admitted applicants were turning down Carey’s offer for even richer scholarship packages at other business schools, the dean adds, highlighting the value of a more flexible financial-aid strategy.

Jensen Comment
Perhaps free college advocates need to study some of the details of this ASU experiment.

How to Mislead With Statistics

What's the Best State for Teachers?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2019/09/whats_the_best_state_for_teachers_this_years_answer_might_surprise_you.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2-rm&M=58940204&U=2290378&UUID=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f

Seeking a stable teacher salary and a healthy work environment? A new analysis suggests heading north.

This year, North Dakota took first place in personal finance site WalletHub's annual ranking of the best and worst states to be a teacher.

The other states (after North Dakota)  rounding out the top five spots this year?

·         New Jersey

·         Pennsylvania

·         Wyoming

·         Connecticut 

The ranking is based mostly on what the website calls "opportunity and competition"—factors including the average salary and starting pay for teachers, potential for income growth over the course of a career, pension, tenure protections, and job competition in the state. Scores on these metrics make up 70 percent of a state's rating. 

The other 30 percent comes from measures of a teacher's work environment and quality of life. These categories cover things like per-pupil spending and teacher-student ratio, but also union strength, commute time, and how supported teachers feel in their jobs. 

To calculate these scores, WalletHub uses census data, federal education data, and data from the National Education Association, the National Council on Teacher Quality, the Learning Policy Institute, and The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, among other sources. A few of the measures are taken from some of WalletHub's other state ranking lists, like statewide school quality and how friendly states are to working moms. 

Continued in article

The worst states are New Hampshire at rank 50/51 and and Arizona at rank 51/51.

 Jensen Comment
These rankings are misleading for various reasons. First and foremost is cost of living (think housing costs). When renting or buying homes, teacher salaries don't go far in very high living cost states of Connecticut and New Jersey. The ranking in the above study seemingly ignored differences between states in terms of "affordability" where the Midwest (think Iowa and Ohio) win out ---
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity/affordability
Anecdotally, we have a teacher who moved to New Hampshire from New Jersey because she was seeking a higher quality students and better deals in housing quality for the money.

Secondly, the "Report Card"  for for schools ranks New Hampshire at Rank 8 way above its Rank 50 of being  "Best State for Teachers." This alone should tell us that something is misleading in these sets of rankings
https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/NPE-Report-Card-Smaller.pdf
My opinion is that New Hampshire has no trouble attracting relatively very high quality teachers in the Granite State's K-12 schools. The State is doing something right to attract school teachers as well as retirees.

Thirdly, the rankings illustrate a problem when there are too many ranking criteria. For example, one criterion in the "Best State for Teachers" ranking is "pension" protection. What a joke in those rankings since teacher pensions are in worse trouble in Connecticut and New Jersey relative to pension protections in most other states. Connecticut in particular is in deep trouble with badly under funded pensions ---
https://www.statedatalab.org/news/detail/connecticut-retiree-health-care-severely-underfunded
New Jersey is among the least fiscally sound states in the USA ---
https://www.statedatalab.org/state_data_and_comparisons/detail/new-jersey

The problem is that with so many other criteria in the ranking formula, pension protections have very little impact on the rankings

My main point is that rankings should always be questioned in terms of what (and how many) variables are included versus what (and how many) variables are excluded.

Over 400 Examples of Critical Thinking and Illustrations of How to Mislead With Statistics ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/MisleadWithStatistics.htm

Field’s Top Young Scholar Asks, Why Don’t More Women Study Economics?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Field-s-Top-Young-Scholar/247135?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=296279

Economics runs in Emi Nakamura’s family. Her mother, father, and aunt are economists, and her grandfather was an econometrician. A macroeconomist at the University of California at Berkeley, Nakamura won this year’s John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under age 40, for her studies of price "stickiness" — whether and how prices of goods and service change — and how government spending affects the economy. She was cited for bringing a data-oriented, empirical approach to macroeconomic study, which is usually more about models and theories. She is only the fourth woman to win the prize since its inception in 1947. The Chronicle talked to her about her research, the importance of the Federal Reserve, and attending, as a child, a Japanese public school in Tokyo in the summer.

. . .

What percentage of women are there in Berkeley’s graduate program?

It varies a lot, but it’s not 50 percent; it may be something like a third. All economics programs would like it to be 50 percent. What I’ve heard is that it drops off a lot sometime in undergrad. It’s something I’d like to know more about because girls and women do better in school from elementary to high school. My understanding is that if it were completely blind, universities would have substantially higher than 50 percent women. So women are better students at every level. What happens to make women not want to go into economics? It may matter whether you have female professors. I think those are important questions because it certainly seems to me like the field could benefit from having more women.

If you were able to advise a president of the United States, how would he or she govern differently?

One crucial thing to remember right now is how important the institution of the Federal Reserve is. People forget what a remarkable victory we’ve had when it comes to inflation. Back in 1980, inflation was over 10 percent, and there was a general sense that it was very hard to lower inflation. There are still many countries in the world where this is the case. But in the United States, inflation over the last 30 or 40 years fell dramatically, and now it been very stable, around 2 percent for many years. This is an enormous victory. My sense is that it has a lot to do with the fact that the Federal Reserve is such a strong institution, and quite an apolitical institution, supported by both Democrats and Republicans. This institution took a really long time to build up. This is something we have to really be careful about not destroying, because it takes a long time to get it back.

Jensen Comment
Accountancy, unlike economics, graduated more women than men over the past few decades. This was not the case before the 1960s when there were some accounting jobs for women, but not jobs as auditors that comprised the majority of new hires in CPA firms.. Now there are more entry-level female auditors than male auditors. Reasons are complicated but it's mostly that women on average graduate with higher gpas and are now valued in all specialties of accountancy.

There are still more male audit partners in spite of initiatives in large CPA firms to promote more women partnerships. Reasons are complicated, but among other things women often tire of the travel and non-accounting promotional long hours required of most partners (think golf and United Fund leadership). Like law partners, CPA firm partners are valued most for the clients they draw to the firms.

About 40% of the Ph.D. graduates in accountancy are female ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/FAQs.pdf
Virtually all Ph.D. graduates in accountancy join tenure tracks of colleges. Fortunately, demand for those graduates greatly exceeds supply at relatively high salaries.
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/FAQs.pdf
The numbers of Ph.D. graduates are greatly limited by the limited number of and capacities of doctoral programs in accountancy ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf
Note the yearly totals at the bottom of the above chart.

Just When You Think McDonald’s Couldn’t Get More Mechanical… ---
https://www.tfp.org/just-when-you-think-mcdonalds-couldnt-get-more-mechanical/

A group of ophthalmology researchers in China got caught trying to pull the wool over the eyes of readers by falsely claiming to have used a therapy that doesn’t exist. ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/16/the-problem-is-that-there-is-no-il-26-gene-in-the-mouse-an-exasperated-letter-leads-to-a-retraction/

A psychology researcher at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has left a tenure-track position there less than a year after she and a co-author retracted a paper ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/19/northwestern-psychology-researcher-out-following-retraction/#more-116197

Similar to the Cheating of James Hunton:  FSU Criminologist Accused of Cooking the Books ---
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190924-Criminology?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=296279

. . .

The behind-the-scenes fight over these (five) flawed papers has escalated into something more fraught than your standard academic disagreement. While Stewart  has remained publicly mum, and hasn’t responded to multiple interview requests made over several weeks, privately he has been vocal about what he views as a campaign of harassment against him. In emails and text messages sent to colleagues, Stewart has portrayed himself as the target of “data thugs” who are attempting to ruin his career. In an email to Florida State administrators, he accused one of his co-authors of having “essentially lynched me and my academic character.” It’s a loaded verb choice not only because Stewart is black, but also because two of the five papers in question focus on the horrific history of lynching in the United States.

The co-author Stewart referred to in that email is Justin Pickett. For the last few months, Pickett, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at New York’s University at Albany, has repeatedly pushed Stewart to share the relevant data and has posted online a 27-page critique of suspicious findings in one of the papers

He has also contacted Florida State administrators and journal editors, urging them to investigate. 

Pickett’s actions have divided the field of criminology: Some applaud his zeal in attempting to uncover the truth, while others see him as violating unspoken norms of collegiality. Stewart and Pickett are locked in a dispute that reflects a broader debate in social science about the reliability of results and the transparency of methods.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This reminds me of the accounting professor James Hunton scandal. Hunton refused to cooperate even with investigators within his own university (Bentley) where he was accordingly terminated and has apparently withdrawn from academe after over 30 co-authored papers were retracted from various journals ---

REPORT OF JUDITH A. MALONE, BENTLEY UNIVERSITY ETHICS OFFICER, CONCERNING DR. JAMES E. HUNTON
July 21, 2014 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

Pursuant to the Bentley University Ethics Complaint Procedures (“Ethics Policy”), this report summarizes the results of an eighteen - month investigation into two separate allegations of research misconduct that were received by Bentley in November 2012 and January 2013 against James E. Hunton, a former Professor of Accountancy. The complainants – one a confidential reporter (as defined in the Ethics Policy) and the other a publisher – alleged that Dr. Hunton engaged in research misconduct in connection wit h two papers that he published while a faculty member at the University: “A Field Experiment Comparing the Outcomes of Three Fraud Brainstorming Procedures: Nominal Group, Round Robin, and Open Discussion,” The Accounting Review 85 (3): 911 - 935 (“Fraud Br barnstorming”) and “The Relationship between Perceived Tone at the Top and Earnings Quality,” Contemporary Accounting Research 28 (4): 1190 - 1224 (“Tone at the Top”).

Because of concerns regarding Fraud Brainstorming that the editors at The Accounting Review had been discussing with Dr. Hunton since May 2012, the editors withdrew that paper in November 2012. Bentley received the allegation of research misconduct from the confidential reporter later that month. The confidential reporter also raised questions about ten other articles that Dr. Hunton published or provided data for while he was at Bentley, which, the reporter alleged, raised similar questions of research integrity.

In my role as Ethics Officer, it was my duty to make the preliminary determination n about whether the allegations warranted a full investigation. To make that determination, I met with Dr. Hunton in person when Bentley received this allegation, after I first instructed Bentley IT to back up and preserve all of his electronic data store d on Bentley’s servers. During that meeting, we discussed the allegation, I explained the process that would be followed if I found an investigation was warranted, and I described the need for his cooperation, including the specific admonition that he pre serve, and make available to me, all relevant materials, including electronic and paper documents. This information and these instructions were confirmed in writing to Dr. Hunton. Dr. Hunton resigned shortly after that meeting, which coincided with my de termination that a full investigation was warranted.

In January 2013 as the investigation was just getting underway, Bentley received the second allegation of research misconduct from the editor of Contemporary Accounting Research. The editor had contacted ted Dr. Hunton directly in November 2012 with concerns about Tone at the Top after the Fraud Brainstorming paper was retracted. The journal brought the issue to Bentley’s attention after the response it received failed to resolve its concerns. When Bentley received this second allegation, I informed Dr. Hunton of it, as well.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The last paragraph of the article suggests that Professor Hunton did not cooperate in the investigation to the extent that it is unknown if his subsequently retracted papers were also based upon fabricated data. The last paragraph reads as follows:

Bentley cannot determine with confidence which other papers may be based on fabricated data. We will identify all of the co - authors on papers Dr. Hunton published while he was at Bentley that involve research data. We will inform them that, unless they have independent evidence of the validity of the data, we plan to ask the journals in which the papers they co - authored with Dr. Hunton were published to determine, with the assistance of the co - authors, whether the data analyzed in the papers were valid. The various journals will then have the discretion to decide whether any further action is warranted, including retracting or qualifying, with regard to an y of Dr. Hunton’s papers that they published

The Hunton scandal along with cheating scandals of other professors are summarized at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoFabricate

Columbia historian stepping down after plagiarism finding ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/17/columbia-historian-stepping-down-after-plagiarism-finding/

Bob Jensen's threads on professors who plagiarized or otherwise cheated ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

Berkeley Underground Economy in Course Admission:  Scalping Course Seats
https://www.dailycal.org/2019/09/13/waitlisted-students-offer-to-pay-classmates-to-drop-courses/

Multiple students on campus have offered to pay their classmates to drop out of classes they are waitlisted for, raising concerns about over-enrollment and advising.

Campus sophomore David Wang reposted a screenshot on the Overheard at UC Berkeley Facebook page showing a post by a Haas senior in their final semester before going abroad offering to pay $100 to the first five students to drop UGBA 102B, “Introduction to Managerial Accounting.” The student in question needed the class to graduate, and claimed that the “advising office was no help, so I’m taking matters into my own hands.”

Wang said in an email that in this student’s situation it would have made sense for advisers to make an exception for the senior since their graduation status was in jeopardy.

“I do not blame the students for paying his/her classmate to get in the class — I would do the same in that situation,” Wang said in an email.

A similar post popped up on a bCourses discussion page for Global 173, “International Human Rights.” The student who posted the request, campus senior Diego Pena, was inspired by the Facebook post. He announced that he would also be paying the first five people to drop the class $100 each and said in the post that he had “nothing to lose.”

Pena, a physics major, explained in an email that it is his final semester at UC Berkeley and he needs the class for a breadth requirement.

“I thought paying a few hundred dollars was way more convenient than not graduating and having to take classes at community college again next semester,” Pena said in an email. “I’m in L&S and have already maxed out my units so they won’t allow me to take more classes.”

Jensen Comment
Rather than get in trouble with university officials and possibly the law, why don't students turn to the many online alternatives from prestigious universities such as taking managerial accounting from the University of North Carolina or Penn State or Purdue or Northwestern or hundreds of other top universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Under the circumstances will Berkeley block transfer credits from top universities?

Earned Income Tax Credit --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

. . .

The direct cost of the EITC to the U.S. federal government was about $56 billion in 2012. The IRS has estimated that between 21% and 25% of this cost ($11.6 to $13.6 billion) is due to EITC payments that were issued improperly to recipients who did not qualify for the EITC benefit that they received.[38] For the 2013 tax year the IRS paid an estimated $13.6 billion in bogus claims. In total the IRS has overpaid as much as $132.6 billion in EITC over the last ten years.[39] 
The direct fiscal cost of the EITC may be partially offset by two factors: any new taxes (such as payroll taxes paid by employers) generated by new workers drawn by the EITC into the labor force; and taxes generated on additional spending done by families receiving earned income tax credit. 
Some economists have noted that the EITC might conceivably cause reductions in entitlement spending that result from individuals being lifted out of poverty by their EITC benefit check. However, because the pre-tax income determines eligibility for most state and federal benefits, the EITC rarely changes a taxpayer's eligibility for state or federal aid benefits. 
In his book The Rise of Big Government: How Egalitarianism Conquered America, political economist Sven R Larson notes that when the EITC is combined with other welfare programs it can have substantial marginal-tax effects. By 2016 tax rates, for a family of four making $30,000, a $5,000 rise in income would result in a rise in the federal income tax and a reduction in EITC and other benefits equal to the marginal tax rate on an income of $467,000. 

The EITC and the Extensive Margin: A Reappraisal
by Henrik Kleven.  Princeton University and NBER---
https://www.henrikkleven.com/uploads/3/7/3/1/37310663/kleven_eitc_sep2019.pdf

This paper reconsiders the impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on labor supply at the extensive margin. I investigate every EITC reform at the state and federal level since the inception of the policy in 1975. Based on event studies comparing single women with and without children, or comparing single mothers with different numbers of children, I show that the only EITC reform associated with clear employment increases is the expansion enacted in 1993.

The employment increases in the mid-late nineties are verylarge, but they are influenced by the confounding effects of welfare reform and a booming macroeconomy. Based on different approaches that exploit variation in these confounders across household type, space and time, I show that the employment effects align closely with exposure to welfare reform and the business cycle. Single mothers who were unaffected by welfare reform (but eligible for the EITC) did not respond.

Overall and contrary to consensus, the case for sizable extensive margin effects of the EITC is fragile. I highlight the presence of informational frictions, widely documented in the literature, as a natural explanation for the absence of extensive margin responses.

Jensen Comment
Possibly some of the reduced benefit of the EITC over the years is due to the simultaneous explosion of fraud in the program that like Medicare became a piñata for criminals.

FBI is investigating after computer hackers stole $4.2 million in funds from the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol ---
https://techxplore.com/news/2019-09-oklahoma-pension-fund-million-cyber.html 

Former employees of MIT's Media Lab say the project is more salesmanship than science, and a symptom of the Media Lab’s “deploy or die” ethos ---
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/201900910-MITmedialab-food-computer?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&cid=cr&source=ams&sourceId=296279

Chronicle of Higher Education:  Free Public Higher Education is a Horrible Idea ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Free-Public-College-Is-a/247134?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&cid=cr&source=ams&sourceId=296279

Now that the race for the Democratic nomination for president is becoming more serious, it is time to take an equally serious look at the proposal for tuition-free public college that has been explicitly endorsed by candidates including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Julián Castro and that is likely to feature prominently in the upcoming debates.

Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that the proposal is not both unaffordable and unenforceable without an unprecedented level of state cooperation and expenditure. Let’s pretend as well that it is more than bumper-sticker material and actually the product of careful thought. Let’s pretend that it actually could become the law of the land.

It would be a terrible law.

There are many problems with higher education in the United States, but the greatest and most destructive is the significant inequality of access to education on the basis of race and economic status, which are often though not always intertwined. The goal of any good public policy should be to use finite public funds to reduce this inequality.

While eliminating tuition at all public colleges and universities, from the smallest community college to flagships like the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, would indeed benefit many lower-income students, it would also, and probably to a greater extent, be a boon to students from the upper-middle and upper classes.

Moreover, the policy would not alleviate and would probably worsen the most striking inefficiency in our system of public education: the abysmally low rates of graduation.

In short, tuition-free college would be a hugely inefficient use of public resources and might actually make inequality of access worse.

The median family income at Virginia is $155,500, and 67 percent of students come from the upper economic quintile. At Michigan the numbers are $154,000 and 66 percent, and at the University of Minnesota — economically diverse by comparison — $110,000 and 50 percent. By contrast, the median family income at Minnesota’s private colleges is $83,000, or slightly below the state median.

Unsurprisingly, a recent study shows that affluent students disproportionately benefit from scholarships and grants offered at these flagship public institutions. Over time these universities have become more selective, more dependent on tuition revenue as state funding has been reduced, and thus less accessible to many of the lower-income students they were ostensibly intended to serve. They behave very much like elite private colleges and universities.

Here is almost certainly what would happen if these public universities were to become tuition-free: The absence of tuition would sharply increase the number of applications they received and would make them even more selective than they are now. Already Virginia and Michigan accept fewer than 30 percent of their applicants.

Unless those elite universities completely changed their admissions practices, an increase in selectivity would benefit primarily the high-achieving students who attend private and well-funded suburban high schools. Nothing in the "free tuition" plans addresses the capacity of these universities to enroll more students, so the applicants most likely to be squeezed out would be those from precisely the economic backgrounds that the plans are intended to help.

Nor does anything in these plans address the quality and efficiency of education provided at public institutions, so the graduation rates at the less selective, woefully underfunded institutions would remain low or get lower. The current six-year graduation rate at four-year Minnesota state universities is 49 percent. Among students of color it is 44 percent. More than half of the students who would attend such a college free would not receive a degree from that college.

Absent the ability to charge tuition, and given the likelihood that federal and state subsidies would be unable to keep pace with rising costs, the most likely outcome is that these already low graduation rates would decline over time. Absent any plan to address racial inequality, the achievement gap between white students and students of color would persist. There is no simple way to deal with the problem of inequality of access to education in the United States, given the deep and complex roots of that problem in everything from racism to fiscal policies that have come increasingly to favor the wealthy. But any policy change should focus on ensuring that the greatest benefit accrues to those who are most in need, that is, those from the lower income levels.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on how free college in parts of Europe is only available to the elite Top 1/3 of Tier 2 (high school) graduates. No nation in the world offers free college to everybody ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Tertiary

Bernie Sanders Doubles Down On Promise Of ‘Free’ Healthcare And College For The ‘Undocumented’ (VIDEO)
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/09/bernie-sanders-doubles-down-on-promise-of-free-healthcare-and-college-for-the-undocumented-video/
All the sick and disabled poor people of the world should try to sneak into the USA for free medical care, long-term nursing home care, and free college. The population of the USA could triple in less than a year.

Bernie Sanders: ‘We Are Going to Impose a Moratorium on Deportations’ (until they complete their free college and a lifetime of free healthcare) ---
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/14/bernie-sanders-we-are-going-to-impose-a-moratorium-on-deportations/

Chronicle of Higher Education:  Free Public Higher Education is a Horrible Idea ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Free-Public-College-Is-a/247134?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&cid=cr&source=ams&sourceId=296279

Now that the race for the Democratic nomination for president is becoming more serious, it is time to take an equally serious look at the proposal for tuition-free public college that has been explicitly endorsed by candidates including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Julián Castro and that is likely to feature prominently in the upcoming debates.

Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that the proposal is not both unaffordable and unenforceable without an unprecedented level of state cooperation and expenditure. Let’s pretend as well that it is more than bumper-sticker material and actually the product of careful thought. Let’s pretend that it actually could become the law of the land.

It would be a terrible law.

There are many problems with higher education in the United States, but the greatest and most destructive is the significant inequality of access to education on the basis of race and economic status, which are often though not always intertwined. The goal of any good public policy should be to use finite public funds to reduce this inequality.

While eliminating tuition at all public colleges and universities, from the smallest community college to flagships like the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, would indeed benefit many lower-income students, it would also, and probably to a greater extent, be a boon to students from the upper-middle and upper classes.

Moreover, the policy would not alleviate and would probably worsen the most striking inefficiency in our system of public education: the abysmally low rates of graduation.

In short, tuition-free college would be a hugely inefficient use of public resources and might actually make inequality of access worse.

The median family income at Virginia is $155,500, and 67 percent of students come from the upper economic quintile. At Michigan the numbers are $154,000 and 66 percent, and at the University of Minnesota — economically diverse by comparison — $110,000 and 50 percent. By contrast, the median family income at Minnesota’s private colleges is $83,000, or slightly below the state median.

Unsurprisingly, a recent study shows that affluent students disproportionately benefit from scholarships and grants offered at these flagship public institutions. Over time these universities have become more selective, more dependent on tuition revenue as state funding has been reduced, and thus less accessible to many of the lower-income students they were ostensibly intended to serve. They behave very much like elite private colleges and universities.

Here is almost certainly what would happen if these public universities were to become tuition-free: The absence of tuition would sharply increase the number of applications they received and would make them even more selective than they are now. Already Virginia and Michigan accept fewer than 30 percent of their applicants.

Unless those elite universities completely changed their admissions practices, an increase in selectivity would benefit primarily the high-achieving students who attend private and well-funded suburban high schools. Nothing in the "free tuition" plans addresses the capacity of these universities to enroll more students, so the applicants most likely to be squeezed out would be those from precisely the economic backgrounds that the plans are intended to help.

Nor does anything in these plans address the quality and efficiency of education provided at public institutions, so the graduation rates at the less selective, woefully underfunded institutions would remain low or get lower. The current six-year graduation rate at four-year Minnesota state universities is 49 percent. Among students of color it is 44 percent. More than half of the students who would attend such a college free would not receive a degree from that college.

Absent the ability to charge tuition, and given the likelihood that federal and state subsidies would be unable to keep pace with rising costs, the most likely outcome is that these already low graduation rates would decline over time. Absent any plan to address racial inequality, the achievement gap between white students and students of color would persist. There is no simple way to deal with the problem of inequality of access to education in the United States, given the deep and complex roots of that problem in everything from racism to fiscal policies that have come increasingly to favor the wealthy. But any policy change should focus on ensuring that the greatest benefit accrues to those who are most in need, that is, those from the lower income levels.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on how free college in parts of Europe is only available to the elite Top 1/3 of Tier 2 (high school) graduates. No nation in the world offers free college to everybody ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Tertiary

Apple is mounting a legal challenge against the European Commission over a 2016  order to pay $14.4 billion in back taxes ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-takes-fight-against-13-billion-euro-eu-tax-order-to-court-2019-9

One year after killing off its premium Apple Watch, Apple is bringing it back with a new version that costs as much as $1,400 ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-watch-series-5-edition-ceramic-model-returns-2019-9

40 Big Tech Predictions for 2019 --- https://www.businessinsider.com/40-big-tech-predictions-2019

Books Won’t Die ---
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/17/books-wont-die/

Jensen Comment
I love books and hope that death of books will be delayed until the end of life on earth (which we're now told is not so far off).  But the statement should perhaps be amended to say "some" books won't die. Other books are entirely inefficient and even misleading when their contents are obsolete before the ink is dry. My favorite example is a tax casebook or other law casebook that may be misleading as new (daily?) court cases and authoritative rulings change the preferred endings of some of the cases. In accountancy the first-course textbooks have a longer expected life than the intermediate and advanced textbooks that need to be revised almost in real time due to new authoritative rulings and court cases taking place daily.

I have a somewhat similar problem with my Website documents. I now have so many Web documents that it's literally impossible for me to keep each one up to date. Do I withdraw those documents from public availability or do I simply let readers beware that I'm only human and can't update each and every document daily or weekly or even annually? I tend to think my outdated documents have some historical value and thus keep them available unless my Web host (Trinity University) says that I'm exceeding my cloud space (thankfully Trinity is pretty generous), although I recently had to make some large cutbacks of old stuff).

Examples of my Web documents that have varying degrees of obsolescence are linked at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/

All books I ever wrote are entirely obsolete and are now just lines on a resume or fodder for historians ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Resume.htm

Perhaps authors of obsolete books could regain copyrights and post those books on a Website. Then parts of those books could be updated (daily?) in different fonts/colors with date flags. This is one marvelous way of keeping online books alive. However, I'm too busy creating new Web documents to bother with updating my old published books.

Here's an example of one of several Web documents that I try to update daily ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/MisleadWithStatistics.htm
Publishing the above document in hard copy with be  like one photograph of a growing plant (think of Jack's upward growing beanstalk) .

MacMillan's Raw Deal in Ebook Pricing ---
http://www.infotoday.com/OnlineSearcher/Articles/The-Searchers-Viewpoint/Raw-Deal-in-Ebook-Pricing-133854.shtml

The Danger of Reusing Natural Experiments ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/09/the-danger-of-reusing-natural-experiments.html

Jensen Comment
There's added danger in the social sciences due to greatly varying circumstances over time.

For example, does short selling always reduce economic crashes?

Feds paid $1 billion in Social Security benefits to individuals without a Social Secuity Number ---
https://freebeacon.com/issues/feds-paid-1-billion-social-security-benefits-individuals-without-ssn/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=f181a5137d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_02_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-f181a5137d-46179017

Errors occurred because the agency did not keep paper applications supporting an individual’s case to receive benefits

The Social Security Administration paid $1 billion in benefits to individuals who did not have a Social Security Number (SSN), according to a new audit.

The agency’s inspector general found errors in the government’s documentation for representative payees, otherwise known as individuals who receive retirement or disability payments on behalf of another person who is incapable of managing the benefits themselves.

The audit released Friday found thousands of cases where there was no SSN on file.

Over the last decade, the agency paid $1 billion to 22,426 representative payees who "did not have an SSN, and SSA had not followed its policy to retain the paper application."

"Furthermore, unless it takes corrective action, we estimate SSA will pay about $182.5 million in benefits, annually, to representative payees who do not have an SSN or paper application supporting their selection," the inspector general said.

The inspector general also found the agency paid $853.1 million in benefits since 2004 to individuals who had been terminated as representative payees by the agency.

The inspector general said the errors occurred because the agency did not keep paper applications supporting an individual’s case to receive benefits on behalf of another and did not update its system if their status was terminated.

Only six percent of representative payees had SSNs that were properly recorded, based on the audit’s sample of 100 beneficiaries.

Government benefits are also going to illegal aliens through the representative payee system. 17 percent of representative payees in the sample did not have an SSN recorded because they were undocumented noncitizens, the inspector general said.

Illegal aliens without SSNs are allowed to receive benefits from the government when acting as representatives for their minor children.

In response to the audit, the SSA said it switched to a new Electronic Representative Payee System last year, and transferring representative payee information "may have resulted in applications showing as terminated or not selected."

The government defended the issuance of benefits to noncitizens and persons without an SSN.

 Continued in article

Former Employee Defrauded University Of Texas Law School Out Of $1.6 Million ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/09/former-employee-defrauded-texas-law-school-out-of-16-million.html 

. . .

Peggy's scheme was as basic as it was brazen. Typically, she would offer to manage a victim's (sports star's) finances—no fee—and start two bank accounts where the new client's income would be deposited as it flowed in. One was a joint account for living expenses; the other, ostensibly for investments, would be funneled into her own coffers, aided by a power of attorney that she secured thanks to her supposed legal credentials.

Other times Peggy's thievery was as simple as charging the Williamses $60,000 for their wedding when it actually cost half that, Kristin says. On another occasion, according to one of Ricky's business partners, a credit card machine at Williams's South Beach restaurant was swapped out for one that fed into an outside account.

The fruits of all these labors were readily on display. The two Bentleys and the Maserati in her Fort Lauderdale driveway were purchased with stolen funds, not to mention four Benzes, three Range Rovers, a Porsche and a Rolls-Royce Ghost. There was jewelry and clothing. Rent on a condo at Trump Towers in Miami, along with hefty mortgage installments for homes in multiple states, private school tuition, international flights and nearly $2 million in American Express bills—all of it creating the smokescreen of someone who'd worked hard and earned big.

Which was all true, in a sense. Peggy clearly applied some impressive financial literacy when it came to the art of avoiding detection. On top of those 85-plus bank accounts, Hawkins and Beek also turned up more than 20 shell corporations, registered across multiple states, through which Peggy laundered money, including the Dennis Rodman Group LLC, Dennis Rodman Group & Associates LLC and Dennis Rodman Inc.

At one point Hawkins and Beek found Peggy's financial web to be so knotted that they abandoned the dizzying quest of tracing her dirty money and instead began looking for sources of legitimate income—something—anything—that wasn't pilfered from one of her victims. "Does she have a job? Is there money coming from anywhere else?" Beek asked. "The answer was, pretty much, no."

From there, the investigation was rounded out by two major events. The first was the discovery that in 2013 Peggy had wired nearly $300,000—much of it originating from Wells Fargo funds in the Hilliards' account in Montana—to a Texas-based title company for the closure on a half-acre lot in a posh neighborhood near downtown Houston, tidily establishing federal jurisdiction in Hawkins's and Beek's backyard.

The second was the 2016 FBI interview in New Orleans. By the time Hawkins knocked on Peggy's apartment door, accompanied by two agents from the local bureau, it was clear that Peggy had hit a rough patch. Gone were the luxury cars, the multiple homes, the steady cash flow. She'd recently filed for bankruptcy (using a stolen social security number) to prevent a foreclosure on one of her Florida properties, and her fifth husband—the surgeon from the sizzle reel, which never did get turned into a TV show, had filed for an annulment on the grounds of bigamy. When that was finalized, a judge ruled that Peggy owed her ex upward of $2 million in back pay for work he'd done at King Management.

Peggy's client relationships were crumbling too. In 2015, TMZ reported that Rodman (through Cohen) had sent her a scathing missive, firing her and accusing her of fraud. Peggy denied any wrongdoing, telling TMZ, "The whole letter is crazy and bogus. I've been with him through thick and thin."

In New Orleans, Hawkins heard similar denials, again and again, regardless of what evidence he put in front of Peggy. But he was unconvinced. "I felt very confident after interviewing her that we had a good case," he says. Sure enough, FBI agents from the New Orleans office returned to her apartment in December 2016, this time with handcuffs and an eight-count federal indictment against Peggy Ann Fulford (her fifth husband's surname).

The feds would leave that day with additional ammo. While combing through her apartment, Hawkins's colleagues spotted something unusual sitting on a nightstand in plain sight: a personal check, written to Peggy by a local orthopedic surgeon for $197,000.

Hawkins looked into it. Peggy had solicited the doctor under the guise of helping finance the redevelopment of an old New Orleans high school into an assisted living facility. But the owner of the property supposedly for sale told Hawkins that she hadn't heard of Peggy. And they certainly had never done business together.

The defendant was led into Courtroom 3A through a side door, a chain restraint dangling around her waist. She wore an olive prison uniform with a long-sleeve undershirt, and her brown hair was tied in a ponytail. Standing next to her public defender, she spotted her father in the gallery and mustered a faint grin. She did not look across the aisle, where a group of her victims glared back.

Finally, Peggy was playing it somewhat straight. Confronted with overwhelming evidence, she had pleaded guilty nine months earlier, in February 2018, to count No. 4 of the federal indictment, interstate transportation of stolen property (the roughly $200,000 that she admitted looting from the Hilliards for the closing costs of that half-acre Houston lot). The other seven counts were dropped as part of a plea deal. Now she was appearing in front of Judge Keith P. Ellison of the Southern District of Texas to learn her punishment. The statutory maximum was 10 years.

After some early legal minutiae and a sniffly opening monologue from Peggy—"I accept full responsibility and any consequences associated with my actions. . . . I am so sorry that I hurt the people that I really loved"—Beek called her first witness. From the second row along the right side of the gallery, Kristin Williams walked to the stand.

"Summarizing years of lying and cheating and stealing have proved to be quite difficult for me," Kristin began, reading from a prepared statement and rattling off moments of financial misery that Peggy had caused. Like the morning when she couldn't afford groceries because her checking account was bare. The time Peggy filed for $334,000 in fraudulent tax refunds on Ricky's behalf, claimed the money for herself by posing as Ricky's wife—an easy deception, given that her fourth husband also had the last name Williams—and promptly spent it.

Back in her gallery seat, Kristin got a pat on the back from someone who knew exactly how she felt. Of the four professional athletes listed as victims in Peggy's indictment, only Travis Best had traveled to Houston for the sentencing. (Kristin spoke on Ricky's behalf, having remained close to him despite their 2016 divorce. Rebekah Hilliard represented Lex with similar testimony. No one from Rodman's camp attended.) But the presence of the former NBA point guard was fitting. After all, Beek told the court, Best was the defendant's very first prey.

Continued in article

Current and past editions of my blog called Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Questioning the Dogma of Banned Books Week ---
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/2102/

From the Scout Report on September 13, 2019

Atom Science --- https://atom.io/
Atom's developers describe it as "a hackable text editor for the twenty-first century." The core Atom editor comes with the standard suite of features most users expect in a programmer's editor: an integrated filesystem browser, version control integration, code auto-completion, multi-pane editing, and syntax highlighting for several dozen programming languages. But there are also over 8,500 add-on packages to contribute other capabilities. Among the currently featured packages are teletype (adding collaborative simultaneous editing), hydrogen (adding interactive code execution and debugging), and scroll-through-time (modifying two-finger scroll to move through time instead of space). Atom ships with four user interface themes, with more than 2,900 others available for download. Atom itself is an Electron application, built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with plugins and themes written in those same technologies. The Atom website provides installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. Many Linux distributions also include Atom in their official packages. Atom is free software, distributed under the MIT license, with source code available on GitHub.

---

Shotcut --- www.shotcut.org 
Shotcut is a cross-platform video editor with native support for a wide variety of formats, which allows video files to be opened and edited directly without the need to import them. This cuts back on the risk of potentially losing information in the process. In formats that support Shotcut, users have access within files to various resolutions and frame rates among different video segments. Shotcut also includes both video and audio filtering effects, a full list of which can be located on the video editor's website Features page. In the Tutorials section, users can locate a number of instructional videos on topics like "Getting Started," "Cross-fades and Transitions," "Film Restoration," and more. Shotcut is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License. The Download section of Shotcut's website contains installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux systems, along with source code downloads

From the Scout Report on National Hispanic Heritage Month

TEACHER'S GUIDE: HISPANIC HERITAGE AND HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES SOCIAL STUDIES ---
https://edsitement.neh.gov/teachers-guides/hispanic-heritage-and-history-united-states

Social studies and humanities educators at a variety of levels should check out this teacher's guide assembled by the folks at EDSITEment to help celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15). This guide puts together numerous high-quality resources created for EDSITEment and other National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) projects, in addition to resources from around the web. Organized thematically, the guide opens with summaries and links to plentiful resources exploring the roots and influences of Hispanic culture, as well as its rich literary heritage. The Lessons from the Chihuahuan Desert section, which highlights teaching materials exploring themes of borders and borderlands, may be of particular interest to educators of grades 6-12. This section is followed by one containing links to more than a dozen of EDSITEment's other excellent lesson plans and curriculum units related to Hispanic history and culture, helpfully organized by academic subject. The guide closes with a selection of links to additional relevant online resources, some of which are available in both English and Spanish. While EDSITEment's resources are generally crafted with K-12 educators in mind, others interested in learning more about Latin American history and culture can also find something to interest them in this guide. [JDC] Comment on or rate this resource

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REMEZCLA SOCIAL STUDIES ---
https://remezcla.com/

Readers interested in contemporary Latin American culture should check out Remezcla. This independent media brand began in 2006 "as a grassroots project among writers and creatives," who noted that "there were so many great stories about new Latin music, culture, and events that no one was covering." Since then, Remezcla has firmly established itself as an influential English-language media outlet for Latinx Millennials, with an audience of millions hailing from the US, Latin America, and Spain. Visitors to Remezcla's website will find ample content to explore, such as discussions of films, music, and art that engage with Latin American culture, as well as announcements and write-ups of live events. Remezcla also publishes commentaries on the bicultural experience of young Latinx people in the U.S. and even articles on sports and food. A handy menu at the top allows readers to view articles in the category of their choice, and the site is searchable as well. Based in Brooklyn with offices in Los Angeles and Mexico City, Remezcla was founded by Andrew Herrera. [JDC] Comment on or rate this resource

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NASA: !LATINOS STEM UP! SCIENCE ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-N3pdOYf7Y&feature=youtu.be

!Latinos STEM Up! was a panel discussion hosted by NASA's Hispanic Outreach and Leadership Alliance (HOLA) on October 12, 2017, as part of HOLA's Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations. This discussion focused on "the contributions of Hispanics to NASA's mission and the importance of Hispanic representation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and careers." It featured six panelists representing a range of backgrounds and perspectives from within the Latinx STEM community, with panelists hailing from leadership at NASA, as well as other organizations. Participants included (for example): Dr. Yaireska Collado-Vega, a physical scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Marile Colon Robles, the education outreach coordinator for NASA's Langley Research Center, and Jose Antonio Tijerino, the president and CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation. In addition to these and other panelists, the discussion was moderated by Elvis Cordova, a former deputy under secretary at the US Department of Agriculture under the Obama administration. Those interested can watch the entire 90-minute panel discussion on YouTube at the link above, where they will also find a link to download the video from NASA's Image and Video Library. [JDC] Comment on or rate this resource

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LATIN AMERICA REPORTS SOCIAL STUDIES ---
https://latinamericareports.com/

The digital publication Latin America Reports describes itself as "an ambitious editorial project that aims [...] to illustrate the importance of Latin America for a global audience by explaining current events, analyzing diverse perspectives, and seeking out the human story." Launched in early 2019, this site offers readers English-language articles covering news stories from Central and South America. From the home page, visitors can browse the most recently published articles, as well as a selection of featured articles from each category. Readers can also access the categories on offer -- as of this write-up, these are Economy, Politics, Society, and Technology -- via the menu at the top of the website. This section also houses shortcuts to view stories by country, for the 11 Latin American countries currently covered. For readers who are interested in Latin American news and analysis beyond the coverage available in mainstream English-language news outlets, but who lack Spanish or Portuguese knowledge, Latin America Reports may be a helpful resource to bookmark. Latin America Reports is a project of Espacio Media Incubator, a digital media company based in Medellin, Colombia. [JDC] Comment on or rate this resource

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DARTMOUTH DIGITAL OROZCO ARTS ---
http://www.dartmouth.edu/digitalorozco/

Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth College is one of a small number of public buildings in the US with works by Mexican painter and muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, who specialized in political murals. The Epic of American Civilization mural at Dartmouth, painted between 1932 and 1934, is certainly one of the largest and most complex. The mural features 24 panels representing overarching themes like migration and ancient human sacrifice. Visitors can navigate the mural using the interactive compass in the upper left corner of the site, as well as by left clicking and dragging in the direction they would like to move. For additional tips, select the question mark icon above the compass. In addition to the mural itself, Dartmouth owns more than two hundred preparatory drawings and historical photographs, which visitors to the Digital Orozco site can explore by clicking on various panels of the mural. For example, "The Pre-Columbian Golden Age" (panel 6) can be viewed along with over a dozen preparatory studies for the figures and layout in the mural, as well as a student research about the mural. [DS] Comment on or rate this resource

 

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

Education Tutorials

US Census Bureau:  Statistics in Schools: History Activities Social studies ---
www.census.gov/programs-surveys/sis/activities/history.html

Science Comics: A Creative Gateway into Literacy and STEM --- www.sciencefriday.com/educational-resources/science-comics-a-creative-gateway-into-literacy-and-stem

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

Middle East Teaching Tools: Arab Uprisings Social --- www.middleeastpdx.org/resources/themes/arab-uprisings

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

Reproducibility and Replicability in Science --- www.nap.edu/catalog/25303/reproducibility-and-replicability-in-science

Video:  There’s a lost continent 1,000 miles under Europe Scientists have tracked down the last remnants of Greater Adria ---
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a35kgz/theres-a-lost-continent-1000-miles-under-europe?utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=76870798&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9VujTcfuBpRY3fjRSFY-zTMLHyat8y68SrWKkpESDMsy622KwODAdbvCzlqDWNQ-lhp3jz-Pr7CF5rQQA0RbaYosaXXQ&_hsmi=76870798

Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) --- https://scoap3.org/

Weather Spark (climate summaries around the world) --- https://weatherspark.com/

Science Comics: A Creative Gateway into Literacy and STEM --- www.sciencefriday.com/educational-resources/science-comics-a-creative-gateway-into-literacy-and-stem

Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE) --- http://cadrek12.org/

Where Humans Came From ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/schools-still-dont-teach-evolution/598312/

The Race to Save the Octopus ---
https://time.com/5657927/farm-raised-octopus/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief-pm&utm_content=20190916&xid=newsletter-brief

The Most Influential Scientist You May Never Heard About ---
https://theconversation.com/the-most-influential-scientist-you-may-never-have-heard-of-35285

Why Time Seems to Fly By As You Get Older, and How to Slow It Down: A Scientific Explanation by Neuroscientist David Eagleman ---
http://www.openculture.com/2019/09/why-time-seems-to-fly-by-as-you-get-older-and-how-to-slow-it-down.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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

Philosophy @ the Virtual Museum (philosophy visualization) --- https://commons.mtholyoke.edu/philosophyatthemuseum/

Medieval e-codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland Social studies --- www.e-codices.ch/en

items: The Democracy Papers --- https://items.ssrc.org/category/democracy-papers/

Pew Research Center: Many Across the Globe Are Dissatisfied With How Democracy Is Working ---
www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/04/29/many-across-the-globe-are-dissatisfied-with-how-democracy-is-working

Middle East Teaching Tools: Arab Uprisings Social --- www.middleeastpdx.org/resources/themes/arab-uprisings

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

National Constitution Center: Educational Resources ---
https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/

Items: The Democracy Papers --- https://items.ssrc.org/category/democracy-papers/

Absurd French Legal System:  French company liable after employee dies during sex (with a stranger) on business trip ---
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49662134

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

Math Tutorials

What the heck does “three times less than” mean? ---
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the-mathematical-phrase-that-melts-my-brain/
Thank you Bob Overn for the heads up.

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

Herman Hollerith (1860-1929)  is widely regarded as the father of modern automatic computation ---
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/hollerith.html

John Milton’s Hand Annotated Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio: A New Discovery by a Cambridge Scholar ---
http://www.openculture.com/2019/09/john-miltons-hand-annotated-copy-of-shakespeares-first-folio.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Discover the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century Precursor to the Kindle ---
http://www.openculture.com/2019/09/discover-the-jacobean-traveling-library-the-17th-century-precursor-to-the-kindle-2.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic literature ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#OnlineBookFinders

Where Humans Came From ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/schools-still-dont-teach-evolution/598312/

What Did People Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cookbook Explain ---
http://www.openculture.com/2019/09/what-did-people-eat-in-medieval-times-a-video-series-and-new-cookbook-explain.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Questioning the Dogma of Banned Books Week ---
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/2102/

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

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 12, 2019

·         Are Shorter Folks at Higher Risk for Type 2 Diabetes?

·         Don't Blame Tech for Young People's Mood Problems

·         HPV 'Herd Immunity' Is on the Rise Among Adult

September 13, 2019

·         EPA to Phase Out Chemical Testing on Mammals

·         Are Shorter Folks at Higher Risk for Type 2 Diabetes?

·         Don't Blame Tech for Young People's Mood Problems

September 14, 2019

·         Stricter Arsenic Standard Made Public Drinking Water Safer: Study

·         Is Your State One of the 'Most Obese' in America?

·         Dementia Caregivers Often Face Sleepless Nights

September 16, 2019

·         FDA to Assess First Peanut Allergy Drug

·         Zantac Heartburn Drug May Contain Carcinogen: FDA

·         CDC Revises Number of Vaping-Linked Lung Illnesses

September 17, 2019

·         Jeopardy! Host Alex Trebek Heading Back to Chemo

·         Gold Medal Flour Recalled Over E. Coli Fears

·         Carcinogen Found in Menthol E-Cigarettes

September 18, 2019

·         Four-Legged Friends Help Buffer Loss of a Spouse

·         Study Questions Hormone Rx for Prostate Cancer

·         Jeopardy! Host Alex Trebek Heading Back to Chemo

September 20, 2019

·         Don't Let Fear of Cancer Keep You From Doctor Visits

·         Just 2 Weeks on the Couch Starts to Damage Your Body

·         Media Giants Pull E-Cigarette Ads

September 23. 2019

·         Youngest in Classroom Diagnosed More Often With ADHD, Other Problems

·         FDA OKs New Pill for Type 2 Diabetes

·         Don't Let Fear of Cancer Keep You From Doctor Visits

September 25, 2019

·         More Hot Flashes Could Mean Higher Odds for Heart Trouble

·         Like Kids and Dogs, Your Cat Really Does Need You

·         Can Aspirin Help Tackle Some Cancers?

VIEW ALL HEALTH NEWS

Ted Talk:  Four Questions You Should Always Ask Your Doctor
https://www.ted.com/talks/christer_mjaset_4_questions_you_should_always_ask_your_doctor?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2019-09-20&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=bottom_right_button

Humor for September 2019

Ted Talk:  Free World Needs Satire ---
https://www.ted.com/talks/patrick_chappatte_a_free_world_needs_satire?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2019-09-20&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=talk_of_the_week_image

Georges Simenon wrote nearly 200 novels. Hitchcock telephoned one day and was told, "Sorry, he’s just started a novel." "I’ll wait,’ came the reply
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/if-only-georges-simenon-had-been-a-bit-more-like-maigret/

Jokes Under Stalin ---
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/08/03/its-only-a-joke-comrade-a66683

Two Amish men and a 12-pack
A couple of Amish dudes were drinking alcohol, carrying a 12-pack of beer and driving their horse and buggy in Ohio. When authorities attempted to question them about drinking and driving, the men made a run for it and escaped into the woods. The authorities have turned the horse over to a local farmer until the two men come forward. Tell me: Did they at least grab the beer?
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/18/us/amish-men-drinking-and-driving-trnd/index.html

Humor September 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q3.htm#Humor0919.htm 

Humor August 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q3.htm#Humor0819.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 

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

• With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier
• With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams
• With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of Accountancy Ignores TAR
• With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research into Undergraduate Accounting Courses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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