Tidbits on April 15, 2020
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Set 01 of Renate's 2020 Pictures From
Germany ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/rjensen/Tidbits/Renate/2020a/Renate01.htm
Tidbits on April 15, 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/
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
Video: Evolution of programming and languages --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc
Watch 3,000+ Films Free Online from the National Film Board of Canada ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/watch-3000-films-free-from-the-national-film-board-of-canada-2.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
You probably remember this historic clip from MASH (I remembered it) ---
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/mash-actor-timothy-brown-dead-at-82-played-10-years-in-nfl
Scroll down to the second clip
What careers Timothy Brown had from NFL running back to actor to correctional
officer
Herding Cats ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYbKxSDTUHM
This Rap-Based School Curriculum Is Teaching Kids That John Locke Was Cool Like
Che Guevara ---
https://reason.com/2020/04/02/che-guevara-flocabulary-john-locke-rap-quiz/
John Lock Rap ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLAIGrvODxE
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
Join Choir! Choir! Choir! for a Community Singalong in Isolation
---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/04/join-choir-choir-choir-for-a-community-singalong-in-isolation.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Some of the videos are not sung by singers in isolation
Instructions are given for joining singers in isolation
Believe it: Orchestra plays Beethoven 9th from their homes ---
https://slippedisc.com/2020/03/believe-it-orchestra-plays-beethoven-9th-from-their-homes/
Symphony In The Age Of Coronavirus ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/03/symphony-in-the-age-of-coronavirus.html
Stream Andrea Bocelli’s Easter Concert from Milan ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/04/stream-andrea-bocellis-easter-concert-from-milan.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
The Met Opera Streaming Free Operas Online to Get You Through COVID-19
http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/the-met-opera-streaming-free-operas-online-to-get-you-through-covid-19.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
A friend of mine says that he's too dumb for opera and too smart for NASCAR
Songs when you were born, got married, died, etc. ---
https://jborden.com/2020/03/30/music-monday-a-fun-little-music-app-for-the-curious/
Céline Dion - It's All Coming Back To Me Now ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDxoj-tDDIU&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20200331&silverid=NTk4MzY1OTg0MzY5S0
WWII Vet (Age 97) Shows Off Dance Moves During Quarantine ---
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200410/wwii-vet-shows-off-dance-moves-during-quarantine
Dolly Parton sings tribute to Kenny Rogers while self-isolating
from the coronavirus ---
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/dolly-parton-tribute-kenny-rogers-self-isolation-coronavirus
Bob Jensen's Links to Free Music
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm
Photographs and Art
Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Including the Great
Pyramids, the Sphinx & More ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/take-a-3d-tour-through-ancient-giza-including-the-great-pyramids-the-sphinx-more.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
National Gallery of Art: Uncovering America --- www.nga.gov/education/teachers/lessons-activities/uncovering-america.html
The Opossum’s Finest Qualities ---
https://www.mindbounce.com/442699/7-of-the-noble-opossums-finest-qualities/
When I lived in San Antonio the opossums were probably our most common nightly
critters in the back yard. They were not as shy as the raccoons and the
armadillos. One problem I had was that if any of these critters fell into my
swimming pool they could not get back out without help.
Wildlife Thailand --- https://wildlifethailand.com/
Pandemic Shutdown: LA's skies are smog-free and Venice's
canals are clear ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-show-nature-is-reclaiming-urban-areas-amid-coronavirus-2020-4
NYT: A Forest Submerged 60,000 Years Ago Could Save Your
Life One ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/science/underwater-forest-shipworms.html
Bob Jensen's threads on art history ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#ArtHistory
Bob Jensen's threads on history, literature and art ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various
types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on libraries --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#---Libraries
What is Albert Camus’ The Plague About? An Introduction ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/04/what-is-albert-camus-the-plague-about-an-introduction.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Robert Frost’s correspondence on teaching, writing and having fun ---
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-letters-of-robert-frost-review-david-bromwich/
The Secret Cruelty of T. S. Eliot ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/what-ts-eliot-love-letters-reveal/609535/
The Diary of Samuel Pepys --- www.pepysdiary.com
Dolly Parton will read bedtime stories to your kids ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/04/dolly-parton-will-read-bedtime-stories-to-you-every-week.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Pistol Pete: The Glory Days of the Reprisal Killing ---
https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-glory-days-of-the-reprisal-killing/281424/?utm_term=OZY&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DailyDose%20%282020-04-01%2013:57:25%29&utm_content=Final
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 April 15, 2020
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2020/TidbitsQuotations041520.htm
One of my heroes in life was
Ron Calgaard who hired me to join the Trinity University faculty in 1982 and was
my President through 1999 when he retired ahead of me ---
https://new.trinity.edu/news/president-emeritus-ronald-k-calgaard
Jensen Comment
Ron had a somewhat intimidating style and a bit of a temper that, when used
judiciously, can make for more effective and efficient leadership. He did his
best not to suffer fools, which is not easy when herding cats. He frequently
presided over contentious faculty meetings that are inevitable on university
campuses. A skill I never shared was his ability to remember names and faces
virtually everybody on the payroll.
Underneath Ron was a very caring university president who worked tirelessly to make this a better world for students of all races, ethnicity, and faith. He lifted Trinity University to a whole new level of national and international respect and financial endowment. He understood the meaning of financial responsibility and preserved much of the endowment for possible harder times in the future.
After retiring he carried on, sometimes with basketball legend David Robinson, to provide education opportunities for disadvantaged young in San Antonio.
My deepest sympathies for Ron's wonderful and devoted wife Genie and his children. Genie and Ron regularly entertained generously in a way that brought our campus community much closer to one another. Conversations with them were never awkward.
How to Save an Excel Sheet
as a PDF ---
https://www.howtogeek.com/659219/how-to-save-an-excel-sheet-as-a-pdf/
A Less Competitive Ivy
League ---
https://www.ozy.com/the-new-and-the-next/ivy-league-international-students-cost-coronavirus/297381/?utm_term=OZY&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DailyDose%20%282020-04-13%2016:17:36%29&utm_content=Final
Kids These Days: Are
Face-to-Face Social Skills among American Children Declining? ---
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/707985
Many social commentators posit that children’s social skills are declining as a result of exposure to technology. But this claim is difficult to assess empirically because it is challenging to measure “social skills” with confidence and because a strong test would employ nationally representative data of multiple cohorts. No scholarship currently meets these criteria. The authors fill that gap by comparing teachers’ and parents’ evaluations of children’s social skills among children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study 1998 and 2010 cohorts. The authors find no evidence that teachers or parents rate children’s face-to-face social skills as poorer among more recent cohorts, even when accounting for family characteristics, screen time use, and other factors. In addition, within cohorts, children with heavy exposure to screens exhibit similar social skills trajectories compared to children with little exposure to screens. There is a notable exception—social skills are lower for children who access online gaming and social networking many times a day. Overall, however, the results represent a challenge to the dominant narrative that social skills are declining due to technological change.
Jensen Comment
A while back when my wife and I were returning from a trip to Maine we stopped
for lunch at a restaurant in Lincoln, NH. Six teenagers (four females and two
males) sat across from us. I don't know anything about them other than that they
all whipped out their smart phones and never attempted to make conversation with
one another. I suspect that some were playing games and some were communicating
with other teenagers via email.
But just maybe they were communicating with each other while sitting side-by-side.
Following the lead of North
Carolina and some other research universities worldwide, The State University of
New York (SUNY) has opted not to renew its “big deal” with Elsevier for
ScienceDirect in favor of a short list of titles to which campuses across the
system will have access ---
http://slcny.libguides.com/slc/elsevier2020update
Get Smart About Plan S
(international initiative to cap scholarly journal subscription rates
and promote more open sharing) ---
https://beyondthebookcast.com/transcripts/plan-s-lands-at-frankfurt/
Jensen Comment
This initiative is serious because it's funded by 13 research
funding agencies that have the power to require open sharing of funded
research.
Elsevier and the
for-profit scholarly journal publishing oligopoly has been ripping off
libraries for decades ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals
Why the USA Leads the World
in University Research ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/markets-minds-and-money-why-america-leads-the-world-in-university-research.html
Jensen Comment
I readily admit my ignorance about much of the research carried on by
universities. For example, my friend Jagdish Gangolly once pointed out my error
in claiming Big Pharma conducts the field tests on its new drugs and medical
devices. In point of fact university medical schools conduct most of that
research, in part to lend more credibility to the outcomes.
Sixty Minutes April 5, 2020: How to Communicate Interactively With the Dead (without doubt the most fascinating Sixty Minutes module I've ever viewed)
Jensen Comment
It's possible to communicate with dead people in many ways, especially if they
have Websites that are still hosted. For example, one of my colleagues and close
friends was a sociology professor named Mike Kearl at Trinity University. Mike
died of a sudden heart attack in March 2015. But his once-popular and widely
viewed Website is still hosted by Trinity University.
One of the ways of
communicating with a dead scholar's Website is via Web crawlers like Google,
Yahoo, Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc.
For example I entered the search phrase "EXERCISING THE SOCIOLOGICAL
IMAGINATION" in the following Web crawler ---
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
One of the hits I got was Mike Kearl's hit at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/mkearl/
This in a way is how Mike can still communicate with us via Web crawlers.
One of the most exciting
modules I've ever seen on CBS Sixty Minutes was aired on April 5, 2020 ---
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/holocaust-stories-artificial-intelligence-60-minutes-2020-04-05/
This is far beyond mere Web crawling.
You have to watch this show from beginning to end to appreciate how extensive interviews with a person before death, innovative video capturing, and artificial intelligence have been combined to create interactive communications with the dead.
As this technology becomes more efficient and less costly, it will almost be like the dead really aren't dead.
The $1.5 Trillion Student Debt (probably over $2.0 trillion before Biden's plan is enacted) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt#United_States
Is this another unfunded trillions dollars?
Biden's New Student Loan Cancellation Plan
Joe Biden on Thursday announced a plan to cancel student loan debt for low- and middle-income borrowers who attended a public college or private historically black institution.
The former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee's proposal, announced in a Medium post, moves him somewhat closer to the debt cancellation plan from Senator Bernie Sanders, who dropped out of the presidential race earlier this week and had said he would seek to cancel all student debt as president.
Biden's plan would forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt for borrowers who earn up to $125,000 a year and who attended community college or four-year public colleges and universities. The federal government would cover monthly payments for borrowers until the forgivable amount was paid off under his proposal, which would apply to borrowers who attended private HBCUs or minority-serving institutions.
"I believe that as we are being plunged into what is likely to be one of the most volatile and difficult economic times in this country’s recent history, we can take these critical steps to help make it easier for working people to make ends meet," Biden wrote. "Senator Sanders and his supporters can take pride in their work in laying the groundwork for these ideas, and I’m proud to adopt them as part of my campaign at this critical moment in responding to the coronavirus crisis."
In addition to the newly announced proposal, Biden has backed a plan from Senator Elizabeth Warren to immediately cancel a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person.
Jensen Comment
I don't think anybody can reliably measure the ultimate cost of Biden's promise
on loan forgiveness, especially following the worst part of the pandemic. Many
graduates who had been making more than $125,000 per year currently lost their
jobs and will probably be hired back at
much lower salaries given the strains of a post-pandemic slow economy.
For example, Wall Street firms will be very slow in hiring back their younger
employees. Young restaurant and tourism industry managers who were thriving
before the pandemic will probably remain unemployed or hired back at a fraction
of their pre-pandemic earnings.
Sure there are young physicians who will make more than $125,000 after the pandemic. But if they're not discouraged now during the pandemic, they will become depressed by having to pay off their huge loans while the humanities and most business majors get off totally free. Incidentally, many physicians are financially hurting during this pandemic. Yesterday my wife had to have her morphine pump refilled at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center that employees thousands of physicians. Yesterday it was like an empty tomb. The hundreds of surgeries taking place daily before the pandemic have been reduced to a miniscule number of emergency surgeries. And this is happening in virtually every hospital in the USA at the moment.
In my opinion the pandemic makes Biden's Plan virtually a Sanders-Warren total debt forgiveness plan except for the unfortunate graduates of private universities not covered in the forgiveness plan (HBCU priavate colleges will be covered).
Personally, with tens of millions of unemployed non-college graduates after the pandemic I think college student debt forgiveness will be low on the priority list of Congress unless big social spenders are swept into Congress on Biden's coat tails. Those big social spenders after this pandemic could entirely destroy the USA's economy.
This pandemic may never end like we hope it will end. Coronavirus vaccines may be like those frustrating flu vaccines that do not save over 20,000 USA victims every year.
I agree to a controlled amount of stimulus strategically placed, but
not when it comes to
raining down trillions of dollars in printed currency. Raining down trillions of
Sanders-like printed dollars from helicopters would be a disaster. Need I remind you that in Zimbabwe
eventually one egg cost 100 billion Zimbabwe dollars ---
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-crippling-drought-in-zimbabwe.html
By July 2019, the basic food basket was BsF.
2,600,000 in Caracas, according to the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers Center
of Documentation and Analysis, which makes monthly surveys about the price of
products. The Commerce Chamber, however, has a different figure: BsF. 3,700,000
---
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/we-need-start-tossing-money-out-helicopters/608968/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=politics-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20200331&silverid-ref=NTk4MzY1OTg0MzY5S0
Johns Hopkins University:
Updated Map and Table on the Number of Coronavirus Cases for Every Nation
---
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
Accuracy is subject to wide margins of error for every nation and varies greatly
between nations.
The best maps for comparing
counties and towns in your state are provided by your state. For example, here's
the map showing the distribution of cases for New Hampshire counties and towns
---
https://www.wmur.com/article/new-hampshire-coronavirus-map/32009329#
I found this by entering the search phrase "Number of Coronavirus Cases" AND
'New Hampshire" at
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Tough Medical Rationing Decisions
WebMD: NYC Ambulances
Won't Take Cardiac Arrest Patients ---
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200403/nyc-ambulances-wont-take-cardiac-arrest-patients
New York and Nevada Won't
allow pharmacies to fill prescriptions of anti-malarial drugs for
non-hospitalized Covid-19 patients
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/sean-hannity-gov-cuomo-stop-denying-new-yorkers-hydroxychloroquine
Fortunately the other 48 states are still allowing Covid-19 patients a BETTER
chance of not having to be hospitalized
I suspect some non-hospitalized NY and Nevada patients are fleeing to bordering
states
Up to April 5. 2020 only 92 patients were hospitalized out off 669 testing
positive for Covid-19
https://www.wmur.com/article/13-more-covid-19-cases-announced-in-new-hampshire-2-hospitalized-dhhs-says/31756082
Rationing ventilators to
patients with the greatest chance of benefiting from the machines---
https://www.wgbh.org/news/national-news/2020/04/03/ventilator-shortages-loom-as-states-ponder-rules-for-rationing
But the word "benefiting" is somewhat ambiguous such as "suffering the most"
versus "most likely to recover"
Those making the most noise in critical care units are likely to be those that
are least able to breathe
To Use or Not Use a
Ventilating Machine ---
https://www.blabber.buzz/
It's widely known that most
people infected by Covid-19 don't have to be hospitalized.
Those who are hospitalized usually have other preconditions that don't mix
well with Covid-19
What are the two most common preconditions?
Answer
One study concludes age and obesity ---
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nyu-scientists-largest-u-s-study-of-covid-19-finds-obesity-the-single-biggest-factor-in-new-york-critical-cases/
MIT: Triage Protocol
Design for Ventilator Rationing in a Pandemic: A Proposal to Integrate Multiple
Ethical Values through Reserves ---
http://economics.mit.edu/files/19358
4 Conclusion
Because of the anticipated and ongoing shortage of key medical resources such as ventilators and ICU units during the Covid-19 pandemic, several leaders in the medical ethics community have made important recommendations regarding medical rationing. These recommendations reflect compromises between several ethical principles – maximizing lives, maximizing life-years, life-cycle considerations, instrumental values, reciprocity, protecting to the sickest, and nondiscrimination. The priority point system, which aggregates all ethical dimensions into a single score, has become the norm. We believe that a reserve system offers additional flexibility and can simultaneously balance competing objectives in ways that a priority point system cannot.
Reserve systems can remedy challenges associated with prioritizing frontline health workers, an issue that has befuddled the medical ethics community. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Emmanuel et al. (2020) and White and Lo (2020) argue that these essential personnel should be prioritized, but several state standards express the concern that if frontline health workers are given priority, they could exhaust total supply and leave no ventilators for patients from the general community. By setting aside a fraction of ventilators for essential personnel as in a reserve system, not only can these concerns be overcome, but the ethical principles of reciprocity and instrumental valuation can also be reflected in the rationing system.
The theory of reserve systems in this paper is based on three simple normative criteria of non-wastefulness, individual rationality, and respect for priority. Non-wastefulness means no ventilator stays idle while there are patients who are in need. Individual rationality means if there are exclusion criteria for certain reserve categories, they have to be respected. For ventilators, it is natural to rule out category-specific exclusion criteria. Hence, in our application of triage protocol design, this criteria hold automatically. Respect for priority means that allocation of units in a given category has to follow the priority order of patients in that category. To the extent the priority order of patients represents the ethical principles guiding the allocation, this is also a natural principle. It is important to emphasize that these are the same principles that are embraced by the existing triage systems. What differs in our analysis is that we allow for different ethical principles to guide allocation decisions across different units.
In our formal analysis, we characterize the entire class of reservation policies that satisfy three minimal principles though implementation of the deferred-acceptance algorithm. As such, we also provide a full characterization of affirmative action policies. In the context of triage protocol design, one of the main insights for implementation of reserve systems is that processing a reserve category earlier is detrimental to its beneficiaries. This result is especially important since transparency is essential for triage protocol design.
While our analysis has focused narrowly on triage protocol design, there are several other direct applications of our formal theoretical results. These include immigration visa allocation in the United States (Pathak, Rees-Jones and S¨onmez, 2020a), affirmative action in school choice systems in Boston, Chicago, New York City and Chile (Dur et al., 2018; Dur, Pathak and S¨onmez, 2019; Correa et al., 2019), affirmative action for public school and government positions in India (Aygu¨n and Turhan, 2017; Baswana et al., 2018; S¨onmez and Yenmez, 2019a,b), and diversity plans for college admissions in Brazil (Aygu¨n and Bo, 2016). We leave explorations of these connections to future drafts of this paper.
We conclude by noting that it is our hope that the triage rationing protocol we have proposed will only be necessary in exceptional circumstances. The flexibility that a reserve system offers comes with the cost of needing to pay attention to several implementation details. It is also important to precisely define what the ethical principles that govern rationing and make sure that these details are made transparent to all stakeholders. Since failure to receive a unit corresponds to certain death, understanding the difference between mechanisms and choosing them accordingly is of vital importance.
Jensen Comment
This is a very well-reasoned paper. But it still does not really answer the
question of whether it's wise small hospitals Montana to give up idle
ventilators to help hospitals in NYC. Emergency needs for those ventilators can
arise at any moment in Montana. The problem with emergency needs in small
hospitals is that they are so unpredictable.
Heterogeneity in Statistics --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneity_(statistics)
Identification and
Estimation of the SEIRD Epidemic Model for COVID-19 ---
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16fhm4DbYFKKKywmvCBtjWfdqjo-ZPx6E/view
This paper studies the SEIRD epidemic model for COVID-19. First, I show that the model is poorly identified from the observed number of deaths and confirmed cases. There are many sets of parameters that are observationally equivalent in the short run but lead to markedly different long run forecasts. Second, I demonstrate using the data from Iceland that auxiliary information from random tests can be used to calibrate the initial parameters of the model and reduce the range of possible forecasts about the future number of deaths. Finally, I show that the basic reproduction number R0 can be identified from the data, conditional on the clinical parameters. I then estimate it for the US and several other countries, allowing for possible underreporting of the number of cases. The resulting estimates of R0 are heterogeneous across countries: they are 2-3 times higher for Western countries than for Asian countries. I demonstrate that if one fails to take underreporting into account and estimates R0 from the cases data, the resulting estimate of R0 will be biased downward and the model will fail to fit the observed data.
Heterogeneity in Economics --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneity_in_economics
When statisticians have
uncertain answers in heterogeneous worlds
The links were forwarded by Tyler Cowen
Belgium heterogeneity
https://twitter.com/yarotrof/status/1249280304952590338
Austrian heterogeneity ---
https://www.unz.com/isteve/a-view-from-vienna/
Behind the numbers: Refunds for dorms and dining are a tricky calculation ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-coronavirus-has-emptied/248472?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_1141663&cid=db&source=ams&sourceId=296279
The spread of the coronavirus sent students home and left college dorms and dining halls empty. Many students have asked for a refund of their room-and-board fees. Some colleges have refused, some have issued refunds, and others remain undecided. All types of institutions are concerned about the price tag of mass refunds, and what it could mean to them.
Jensen Comment
The most negligible parties in this situation are the lawyers who wrote the dorm
contracts and did not factor in the contractual refund calculation. Although
there may be contractual clauses for individual cases such as when a student is
expelled from a dorm, I guess the lawyers never thought about pandemics or other
situations where the college shuts down all dorms before the end of academic
years. The university probably has insurance to cover situations where fire or
other casualty damage closes a dorm. Insurance proceeds can then be used for
resident refunds or the expense of alternative housing, I doubt that any college
had pandemic insurance covering dorm contracts.
Refund allocation on the basis of the proportion of a term not served by a dorm is arbitrary relative to costs. For example, liability insurance and casualty insurance on a dorm is generally fixed for an entire year at a time. Many other dorm costs are fixed costs must be paid even if the dorm is closed before he end of a term.. Some costs that are variable for a over years are not variable over partial years such as the labor contracts for dorm workers that guaranty salary for for a year at a time. It's common for universities to outsource food services and those contracts may have huge penalties for early cancellations.
In hindsight the lawyers and accountants should've written in fine print covering pandemics. They are probably re-writing future dorm contracts, but it's too late for the Spring 2020 term.
CalPERS (California Employees Retirement Fund) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalPERS
CalPERS Dumps
Risk Hedge Right Before Coronacrash, Sacrificing $1 Billion
---
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/04/calpers-dumps-risk-hedge-right-before-coronacrash-sacrificing-1-billion-and-confirming-doubts-about-chief-investment-officer-ben-mengs-expertise.html
Jensen Comment
Progressives who lambaste economic stimulus for Wall Street and major players in
the stock market stupidly ignore that USA workers (think school teachers,
municipal workers, college employees, factory workers, etc.) are enormously
dependent upon stock market and pension fund recovery. Since 2006 and the
crashing of interest rates pension fund management became more challenging.
Workers with choices between stocks and bonds shifted more heavily into
financially risky stocks after 2006. Without economic stimulus of the stock
markets both present and future retirees of all types may face pension fund
disaster.
There are
complicated ways to hedge financial risk to a certain extent, and the accounting
rules for hedge accounting are enormously complicated ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm
In fact accounting rules for thousands of types of hedging strategies are so complicated that they're only superficially covered in university accountancy programs and on the CPA exam. Large accounting firms painfully develop their own derivative financial instrument and hedge accounting experts.
Bats Harbouring Six New Types of Coronavirus, Scientists
Discover ---
https://www.newsweek.com/scientists-six-new-types-coronavirus-bats-1497273
My physician friend keeps warning about how easy it is for viruses to mutate
What does this economist think of epidemiologists?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/what-does-this-economist-think-of-epidemiology.htm
Jane Goodall blames human’s
‘disrespect’ for animals for coronavirus ---
https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/jane-goodall-blames-humans-disrespect-for-animals-for-coronavirus/
Coronavirus: The good that
can come out of an upside-down world ---
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52094332
Jensen Comment
And out of this comes a deep appreciation for our known heroes (medical workers
and public safety workers) and our unsung heroes working unprotected in grocery
stores, restaurant takeout services, transportation services, etc. God bless
them! Let's not forget to support their quests for higher wages and benefits in
better times, although this does not make me supportive of dysfunctional minimum
wages that deprive them of jobs in many instances.
Let's not forget the farm workers and truck drivers who are underappreciated for their production/delivery of food that we're now more grateful for in these times of shortages.
Let's not forget our teachers and students and schools at all levels who made difficult changeovers of their long-standing pedagogies.
And let's not forget those employers, landlords, and taxpayers who are making and will continue to make huge sacrifices for the benefits of employees and customers.
Lower consumption may give some creatures greater opportunity to regenerate (think of lobsters, shrimp, and fish in the seas)
And maybe we should be grateful for lower crime (empty streets take away the muggings, drug dealings, occupied homes reduce house break-ins, closed businesses reduce insider thefts, etc.)
And let's not forget all the babies that would not have been born without the lockdowns and shortages of condoms.
And maybe conflicting nations will give more thought to preventing Armageddon after seeing how global WMDs might become.
Although the impacts may be minimal short-lived there are some possible climate change retardants such as all the vehicles parked instead of clogging the highways, the many airplanes not flying, the ships not crossing the seas (including cruise boats), businesses shut down that are not spewing as much carbon into the air, residents on tight budgets who are not turning on their air conditioners, etc. Scientists can maybe even study how business slowdown impacts the environment, but this is only a hope from a non-scientist. The uncontrollable impact of nature on climate change (think methane bubbling up in our oceans) may be too great to measure the temporary benefits of business slowdowns.
Facebook Messenger --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Messenger
MIT: Forget Zoom—children are using Facebook Messenger Kids to deal
with coronavirus isolation ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/30/975013/coronavirus-zoom-facebook-messenger-kids-isolation-friends/
Racist Threats and Attacks that Rattled a California University Campus
Were Faked, Police Say ---
https://www.newsweek.com/racist-threats-attacks-that-rattled-california-university-campus-were-faked-police-say-1497533
Will They Return? Surveys suggest tough times for most colleges ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/03/30/surveys-offer-mixed-outlook-student-enrollment-fall?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=4dae1431b7-WNU_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-4dae1431b7-197565045&mc_cid=4dae1431b7&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
The Federal Government Owns 92 Percent of Student Loans. Why Do Politicians
Lie About It? ---
https://mises.org/wire/federal-government-owns-92-percent-student-loans-why-do-politicians-lie-about-it?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=bb09844d12-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-bb09844d12-228708937
Go Ahead and Start a
Business — But Don’t Quit Your Day Job
https://hbr.org/2020/04/go-ahead-and-start-a-business-but-dont-quit-your-day-job?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=dailyalert_not_activesubs&referral=00563&deliveryName=DM75340
Jensen
Comment
Some people think the American Dream is dead. I think there's enough capitalism
left in America to keep the American Dream alive even if it is on life support.
Things working in its favor these days are very low interest rates coupled with
bankruptcy escapes from debt. But much is working against an American Dream,
especially government regulation and red tape, especially environmental and
labor laws that have good intentions but horrible consequences on dreams.
The Singapore Dream: How Singapore's richest man went from welding in a factory for $14 per hour to owning a $17 billion hotpot restaurant chain ---
While a
move is underway to destroy the American Dream of rags to riches (by taxing away
the riches) the Chinese dream is on the rise.
The Chinese Dream
How a Chinese billionaire went from making $16 a month in a factory to being one
of the world's richest self-made women with an $8.3 billion real-estate empire
---
https://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-richest-self-made-woman-wu-yajun-net-worth-2019-2
Top 50 Billionaires in China ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_by_net_worth
Jensen
Comment
The question for students to debate is why a supposed
communist country allows so many billionaires to rise up from poverty.
That's supposed to happen in the USA where a child growing up in deep
poverty (think Oprah Winfrey or Howard Shultz) became a multi-billionaires.
But is it also supposed to happen under communism? If
so, why?
One reason is that many billionaires can afford to pour lots of money into high risk ventures. When's the last time you heard about a high risk (think Silicon Valley) venture in Europe?
How to Mislead With Statistics
Coronavirus Update:
Australia and Norway share nearly the same number of COVID-19 infections, around
5,800, despite Norway being more than four times smaller in population ---
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html?utm_term=OZY&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PDB%20%282020-04-06%2011:07:40%29#/85320e2ea5424dfaaa75ae62e5c06e61
The link is to the database, but in a newsletter from OZY on April 6, 2020 ---
Actually it's a very good newsletter that I read daily
Is there any nation on earth
that can social distance better than Australia?
Norway has slightly under 150,000 square miles
Australia has 7.6 million square miles.
How to Mislead With Statistics
States With the Fewest and
Most Primary Care Physicians per Person
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/04/03/states-with-the-fewest-and-most-doctors-per-person-2/?utm_source=247WallStDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DailyNewsletter&utm_content=APR062020a
Jensen Comment
Probably the easiest way to be misled fail to note that the state (Vermont) with
the most primary care physicians is also one of the smallest states in the USA
in terms of population. Also note that not all primary care physicians have MD
degrees or they are MDs with questionable foreign training.
Low population states like Vermont with a relatively high number of primary care physicians also have a relatively low number of specialists, which is why those of us in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine have to go south (think Massachusetts) to find specialists.
Also note that primary care clinics having one or more doctors also to increasingly rely on well-trained physicians assistants. Having more doctors does not necessarily assure getting better care. When I changed primary care clinics some years back I was assigned an MD trained in Poland. Eventually she was determined to be incompetent and was replaced by a physicians assistant who was much better for the thinks physicians assistants are allowed to do.
How to Stream U.S. Sports
for Free Online ---
https://www.howtogeek.com/665070/how-to-stream-u.s.-sports-for-free-online/
Jensen Comment
I enjoyed playing sports, but after high school I became too busy the rest of my
life to be a spectator. Even at Super Bowl parties I preferred playing bridge
while many others watched the game.
If you get bored with streaming entertainment you can audit a course from nearly every prestigious university (there are thousands of courses to choose from. But a professor friend once noted that even auditing a course online is like trying to drink from a firehose. You have to be prepared to really, really work if you audit a free course from a prestigious university.
Bob Jensen's threads on
thousands of free courses from prestigious universities that you can audit
online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The learning is free on all these courses, but there may be rather reasonable
fees for course materials and certificates of completion. Some college students
can get a leg up before having to take similar courses for real at their own
colleges and universities. Old folks can discover what it's like being a student
in these changing times.
Note that some of these courses are intense and require considerable effort on your part if you really want to learn. Learning entails a lot of hard work and concentration. However, if you're locked down at home what have you got to lose?
Type II (Type 2, Beta, False
Negative) Error in Statistical Inference ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors#Type_II_error
Type II error, unlike Type I error, is almost never measured in statistical
inference of sample data because it depends on knowing the population mean and
variance ---
https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~gwallace/PA_818/Resources/Type
II Error and Power Calculations.pdf
The COVID-19 outbreak,
explained with Bayes’ Rule (which should be called the Bayes-Price Rule) ---
https://towardsdatascience.com/statistics-and-unreliable-tests-coronavirus-is-difficult-to-contain-e113b5c0967c
How false-negatives in diagnostic testing lead to the release of infected people, motivate extreme containment measures have been implemented, explain why official figures are too low. The COVID-19 outbreak, explained with Bayes’ Rule.
Frequentist Inference ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequentist_inference
Bayesian Inference ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
Monty Hall Problem ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
The war between frequentists and Bayesians rages on, especially on the battle lines drawn in real-world databases rather than hypothetical puzzles.
April 8, 2020 reply from David Johnstone in Australia
The war is won Bob, medical testing (which has the advantage that with experience the error probabilities of a test become known) is naturally Bayesian, as is genetics.
Frequentist statistics - and poor behaviour by researchers that exploits frequentist statistics - gave rise to the replication crisis because it did not train people to assess weight of evidence in a logical way - e.g. there are still many researchers who believe that a low p-level with a higher sample size represents greater evidence against the null hypothesis (the exact opposite of the Bayesian argument in Lindley's paradox).
If I can be rude, I have watched your posts on this now for a while and I sense your great ambivalence, you seem to want those beautiful frequentist methods to have at least equal status. They are beautiful in their maths, but they are built on flawed logic (making sure that we separate the two; e.g. a p-level is a logical creation that can be put into effect by correct and very clever math to yield a misleading measure of evidence).
Your natural frequentist proclivities are I perceive "trained in" and hard to give up on, that's the whole Kuhn progression. Bayesian stats understands and can do anything that a frequentist does, but can do a lot more and with a lot more appreciation for meaning.
April 8, 2020 reply from Bob Jensen
It's that word "subjective" that always turns me off
Thanks David
April 8, 2020 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
Bob,
When you are trying to choose between the two, the only good way to compare them is by examining the axioms underlying them. Look at the axioms underlying the Bayesian statistics and compare them with the axioms of traditional probability stated by Kolmogorov. There is no contest. You see the clear difference, and there is no reason to look at "subjective".
Regards,
Jagdish
April 8, 2020 reply from David Johnstone in Australia
Dear Bob and Jagdish,
Bayesians like "subjective" because it removes a straight jacket. Frequentism is riddled with handcuffs and chastity belts. e.g. you draw a random sample and reject the null, but you notice that the sample was particularly biased looking (e.g. its composition does not resemble the population at all, perhaps in some very worrying way). Too late, you can't reject the sample, its "random" and that rejection would only be subjective.
April 8, 2020 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
Dear David,
I entirely agree with what you said: Once you have the random sample taken, the game is in some sense over. Of course for estimation you can do sequential plans and so on, but for inference the game is over and you are back to square 1.
I think the greatest objection the frequentists have regarding the Bayesians is in the choice of a prior. That it is arbitrary, and so subjective. When I was an undergraduate, that bothered me a bit. Almost all ny professors were anti-Bayesians, and would not accept my argument that in science, as Newton said, you stand on the shoulders of those who came before you and therefore have pretty good hunches as to what the prior distribution might be, and in many problems the process that generates the data tells you what the distribution it is and you might even have a pretty good idea what the parameters might be. For example, if it is a system reliability problem you might know it is a Weibull distribution and the specification of the system might tell you what the design parameters are. I essentially gave up until I went to graduate school (established by MIT in Calcutta) where at least some were Bayesians and offered advanced Bayesian courses.
The second argument was that computations were too time consuming. That, of course was a valid argument those days (mid 1960s) when in India we were working with IBM 1401s and 1620s with something like 4-16kB memory and sometimes no disks. This objection no longer is valid.
The punchline to the story was that one of my anti-Bayesian professors (P.D. Ghangurde) came to the US, worked with the great statistician/mathematician H.O. Hartley, wrote a dissertation on optimization os sampling plans using mathematical programming and Bayesian methods after becoming a Bayesian.
Regards,
Jagdish
April 9, 2020 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi David and Jagdish,
I understand your love for the analytics apart from the real world.
But if I took the trouble to find frequentist studies that have been independently verified there are millions to choose from, especially in real world science.
I've never seen Bayesian inference studies real world studies that have been independently verified.
Do you have some examples of Bayesian inference conclusion verifications?
I have the same trouble with verification in specific asset appraisals, especially when it comes to cost-benefit analysis to verify appraisals. Two appraisers may have significantly different appraised valuations. So we can hire 100 appraisers and then look at the means and variances of crowd sourcing distributions. But then the buyer who eventually purchases the asset may get it at an amount significantly different from the mean or median value of the subjective estimates of 100 appraisers.
Of course verification is less costly for some types of appraisals. It would be very costly to verify appraisals of the Empire State Building. It's less costly to verify the value of an Iowa Farmer's truckload of corn when he takes it to a local ethanol plant. We can't use the commodity market price of corn in Chicago, because that price is affected by both location of the corn and quality standards set by the trading market. The farmer's corn obviously differs in location and probably differs significantly in commodity market quality, particularly in terms of moisture content. But the variance around independent appraised values of a truck load of corn will have a much smaller variance problem than the variance problem with appraised values of the Empire State Building.
In the study I cited at the start of this thread, I think independent verification would be quite costly to obtain, especially from 100 experts ---
The COVID-19 outbreak, explained with Bayes’ Rule (which should be called the Bayes-Price Rule) ---
https://towardsdatascience.com/statistics-and-unreliable-tests-coronavirus-is-difficult-to-contain-e113b5c0967cHow false-negatives in diagnostic testing lead to the release of infected people, motivate extreme containment measures have been implemented, explain why official figures are too low. The COVID-19 outbreak, explained with Bayes’ Rule.
Do either of you have some illustrations of real world conclusions from Bayesian inference?
April 9, 2020 reply from David Johnstone in Australi9
David Johnstone <david.johnstone@sydney.edu.au>
Dear Bob, independent Bayesian verifications occur routinely in DNA inferences. These are easy because priors are largely agreed. In other cases, verifications require enough data to draw people with different priors together. But remember, there's no hiding from the same issue in frequentism. X and Y might get the same p-level but they interpret it differently - because there is no objective way to interpret a p-level (e.g. X "discounts" it for sample size, Y "discounts" it for its funny looking random sample, Z takes a regimented binary interpretation whereby 4.99% means something completely different to 5.01 % , etc.......) Frequentism has the same issues as Bayesianism, they are just swept under the carpet. The very famous and quite eclectic statistician Jack Good called them SUTC statistics.
I will just add that people who think about these things enough more and more become Bayesian, because its the only way that makes sense. e.g. its the only. way that applies all the laws of probability without any inconsistency to the task of assessing probabilities.
April 9, 2020
Maybe accountics scientists will one day jump on your bandwagon, but I don't see evidence of it yet in accounting research journals. They remain Frequentists.
It may be due to the lower number of experts who can agree agree on the subjective priors.
But then it may also be that moving accountics scientists is like moving bodies in a cemetery (a quote from Woodrow about getting academics to change in general).
Law schools build
reputations on specialty programs more than accountancy schools. This, in part,
is what three years of post-graduate studies can do in terms of specialization ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/04/2021-us-news-specialty-rankings.html
A pair of researchers in
India with a history of stealing a paper from other authors during the peer
review process have lost four more articles, this time for questionable data ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/04/10/authors-arent-happy-to-lose-four-more-papers-in-chemistry-journals/
Current and past editions of my blog called Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Don't Just Waste Your Time Being a Couch Potato
edX ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdX
Note that an edX certificate is not the same as course credit that can be
transferred to a college's degree program.
Free Learning Opportunity:
31 free Harvard University classes you can audit online through edX ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-free-online-courses
Course Listing (especially note the statistics and data science courses that are
becoming increasingly popular)
https://www.edx.org/school/harvardx?source=aw&awc=6798_1585926944_f01a2a1da9b0942c09bfc22ed57d1d18&utm_source=aw&utm_medium=affiliate_partner&utm_content=text-link&utm_term=257137_Business+Insider
Harvard University has over 140 of its classes publicly available online through online course provider edX.
· We put together a list of the 31 most interesting Harvard online courses you can enroll in for free, spanning topics like computer science, public health, politics, history, poetry, and the science of cooking.
· Browse all the Harvard online courses that are free to audit here. You can pay a fee (typically $50-$200 per course) if you'd like full access to the course materials and a certificate to add to your CV, resume, or LinkedIn profile.
Bob Jensen's threads on
thousands of free courses from prestigious universities that you can audit
online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The learning is free on all these courses, but there may be rather reasonable
fees for course materials and certificates of completion. Some college students
can get a leg up before having to take similar courses for real at their own
colleges and universities. Old folks can discover what it's like being a student
in these changing times.
Note that some of these courses are intense and require considerable effort on your part if you really want to learn. Learning entails a lot of hard work and concentration. However, if you're locked down at home what have you got to lose?
The fiscal multiplier during
World War II ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/the-fiscal-multiplier-during-world-war-ii.html
Jensen Comment
Tyler favors borrowing to fund the USA's pandemic stimulus, although nations
like the USA that already have national debt exceeding the GDP (think Japan,
United States, Italy, France, and Spain) may find it difficult to borrow as much
as is needed for the pandemic stimulus. Borrowing is clearly less inflationary
than printing helicopter money to rain down on unemployed workers and failing
businesses. Tyler doesn't like to write about helicopter money ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money
National Debt/GDP --- https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-national-debt/
National Debt of the USA ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States
Especially note the module on Risks and Debates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States#Risks_and_debates
Jensen Comment
When a nation's debt exceeds GDP it becomes more worrisome to try to sell
trillions of dollars of additional debt to investors. The Chinese already
invested over a trillion dollars of our National Debt. How much more will they
want? Will they continue to roll over what they already have?
More importantly --- when increasing inflation appears to a threat, investors in our debt become more and more reluctant to roll over their investments in our debt, let alone invest in new issues of debt.
Remember that interest must be paid on the National Debt, and that interest is becoming a larger and larger expense in the annual budget of the Federal government. There's no free lunch when it comes to National Debt, especially levels of National Debt that greatly exceed a nation's GDP.
How to Mislead With False Promises
The Atlantic: We Need to Start Tossing
Money Out of Helicopters It’s the best option in such extreme circumstances ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/we-need-start-tossing-money-out-helicopters/608968/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=politics-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20200331&silverid-ref=NTk4MzY1OTg0MzY5S0
Jensen Comment
I agree to a controlled amount strategically placed, but not when it comes to
raining down trillions of dollars in printed currency. Raining down trillions of
dollars from helicopters would be a disaster. Need I remind you that in Zimbabwe
eventually one egg cost 100 billion Zimbabwe dollars ---
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-crippling-drought-in-zimbabwe.html
By July 2019, the basic food basket was BsF.
2,600,000 in Caracas, according to the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers Center
of Documentation and Analysis, which makes monthly surveys about the price of
products. The Commerce Chamber, however, has a different figure: BsF. 3,700,000
---
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/we-need-start-tossing-money-out-helicopters/608968/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=politics-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20200331&silverid-ref=NTk4MzY1OTg0MzY5S0
A better alternative to helicopter raining is for the government to
temporarily buy (maybe with printed money) equity positions into newly issued
shares in many failing businesses --- to put them back on their feet until the
economy is turned around. Then government should sell those shares like it did
in a turned-around Chrysler Corporation following the 2008 recession. Multiplier
effects will create new businesses and new jobs ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier
Venezuelans would rather have jobs than billions of useless printed money.
The good news in this pandemic is that it it may have dashed the false
promises of Warren and Sanders that the USA economy would be a better place with
$100 trillion spent on new social programs ---
Brian Riedl computed the added $100 trillion cost
of Bernie's initiatives (not counting his free pre-schooling for every child,
the collapse of the capital markets, the loss of most USA pensions, and tides
through open borders ) ---
https://www.city-journal.org/bernie-sanders-expensive-spending-proposals
That helicopter spending (think free college for everybody, guaranteed minimum
wage for everybody, free health care and medicines and nursing care for a great
tide of illegal immigrants from all over the world, etc.) would become an
economic disaster.
Opposing Viewpoint from Stanford University
An open letter drafted by Stanford professors says the
coronavirus stimulus package should benefit workers — not corporations and their
wealthy shareholders ---
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/economists-congress-dont-bail-out-big-business?utm_source=Stanford+Business&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Stanford-Business-Issue-184-3-29-2020&utm_content=alumni
Jensen Comment
It's not clear how you save jobs without saving businesses, including big
businesses like Microsoft and General Motors that hire so many people. Of course
you can replace capitalism with socialism or follow Bernie Sanders'
recommendation of letting employees and labor unions take control of all big
businesses without investing a penny.
It's also not clear to me how you save stock markets and pension funds by destroying wealthy investors.
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
Here's a somber and serious Guardian article on why the Cuban
model of income equality for all is a disaster ---
Fidel Castro says his economic system is failing ---
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/09/fidel-castro-cuba-economic-model
The Singapore Dream: How Singapore's richest man went
from welding in a factory for $14 per hour to owning a $17 billion hotpot
restaurant chain ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/life-of-singapore-richest-man-from-welder-to-hotpot-billionaire-2020-1
While a
move is underway to destroy the American Dream of rags to riches (by taxing away
the riches) the Chinese dream is on the rise.
The Chinese Dream
How a Chinese billionaire went from making $16 a month in a factory to being one
of the world's richest self-made women with an $8.3 billion real-estate empire
---
https://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-richest-self-made-woman-wu-yajun-net-worth-2019-2
Top 50 Billionaires in China ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_by_net_worth
Jensen
Comment
The question for students to debate is why a supposed
communist country allows so many billionaires to rise up from poverty.
That's supposed to happen in the USA where a child growing up in deep
poverty (think Oprah Winfrey or Howard Shultz) became a multi-billionaires.
But is it also supposed to happen under communism? If
so, why?
One reason is that many billionaires can afford to pour lots of money into high risk ventures. Why are there so many billionaires in China and Russia and so few in failing Cuba?
How to Mislead With Statistics
Does having more police lead to a lower crime rate? ---
https://www.data-z.org/news/detail/does-having-more-police-lead-to-a-lower-crime-rate
Dr. Fauci: ‘You Can’t Rely On The Models,’ Too Many Variables ---
https://www.dailywire.com/news/fauci-you-cant-rely-on-the-models-too-many-variables
Jensen Comment
Missing variables are often overlooked problems by social science, finance, and
accounting researchers. Not only are there too many missing variables, but some
of those variables are ignored because they can't be reliably quantified and/or
are not in purchased databases that "lazy" researchers prefer to use rather than
gather their own data. Models don't deal well with qualitative variables. In
accountancy these variables are called intangibles and are often ignored by
model builders.
An even bigger problem is the assumption of stationary that does not apply to a non-stationary world. This is especially a problem in a pandemic.
Academic researchers keep using defective models if they can get them tenure and promotions with the help of journal referees who belong to the same clubs.
Some Jobs Nobody Knew About Until 2020 ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-emerging-jobs-in-high-demand-in-2020-2019-12?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BIPrime_select&utm_campaign=BI
Prime 2020-04-08&utm_term=BI Prime Select
Jensen Comment
Actually these jobs were hot before 2020 and may be temporarily not so hot
because of the pandemic.
There are two things to consider when choosing a career --- opportunity versus security. For example, the hot jobs in large accounting firms before 2020 were in consulting whereas the most secure jobs were, and still are, in auditing and tax --- those careers we really call "accounting careers." Everybody suspects consulting careers in accounting firms will bounce back (maybe slowly) after the 2020 pandemic, but auditors and tax accountants have the most secure jobs during 2020. Business firms still are required to have audits and file tax returns during lockdown. They are not required to hire consultants in these hard times.
Another example is academia. A small proportion of accountants (less than 300 per year) leave the real world and enter accounting doctoral programs. Many do so knowing that they will be making a lot less 20 years from now as college professors than if they commenced their own accounting firms that are strategically placed in terms of services and geography. There's a whole lot of opportunity that comes with starting up an accounting firm, but there's no tenure security like the security enjoyed by accounting professors.
For example, I started out my career with the largest CPA firm, then called Ernst & Ernst, in Denver. With the training and experience I was getting from E&E I seriously considered opening my own CPA firm in Aspen back when Aspen was a decadent mountain town filled with decrepit wooden houses --- houses renting out beds for $1.75 per night during ski week ends. I don't know if my startup firm would've been a success in Aspen, but I have daydreams that I might well have retired as a multi-millionaire.
In reality I chose the secure path and retired comfortably after 40 years as an accounting professor. I've no regrets, because I've never really had to guts to gamble big time.
While on the faculty of Trinity University one of my colleagues did not get tenure. He then started his own tax and audit firm in San Antonio and eventually retired (I'm guessing here) twenty times wealthier than me. Sigh!
Bob Jensen's threads on careers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
During one period in history Muslims were philosophically and economically
more developed than Western Europeans. What later happened?
https://www.amazon.com/Islam-Authoritarianism-Underdevelopment-Historical-Comparison-ebook/dp/B07S9DBZ1R/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=ahmet+kuru&qid=1586215332&sr=8-1/marginalrevol-20
Jensen Comment
I've not yet read anything more than reviews of this book, so I hesitate to
comment further.
Rishard Sansing also suggested the following book:
https://www.amazon.com/Long-Divergence-Islamic-Held-Middle-ebook/dp/B0046A9MA4/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3H75B928IWEPT&dchild=1&keywords=the+long+divergence+how+islamic+law+held+back+the+middle+east&qid=1586259084&sprefix=long+diverge%2Caps%2C167&sr=8-1
Paycheck Protection Stimulus Funds: Emergency loan program plagued
by chaos on eve of launch ---
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/emergency-loan-program-plagued-by-chaos-on-eve-of-launch
Also see
https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2020/apr/paycheck-protection-program-ppp-loans-sba-details-coronavirus.html?utm_source=mnl:cpald&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=03Apr2020
The New Yorker: What Happens When the News is Gone? ---
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-future-of-democracy/what-happens-when-the-news-is-gone
Jensen Comment
It's not just the rural communities that are suffering. USA's big city
newspapers (think the Chicago Tribune and the Detroit Free Press) have had to
reduce the number of investigative reporters that were especially important in
uncovering the many crimes of local politicians, police departments, school
administrators, business leaders, etc. The modern media like TV stations
and blogs are not supporting investigative reporters to make up for the loss of
such reporters paid by newspapers.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit becoming available to corrupt officials in our smallest to largest communities and everywhere inbetween.
Zoom Video Communications --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications
MIT: Zoom is facing questions about how private or secure it really
is ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615430/zoom-is-facing-questions-about-how-private-or-secure-it-really-is/
NYC schools told not to use Zoom for distance learning amid security
concerns, reports say ---
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/nyc-schools-told-not-to-use-zoom-for-distance-learning-amid-security-concerns-reports-say
Instead, schools were advised to switch to Microsoft’s Microsoft Teams collaboration technology, according to Chalkbeat.
USA's Palantir Technologies --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies
Big Data Privacy and the Pandemic ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/that-was-then-this-is-now-palantir-privacy-edition.html
How to Mislead With Statistics
What if it's true 80% to 90% of the patients on ventilators die on those
ventilators?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/how-many-lives-is-hospitalization-saving-in-the-pandemic.html
Jensen Comment
Before this pandemic, a huge percentage of terminally ill patients who were
afflicted by something other than pneumonia eventually died of pneumonia.
Therefore, should most medical research funding go into preventing
pneumonia (sometimes called the best friend of the aged)?
It may well be that rationing of ventilators is taking place now with priority being given to patients who are going to die in any case. Ventilators may ease their suffering even though they are not necessarily saving their lives. And if they got ventilators sooner would they have lived.
It may well be that a massive amount of expenditure for ventilators is a good thing at this point, but in accounting and economics we want useful data for making expenditure tradeoffs. It may be too soon in this pandemic to have that useful data.
The above article raises some interesting questions in the world of scarce resources.
China’s Divorce Spike Is a
Warning to Rest of Locked-Down World ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-31/divorces-spike-in-china-after-coronavirus-quarantines
Jensen Comment
There are considerable cultural differences between the USA and China and even
differences within the two cultures. Conflicts are bound to arise, particularly
when money in the family becomes scarce. In the USA for certain drinking will
exacerbate many of the conflicts. I don't know enough about China to even
speculate.
The article stresses that households vary greatly from increased matrimonial love to increased matrimonial friction. For some the entire family, including children, will bond closer. For others the tension and boredom will be devastating during lockdown.
How the Amish are adapting
to closed schools (it's a bit like taking a child to the doctor without anybody
in the waiting room) ---
https://www.the-daily-record.com/news/20200331/amish-parochial-schools-adapting-to-closures
Jensen Comment
I read where many online students are failing to go online even when they have
the online connections. Amish parents are not letting kids miss school
appointments. The difference is parental control.
A Decidedly Suboptimal Set of Circumstances: Harvard Law Profs Evaluate
Online Instruction ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/04/a-decidedly-suboptimal-set-of-circumstances-harvard-law-profs-evaluate-online-instruction.html
Jensen Comment
The biggest problem with the current transition from onsite to online in less
than a month is that the only choice was to turn a live classroom into a video
conference. This is synchronous learning. The best online learning is usually
asynchronous, but asynchronous learning generally entails a lot of preparation
time such as the making of Camtasia videos for technical parts of a course.
Bob Jensen's largely outdated but still relevant threads on asynchronous
versus synchronous learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
How to Mislead With Statistics
How Germany is managing its coronavirus epidemic, and reacting with
disdain to Trump’s policies ---
https://theconversation.com/how-germany-is-managing-its-coronavirus-epidemic-and-reacting-with-disdain-to-trumps-policies-134758
The solid and publicly funded German health system is also credited for Germany’s relatively low death rate. There are over 28,000 intensive care beds with sufficient respirators available at German hospitals, more than in most other parts of the world.
Jensen Comment
The author of the above article makes no note that it's almost impossible to
compare Germany (with 83 million people crowded into a land mass less than half
the size of Texas)
The huge problem with comparing the USA health care with that of Germany is that the patients in the USA are spread over such a vast territory compared to Germany. The Coronavirus case has hit some parts of the USA (think the areas around NYC and Seattle) very hard relative to vast system of thousands rural communities that have zero or less than a handful of Coronavirus cases. There are a lot of unused supplies (think masks, gowns, and ventilators) in the USA stored unused in USA hospitals that have never seen a Coronavirus case (we have a son who works in one of these hospitals in Maine). But it would be unwise for these rural hospitals to strip their supplies when there are risks of sudden outbreaks anywhere in the USA.
Since Germany has a national health care plan progressives
think think that these "free" health care services must be vastly superior to
the USA's health care coverage. The fact of the matter is that Germany's free
plan is quite basic and relatively inferior to the free plans in other parts of
Europe. The Germans that can afford it pay for private medical insurance to get
better health care coverage.
Health Insurance in Germany --- http://www.toytowngermany.com/wiki/Health_insurance
I think the USA should consider the German insurance plan.
Germany does have some economic advantages over the USA. Since it has much
less National Debt/GDP relative to the USA it's much
easier for the Germans to borrow in order to finance a huge economic stimulus
package relative the USA that will probably have to rely on printing money for
the first stage of a stimulus package ---
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-national-debt/
A problem for the EU right now is that this pandemic further threatens to break up the EU since the more prosperous European nations are weary of supporting their poor neighbors.
Some Frauds Are More Sickening Than Others: 39 million masks for
California hospitals that never materialized spark federal investigation ---
https://ktla.com/news/california/39-million-masks-for-california-hospitals-that-never-materialized-spark-federal-investigation/
New York City Sees More Burglaries of Empty Businesses Under Coronavirus
Emergency Measures ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-sees-more-burglaries-of-businesses-under-coronavirus-emergency-measures-11586008801
The sad thing is that the courts in the majority of instances won't prosecute
these burglaries
Mr. Caserta said boarding up buildings sends an inappropriate message to the community. “It brings up this idea of rioting and collapse of society,” Mr. Caserta said. “This is way too much, and it sends the wrong signal.
Jensen Question
What's the right signal? --- just offer burglars a smorgasbord and be grateful
they don't torch the city
Time to watch Mad Max once again ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max
For those of you who don't believe in a higher power
Venezuelan Navy Ship Shoots and Repeatedly Rams German Expedition Cruise Ship
in International Waters --- Then the Navy Ship Sinks
https://gcaptain.com/venezuelan-navy-ship-sinks-after-collision-with-expedition-cruise-ship/
Jensen Comment
What the Venezuelan ship captain failed to take into account was that the German
ship was a thick-hulled ice breaker
Reminds me of an old joke that's oft repeated by conference speakers ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_urban_legend
How to Mislead With False Promises
The Atlantic: We Need to Start Tossing
Money Out of Helicopters It’s the best option in such extreme circumstances ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/we-need-start-tossing-money-out-helicopters/608968/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=politics-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20200331&silverid-ref=NTk4MzY1OTg0MzY5S0
Jensen Comment
I agree to a controlled amount strategically placed, but not when it comes to
raining down trillions of dollars in printed currency. Raining down trillions of
dollars from helicopters would be a disaster. Need I remind you that in Zimbabwe
eventually one egg cost 100 billion Zimbabwe dollars ---
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-crippling-drought-in-zimbabwe.html
By July 2019, the basic food basket was BsF.
2,600,000 in Caracas, according to the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers Center
of Documentation and Analysis, which makes monthly surveys about the price of
products. The Commerce Chamber, however, has a different figure: BsF. 3,700,000
---
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/we-need-start-tossing-money-out-helicopters/608968/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=politics-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20200331&silverid-ref=NTk4MzY1OTg0MzY5S0
A better alternative to helicopter raining is for the government to
temporarily buy (maybe with printed money) equity positions into newly issued
shares in many failing businesses --- to put them back on their feet until the
economy is turned around. Then government should sell those shares like it did
in a turned-around Chrysler Corporation following the 2008 recession. Multiplier
effects will create new businesses and new jobs ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier
Venezuelans would rather have jobs than billions of useless printed money.
The good news in this pandemic is that it may have dashed the false promises
of Warren and Sanders that the USA economy would be a better place with $100
trillion spent on new social programs ---
Brian Riedl computed the added $100 trillion cost
of Bernie's initiatives (not counting his free pre-schooling for every child,
the collapse of the capital markets, the loss of most USA pensions, and tides
through open borders ) ---
https://www.city-journal.org/bernie-sanders-expensive-spending-proposals
That helicopter spending (think free college for everybody, guaranteed minimum
wage for everybody, free health care and medicines and nursing care for a great
tide of illegal immigrants from all over the world, etc.) would become an
economic disaster.
The University of Washington
was one of the first U.S. institutions to move online amid the pandemic. Here's
how faculty say the transition is going ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/03/31/faculty-discuss-their-quick-transition-online-instruction?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=42108796fd-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-42108796fd-197565045&mc_cid=42108796fd&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Inside Higher Ed:
Coronavirus News Roundup for March 31 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/03/31/roundup-fbi-recommendations-funding-simulation-and-dribbling-turtle?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=42108796fd-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-42108796fd-197565045&mc_cid=42108796fd&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Some states are hitting
electric vehicles with higher registration fees ---
https://www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/more-states-hitting-electric-vehicle-owners-with-high-fees/
Note the graph for states
Jensen Comment
Conventional vehicles pay registration fees plus fuel taxes. Two problems with
the EV registration fee is that registration fees go to pay for a lot of things
other than roads and bridges, whereas fuel tax goes mostly for road
maintenance.
The bottom line is that EV owners are virtually free riders on our roads and bridges. I think this will have to change, especially when the 18-wheel EVs hit the highways in great numbers. The loss in fuel taxes will have to be made up somewhere,
Publishing: The peer-review
scam ---
https://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1.16400
Jensen Comment
How different is the extremes of leaning on friends to write glowing reviews
versus paying experts to write glowing reviews?
Cryptocurrency --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency
Coronavirus is forcing fans
of Bitcoin to realize it’s not a “safe haven” after all ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615385/coronavirus-is-forcing-fans-of-bitcoin-to-realize-its-not-a-safe-haven-after-all/
The Internet Is Breaking a
Little From the Coronavirus ---
https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-netflix-facebook-internet-breaking.html
Jensen
Comment
The State of New Hampshire county map below shows almost no Coronavirus cases
for northern NH as of March 30, 2020 --- although there may be some unreported
cases.
https://www.nhpr.org/post/
But our children and some unemployed adults are all using the Internet much
heavier these days for both learning and entertainment. My Internet comes in via
Spectrum Cable at a "high speed price" in these mountains. But the speed at my
house is greatly reduced since the lockdown. This could, of course, have nothing
to do with increased usage during the lockdown, but I'm suspicious.
For example, on average it normally takes me less than five minutes to transfer 10 updated Website files at a time to Texas, but the time varies with the sizes of the files. Now I cannot even transfer 10 updated files at a time and must transfer only one or two files at a time at a slower pace.
On occasion a streaming Netflix video just stops. I now have such a large library of purchased movie DVD disks that I really am not streaming all that many movies these days. The selection of streaming videos on Netflix sucks in terms of what Erika and I prefer.
No Fooling on April 1, 1948 (too bad Gamov did not change his name to Cee)
Physicists Hans Bethe and George Gamow became acquainted with a young physicist with such an unusual name that they decided to write a joint paper. Its distinguishing feature was its byline: by Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow.
http://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Bethe.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gamow
Zombie papers: Why do papers
by the most prolific fraudster in history keep getting cited?
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/04/01/zombie-papers-why-do-papers-by-the-most-prolific-fraudster-in-history-keep-getting-cited/
Pistol Pete: The Glory
Days of the Reprisal Killing ---
https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-glory-days-of-the-reprisal-killing/281424/?utm_term=OZY&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DailyDose%20%282020-04-01%2013:57:25%29&utm_content=Final
Econ Journal Watch,
Volume 17, March 2020
https://econjwatch.org/issues/volume-17-number-1-march-2020
Free Downloads
This journal is like most journals in terms of timing. Articles were most likely
submitted and accepted long before current events like Covid-19
Jagdish: Note Joan
Robinson's Views on the Cultural Revolution in China ---
https://econjwatch.org/file_download/1151/CompleteIssueMar2020.pdf?mimetype=pdf
Jagdish once expressed his debatable opinion that Robinson's support for Mao
might have prevented her from getting a Nobel Prize
Robinson’s enthusiastic support for Mao’s project from 1949 to his death was continuous, and in this she stood out.
April 2, 2020 reply from Jagdish
Bob,
I still stand by my statement. Joan Robinson was a towering personality in economics. That both Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman sang her praises and would support her case for a Nobel tells you about her stature. Her intellectual honesty remains unblemished even today. Unfortunately, the fact that she changed her mind about Mao can be found not in her writings but in her diaries. The ignorant media simply hasn't done its job.
First her intellectual honesty. In their book "Two Lucky People" the Friedmans' relate a story around 1953-4 when Friedman was in Britain on a Fulbright, and Robinson was to lecture criticizing Friedman's work. Friends suggested Friedman attend the lecture. Robinson urged him to do so. At the beginning of the lecture she introduced Friedman and invited to join her on stage and debate. It must have been surprising to the two diametrically opposed group of economists at Cambridge (Kings and Caius) who were present; they were rarely together anywhere. A lesser academic would have done things very differently. (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-milton-friedman-6230013.html)
Second, Joan Robinson did change her mind about Mao and China, but unfortunately too late to appear in her writings. Her last visit to China was in 1978, and in her diary she writes, "..the history of the decade, 1966-1976, has been a profound shock,....How could it happen that, under cover of Mao Tse-tung thought, a medieval drama of ambition and treachery could play itself out?” . Soon after, she was very ill for a ling time and in a coma for months. She passed away in 1983. And even today the media, especially the right wing one, keeps harping on her communist sympathies. It is shameful that they don't fully research stuff before writing, but expect severely ill or comatose to publish their change of mind. And that rule does not apply to right-wing darlings. The Osborne article on page 218 , however, does allude to Robinson's change of mind.
There was another factor I have not spoken about before. No woman had won a Nobel in economics then. The first woman to win it was Elinor Ostrum of Indiana University in 2009. I personally think starting a Nobel in a relatively immature field as Economics was itself immature. Now I think they are already scarping at the bottom of the barrel to find candidates to award the prize. It would have made more sense to have a Nobel in the social sciences and include even some humanities disciplines that are science oriented , such as Anthropology.
We Indians have a special place in our hearts for Joan Robinson. As a young woman, her husband (EAG Robinson) was hired by the Maharaja of Gwalior in India to be the tutor to his kids. Joan Robinson accompanied him, and became the nanny to the kids of the Maharaja. Since then there was a special bond between her and India. She visited India frequently, and was associated with a research Institute in Trivandrum in the state of Kerala. At Cambridge, she took on Indian students. Amartya Sen said of her, "totally brilliant but vigorously intolerant.". When she died, her eulogy was delivered by an Indian economist.
Britain was in many ways no better than even India when it came to women. Joan Robinson was given a Fellow position only at Girton College, w womens' college. She was given a similar position at a well known college like Trinity or Kings not too long before she passed on.
You can find her fascinating “Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist” at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/07/joan-robinsons-open-letter-from-a-keynesian-to-a-marxist-2
Regards,
Jagdish
Jagdish S. Gangolly Emeritus Associate Professor Department of Informatics Director (Retired), PhD Program in Information Science State University of New York at Albany 1400 Washington Ave Albany, NY 12222
April 3, 2020 reply from Bob Jensen
Thank you Jagdish for a very informative reply. Whereas science and medicine usually point to a discovery (think DNA structure) as the reason for a Nobel Prize, economic Nobel Prizes are often awarded for great economics minds rather than any one discovery in particular, although there are sometimes single discoveries that are sometimes later viewed as somewhat questionable like the CAPM shared-prize discovery. Then again, nearly all Nobel Prizes for literature, economics, and peace are nearly always more controversial relative to those in science.
Bob
Massachusetts Attorney
General’s Office being charged with knowingly withholding key evidence from the
trial judge. Ultimately over 35,000 convictions were overturned ---
https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/03/30/netflix-spotlights-mass-lab-debacle-in-how-to-fix-a-drug-scandal
From the Scout Report on April 3, 2020
Kate --- https://kate-editor.org/
Kate is an advanced text editor that uses a multiple document interface. The editing window can be split into multiple panes. Within each pane, multiple documents can be opened in tabs. Kate includes bidirectional text support, a bookmark system, and on-the-fly spell checking. For programmers, Kate provides syntax highlighting, code folding, bracket matching, and code autocompletion for a number of programming languages. Users can save sets of documents as editing "sessions" that can be opened again as a group. Kate's plugin system allows for panels to be added to interact with a shell prompt, SQL database servers, and debuggers. Other plugins provide additional features such as XML validation and code snippet libraries. Kate is free software distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, with source code available under the Build It section of the website. Under the Get Kate tab, readers can find installers for windows and macOS systems. Users of Linux and BSD systems will find Kate in their system's package manager
OpenSimulator --- http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page
Simulator is server software that can be used to create multi-user interactive 3D virtual environments. These environments are similar to what "online virtual world" game Second Life provides, but the OpenSimluator developers state that "OpenSimluator does not aim to become a clone of the second life server platform. Rather, the project aims to enable innovative feature development for virtual environments." Developers can extend OpenSimulator with new functionality by writing modules in C#. OpenSimulator environments can be linked together using the Hypergrid protocol, such that users can move between them. Readers can locate a list of public OpenSimulator instances via the Grid List tab. Instructions for connecting to an instance can be found under Connecting. In the Download section of the site, users will find installers and setup instructions for both Linux and Windows systems, as well as source code and links to the OpenSimulator Git repository.
Free Online Tutorials, Videos, Course Materials, and Learning Centers
Education Tutorials
Science Learning Hub --- www.sciencelearn.org.nz
Planet Puffin --- www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0787zxf
Dyson Creates 44 Free Engineering & Science Challenges for Kids Quarantined
During COVID-19 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/04/dyson-creates-44-free-engineering-science-challenges-for-kids-quarantined-during-covid-19.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
Bob Jensen's threads on education links ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
This is What Richard Feynman’s PhD Thesis Looks Like: A Video Introduction
---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/04/this-is-what-richard-feynmans-phd-thesis-looks-like-a-video-introduction.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
What Einstein May Have Gotten Wrong ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/04/passage-of-time-relativity-physics/609841/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-weekly-newsletter&utm_content=20200412&silverid-ref=NTk4MzY1OTg0MzY5S0
Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech ---
https://newatlas.com/energy/hb11-hydrogen-boron-fusion-clean-energy/
Wildlife Thailand --- https://wildlifethailand.com/
Planet Puffin --- www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0787zxf
Food Resources
Foodie Pharmacology --- http://foodiepharmacology.com/
Milk the Funk: The Podcast --- www.milkthefunk.live
Serving Up Science --- www.npr.org/podcasts/598860638/serving-up-science
The Food Chain Social --- www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p028z2z0
Gastropod --- https://gastropod.com/
White vs. Wheat: The Food Fight of the Centuries ---
https://gastropod.com/white-vs-wheat-the-food-fight-of-the-centuries/Bob Jensen's threads on food science ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#Botany
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
Brad DeLong's Lecture: The Rise of Socialism, -350 to 1917 ---
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/04/lecture-the-rise-of-socialism-350-to-1917.html
Journalist's Resource: Syllabi --- https://journalistsresource.org/syllabi/
United States Census Bureau --- https://scout.wisc.edu/archives/index.php
Census Information --- http://www.peoplefind.com/frames/freeresources/govdataindex.htm
U.S. Census Knowledge Quiz --- www.pewresearch.org/quiz/census-know
Census Reporter --- https://censusreporter.org/
Black Census Project --- https://blackcensus.org/
Census Historical Timeline --- www.sno-isle.org/census/timeline
Powers of Ten: Census Edition (data visualization) ---
https://jjjiia.github.io/powers/
Vogue Magazine History: Colorism in High Fashion Social ---
https://pudding.cool/2019/04/vogue/
Language of Place: Hopi Place Names, Poetry, Traditional Dance and Song ---
https://edsitement.neh.gov/curricula/language-place-hopi-place-names-poetry-traditional-dance-and-song
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Bob Jensen's links to free courses and tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Law and Legal Studies
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to Law
Math Tutorials
Math Values (education and motivation) --- https://www.mathvalues.org/
Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey ---
www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/ebooks/pdf/LivingProof_WEB.pdf
This book also has some suggestions for careers in mathematics
Euler's Sum of Powers Conjecture ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_sum_of_powers_conjecture
The Shortest Known Paper Published in a Serious Math Journal ---
http://www.openculture.com/2020/02/shortest-known-paper-published-in-a-serious-math-journal.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
February 27, 2020 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
Bob,
In one of Jerzy Neyman's PhD classes, George Dantzig misunderstood two problems Neyman had written on the board as a homework problem. Neyman told him what he had achieved. A year later when Dantzig was fishing for a dissertation topic he went to see Neyman who asked him to put his paper in a binder and he would accept it as his dissertation. You can find the two papers at:
On the Fundamental Lemma of Neyman and Pearson
Regards,
Jagdish
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
Social Distancing in 1347 ---
https://quillette.com/2020/03/28/social-distancing-during-the-black-death/
Brad DeLong's Lecture: The Rise of Socialism, -350 to 1917 ---
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/04/lecture-the-rise-of-socialism-350-to-1917.html
. . .
Left-wing socialists believed that the backlash to the market would produce overwhelming popular revolutionary demands for a government to take control of the economy and guarantee jobs at equal and fair wages for all. They were to be surprised and astonished when the mass of the people disagreed."
. . .
B. Revolutionary-Utopian & Class-War Aspirations
But then they also looked forward to revolution—and to class war. They did say that the revolution would be peaceful: “By every lawful means to bring about a free state and a socialistic society…” But their goals were maximal. This peaceful. legal, constitutional revolution would “effect the destruction of the iron law of wages by doing away with the system of wage labor…” This peaceful. legal, constitutional revolution would lead to large-scale confiscations of all private property: “The transformation of the capitalist private ownership of the means of production—land and soil, pits and mines, raw materials, tools, machines, means of transportation—into social property and the transformation of the production of goods into socialist production carried on by and for society…” And they believed in class war, or at least that the industrial working class was the only class that had a right to govern: “This… emancipation… [is] of the entire human race…. But it can only be the work of the working class, because all other classes… have as their common goal the preservation of the foundations of contemporary society…”
C. Maximal Confusion About the Gap
Hence there was an immense gap between their policies and their rhetoric. This led to great confusion—on the part of the voters, and of the left-wing socialist leaders and cadres themselves. What were they for? Which did they really mean? Were they violent revolutionaries biding their time? Were they constitutional politicians and organizers with utopian aspirations and a tendency to get carried away when addressing the faithful? Voters did not know. Their opponents did not know. They did not know.Jensen Comment
Socialist experiments in the real world proved non-sustainable and always ended up with lots of miserable and hungry people.
Emmy Noether's right to teach at Gottingen was
withdrawn because of her Jewish ancestry. The departure of numerous scientists
from Germany played a major role in transferring world mathematical leadership
to the United States.
http://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Noether_Emmy.html
Video: Evolution of programming and languages ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc
Bob Jensen's threads on the history of computing and networking ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#---ComputerNetworking-IncludingInternet
The Secret Cruelty of T. S. Eliot ---
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/what-ts-eliot-love-letters-reveal/609535/
The Diary of Samuel Pepys --- www.pepysdiary.com
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
Language of Place: Hopi Place Names, Poetry, Traditional Dance and Song ---
https://edsitement.neh.gov/curricula/language-place-hopi-place-names-poetry-traditional-dance-and-song
Bob Jensen's threads on free music tutorials are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Scroll down to Music
Bob Jensen's threads on music performances ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Writing Tutorials
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Bob Jensen's threads on medicine ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2-Part2.htm#Medicine
CDC Blogs --- http://blogs.cdc.gov/
Shots: NPR Health News --- http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots
Updates from WebMD --- http://www.webmd.com/
April 1, 2020
· Don't Fall Prey to COVID-19 Scammers
· Many Surgery Centers to Serve As COVID-19 Hospitals
· Trump Details Machine to Decontaminate N95 Masks
· Evidence COVID Survivors' Blood May Help Very Ill
April 2, 2020
· 32 States Have Issued Stay-at-Home Orders
·
Dolly Parton Comforts Kids Amid
Pandemic
http://www.openculture.com/2020/04/dolly-parton-will-read-bedtime-stories-to-you-every-week.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
· COVID-19 Deaths in Italy a Lesson for the US
· FDA Requests Zantac Be Pulled From the Market
April 3, 2020
· Why Germany Has Fewer COVID Deaths Than Neighbors
· In Some Cases, COVID-19 May Harm the Brain
· Trump: No Mask? Try Scarf for COVID-19 Protection
April 4, 2020
· 82,000 Health Care Workers Volunteer for New York
· Study: If We Use Masks COVID Deaths Could Fall 10%
· Advanced Ovarian Cancer: Survival & NAC Use Continue to Increase
April 6, 2020
· 82,000 Health Care Workers Volunteer for New York
· Study: If We Use Masks COVID Deaths Could Fall 10%
· Advanced Ovarian Cancer: Survival & NAC Use Continue to Increase
April 7, 2020
· 3 in 4 U.S. Hospitals Treating COVID-19 Patients
· No School Forces Many Medical Workers to Stay Home
· COVID Rules Sending the Sick to Hospitals Alone
April 10, 2020
· Dangerous Claims That Bleach Can Treat COVID-19
· COVID-19 Is Making Psychiatric Treatment Tougher
· Chloroquine, Zinc Tested to Block COVID Infection
· Beaches, Lakes, Pools: Is COVID-19 in the Water?
· See Acute Hepatitis? Consider COVID-19, NY Case Suggests
· COVID 19: Psychiatric Patients May Be Among the Hardest Hit
· CDC Issues New Return-to-Work Guidelines
April 11, 2020
· National Stockpile Almost Out of PPE
· 100 American Flight Attendants Have COVID-19
· Heart Patients: Ask About Home-Based Cardiac Rehab
April 14, 2020
· Will Antibody Tests Help Us Leave Quarantine?
· Google and Apple Partner to Trace COVID-19 Cases
· FDA: Answers On Blood Donation, Face Masks
Pfizer Identifies Lead Coronavirus Drug Candidate Experimental medicine to
be tested on patients this summer; arthritis therapy Xeljanz considered, too ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-identifies-lead-coronavirus-drug-candidate-11586427303?mod=djemCFO
Pfizer Inc. PFE 2.95% has found a promising but early potential coronavirus treatment, which the drugmaker aims to begin testing in patients this summer.
Laboratory research suggests the drug candidate blocks the new coronavirus from replicating, Pfizer research-and-development chief Mikael Dolsten said in an interview. The findings indicate the experimental drug could slow or stop the spread of the virus in patients with mild-to-moderate symptoms, though human testing will be necessary for proof.
The early progress is among several developments in Pfizer’s multipronged efforts to find coronavirus drugs and vaccines.
Pfizer will also start testing its approved rheumatoid-arthritis drug Xeljanz in coronavirus patients in Italy this week to see whether the therapy has a benefit, Dr. Dolsten said. And the company is planning to publish research on whether one of its antibiotics helps.
In addition, Pfizer has been working with BioNTech SE BNTX -1.43% of Germany to develop a vaccine based on an emerging gene-based technology. Pfizer said it plans to move into clinical trials as early as the end of this month with four different vaccines simultaneously, and aims to move the best one forward in future studies.
“I feel confident that we will win, battle by battle, to turn around this viral war against our society,” Dr. Dolsten said.
There are no approved medicines to treat or prevent the new coronavirus, which causes the disease known as Covid-19. The testing required to assure the drugs and vaccines work safely is expected to take months.
Dozens of companies and university researchers have been hustling to develop therapies or vaccines against the virus. More than 140 are in development world-wide, most in early stages, including about a dozen already in clinical trials, according to Informa Pharma IntelligenceContinued in article
Humor for April 2020
From Auntie Bev and Paula (with a few added by Bob)
You're not hungry, you're bored --- Shut the refrigerator door
I finished three books yesterday --- that's a lot of coloring
I'm working my way up to painting by the numbersDarn, my house got TP'd and my property taxes jumped upward
How much longer will TP last if you put it in the freezer?
This is the longest something made in China ever lasted
Imagine surviving unprotected sex and then dying from a handshake
Home invasions are on the decline, because everybody is home with guns and enough bleach and toilet paper to clean up the scene
If you resort to cannibalism during the lockdown, remember vegans are grass fed
After a week of lockdown I saw a mom outside scraping off a bumper sticker reading "My kid's an honor student"
Police are worried that an activist will start a riot by throwing out a roll of toilet paper or package of condoms in a Walmart parking lot
President Trump does not need a face mask, but there's a great need for duck tape
The world will end when people wipe themselves out with all that toilet paper
Why is it that the Tofu never needs restocking in the supermarket?
My body's absorbed so much soap and disinfectant that I can pee and clean the toilet at the same time
Dogs that will sit and stay are better trained than teenagers
Does Hooters offer home delivery during this pandemic?
Laughter's contagious but it still needs a stimulus
Forwarded by Tina
I need to practice social-distancing from the refrigerator.
Still haven't decided where to go for Easter ----- The Living Room or The Bedroom
PSA: every few days try your jeans on just to make sure they fit. Pajamas will have you believe all is well in the kingdom.
Homeschooling is going well. 2 students suspended for fighting and 1 teacher fired for drinking on the job.
I don't think anyone expected that when we changed the clocks we'd go from Standard Time to the Twilight Zone
This morning I saw a neighbor talking to her cat. It was obvious she thought her cat understood her. I came into my house, told my dog..... we laughed a lot.
So, after this quarantine.....will the producers of My 600 Pound Life just find me or do I find them?
Quarantine Day 5: Went to this restaurant called THE KITCHEN. You have to gather all the ingredients and make your own meal. I have no clue how this place is still in business.
My body has absorbed so much soap and disinfectant lately that when I pee it cleans the toilet.
Day 5 of Homeschooling: One of these little monsters called in a bomb threat.
I'm so excited --- it's time to take out the garbage. What should I wear?
I hope the weather is good tomorrow for my trip to Puerto Backyarda. I'm getting tired of Los Livingroom.
Classified Ad: Single man with toilet paper seeks woman with hand sanitizer for good clean fun.
Day 6 of Homeschooling: My child just said "I hope I don't have the same teacher next year".... I'm offended.
Better 6 feet apart than 6 feet under
Forwarded by Paula Ward
GREAT TRUTHS THAT LITTLE CHILDREN HAVE LEARNED:
1) No matter how hard you try, you can't baptize cats..
2) When your Mom is mad at your Dad, don't let her brush your hair.
3) If your sister hits you, don't hit her back. They always Catch the second person.
4) Never ask your 3-year old brother to hold a tomato.
5) You can't trust dogs to watch your food..
6) Don't sneeze when someone is cutting your hair..
7) Never hold a Dust-Buster and a cat at the same time.
8) You can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.
9) Don't wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts.
10) The best place to be when you're sad is Grandma's lapGREAT TRUTHS THAT ADULTS HAVE LEARNED:
1) Raising teenagers is like nailing Jello to a tree.
2) Wrinkles don't hurt.
3) Families are like fudge...mostly sweet, with a few nuts.
4) Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.
5) Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside.
6) Middle age is when you choose your cereal for the fiber, not the toy.THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE:
1) You believe in Santa Claus.
2) You don't believe in Santa Claus.
3) You are Santa Claus.
4) You look like Santa Claus.GREAT TRUTHS ABOUT GROWING OLD
1) Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.
2) Forget the health food.. I need all the preservatives I can get.
3) When you fall down, you wonder what else you can do while you're down there.
4) You're getting old when you get the same sensation from a rocking chair that you once got from a roller coaster.
5) It's frustrating when you know all the answers but nobody bothers to ask you the questions.
6) Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.
7) Wisdom comes with age, but sometimes age comes alone.SUCCESS:
At age 4 success is . . . Not piddling in your pants.
At age 12 success is . . . Having friends.
At age 17 success is . . . Having a driver's license.
At age 35 success is . . . Having money.
At age 50 success is . . . Having much more money.
At age 70 success is . .. Having a driver’s license.
At age 75 success is . ... Having friends.
At age 80 success is . . . Not piddling in your pants.
Forwarded by my close doctor friend
March Madness is cancelled, the NBA is shut down, the Masters is postponed, and my Aunt Marge’s senior bowling has even thrown in the towel. Now restaurants and bars are closed, and our 40-handicap governor is threatening to shut down all entertainment facilities including golf courses. I have not tested positive, but the coronavirus is killing me.
There is nowhere to go and nothing to do. My wife suggested we take a walk, but I don’t walk anywhere unless I have a golf club in my hand and it’s cart path only. My kids have a restraining order on us and won’t let us come within 200 yards of the grandchildren. And we can no longer eat out, but when we tried to cook at home, there were cobwebs in the oven.
The network channels are inundated with coverage of the virus. The golf channel has been showing reruns of old tournaments, which are almost as riveting as watching my brother-in-law’s video of his family camping trip to Yellowstone. And my wife is so desperate for something to do, she is even considering sex, and maybe even with me.
Paranoia is off the tracks.
Before the shutdown, we were having dinner at a local bar. I let out a loud sneeze and everyone at the surrounding tables started yelling "check please." My stock portfolio is plummeting and most of our cash is currently invested in toilet paper. I am washing my hands 137 times a day. I don’t touch anyone. I don’t even touch myself. I have been using tongs to go to the bathroom. This has to stop.
Our society and economy have been crippled by a microscopic virus. Scientists have not yet determined the exact origin but have narrowed it down to a Chinese fish market or Rosie O’Donnell’s bathtub. And no one is sure how to prevent or cure it. In the past, the ways to prevent contracting a contagious disease were simple: don’t eat in restaurants with cat on the menu and don’t date my college roommate’s sister.
I don’t consider myself to be in the high risk category. I have been building up my immune system by eating one meal per day at MacDonald’s for the last 25 years. Germs just slide through me. My only pre-existing condition is an inability to launch a golf ball further than 180 yards. And, according to the CDC, symptoms of the coronavirus are sweats, dizziness, and trouble breathing, which I experience whenever I am standing over a 3 foot putt. I can handle it.
So, I proposed to my regular foursome the idea of escaping from our self-imposed Stalag 17 and venturing outside for a round of golf. Everyone recognized the danger and severity of the situation. But when faced with the decision to remain sequestered with our wives or to risk contracting a deadly virus, it was a no-brainer. Every man opted to play golf.
Our foursome does not pose a medical risk to mankind. My friend, George is virus free. Social distancing has not been a problem for him. Other than us, he doesn’t have any friends. Bob, my neighbor is a urologist who has been working from home for several weeks. He has developed a way to do remote prostate exams by having patients sit on their cell phone. And our other partner, Jerry tested himself with a kit he bought online. However, he thinks he may have gotten the wrong kit. It showed no traces of the virus but indicated that he was pregnant with twins.
The federal government has established guidelines for social engagement. For example, you must stay at least 6 feet apart and no more than 10 people are allowed at a gathering, which means Patrick Reed’s fan club can still meet. In addition, our foursome drafted our own specific set of rules for Pandemic Golf.
Rules of Play:
· • Hazmat suits are permitted. As an alternative, one can wear a college mascot costume or big bunny pajamas.
· • Masks are not permitted, because we would look more like stagecoach robbers than a foursome.
· • Leave the flag in. And to avoid retrieving balls from the hole, any putt shorter than Lebron James is good.
· • Ride in separate golf carts and don’t come closer to another player than a fully extended ball retriever.
· • Don’t touch another player’s balls. This is always good advice.
· • No high fives. Fortunately, we seldom have a reason.
· • No petting the geese or the cart girl.
· • Don’t use the spot-a-pot. More disease in there than in all of Wuhan China.
· • No excuses. Slicing or hooking are not side effects of the coronavirus.
· • Make an online bank transfer to pay off your bets for the day.
· • Straddle the sprinkler on the 18th hole before getting into the car.
These rules and restrictions adequately protected us from contamination. Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for bad golf. I had trouble gripping the club with oven mittens, but it was an enjoyable afternoon which ended way too soon. There were no handshakes on the 18thgreen, no beers at the bar, and we drove home separately.
As the pandemic plays through, it is giving us a glimpse into our inevitable future where all meals are delivered, all entertainment comes through the tv screen, and all human interaction is through our cell phone. Where schooling is online at home, exercise is on a stationary bike in our basement, medical testing is done at drive thru windows, and colonoscopies are performed at Jiffy Lube. The world is changing. It is becoming less interpersonal as technology consumes us. So now that we have time on our hands, everyone should take a moment to cherish this fading era, when friends still get together to hit a little ball around an open field for no good reason other than to enjoy the companionship of their company.
Herding Cats ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYbKxSDTUHM
Humor March 2020 --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book20q1.htm#Humor0320.htm
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