Tidbits on January 30, 2020
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Set 2 of Dorothy's Winter Wonderland Hikes ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/
Tidbits/Dorothy/Set02/Set02.htm 

 

Tidbits on January 30, 2020
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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

Excellent, Cross-Disciplinary Overview of Scientific Reproducibility in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ---
https://replicationnetwork.com/2018/12/15/excellent-cross-disciplinary-overview-of-scientific-reproducibility-in-the-stanford-encyclopedia-of-philosophy/
[Researchers] are rewarded for being productive rather than being right, for building ever upward instead of checking the foundations.---
Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/waste-1000-studies/589684/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20191022&silverid-ref=NTk4MzY1OTg0MzY5S0
Bob Jensen:  My take on research validation or lack thereof is at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm

Tom Lehrer on Mathematical Models and Statistics ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So
You must watch this to the ending to appreciate it.

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

Animated  Visualization of the United States’ Exploding Population Growth Over 200 Years (1790 – 2010) ---
A Visualization of the United States’ Exploding Population Growth Over 200 Years (1790 – 2010)

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

In September 2017 the USA National Debt exceeded $20 trillion for the first time ---
http://www.statedatalab.org/news/detail/national-debt-surpasses-20-trillion-for-the-first-time-in-us-history

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




Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio

What the Earth Would Look Like if You Drained the Water from the Oceans ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/what-the-earth-would-look-like-if-we-drained-the-water-from-the-oceans.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

A worthwhile video of women in economics (Episode 2) ---
https://learn.mru.org/women-economics-series-anna-schwartz/?utm_source=WIEUpdates&utm_medium=ReleaseBlast&utm_campaign=MRUEmail&utm_content=schwartz
Bob Jensen's threads on women at work ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Women

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 

The First & Last Time Mister Rogers Sang “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” (1968-2001) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/the-first-last-time-mister-rogers-sang-wont-you-be-my-neighbor-1968-2001.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Do drummers have different brains than the rest of us ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/neuroscience-of-drumming.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
I don't know about her brain, but she can sure play the drums ---
Meet Viola Smith, the World’s Oldest Drummer: Her Career Started in the 1930s, and She’s Still Playing at 106 -
--
 http://www.openculture.com/2019/10/meet-viola-smith-the-worlds-oldest-drummer.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

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


Photographs and Art

Millions of Great Photographs --- https://fineartamerica.com/art/photographs

100 Influential Photographs --- http://100photos.time.com/

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

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

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

The Most Loved and Hated Classic Novels According to Goodreads Users ---
http://danfrank.ca/the-most-loved-and-hated-classics-according-to-goodreads-users/

The New York Public Library Announces the Top 10 Checked-Out Books of All Time ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/the-new-york-public-library-announces-the-top-10-checked-out-books-of-all-time.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The Apple Seed (audio storytelling) ---  www.byuradio.org/show/be57d05d-de36-4170-8ae8-5b56c227ff86/the-apple-seed

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 January 30, 2020
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2020/TidbitsQuotations013020.htm             




Jim Lehrer’s 16 Rules for Practicing Journalism with Integrity ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-for-being-a-journalist-with-integrity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

To meet such high standards required a rigorous set of journalistic… well, standards—such as Lehrer was happy to list, below, in a 1997 report from the Aspen Institute.

1.      Do nothing I cannot defend.*

2.      Do not distort, lie, slant, or hype.

3.      Do not falsify facts or make up quotes.

4.      Cover, write, and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.*

5.      Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.*

6.      Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am.*

7.      Assume the same about all people on whom I report.*

8.      Assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

9.      Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story mandates otherwise.*

10.  Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label them as such.*

11.  Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.*

12.  Do not broadcast profanity or the end result of violence unless it is an integral and necessary part of the story and/or crucial to understanding the story.

13.  Acknowledge that objectivity may be impossible but fairness never is.

14.  Journalists who are reckless with facts and reputations should be disciplined by their employers.

15.  My viewers have a right to know what principles guide my work and the process I use in their practice.

16.  I am not in the entertainment business.

Jensen Comment
These apply to academic writing as well.


30 Big Tech Predictions for 2020:  A Free Report
https://www.businessinsider.com/intelligence/30-big-tech-predictions-for-2020?IR=T&itm_source=businessinsider&utm_medium=content_marketing&itm_term=content_marketing_leadgen_text_link_30-big-tech-predictions-for-2020&itm_content=leadgen_content_marketing_text_link&itm_campaign=content_marketing_leadgen_link

TOP 5 BANKING PREDICTIONS (including growth of European and USA neobanks)

TOP 5 CONNECTIVITY & TECH PREDICTIONS

TOP 5 DIGITAL HEALTH PREDICTIONS (including more surprises from Amazon Care)

TOP 5 DIGITAL MEDIA PREDICTIONS

TOP 5 FINTECH PREDICTIONS

TOP 5 PAYMENTS AND COMMERCE PREDICTIONS

 Continue scrolling down for details in this report


Meet the Pioneers (mostly young male software engineers) - January 2020 
https://pioneer.app/blog/meet-the-pioneers-january-2020/


Behavioral economics, it seems, might just have a bias problem of its own:  Seeing biases where non exist ---
https://replicationnetwork.com/2020/01/25/in-the-news-bloomberg-january-14-2020/


A committee at Georgetown University law school is re-evaluating its policies on student protests after a demonstration prevented a speaker's speech ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/01/28/georgetown-law-debates-punishments-disruptive-protesters?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=e7b2076c7e-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-e7b2076c7e-197565045&mc_cid=e7b2076c7e&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

Georgetown University law students are worried school administrators will restrict their right to protest guest speakers on campus after a loud demonstration by students and faculty members interrupted a speech by a Trump administration official last year.

The protesters ultimately prevented Kevin McAleenan, former acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, from giving the keynote address last October during the school's annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference.​ By denying audience members the opportunity to hear McAleenan's speech, the protesters violated the university's written policies for speech and expression.

Administrators responded by reconvening the law center's Speech and Expression Committee to consider limitations and disciplinary measures against demonstrators at future speaking events.​The committee made up of students, faculty members and senior staff was created in 2017 to examine how and where speech is expressed on campus.

William Treanor, dean of the Georgetown University Law Center, asked the committee to recommend whether to implement more specific guidelines for speech and expression on campus by spring 2020, according to a Jan. 16 email to law students. The email was signed by Mitch Bailin, the dean of students, and Peter Byrne, a professor and faculty director of two programs at the law school.

The committee was tasked with considering whether the law center should control who is invited to speak at the campus and who may invite them, what the law center’s response should be to “disruptive protests” during speaking events, and if “possible disciplinary or other administrative action” should be pursued against student and faculty member “disrupters” in the future, according to the email sent to law center students.

Students and faculty opposed to the Trump administration's controversial immigration policies made no secret of their objection to McAleenan's participation in the conference. They wrote a letter to Treanor on Sept. 30, calling on him to disinvite the acting secretary. The law school anticipated the protest and had additional staff members and security present. It also set up a designated area for demonstrators to gather outside the auditorium so as to not disrupt the speech or other classes and activities occurring in the building, a law school official said.

 Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I'm opposed to encouraging shout downs for a number of reasons. First shout downs are likely to increase adrenalin flows of both sides that, in turn, can easily be ramped up to physical violence as demonstrated by the famous Middlebury College shoutdown.

Secondly, I opposed to shout downs because what's fair for one side is fair for the other. Liberals in the law school at Georgetown University encourage the shout downs of any speaker favoring Trump's immigration policies. Think of their horror, however, if conservative students shout down AOC if she comes to Georgetown promoting open border policies and automatic citizenship to any and all of over six billion people in the world.

When someone is approved to speak on campus it's imperative that courtesy to speak is enforced by campus security. This of course raises the question of whether Big Brother on campus should have unrestrained power of approval.


January 2020: Charles Murray to Return to Middlebury College ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/01/24/charles-murray-return-middlebury-college?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=69f8413347-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-69f8413347-197565045&mc_cid=69f8413347&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

April 2019:  Politically Correct Middlebury Still Cannot Keep Conservative Speakers Safe ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/18/middlebury-calls-lecture-conservative-polish-leader-amid-threats-protests?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=779d04ade1-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-779d04ade1-197565045&mc_cid=779d04ade1&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
What conservative would want to join this faculty or join the student body?
Is Middlebury so against diversity?

Charles Murray and the Bell Curve --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(political_scientist)

Race and Intelligence --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

Debate at Middlebury Over Co-author of the "Bell Curve" (race and intelligence) ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/02/28/debate-middlebury-over-co-author-bell-curve?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=979f5ef0d8-DNU20170228&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-979f5ef0d8-197565045&mc_cid=979f5ef0d8&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

The (Political Correctness) Mob of Students at Middlebury
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mob-at-middlebury-1488586505?mod=djemMER

A mob tries to silence Charles Murray and sends a prof to the ER.

Once again a scholar invited to speak at a university has been shouted down by an angry mob clearly unable to challenge him intellectually. On Thursday at Middlebury College, allegedly an institution of higher learning, a crowd of protesters tried to run Charles Murray off campus. Mr. Murray is the author of many influential books, including “Coming Apart,” which the kids might read if they want to understand their country and can cope without trigger warnings.

Amid the shouts, Mr. Murray was taken to another location where he was able to speak. But a Middlebury professor escorting Mr. Murray from campus—Allison Stanger—was later sent to the hospital after being assaulted by protesters who also attacked the car they were in. As if to underscore the madness, the headline over the initial Associated Press dispatch smeared Mr. Murray rather than focusing on the intolerance of those disrupting him: “College students protest speaker branded white nationalist.”

Middlebury President Laurie Patton apologized in a statement to those “who came in good faith to participate in a serious discussion, and particularly to Mr. Murray and Prof. Stanger for the way they were treated.” While she believes some protesters were “outside agitators,” Middlebury students were also involved—and she said she would be “responding.”

Mr. Murray tweeted: “Report from the front: The Middlebury administration was exemplary. The students were seriously scary.” Let’s hope President Patton follows through with discipline to scare these students straight.

Harvard and Princeton Leading Scholars Protest the Middlebury Political Correctness Incident ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/16/ideological-odd-couple-robert-george-and-cornel-west-issue-joint-statement-against?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=bdb7326f2a-DNU20170316&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-bdb7326f2a-197565045&mc_cid=bdb7326f2a&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

Stylistically and politically, Robert P. George and Cornel West don’t have much in common. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, is one of the country’s most prominent conservative intellectuals. West, a professor of the practice of public philosophy and African and African-American studies at Harvard University, is a self-described “radical Democrat” who, in addition to many books, once released a spoken-word album.

So when George and West agree on something and lend their names to it, people take notice -- as they did this week, when the pair published a statement in support of “truth seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” It’s a politely worded denunciation of what George and West call “campus illiberalism,” or the brand of thinking that led to this month’s incident at Middlebury College, where students prevented an invited speaker from talking and a professor was physically attacked by some who were protesting the invitation.

“It is all too common these days for people to try to immunize from criticism opinions that happen to be dominant in their particular communities,” reads the statement. “Sometimes this is done by questioning the motives and thus stigmatizing those who dissent from prevailing opinions; or by disrupting their presentations; or by demanding that they be excluded from campus or, if they have already been invited, disinvited.”

Sometimes, it says, “students and faculty members turn their backs on speakers whose opinions they don’t like or simply walk out and refuse to listen to those whose convictions offend their values. Of course, the right to peacefully protest, including on campuses, is sacrosanct. But before exercising that right, each of us should ask: Might it not be better to listen respectfully and try to learn from a speaker with whom I disagree? Might it better serve the cause of truth seeking to engage the speaker in frank civil discussion?”

All of us “should be willing -- even eager -- to engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence and making arguments,” George and West wrote. “The more important the subject under discussion, the more willing we should be to listen and engage -- especially if the person with whom we are in conversation will challenge our deeply held -- even our most cherished and identity-forming -- beliefs.”

Such “an ethos,” they conclude, “protects us against dogmatism and groupthink, both of which are toxic to the health of academic communities and to the functioning of democracies.”

George said in an interview Wednesday that signatures for the statement were flowing in at rate of several per minute, and that the names reflect all points of the ideological spectrum. “We’re gratified,” he said, adding that the statement aims to “encourage -- put the courage in -- people to stand up for themselves” and for the values of the academy.

“The goal is a heightened sense among faculty, administrators and students -- all three categories -- that they must refuse to tolerate campus illiberalism,” George said. “It’s a shared responsibility of everybody to not only refuse to participate in it but to refuse to accept it. In order for colleges and universities to fulfill their missions, there has to be an ethos, an atmosphere, an environment, in which people feel free to speak their minds -- where people are challenging each other, and thus learning.”

The immediate impetus for the statement was indeed the shouting down of Murray, author of the controversial book The Bell Curve, at Middlebury; the professor who was injured at the protest is the next signatory, after George and West. But the authors say they’ve long been concerned with a turning tide on colleges campuses that’s led to the shouting down and disinvitation of invited speakers, and other forms of what is arguably intellectual censorship. They’ve been trying to model the kind of civil dialogue they’re advocating for several years, teaching and speaking together publicly about the benefits of a liberal arts education -- including recently at the American Enterprise Institute.

Yet college illiberalism continues to grow, in their view. Just recently, for example, George said, Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton, who has argued in favor of abortion and euthanasia for severely disabled infants in some instances, was interrupted by disability rights protesters throughout an appearance via Skype at the University of Victoria in Canada.

George blamed the phenomenon on a campus culture of rightful inclusion that has been somehow “corrupted into the idea that people have the right to be free from hearing positions they disagree with.” That’s exacerbated, he said, by an emergent “consumer model” of education, in which colleges and universities competing for enrollments don’t want to offend their “customers,” even if the product -- higher education -- is supposed to be “challenging students’ deeply held convictions and helping them to lead examined lives.”

Singer announced on Twitter that he’d signed the petition. George pointed out that Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University and former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, who is anti-abortion and in many ways Singer’s ideological opposite, also signed on.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness


The Most Loved and Hated Classic Novels According to Goodreads Users ---
http://danfrank.ca/the-most-loved-and-hated-classics-according-to-goodreads-users/


University of Central Florida  to fire 3 faculty members accused of helping student get PhD in exchange for grants ---
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-ne-ucf-fake-degree-professors-20200127-b2qpqedpa5eafcmvlculcrnzla-story.html?cid=db&source=ams&sourceId=296279

UCF plans to fire two professors and the director of its Institute for Simulation and Training because they helped a student fraudulently obtain a doctoral degree in exchange for the student helping the institute secure grants, the university announced Monday.

The university also started the process to revoke the student’s PhD, which, UCF documents show, was completed using work from other students and amounted to plagiarism.

“There was a quid pro quo between” the graduate student and one of the professors, “providing funding in exchange for a PhD from UCF,” according to an investigative report by a Washington, D.C., law firm hired by the university.

The student also may have violated federal bribery laws, the law firm report said. The dissertation appears to be based on research he “neither designed nor conducted,” it added.

UCF officials began an investigation in 2016 when someone called a university hotline to report a student was “being unusually helped” in exchange for “providing and overseeing research funds” for a lab at the Institute for Simulation and Training, letters sent to the three employees show.

The student worked for an “agency” that provided research funding, the documents show. That agency had been making grants to the institute since at least 2007 and has been one of its “most significant sources of funding,” said the report by the Cohen Seglias law firm.

Continued in article

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

 


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on January 28, 2020

Airbus has reached a preliminary agreement with fraud agencies in the U.S., U.K. and France over a longstanding investigation into bribery and corruption.

Airbus will settle fraud charges ---
https://www.ozy.com/presidential-daily-brief/pdb-270896/?utm_source=pdb&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=January%2028%2C%202020&variable=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f&utm_term=OZY#article271461

Linguistics:  How do scammers use language to trick their victims? ---
https://daily.jstor.org/the-life-changing-linguistics-of-nigerian-scam-emails/

Another Obama Solar Company Burns Out – DC Solar Owners Plead Guilty to Largest ($1 billion) Ponzi Scheme in Eastern California History ---
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/another-obama-solar-company-burns-out-dc-solar-owners-plead-guilty-to-largest-ponzi-scheme-in-eastern-california-history/

A couple pleaded guilty to scamming Warren Buffett as part of a $1 billion Ponzi scheme ---
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/couple-admit-scamming-warren-buffett-1-billion-ponzi-scheme-2020-1-1028844728

Ponzi Schemes Where Bernie Madoff Was King
See http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRottenPart2.htm#Ponzi

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


Investing:  Why We Shouldn’t Be In Love With Startups ---
https://readwrite.com/2020/01/20/why-we-shouldnt-be-in-love-with-startups/


The Most Tax-Friendly States for the Rich ---
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/01/24/the-most-tax-friendly-states-for-the-rich/2/

01 Nevada (very friendly)
02 Florida
03 South Dakota
04 Alaska
05 Wyoming
06 Tennessee
07 Washington
08 New Hampshire
09 Texas
10  North Dakota

. . .

41 Connecticut
42 Maine
43 Nebraska
44 Hawaii
45 Maryland
46 New Jersey
47 Minnesota
48 Vermont
49 New York
50 California (Give state all that's left after paying off the Feds)

Jensen Comment
States friendly for the rich are not necessarily the most friendly for the middle and lower income people. For example, sales tax doesn't matter much for the rich, but it's very important to other people who have much tighter budgets.
Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon have no sales tax ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_States

Property taxes matter somewhat more to above-average income folks, but the super rich do not seem to care. For other home owners, however, the 2019 tax reform was a disaster since property taxes and state income taxes became capped at $10,000.  That cap was a disaster for the states ranked 41-50 above. Proposition 13 in California gives much needed property tax relief to long-time home owners but is of no help to short-timers.

Some states (think New Hampshire) with no income taxes and sales taxes get hammered by having relatively high property taxes.

States like Florida with no inheritance taxes are popular with the super rich.

 


Norway tells Toyota to stop calling hybrid cars “self-charging” ---
https://qz.com/1791515/norway-tells-toyota-to-stop-calling-hybrid-cars-self-charging/


The New York Public Library Announces the Top 10 Checked-Out Books of All Time ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/the-new-york-public-library-announces-the-top-10-checked-out-books-of-all-time.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

1.      The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats: 485,583 checkouts

2.      The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss: 469,650 checkouts

3.      1984 by George Orwell: 441,770 checkouts

4.      Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak: 436,016 checkouts

5.      To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: 422,912 checkouts

6.      Charlotte's Web by E.B. White: 337,948 checkouts

7.      Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: 316,404 checkouts

8.      How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie: 284,524 checkouts

9.      Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling: 231,022 checkouts

10.  The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle: 189,550 checkouts

 

Jensen Comment
Aside from the children's books, most of the others in the Top 10 are not all that important for me except for 1984. We might counter this list by saying these are the books New Yorkers checked out when they spent their book-buying budgets on other books more important to them.

What's probably more important is how the ranking was based upon "All Time" checkouts. This distorts the decline in library checkouts over the last 80 years. For example, paperback books were not all that available until the latter half of the 20th Century. But when they became available for either hard cover and paper cover purchasing paper backed books became much more popular relative to taking the time and trouble to wait for and check out popular books in a library. Of course by the 21st Century Amazon made purchasing of used books and electronic books very popular relative to library checking out of books.

Compare the numbers of checkouts of any one of the above Top 10 books with over 100 million copies of Agatha Christies' best selling novel --- And Then There Were None ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie#Works_of_fiction
For example compare 485,583 checkouts of the Ezra Keets The Snowy Day with more than 100,000,000 in sales of Agatha's  And Then There Were None.
Yeah I know, it's misleading to compare the checkouts in one large library with worldwide sales of a book. But I just bet there were more than more than 500,000 all time sales of  And Then There Were None in New York City alone.

Of course today tens of millions of books are available free as downloads ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
This greatly reduces the need to locate and check out a library's hard copy version of a free download. The fact that people do still check out books that are also free downloads reflects how important hard copy can be relative to electronic reading.

Currently I'm not living near a good library, but even when I was near a great campus library I was buying inexpensive used copies on Amazon rather than take the time and trouble to locate and then check out a book from the campus library. I still buy books from Amazon that are free online, because I much prefer to read hard copy books. That does not mean that I do not read excerpts of a lot of free online books on my computer screen. I frequently only read parts of books --- my blog readers suspect this already.


If you’ll hit age 65 soon and are still working, here’s what to do about Medicare ---
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/medicare-rules-and-costs-for-people-age-65-who-are-still-working.html
Also keep in mind that if you retire early such as at Age 62 you're not eligible for Medicare until Age 65


US News:  Should You Pay Off Your Mortgage Before You Retire?
https://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/articles/should-you-pay-off-your-mortgage-before-you-retire

Here are five major scenarios where you can come out ahead by keeping your mortgage going into retirement:

You are earning a better rate on your investments than you pay on your mortgage.

You would be paying off your mortgage with savings.

You have other higher-interest debt.

You can qualify for a tax deduction by saving elsewhere.

You're making an emotional rather than financial decision.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Since many taxpayers about to retire have very small mortgage balances on their existing homes the issue may be whether to take out a mortgage on a new retirement home. The Trump tax reform killed off the mortgage interest deduction (and some other itemized deductions) for most people except for folks that have high medical bills not covered by Medicare such as expensive nursing care bills not covered by Medicare or other insurance plans. To date you can still take advantage of putting a cushion of retirement savings into federally tax exempt (muni) bond funds. The advantage of doing so is both the tax exemption interest income (capital gains are not exempt) and liquidity. If you need a cushion of liquidity now and then you can write checks on your tax exempt mutual fund any time whereas to get cash from a fully paid off home you need to either sell the home or take out a loan on a new home, but of which entail relatively high transactions costs to get at a relatively small amount of cash.

What I did when we bought a rather expensive retirement home is to take out a large mortgage and add the proceeds of the sale of our former home to our Vangaard long-term tax exempt mutual fund --- which is our liquidity cushion above and beyond our taxable retirement annuities. This worked out well for us over the years, but a tax exempt savings cushion is not necessarily advice I would give to everybody buying a new retirement home. There's a new wrinkle of uncertainty about the future tax code. If the Democratic Party sweeps a future election, taxes will probably increase and tax exempt bonds may become a casualty of future tax increases. Thus far liberals have not seriously threatened tax exempt bonds, because they've no good alternative for funding the trillions in added costs to entities that sell such tax exempt bonds --- entities like school districts, towns, counties, and states (including using tax exempt bonds to fund low income housing).

The bottom line is that I'm not giving financial advice to anybody, and even professional financial advisers at the moment face the difficulties of not knowing how the tax codes will change in the future for governments at all levels --- federal, state, and local.

As the saying goes, the only certainties in life are death and taxes. In the case of death we don't know when. In the case of taxes we don't know when or how much.

Always keep in mind that getting higher rates of return after taxes almost always entails higher financial risks as well. The above article is superficial in this regard.


Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_New_Hampshire_University
Over 160 full-time faculty and 6,000 adjunct teachers serving nearly 100,000 students (4,000 onsite)

Penn State World Campus (PSWC) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_State_World_Campus
Details on numbers of faculty are hard to find. I suspect this is because so many faculty are shared with Penn State University onsite programs.

The Transfer Agreement Between Pennsylvania Community Colleges and the For-Profit Mega University of Southern New Hampshire
From a Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on January 15, 2020

I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe.

Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.

A transfer agreement that shows the gloves are off.

A transfer agreement that shows the gloves are off. Transfer agreements don’t usually signal a sea change. The one that Pennsylvania’s community-college system just announced with Southern New Hampshire University may be one that does. It also raises a lot of interesting issues about the increasing competition for students — it’s a market out there, folks — and whether expectations for relationships among public-college systems are going out the window.

But first, the basics: Last week the Pennsylvania Commission for Community Colleges announced a broad partnership with Southern New Hampshire University that will provide students from the system’s 14 colleges with a hassle-free transfer pathway to the online giant. For the most part, as The Philadelphia Inquirer noted, they’ll pay less to complete their bachelor’s degree than they would if they went to Penn State World Campus or one of the four-year colleges in the state public-college system.

It was clearly a coup for SNHU. As one of my Twitter followers succinctly put it: Southern New Hampshire “captured 3 very important things — cost, convenience and credit transferability — a market driven response to a big problem.”

SNHU has other such agreements with community-college systems. Readers of my coverage of its growth ambitions shouldn’t have been surprised by the willingness of this “mega-university” to build this on-ramp.

What struck me about this one was SNHU’s partner: a system with 175,000 students enrolled for credit in a state where there are two seemingly viable public alternatives, both of which could certainly use the students. Was this some sort of indictment of those options?

When I spoke with Elizabeth A. Bolden, president and chief executive of the commission, she steered clear of that characterization. Yet she made it abundantly clear that the features of the SNHU deal — the university allows students to transfer up to 90 credits, and its academic calendar offers more windows for enrollment — were offerings that the other colleges hadn’t put on the table. In SNHU, Bolden said, the commission had found a partner “willing to think outside the box.”

Cost was a factor. The attractive pricing that SNHU offered will also be available to employees of the colleges and their families. But that wasn’t determinant, Rather, Bolden said, “the power in the agreement is the simplicity and the transparency” it offers to students. “They don’t need to go to a website and make a course-to-course articulation” to figure out which credits will transfer.

I wonder how this agreement will play with state policy makers in Pennsylvania — and in states where oversight over public-college systems is more centralized. After all, as some have observed, it can be argued that this is a case where one state-subsidized entity is undermining other state-subsidized systems.

But it could also be argued that with the emergence of “mega-universities” and other online competitors, the shifting landscape might sometimes now require snubbing a sister public system.

That’s where Bolden comes down. Students come first, she told me: “We have an obligation to them, not our institutions.” She also noted that more than 1,500 students a year from Pennsylvania community colleges already transfer to SNHU. Why is that? she asked. “That is the question that I think Pennsylvania policy makers have to ask themselves.”

It reminds me of the argument I heard from Eduventures’ Richard Garrett last year: that when big out-of-state online players show up, that should be “a wake-up call to states” to start thinking strategically about using online education to further their needs and goals.

it also made me wonder whether the “caution” that I’ve described as a hallmark of World Campus has been the right strategy — and whether this deal with SNHU will change Penn State’s approach.

Southern New Hampshire isn’t the first online institution to have approached the commission, Bolden told me, and she doesn’t expect it to be the last. (I asked who else; she wouldn’t say.) She’s still open to offers, including those from the in-state systems. I doubt she’s the only two-year-system leader weighing these options. As she put it: “Community-college students are in high demand.”

It’s also worth noting that even as some observers have hailed this deal as a victory for “the market,” others view it as a big fail on the part of state leadership. Those critics include the Temple University sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab. “As Pennsylvania has abdicated its responsibility for funding higher education,” she wrote in an op-ed, “it has correspondingly failed to hold its colleges and universities accountable for collaborating.”

So what do Penn State and Pennsylvania’s public-college system think of the deal? I haven’t seen reaction from World Campus, but over the weekend Dan Greenstein, the newish chancellor of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, let some of his feelings be known in a thread on Twitter. It was a bit cryptic, but suffice to say, when someone invokes the phrase “hunger games” you can be pretty sure it wasn’t intended as praise.

Jensen Comment
Usually when you go cheaper you get less --- in this case I seriously doubt that the quality of education from SNHU is close to the quality of the upper-division state universities in Pennsylvania. I've not investigated quality differences between Penn State World Campus online and SNHU online, but I've been a long-time critic of most for-profit universities, including SNHU that has an open-enrollment policy. Penn State World Campus performs quite well in US News Online Ranking Programs.
https://news.psu.edu/story/603539/2020/01/14/academics/six-top-10-rankings-penn-state-us-news%E2%80%99-2020-best-online-programs
Like virtually all for-profit universities SNHU does not submit data to ranking systems like US News. Makes you think!
Of course there will be outliers of outstanding programs at both SNHU and PSWC.


How to Mislead With Statistics
The problem in the article below is the definition of the word "exactly." Since the Harvard Business School generally requires substantial professional work experience before acceptance this greatly cuts down on the number of applicants. For example, engineering graduates generally have several years of experience working at their craft before applying to the Harvard Business School. And even then the admission rate is only about 11%. There is no one "exact" way under "sufficient conditions" to get a given applicant into the entering class. In mathematics we talk about necessary conditions versus sufficient conditions. The article below deals with what are mostly necessary conditions but not sufficient conditions.

Here's "exactly" what it takes to get accepted into Harvard Business School, according to 5 grads and the managing director of admissions ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-get-into-harvard-business-school-according-to-admissions-2019-7?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BIPrime_select&utm_campaign=BI Prime 2020-01-28&utm_term=BI Prime Select

Roughly 10,000 students apply to Harvard Business School each year, but the acceptance rate is only 11%.

Below, five successful applicants discuss what worked for getting in the door and what didn't.

For instance, in your entrance essay, it's important not to overplay tales of overcoming incredible adversity. The writing should also be succinct and uncomplicated.

Spend time working in the field you want to pursue — and don't be afraid to network.

The managing director of MBA admissions and financial aid pinpointed three qualities shared by successful applicants, including the ability to enjoy and partake in "lively discussion in a classroom setting

Make your essay a 'window into your soul' . . .

Have a novel story to tell — and tell it well . . .

Channel authenticity . . .

Give yourself time to write your masterpiece . . .

Get your feet wet in industry

Losee said successful applicants share three characteristics.

"First, they have demonstrated leadership, whether it be in an academic, professional, or extracurricular setting, and show the potential to have even more impact," he said.

"We're also looking for applicants who have analytical aptitude and appetite, are able and willing to analyze a situation and form an opinion based on that analysis, and enjoy a lively discussion in a classroom setting, a key component of our case method of learning."

Finally, Losee emphasized that the school seeks students who will engage in the HBS community and be respectful of their classmates.

Jensen Comment
Unsaid in the above article, it really pays to be a high GMAT minority applicant with a technical undergraduate degree (think computer science, engineering, and natural science) from a very prestigious university..


How to Mislead With Article Titles
The problem in the article below is the definition of the word "exactly." Since Stanford Medical only admits an average of 90 students out of more than 7,500 highly qualified applicants there is no one "exact" way under "sufficient conditions" to get a given applicant into the entering class. In mathematics we talk about necessary conditions versus sufficient conditions. The article below deals with what are mostly necessary conditions but not sufficient conditions. And since there can be tradeoffs doing really, really well on some necessary conditions most likely can offset doing not quite so well on other necessary conditions. For example, being an autistic native American Veteran with one leg with a perfect MCAT score and a willingness to serve for a lifetime at minimum wage on a native American reservation probably will probably give you an edge over all other applicants. You might even get away with bringing up controversial topics and wear a MAGA hat during the interview.

Here's "exactly" how to get accepted into Stanford University's School of Medicine ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-get-into-stanford-university-medical-school

Meeting a minimum threshold on the MCAT admission test

Get the right reference letters, and get them early

Use your essay to talk about not only your science background but also your longer-term goals as a doctor

Prepare to answer critical-thinking interview questions, and avoid bringing up controversial topics


How to Mislead With Statistics

Billionaires Have More Wealth Than 60% of the World's Population, Report Finds ---
https://time.com/5768346/billionaires-wealth/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=20200121&xid=newsletter-brief

Jensen Comment
This is misleading in the sense of controversial use of the word "have." Elon Musk is a billionaire who founded Tesla Inc. and owns about 22% of the shares of Tesla (which essentially gives him control for the company's future). Suppose hydrogen technology suddenly becomes vastly superior to lithium battery technology for vehicles. Tesla Inc. would most likely go instantly bankrupt and any its tangible assets would become property of the creditors who loaned lots of money in Tesla for those tangible assets.. Elon Musk's shares now valued at billions of dollars would be instantly worthless.

Elon Musk's billions in wealth are essentially the current value of his residual ownership in corporate shares. Residual owners are the last investors in a corporation to be paid off if the corporation collapses. Most billionaires, like Elon Musk, have their billions tied up in residual ownership that is the highest form of financial risk. There are of course some exceptions where billionaires have invested in lower risk alternatives, but most of the billionaires on earth have taken on high financial risks relative to other investors in the world.

My point here is that to "have" more wealth generally entails "having" more financial risk, although that risk can be hedged in a way that reduces risk by "having" less wealth in order to hedge. Articles such as the one cited above generally ignore financial risk that billionaires also "have." If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren want to transfer wealth by virtually confiscating billionaire wealth then they are also transferring the financial risk accompanying this wealth. Thus confiscating billionaire wealth comes at a cost to somebody. For example, Bernie Sanders would like to confiscate nearly all of Elon Musk's shares of Tesla and put them into a trust for all 45,000 Tesla workers. Those workers, however, will also have the financial risk that accompany residual ownership. .

Now we come to the essence of what Elon Musk or a worker trust "has" with his 22% of the shares of Tesla Inc.
Tesla Inc. is thought by many to be a Ponzi fraud scheme. The billions in share value s not due to anything tangible. The billions in value are speculations on price movements of the future. Today all Tesla share value is air lighter than helium. There's nothing to Elon Musk's billions other than a residual interest in hope for the future of Tesla Inc. Elon Musk owns relatively little in terms of tangible value. It's all intangible hope (Ponzi speculation) for the future.

Not all billionaires have as much financial risk as Elon Musk. But certainly most billionaires have a lot of financial risk that accompanies their wealth. If government confiscates their wealth then government also takes on the financial risk. If government puts those shares in worker trusts then the worker trusts bear those financial risks. If government sells those share then buyers of those shares also are buying into the financial risks.

We might even hypothesize that "Billionaires Have More Financial Risks Than 60% of the World's Population."

Here's a humorous and serious TED talk that seriously argues why the world needs billionaires

https://www.ted.com/talks/harald_eia_where_in_the_world_is_it_easiest_to_get_rich
 

Why did Cuba abandon its socialist/communist dream of equality for everybody?
The Guardian:  This was the egalitarian dream of Cuba in the 1960s: For years in Cuba, jobs as varied as farm workers and doctors only had a difference in their wages of the equivalent of a few US dollars a month.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/12/cuba


How to Mislead by Avoiding Statistics

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race ---
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race

The above article avoids the obvious thing that's needed --- data in the number of hunters and  gatherers and the amount of food that can be gathered to sustain each human in the surrounding environment. Agriculture has the obvious advantage of being able to,in general, to provide for increasing amounts of food to meet the growth in population and the invention of technologies for preserving, storing, and trading food. If food became scarce hunters and gatherers had to relocate to more plentiful environments. If they invented other means of providing goods and services with trading potential (think manufacturing) then they could stay in their homes (think cities), export their produce (think clothing and shoes), and import their food from rural farmers.

The major problem with hunting and gathering and also agriculture is the Malthusian problem of population explosion ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_growth_model

Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. ... The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants, and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice.

— Thomas Malthus, 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter I


The American College of Physicians, unlike the American Medical Association and virtually all other medical/hospital associations, endorses Medicare for All and a public choice option ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-college-of-physicians-endorses-medicare-for-all-2020-1

Jensen Comment
According to the article the ACP believes that Medicare-for-All as envisioned by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will alleviate workloads and physician burnout. Nothing could be further from the truth. The open border advocacy and promises of free medical services to anybody that immigrates to the USA will greatly overburden physicians. How naive can you get.

Half of all US nurses and doctors are burned out — and they say the healthcare system is to blame ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/nurses-doctors-face-burnout-due-to-health-care-system-2019-10
Medicare-for-All won't help since it promises to work them harder for less pay and promises healthcare coverage to possibly millions of immigrants flowing in under open borders


Big Data+Small Bias << Small Data+Zero Bias ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/big-datasmall-bias.html


Walter E. Williams --  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Williams

Unappreciated Crime Costs ---
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/01/15/unappreciated-crime-costs-n2559445?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=01/15/2020&bcid=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f&recip=17935167

Criminal activity imposes huge costs on black residents in low-income neighborhoods of cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia and many others. Thousands of black Americans were murdered in 2019. Over 90% of the time, the perpetrator was also black. Leftists and social justice warriors charge that what blacks have to fear most is being shot and killed by police, but the numbers don't add up. For several years, The Washington Post has been documenting police shootings in America. Last year, 933 people were shot and killed by police. Twenty-three percent (212) of people shot and killed were black; 35% (331) were white; 16% (155) were Hispanic and 201 were of other or unknown races. The high homicide rate within the black community doesn't begin to tell the full tragedy.

Crime imposes a hefty tax on people who can least afford it. They are the law-abiding residents of black neighborhoods. Residents must bear the time cost and other costs of having to shop outside of their neighborhoods. Supermarkets that are abundant in low-crime neighborhoods are absent or scarce in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. Because of the paucity of supermarkets and other big-box stores in these neighborhoods, some "experts" and academicians have labeled them as "food deserts." That's the ridiculous suggestion that white supermarket merchants and big-box store owners don't like green dollars coming out of black hands. The true villains of the piece are the criminals who make some businesses unprofitable. By the way, these are equal opportunity criminals. They will victimize a black-owned business just as they would victimize a white-owned business. The high crime rates in many black neighborhoods have the effect of outlawing economic growth and opportunities.

In low-crime neighborhoods, FedEx, UPS and other delivery companies routinely leave packages containing valuable merchandise on a doorstep if no one is home. That saves the expense of redelivery and saves recipients the expense of having to go pick up the packages. In high-crime neighborhoods, delivery companies leaving packages at the door or supermarkets leaving goods outside unattended would be equivalent to economic suicide. Fearing robberies, taxi drivers, including black drivers, often refuse to accept telephone calls for home pickups and frequently pass prospective black customers who hail them on the street. Plus, there's the insult associated with not being able to receive pizzas or other deliveries on the same terms as people in other neighborhoods.

Another often-overlooked impact of crime is lower property values. Homes that wouldn't fetch $10,000, $20,000 or $40,000 suddenly fetch hundreds of thousands when large numbers of middle- and upper-income people purchase formerly run-down properties and fix them up. This is called gentrification, where wealthier, predominantly white, people bid higher rental prices thus forcing out low-income residents. As a result of gentrification, there is greater police protection and other neighborhood amenities increase.

Many make the erroneous assumption that black people don't care about crime. But black people strongly disapprove of the day-to-day violence that's all too common in their communities. What compounds that problem is a deep mistrust of police in poor black neighborhoods. This distrust, along with fear of reprisals by black criminals, causes an atmosphere of noncooperation with the police. It creates the "stop snitching" principle. This principle of snitches being worse than criminals themselves only exacerbates the crime problem in black communities by giving aid and comfort to the true enemies of the community -- those who prey on the community and have little fear of being brought to justice. In some cities, less than 10% of murderers are ever charged.

For decades, the problems of blacks could be laid at the feet of racial discrimination. Our ancestors started a civil rights struggle and won. Today, the most devastating problems of blacks are entirely self-inflicted such as high illegitimacy, family breakdown and unsafe communities. These problems have little to do with civil rights. But as long as blacks buy into the notion that white racism is the source of their problems, the solutions will be elusive forever.


Fraudsters Eyeing Life Insurance And Retirement Accounts ---
http://www.insurancenewsnetmagazine.com/article/fraudsters-eyeing-life-insurance-and-retirement-accounts-3788#.Xh8rI3dFycw

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


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

Read 58 pages of letters revealing how WeWork convinced securities regulators to let it use an accounting measure that painted a rosy picture ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-sec-letters-about-contribution-margin-2020-1

·         Business Insider obtained 58 pages of correspondence between the SEC and WeWork about the coworking company's IPO filing and questions or concerns the agency had about the document.

 

·         One crucial piece of the back-and-forth centered on the company's use of a non-GAAP financial metric.

 

·         The SEC originally asked WeWork to "remove disclosure of this measure throughout your registration statement."

 

·         After pushback from WeWork's lawyers, including a former chief of the same SEC division asking the company to scrap the metric, the agency relented and allowed the company to continue using the metric after it made some changes. 

When WeWork first released the documents for its initial-public-offering filing in mid-August, investors, analysts, and journalists zeroed in on a creative financial metric the company was using to show the performance of each location. 

Dubbed the contribution margin after an earlier and quite similar metric called community-adjusted EBITDA was universally panned, it departed from general accepted accounting principles (GAAP, in accounting speak) in how it accounted for lease costs.

The metric was intended to reflect the true timing of revenue and costs associated with the real-estate leases, according to the company. The figure was positive when key GAAP numbers were in the red. 

It turns out the Securities and Exchange Commission had concerns about the metric. In a nine-page letter to then-CEO Adam Neumann dated August 30, the SEC's division of corporation finance raised numerous issues and concluded one section with the words: "Please remove disclosure of this measure throughout your registration statement."

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on controversial non-GAAP metrics ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory02.htm#ProForma


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

List of top virtual crypto currencies in 2020 ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/top-cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin ($156.52 Billion)
Ethereum ($17.50 Billion)
Ripple's XRP ($9.80 Billion)
Bitcoin Cash ($5.76 Billion)
Bitcoin SV ($5.51 Billion)
Tether ($4.11 Billion)
Litecoin ($3.57 Billion)
EOS ($3.42 Billion)
Binance Coin ($2.62 Billion)
Monero ($1.12 Billion)

 Purchase & Download the Full Report


Unwritten Ethics Question:  Is Almost Everything Fair in Love, War, and Baseball

MIT:  Baseball’s ban on sign-stealing technology doesn’t make sense ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615051/the-red-sox-should-not-have-fired-alex-cora/

. . .

The Astros and Red Sox were wrong to fire their employees for seeking tactical advantage. The New England Patriots were right not to fire Belichik in 2007. Should an investigation find that his team was indeed surreptitiously filming the Bengals at his behest, the team should not fire him as a consequence.

Rather, football and baseball should change their rules to reflect the ubiquity of imaging and communications devices. Both sports will be better off without spurious constraints on technologically aided attempts to decrypt opponents’ communications. Sporting contests, after all, are decided not only by luck and strength, but also by skill.

 

Jensen Comment
I don't like the above article, because I think opposing teams in sports should play under the same ethics even when the "ethics" are not explicit in writing --- much like the way ethics kicks in when the laws are not explicit in writing.  Hence I feel that opposing teams should also play under the same set of unwritten ethics. It was not sportsmanlike when the Houston Astros played under different ethics than the LA Dodgers in the 2017 World Series ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Houston_Astros_season

We expect business firms to behave under the equal ethics. Why shouldn't sports teams play under equal ethics of baseball?
It's not at all fair when a team wins a competition because looser ethics constraints.

Taken to an extreme should a boxer with a stun gun in his gloves be allowed to win when his opponents who did not have hidden stun guns?
This is fair only if both fighters have an option to use stun guns in their gloves.

My favorite example of ethical performance is our hometown hero Bode Miller who grew up close to our Cannon Mountain Ski Resort.

Bode Miller --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/WinterSports/Set01/WinterSportsSet01.htm

According to the Time Magazine story Bode invented a ski boot modification that would've given him an edge in his racing competitions. But Bode did not want a one-sided win aided by his technology modification. Therefore, he made his invention known to his competitors. Whether or not they chose to use it was then up to them. The important point is that all racing competitors were competing under the same ethics.

Ethics is all about the unwritten "rules" above and beyond the written rules of fair competition.

Of course there are exceptions when human life is at stake.

Is there a difference between wars and athletic competitions and business behavior. War entails real lives and enormous stakes. The classic dilemma that relates to the recent sign stealing scandal in baseball is England's cracking of the code of the German Enigma Machine  in World War II---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
Breaking of the Enigma Machine encryption code was really sign stealing. If the Germans realized that Alan Turing's team had cracked the code the Germans would no longer have relied on the same encryption system just like the LA Dodgers would have changed the signaling between the catcher and pitcher when they played the Houston Astros if the Dodgers had known that the Astros discovered how to read pitches in advance. But only trophies and money were at stake --- not lives and victory in world war.

What's interesting is the degree to which England went to keep Turning's discovery secret. If England always saved its ships from the German U-Boats the Germans would soon suspect that the Enigma Machine had been compromised. So England actually let some some of its ships be sunk (and lives lost) to continue to protect some other ships and some other lives. What a cat and mouse dilemma?

Then there's the ultimate question to be addressed in most any ethics course.
Should Harry Truman have invited the Japanese to witness an atomic bomb drop in the desert before he decided to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima
We can erase the official records of the Astros' winning of the 2017 World Series, but we can't erase the official record of the loss of World War II in the pacific.


It's never been easier to get an A at Princeton ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/01/the-decline-and-fall-of-grade-deflation-at-princeton.html

A’s were the most common grade in all academic divisions. Over two-thirds of the humanities’ grades were in the A-range — C’s were virtually nonexistent — versus 46 percent in the natural sciences.

Although engineering and the natural sciences graded harsher, students were about twice as likely to earn an A+ in them as their classmates in other divisions. Unlike generic A’s, professors must file a special statement explaining why they’re giving an A+. Both are worth 4.0 points on the GPA scale.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Note the graphs comparing Humanities (highest gpa averages), Social Sciences, Engineering, and Natural Sciences (lowest gpa averages slightly under 3.4)

The Top 20 (actually 19) Universities with the Highest Average GPAs ---
https://ripplematch.com/journal/article/the-top-20-universities-with-the-highest-average-gpas-84ef5edf/

With Ivy League universities making up 4 of the 5 universities with the highest average GPAs, it’s clear there’s an issue with grade inflation among some of America’s most elite institutions. The only Ivy League absent from our full top 20 list is Princeton University, which once had concrete policies (subsequently abandoned) in place to prevent grade inflation. Whether or not you use GPA as a way of evaluating entry-level candidates, it’s important to understand that every university has a different way of grading, and not all GPAs are created equal. Evaluating candidates holistically – think experience, skills, university AND GPA will garner a better set of candidates than screening on GPA alone.

 

 
1. Brown University – 3.71

Brown University – which is known for its relaxed grading system – once again takes the top spot with an average GPA of 3.71. As reported last year, Brown’s grading system does not record failing grades and there’s no such grade as a “D”, leaving A’s, B’s, and C’s as the only grading option for students. According to Brown’s website, the de-emphasis on grades is intentional, and was implemented to encourage students to explore the academic curriculum widely.

 

2.  Stanford University – 3.66

Similar to our 2018 report, Stanford ranks as No. 2 on our list with its average GPA of 3.66. The grading system remains unchanged from the previous year, which notably, gives students a shot at a 4.3 GPA if they receive an A+ in a class.

 

3. Harvard University – 3.64

Following closely behind Stanford University, the self-reported average GPA at Harvard University is 3.64, or hovering around A-. It seems that not much has changed since 2015, when a survey of graduating seniors published in the Harvard Crimson reported the average GPA at 3.64. That same survey found that, despite the frequency of high GPAs, 72% of students surveyed didn’t think grade inflation at Harvard was much of a problem at all.

 

4. Yale University – 3.62

According to a 2017 Yale News article, 92% of Yale faculty believe there is grade inflation at Yale. The article also points out that while Yale does not publicly release GPA data, Yale News estimated that around 30% of students graduated with an A- GPA or above based on the percentage of students that graduated Cum Laude. With an average GPA of 3.62 reported by the Yale students that use our platform, that sounds about right.

 

5. Columbia University – 3.59

Similar to Stanford University, an A+ at Columbia University gives students a 4.33 GPA, according to the grading policy listed on the university’s website. With Columbia University’s average GPA as a 3.59 for undergraduate students, the Ivy League made it into our top 5 despite steps taken by the university to address the high concentration of students that receive A’s.

 

With Ivy League universities making up 4 of the 5 universities with the highest average GPAs, it’s clear there’s an issue with grade inflation among some of America’s most elite institutions. The only Ivy League absent from our full top 20 list is Princeton University, which once had concrete policies in place to prevent grade inflation. Whether or not you use GPA as a way of evaluating entry-level candidates, it’s important to understand that every university has a different way of grading, and not all GPAs are created equal. Evaluating candidates holistically – think experience, skills, university AND GPA – will garner a better set of candidates than screening on GPA alone.

 

See the rest of the top 20 universities with the highest average GPAs below:

 

6. Vanderbilt University – 3.57

 

7. Duke University – 3.56

 

7. Baylor University – 3.56

 

9. Northeastern University – 3.55

 

10. Dartmouth College – 3.54

 

10. Barnard College – 3.54

 

12. Amherst College – 3.53

 

12. Rice University – 3.53

 

12. The University of Pennsylvania – 3.53

 

15. Washington University in St. Louis – 3.52

 

15. Northwestern University – 3.52

 

15. Johns Hopkins University – 3.52

 

18. Stevens Institute of Technology – 3.51

 

19. Cornell University – 3.5

 

19. University of Notre Dame – 3.5

 

Jensen Comment
At 3.63 Princeton would've ended up at Rank 4 if Princeton had not been removed from the above ranking.

When universities are extremely hard to get into, one argument for grade inflation is that it's unfair in Lake Wobegon to give grades of C or below. Arguments against this excuse for grade inflation in Lake Wobegon is that even at Princeton and the other prestigious universities some students are markedly better than other students. The best students complain that it's impossible in Lake Wobegon to prove they are better than their peers.

An argument against grade inflation in Lake Wobegon is that theirs not a whole lot of incentive to try hard to be better than average if the average is the highest grade that can be earned in a course. My guess is that students who experience blood, sweat, and tears for grades in Lake Wobegon are those that face stiff competition in external competency examinations such as the competition faced by pre-med students when taking the MCAT in stiff competition to get into medical school. Engineers face licensing examinations. And if you're trying to get into graduate schools there are GRE, LSAT, GMAT, and other competitive examinations.

When nobody gets a C grade it's a lot easier for faculty to assign grades. Grades D and F are for outlier students who are usually easy to identify. C grades used to be given for average performance, including students who did not perform so well but really, really tried. When there are no C grades those students who did not perform well but really, really tried get B grades.

I think a lot of the blame for grade inflation across the USA is heavily due to having student evaluations affect tenure and other performance decisions of teachers. Students now have blackmail nooses that they hold over the heads of their teachers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor

Based on existing research, “the strongest predictor of (student) evaluations is grade expectations,” he said ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/12/09/study-attempts-debunk-criticisms-student-evaluations-teaching?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=bd09d7a331-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-bd09d7a331-197565045&mc_cid=bd09d7a331&mc_eid=1e78f7c952


The Atlantic:  Has College Gotten Too Easy? Time spent studying is down, but GPAs are up ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/07/has-college-gotten-easier/594550/

Jensen Comment
In eight decades the median grade across the USA went from C+ to A- (with variations of course) and efforts in such places as Princeton and Cornell to limit the proportion of A grades were ended and deemed as failures.
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor

Now we ask:  Has college gotten to easy. I guess you know what I think.

Higher education has become Lake Wobegon where (almost) all students are above average in terms of what used to be average.

Especially note the grade inflation graphs at www.Gradeinflation.com


Cheat (think plagiarism) on Your Homework? In This Harvard Class, Just Say You’re Sorry ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Cheat-on-Your-Homework-In/247902?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=296279

A student’s programming code just won’t run. It’s getting late, and the assignment is due in just a few hours. There are a million other things to do. The specter of a failing grade looms large. And lifting part of a classmate’s work before clicking submit seems like an easy shortcut.

Taking such a step — and getting caught — could result in a disciplinary hearing and a harsh sanction, but not necessarily in Harvard University’s wildly popular introductory computer-science course. Professor David J. Malan has incorporated a “regret clause” into his syllabus: If first-time offenders come forward and admit what they did within 72 hours, an instructor will give a failing grade on the assignment — but will not refer the case for disciplinary action.

Six years in, the clause — used by a tiny minority of students — has not pushed down the percentage of students in the class referred to the university’s honor council, according to a paper Malan released recently. But he has learned some valuable lessons about why students cheat, and he believes conversations with regretful students may lead them to develop healthier work habits, like reaching out for help or attending office hours. He recommends that other instructors, even outside computer science, adopt the initiative for that reason.

“Acts of academic dishonesty were a symptom of larger concerns or pressures in their life,” Malan said of some cases. The conversations, he said, “made it much more real, and much more difficult, because now you are on the front lines, discussing these things with students.” Sometimes, in the conversations, the student cries.

The paper, released in December, offered a comprehensive set of statistics on the policy’s use and wider effects for the first time. Hundreds of students enroll in Malan’s course — CS50 — each fall, and the number of students who invoke the regret clause annually peaked in 2015 at 26, or about 3 percent of that fall’s 750-person class. This past semester, just 8 of 781 students did so.

. . .

In 2012, after 125 students were suspected of cheating on a Harvard take-home exam, Blum wrote that students at highly selective universities have a sense of “inevitable achievement” and perhaps feel “entitled to succeed.” She said recently that such an atmosphere at selective institutions could make statements like the “regret clause” more challenging to carry out, though she said that this outlook is far from universal and that she had grown more sympathetic to students since then.

Over all, Blum said, the Harvard “regret clause” merits wider consideration: “They really are trying to get to the bottom of what’s motivating the behavior. Is it that students really need some mental-health counseling, or do they need to improve their academic skills? That seems to me humane.”

Jensen Comment

The article above does not reveal the grading expectations of Professor Malan's course and what the reward might be for successful cheating. In a computer science course with coding I suspect much of the cheating is collaboration where students work jointly with somebody when they were supposed to work individually on coding projects. I suspect plagiarism on term papers is more apt to be a problem in humanities (think history) and social science (think economics) courses. If a course term paper is an enormous component of the final grade (say 50%) students are less apt to self-report their cheating if they get an F on the term paper after self reporting the cheating (as is the case in David Malan's course featured in the above article). In David Malan's above course I would guess that self-reporting cheaters were punished with F grades have a much smaller component of the final grade.

This article overlooks some important points. Firstly, it overlooks the fact that Harvard has just about the highest grade inflation in the USA. With 4.00 being the highest possible gpa, one study puts Harvard in third place (with a 3.64 average graduation gpa) behind Number 1 grade inflator Brown University and Number 2 Stanford University ---
https://ripplematch.com/journal/article/the-top-20-universities-with-the-highest-average-gpas-84ef5edf/
Scroll down to the graphs

In the 2012 cheating scandal cited above, over 60 students out of 125 were expelled from Harvard for cheating. What the article does not tell you is that the students were not cheating for an A grade. Every student was assured in that political science course of getting an A grade for the course  if a student turned in the course assignments irrespective of the quality of the work turned in. Students were not cheating for a top grade. Most were cheating because when assured of a top grade without putting in much of any effort some viewed putting in any effort as a waste of of their valuable time since quality of work was not important ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#UVA  (scroll down to the Harvard incident)

Undergraduate  student Ted Kennedy was kicked out of Harvard for hiring somebody to take his final exams. Self-reporting here would have resulted in an F grade for each course. And future Senator Kennedy  would not only implicate himself by self-reporting of cheatin  --- the person who took money to take the exams would also be implicated. Ratting on partners in crime can get you hurt.

And besides self reporting of cheating is not good training to become a politician.

Suppose three students in Professor Malan's course cheat by collaboration. If one has self-reports the cheating what happens to the other two students who did not self report?


Hans Eysenck --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Eysenck

Journal retracts 30-year-old paper by controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/01/21/journal-retracts-30-year-old-paper-by-controversial-psychologist-hans-eysenck/
Academic support for genetics differences in intelligence by race has been on the decline for some time.


A California woman pleaded guilty in federal court in Boston to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for paying a man to take online courses for her son to graduate on time from Georgetown University ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/01/23/woman-admits-she-paid-man-take-online-classes-her-son?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=8883280d05-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-8883280d05-197565045&mc_cid=8883280d05&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
No mention is made of what Georgetown University will do, including the possibility of revoking the degree.
Jail time is being recommended for his mother.


How to Mislead With Statistics

Can ‘White Resentment’ Help Explain Higher-Education Cuts? ----
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-White-Resentment-/247921?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=296279

Blunt discussions of racism are increasingly showing up in research of state higher-education issues. A recent study into state appropriations for public colleges is one of a growing number of efforts to try to understand how considerations of race are driving policy decisions.

The researchers found that Republican lawmakers were more generous to higher education in places where there was a higher proportion of white students enrolled as undergraduates.

Take state appropriations, for example. Most studies of the issue rely on the assumption that state lawmakers are seeking to make rational choices in doling out tax dollars. One common explanation is that higher education serves as a sort of “balance wheel” for the state budget: Money for higher education increases in good economic times and decreases when state revenues fall, according to a new paper by Barrett J. Taylor, at the University of North Texas, and Brendan Cantwell, at Michigan State University.

But Taylor and Cantwell eyed instead a more sinister explanation. They suspected that Republican lawmakers, who are overwhelmingly white, would be less generous to an increasingly diverse higher-education landscape. “Republican officials may be more skeptical of higher-education funding when the presumed beneficiaries of government spending are racially diverse,” they posit in their paper.

Cantwell and Taylor looked specifically at places where Republicans controlled both the legislative and executive branches of state government. And they measured how state appropriations differed when the undergraduate enrollment is either more diverse or less diverse than the overall state.

They found that Republican lawmakers were more generous to higher education in places where there was a higher proportion of white students enrolled as undergraduates. “The findings are quite robust,” said Cantwell, an associate professor of educational administration.

People might interpret those results very differently depending on their political leanings, Cantwell said, because the study doesn’t establish that Republican lawmakers are actively choosing to spend less on diverse populations of college students.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This is one of the many articles that the Chronicle disallows comments, because the Chronicle is opposed to opposing viewpoints that it cannot referee in letters to the editor (only a miniscule number of letters are published).

This article misleads by not looking for other causes in the decline in state appropriations for higher education.

I don't deny that some racism and bias against higher education spending are involved by some lawmakers, but the principle cause of the principle cause of the proportionate decline in in state appropriations for higher education is the rise in budget demands that take priority over higher education, mostly Medicaid. Medicaid is heavily funded by state taxpayers, and costs of medical care and medications rose faster than inflation. Added to this demand for funding is the increased numbers of people eligible for Medicaid that arose by increasing the income levels for eligibility for Medicaid that came about with Obamacare.

The Medicaid Expansion Cheat ---
https://mises.org/wire/medicaid-expansion-cheat?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=326849ea12-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_31_06_15_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-326849ea12-228708937

The Washington Post:  Medicaid is Out of Control. Here's How to Fix It ---
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/medicaid-is-out-of-control-heres-how-to-fix-it/2017/03/19/05167e9e-0b2e-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html

. . .

But the most significant Medicaid fact is this: Although three-quarters of Medicaid recipients are either children or young adults, they account for only one-third of costs. The elderly and disabled constitute the other one-quarter of recipients, but they represent two-thirds of costs. 

How could this be? Doesn't Medicare — not Medicaid — cover the elderly and disabled? Well, yes, but there’s a giant omission: nursing home and other long-term care. Medicaid covers these for the poor elderly and disabled.

At the federal level, spending on the elderly — mainly for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — is already crowding out nonelderly spending, as the Trump administration's 2018 budget shows. Now pressures are tightening on states. 

Because they pay 40 percent of Medicaid, its escalating costs compete directly with state and local services — schools, roads, police, parks, sanitation — and lower taxes. Medicaid's “entitlement” nature means that anyone who qualifies for support must get it. By contrast, schools and other state services get what seems affordable. Slowly, Medicaid is usurping state priorities. 

Medicaid now claims nearly one-fifth of states' general revenues, reports Robin Rudowitz of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Under present law, the squeeze will worsen.

Fortunately, there’s a sensible solution to this problem. It isn't to gut care for the elderly. Instead, we should transfer Medicaids long-term care to the federal government, which would pay all costs, probably by merging with Medicare. In return, the states would assume all Medicaid’s costs for children and younger adults, give up some or all of their federal aid for K-12 schools and, if needed, trim other federal grants to ensure financial neutrality.

At the outset, there would be no obvious winner. For every dollar of higher federal spending on long-term care, there would be a dollar offset in lower spending on medical care for children and younger adults plus less generous federal grants. But over time, this swap of responsibilities would make sense for everyone. It would concentrate oversight for the young at the state and local levels while aid to the elderly and disabled would be firmly lodged at the federal level.

Consider. For states, spending would no longer be tied to demographic trends — an aging society — they can't change. Controlling schools and a child-centered Medicaid, they would be in the best position to fight child poverty, which is arguably the nation's most serious social problem. The rising costs of long-term care, a national problem, would not handcuff them.

As for the federal government, it would control all major programs for the elderly and disabled. The present splintering is undesirable. It means that a fifth of Medicare recipients are so-called “dual eligibles,” belonging also to Medicaid. This raises costs and complicates caregiving. If benefits for the elderly are to be cut (say, by raising eligibility ages), that job is best done if the federal government can choose from all programs for the old.

Unfortunately, there is little support for this sort of swap. Commentators (including this reporter) periodically propose it and praise its benefits. But national politicians seem uninterested. They prefer instead to bleed the states.

 

Jensen Comment
Hence if you take long-term care expenditures out of state Medicaid budgets you would have more state money for higher education.

Sadly, the Federal government is already running at a trillion dollar deficit. We can just keep expanding the deficit. Other solutions are needed.

 


The Digital Pulpit: A Nationwide Analysis of Online Sermons ---
https://www.pewforum.org/2019/12/16/the-digital-pulpit-a-nationwide-analysis-of-online-sermons/?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=2152466a18-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_19_07_43&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-2152466a18-400852189

Catholic masses in comparison make up the 37-14 = 23 minute difference with rituals


Ubiquitous Surveillance Cameras Are Changing Our Understanding of Human Behavior ---
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdbxm/ubiquitous-surveillance-cameras-are-changing-our-understanding-of-human-behavior


Where Do History and English Majors Come From? ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Where-Do-HistoryEnglish/247833?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=296279
In this article "where" means what universities. It does not mean the kinds of students in a given university who choose these majors.
The article does not delve into why students chose these majors over other alternatives, although I'm certain the reasons are quite varied.
The proportions of such majors are smaller than I would've expected, especially in universities like Princeton and Williams that do not offer some of the most popular career majors to undergraduates.


Women Hold 2020 Editor-in-Chief Positions at the 16 Most Elite Law Reviews ---
https://www.law.com/2020/01/21/women-hold-editor-in-chief-positions-at-the-16-most-elite-law-reviews/

Bob Jensen's threads on women at work ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Women


The widespread adoption of electric cars in California is reducing gas tax (road repair) revenue by millions of dollars a year ---
https://kcbsradio.radio.com/articles/electric-cars-cut-into-californias-gas-tax-revenue

Illustration of the "Free Rider" phenomenon in economics, although this is a government policy failure rather than a market failure externality ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem


Soft on Violent Crime in Texas:  Harris County’s Dirty Little Secret ---
https://www.houstoncourant.com/houston-voices/2020/harris-countys-dirty-little-secret


A struggling Minnesota church is asking its older parishioners to leave in hopes of making it more attractive to young families ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3809756/posts
I hope the old folks take their money with them.


Burger King cuts the price of its Impossible Whopper as sales fade ---
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/burger-king-cuts-impossible-whopper-193113756.html
Customers willing to pay more for more flavorful real meat


More than 1,900 stores are closing in 2020 as the retail apocalypse drags on. Here's the full list ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/stores-closing-in-2020-list-2020-1

Pier 1 Imports: 450 stores
Gap: 230 stores
Walgreens: 200 stores
Chico's: 200 stores
Forever 21: 178 stores
Destination Maternity: 183 stores
A.C. Moore: 145 stores
Bose: 119 stores
Olympia Sports: 76 stores
Sears: 51 stores
Kmart: 45 stores
Bed, Bath & Beyond: 44 stores
Lucky's Market: 32 stores
Express: 31 stores
Macy's: 30 stores
JCPenney: 6 stores


Americans’ financial satisfaction hit an all-time high in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to the AICPA’s Q4 2019 Personal Financial Satisfaction Index (PFSi) ---
https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2020/jan/americans-financial-satisfaction-q4-2019-22785.html?utm_source=mnl:cpald&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=23Jan2020


Dangers of Repeat Violent Crime in Texas:  Harris County’s Dirty Little Secret ---
https://www.houstoncourant.com/houston-voices/2020/harris-countys-dirty-little-secret

 

Dangers of Repeat CRIMES FOR WHICH (New York State )DEFENDANT MUST BE RELEASED FROM CUSTODY, WITHOUT BAIL, AFTER JANUARY 1ST:---
https://www.nicoleforny.com/bail/

• Burglary in the second degree (residential burglary)
• Burglary in the third degree

• Robbery in the second degree (aided by another person)
• Robbery in the third degree
• Manslaughter in the second degree
• Criminally negligent homicide
• Aggravated vehicular homicide
• Vehicular manslaughter in the first and second degrees
• Assault in the third degree
• Aggravated vehicular assault
• Aggravated assault upon a person less than eleven years old
• Vehicular assault in the first and second degrees
• Criminal possession of a weapon on school grounds
• Criminal possession of a firearm
• Criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree
• Criminal sale of a firearm to a minor
• Criminal possession of a controlled substance in the first and second degrees
• Criminal sale of a controlled substance in the first and second degrees
• Criminal sale of a controlled substance in or near school grounds
• Use of a child to commit a controlled substance offense
• Criminal sale of a controlled substance to a child
• Patronizing a person for prostitution in a school zone
• Promoting an obscene sexual performance by a child
• Possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child
• Promoting a sexual performance by a child
• Failure to register as a sex offender
• Bribery in the first degree
• Bribe giving for public office
• Bribe receiving in the first degree
• Arson in the third and fourth degrees
• Grand larceny in the first, second, third, and fourth degrees
• Aggravated cruelty to animals
• Overdriving, torturing and injuring animals
• Failure to provide proper sustenance to animals
• Animal fighting
• Unlawful imprisonment in the first degree
• Coercion in the first degree
• Criminal solicitation in the first degree
• Criminal facilitation in the first degree
• Money laundering in support of terrorism in the third and fourth degrees
• Making a terroristic threat
• Obstructing governmental administration in the first and second degree
• Obstructing governmental administration by means of a self-defense spray device
• Promoting prison contraband in the first and second degrees
• Resisting arrest
• Hindering prosecution
• Tampering with a juror
• Tampering with physical evidence
• Aggravated harassment in the first degree
• Directing a laser at an aircraft in the first degree
• Enterprise corruption
• Money laundering in the first degree


The rise and fall of Sears, once the largest and most powerful retailer in the world ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/rise-and-fall-of-sears-bankruptcy-store-closings

Jensen Comment
Sears sold thousands of prefabricated mail-order houses. Slightly over 100 years ago my Grandmother Jensen's brother (Marten) down the road bought a mail order house from Sears for his beautiful farm in northern Iowa. It took quite a few horse-drawn buckboard loads to haul the pieces out to the farm from the train depot. Alongside a walnut tree grove this fancy house had two stories and five bedrooms. ---
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/20/657770791/sears-is-fading-but-memories-of-its-mail-order-homes-endure


How to Restore the California Dream:   Removing Obstacles to Fast and Affordable Housing Development ---
https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=13013&fbclid=IwAR0HGoCXHQMgf2L0-BoRk-jRvc1-E_oOIRM2GiXuQZABJ8v6bLwBLa9BOBk

Jensen Comment
The need for fast and affordable housing conflicts with expensive new regulations such as the requirement that all new housing have solar panels and rent controls that discourage investment in rental property.

One of the biggest problem with housing for the homeless is that it attracts more homeless into a community, along with services for the homeless such as welfare services, drug rehab services, free medical services, municipal services such as police and fire protection, etc. We all would like more housing for the homeless in somebody else's community.

Some policies greatly increase the population of homeless in a community, notably sanctuary city policies -that attract homeless to the entire west coast of the USA.and other cities like NYC --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city




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


Education Tutorials

The Apple Seed (audio storytelling) ---  www.byuradio.org/show/be57d05d-de36-4170-8ae8-5b56c227ff86/the-apple-seed


Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Mysterious particles spewing from Antarctica defy physics ---
https://www.livescience.com/antarctic-neutrino-mystery-deepens.html

Space Policy Online --- https://spacepolicyonline.com/

What the Earth Would Look Like if You Drained the Water from the Oceans ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/what-the-earth-would-look-like-if-we-drained-the-water-from-the-oceans.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

How the Female Scientist Who Discovered the Greenhouse Gas Effect Was Forgotten by History ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/how-the-female-scientist-who-discovered-the-greenhouse-gas-effect-was-forgotten-by-history.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Our Shared Seas (ocean ecology) --- https://oursharedseas.com/

Do drummers have different brains than the rest of us ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/neuroscience-of-drumming.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
I don't know about her brain, but she can sure play the drums ---
Meet Viola Smith, the World’s Oldest Drummer: Her Career Started in the 1930s, and She’s Still Playing at 106 -
--
 http://www.openculture.com/2019/10/meet-viola-smith-the-worlds-oldest-drummer.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

Life Inside (prison life) ---  www.themarshallproject.org/tag/life-inside

The meaning of Margaret Mead --- https://aeon.co/essays/how-margaret-mead-became-a-hate-figure-for-conservatives
How anthropology researchers saw things so differently in Samoan culture
Remember the story about blind people describing what they see when touching different parts of an elephant

A worthwhile video of women in economics (Episode 2) ---
https://learn.mru.org/women-economics-series-anna-schwartz/?utm_source=WIEUpdates&utm_medium=ReleaseBlast&utm_campaign=MRUEmail&utm_content=schwartz
Bob Jensen's threads on women at work ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Women

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

Women Hold 2020 Editor-in-Chief Positions at the 16 Most Elite Law Reviews ---
https://www.law.com/2020/01/21/women-hold-editor-in-chief-positions-at-the-16-most-elite-law-reviews/
Bob Jensen's threads on women at work ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Women

Life Inside (prison life) ---  www.themarshallproject.org/tag/life-inside

College Behind Bars (prison education and training) --- www.pbs.org/kenburns/college-behind-bars

The Sentencing Project: State-by-State Data ---  www.sentencingproject.org/the-facts/#map

Oxford Transitional Justice Research Seminars --- https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/oxford-transitional-justice-research-seminars

Media Constructions of Social Justice --- www.projectlooksharp.org/front_end.php?kit_id=7#

The Digital Panopticon: Tracing London Convicts in Britain & Australia, 1780-1925 Social --- www.digitalpanopticon.org

Victims Beware:  Soft on Violent Crime in Texas:  Harris County’s Dirty Little Secret ---
https://www.houstoncourant.com/houston-voices/2020/harris-countys-dirty-little-secret

Victims Beware:  CRIMES FOR WHICH (New York State )DEFENDANT MUST BE RELEASED FROM CUSTODY, WITHOUT BAIL, AFTER JANUARY 1ST:---
https://www.nicoleforny.com/bail/

• Burglary in the second degree (residential burglary)
• Burglary in the third degree

• Robbery in the second degree (aided by another person)
• Robbery in the third degree
• Manslaughter in the second degree
• Criminally negligent homicide
• Aggravated vehicular homicide
• Vehicular manslaughter in the first and second degrees
• Assault in the third degree
• Aggravated vehicular assault
• Aggravated assault upon a person less than eleven years old
• Vehicular assault in the first and second degrees
• Criminal possession of a weapon on school grounds
• Criminal possession of a firearm
• Criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree
• Criminal sale of a firearm to a minor
• Criminal possession of a controlled substance in the first and second degrees
• Criminal sale of a controlled substance in the first and second degrees
• Criminal sale of a controlled substance in or near school grounds
• Use of a child to commit a controlled substance offense
• Criminal sale of a controlled substance to a child
• Patronizing a person for prostitution in a school zone
• Promoting an obscene sexual performance by a child
• Possessing an obscene sexual performance by a child
• Promoting a sexual performance by a child
• Failure to register as a sex offender
• Bribery in the first degree
• Bribe giving for public office
• Bribe receiving in the first degree
• Arson in the third and fourth degrees
• Grand larceny in the first, second, third, and fourth degrees
• Aggravated cruelty to animals
• Overdriving, torturing and injuring animals
• Failure to provide proper sustenance to animals
• Animal fighting
• Unlawful imprisonment in the first degree
• Coercion in the first degree
• Criminal solicitation in the first degree
• Criminal facilitation in the first degree
• Money laundering in support of terrorism in the third and fourth degrees
• Making a terroristic threat
• Obstructing governmental administration in the first and second degree
• Obstructing governmental administration by means of a self-defense spray device
• Promoting prison contraband in the first and second degrees
• Resisting arrest
• Hindering prosecution
• Tampering with a juror
• Tampering with physical evidence
• Aggravated harassment in the first degree
• Directing a laser at an aircraft in the first degree
• Enterprise corruption
• Money laundering in the first degree

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


Math Tutorials

 

Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to Mathematics and Statistics

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


History Tutorials

The First Real Museum of Philosophy Prepares to Launch: See the Museo della Filosofia in Milan ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/the-first-museum-of-philosophy-prepares-to-launch.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

NYT:  American history textbooks can differ across the country, in ways that are shaded by partisan politics ---
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html Jensen Comment
I remember years ago when an American History textbook intended for all high schools in Texas had hundreds of mistakes including the "fact" that the USA dropped a nuclear bomb in the Korean War. Most of these "mistakes" were not typos. Gone are the days when American History textbooks are factual.

Beyond the Bubble: History Assessments of Thinking ---
https://sheg.stanford.edu/history-assessments

The rise and fall of Sears, once the largest and most powerful retailer in the world ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/rise-and-fall-of-sears-bankruptcy-store-closings

January 22, 1984:  Apple Introduced the Macintosh Computer in a 60-Second Superbowl Commercial ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Macintosh
Who won the game?

The Ancient History of Copper ---
https://www.thebalance.com/copper-history-pt-i-2340112

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

 

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ---
https://folkways.si.edu/

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

Linguistics:  How do scammers use language to trick their victims? ---
https://daily.jstor.org/the-life-changing-linguistics-of-nigerian-scam-emails/

Academic Phrasebank --- www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk

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/

January 13, 2020

·         Climate Change May Translate Into More Fatal Injuries

·         All in the Timing: Many Get Knee Replacement Too Late or Too Soon

·         Could Your Morning Coffee Be a Weight-Loss Tool?

·         Can Pot Bring on Psychosis in Young Users? It May Be Happening, Experts Say

·         Targeted Ultrasound Destroys Cancer Cells: Study

·         New Coronavirus May be Cause of Outbreak in China

·         California May Start Producing Its Own Medicines

·         Arousal Syndrome No Cause for Shame, Doctors Say

·         Texas Teen, 15, Youngest to Die From Vaping

January 14, 2020

·         What Works Best to Help Men With Overactive Bladder?

·         Nearly 20 Years Later, Cancer Rates Higher in 9/11 First Responders

·         'Burnout' Could Raise Your Odds for A-fib

·         Good News for People with Persistent Anxiety

·         More Studies Link Vaping to Asthma, COPD

·         N.J. Lawmakers Vote to Ban Flavored Vape Products

·         Sports Coaches Recruited to Help Stop Dating Violence

·         Climate Change May Translate Into More Fatal Injuries

 January 15, 2020

·         Probiotics: Don't Buy the Online Hype

·         Sandwiches Recalled Over Listeria Fears

·         For Trans Youths, a Tough Path to Gender Harmony

·         Less Sex Could Mean Earlier Menopause

·         Which Obesity Surgery Is Right for You?

·         Pot-Using Drivers Still Impaired After the High Fades

·         New Drugs Getting FDA's Blessing Faster, but Is That a Good Thing?

·         Is It Flu, Or Flu-Like? It's Miserable Either Way

·         Machine Could Expand Pool of Livers for Donation

 January 16, 2020

·         CDC Lifts Advisory Against Certain Romaine Lettuce

·         Trauma of Miscarriage May Trigger PTSD

·         Probiotics: Don't Buy the Online Hype

·         Sandwiches Recalled Over Listeria Fears

·         For Trans Youths, a Tough Path to Gender Harmony

·         Less Sex Could Mean Earlier Menopause

·         Which Obesity Surgery Is Right for You?

·         Pot-Using Drivers Still Impaired After the High Fades

·         New Drugs Getting FDA's Blessing Faster, but Is That a Good Thing?

 January 20, 2020

·         Confronting Racial Bias in Maternal Deaths

·         Are Doctors Throwing Away Potential Donor Kidneys?

·         Racy Slogans Halt Utah Condom Distribution Plan

·         Sepsis Causes Far More Deaths Than Thought

·         Parents Can Help Their Sleep-Deprived Teens

·         Flu Shot No Match for 'B' Strain, Season Rages On

·         Diet Drug Belviq May Raise Cancer Risk: FDA

·         Prices of MS Medications Keep Soaring

·         CDC Lifts Advisory Against Certain Romaine Lettuce

 January 22, 2020

·         First U.S. Case of China Coronavirus Diagnosed

·         FDA: Skin Absorbs Untested Sunscreen Chemicals

·         Why Are Fewer U.S. Kids Going to Pediatricians?

·         Could a Kid's Microbiome Alter Their Behavior?

·         Brain Waves Explain Sleep Woes in Kids with Autism?

·         Ozzy Osbourne has Parkinson's Disease

·         Taylor Swift's Mother Has Brain Tumor

·         Millions With Heart Disease Use Pot, Risking Harm

·         Deadly New Coronavirus Can Spread Between Humans

January 23, 2020

·         3 U.S. Airports to Screen for Chinese Coronavirus

·         Eating More Veggies Won't Stop Prostate Cancer: Study

·         'Yo-Yo' Blood Pressure Numbers in Youth a Bad Sign for Health Later

·         Allow Dead Men to Be Sperm Donors, Medical Ethicists Say

·         Mystery Coronavirus from China: What to Know

·         Utah Bans Conversion Therapy

·         Production of Two Excedrin Painkillers Halted

·         Vaping Is the Darling of Instagram

·         This Year's Flu Season Taking Deadly Aim at Kids

January 24, 2020

·         CDC Confirms Second U.S. Coronavirus Case

·         Low-Dose Aspirin Might Help Prevent Preterm Births

·         Washington Monitors Coronavirus Patient’s Contacts

·         Coronavirus 2020 Outbreak: Latest Updates

·         Many Critical Workers in U.S. Short on Sleep

·         Faulty Immune System May Lead to Lung Cancer

·         New Drug Could Help Stop Blindness From Thyroid Eye Disease

·         The Damage of Vaccine Misinformation

·         Rare Disease Put This Young Mom in a Coma for 7 Months

January 28, 2020

·         Why Vaping Emergencies May Be Missed

·         Schizophrenia Meds Safe Long-Term, Study Finds

·         Psychedelic Drug Eases Cancer Patients' Distress Long Term

·         Scientists Hope New Tech Aids Coronavirus Vaccine

·         Americans Toss Out Nearly a Third of Food at Home

·         Could a Common Diuretic Med Help Ease Autism Symptoms?

·         Poverty Could Drive Up Youth Suicide Risk

·         Genes May Show Players at Risk for Brain Trouble

·         Kobe Bryant Dies in Helicopter Crash

VIEW ALL HEALTH NEWS

 


What Is the Coronavirus?: Answers to Common Questions About the Mysterious New Virus Spreading Across China ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/what-is-the-coronavirus.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29


The Body:  A Guide for Occupants
http://timharford.com/2020/01/book-of-the-week-4-the-body-a-guide-for-occupants/


Can lithium halt progression of Alzheimer's disease?
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-lithium-halt-alzheimer-disease.html


A ketogenic diet—which provides 99 percent of calories from fat and protein and only 1 percent from carbohydrates—produces health benefits in the short term, but negative effects after about a week ---
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-keto-diet-small-doses.html


Why eating yogurt may help lessen the risk of breast cancer ---
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-yogurt-lessen-breast-cancer.html


High-protein diets boost artery-clogging plaque, mouse study shows ---
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-high-protein-diets-boost-artery-clogging-plaque.html


New research could reduce the risk of sudden cardiac death ---
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-sudden-cardiac-death.html


Humor for January 2020

UW-MADISON CAMPUS HUMOR PUBLICATIONS ---
https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/uwmadison/uwhumor/

Campus Jokes ---
http://www.jokebuddha.com/Campus

Here's a humorous and serious TED talk that seriously argues why the world needs billionaires
https://www.ted.com/talks/harald_eia_where_in_the_world_is_it_easiest_to_get_rich

 



Humor January 2020 --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book20q1.htm#Humor0120.htm

Humor December 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q4.htm#Humor1219.htm

Humor November 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q4.htm#Humor1119.htm

Humor October 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q4.htm#Humor1019.htm

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 July 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q3.htm#Humor0719.htm

Humor June 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q2.htm#Humor0619.htm

Humor May 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q2.htm#Humor0519.htm

Humor April 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q2.htm#Humor0419.htm 

Humor March 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q1.htm#Humor0319.htm

Humor February 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q1.htm#Humor0219.htm 

Humor January 2019--- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book19q1.htm#Humor0119.htm   




Tidbits Archives --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials

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