The populist who has the most radical tax plan imaginable.
"The Huckabee Contradiction," The Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2007; Page A24 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119682363824414053.html

Some say Mr. Huckabee is the tribune of the "religious left," and that strikes us as about right. He exhibits protectionist instincts, distancing himself from Nafta and saying he would insist on penalties and barriers to countries that don't support his conception of "fair trade." He delivers populist sermons against income inequality, but in favor of farm subsidies and an expanded government role in health care. He regularly knocks Wall Street, and he borrows from the Democratic playbook with digs at "the rich."

The irony is that if he ever did win the nomination, Mr. Huckabee would be vulnerable to the same sort of attacks from the left, if not more so. The political contradiction of his economic policy is that, even as he campaigns as a populist, his signature tax proposal is the most radical reform imaginable -- the so-called "fair tax."

The fair tax has been knocking around GOP precincts for years and has been heavily promoted by Texas millionaire Leo Linbeck, among others. We've heard their pitch in our offices and admire their passion. Their concept is to junk the federal tax code -- payroll, income, corporate, Social Security, everything -- and substitute a 23% national retail sales tax on nearly all goods and services. But while proponents use that 23% figure as an easier political sell, the rate is closer to 30% when it's calculated like any other sales tax, with the levy on top of the price. State sales levies would go on top of that.

There's a lot to be said for taxing consumption over income, and the fair tax would be worth consideration if we were writing a tax code from scratch. Realistically, we're not. The plan would require repealing the Sixteenth Amendment that allowed a federal income tax, and the chances of that happening are approximately zero. The political risk, given the nature of government, is that we'd end up with both an income tax and a national sales tax. Europe, here we come.

Mr. Huckabee has latched onto the fair tax in part to show his antitax bona fides -- which is necessary given his mixed tax and spending record during his decade in Little Rock. The Club for Growth has documented that record, with prejudice. But the fair tax also fits into Mr. Huckabee's populist pitch as a way to "abolish" the hated IRS. GOP audiences love that one, and so do we.

But in the case of the fair tax this boast is also misleading. One problem with a national sales tax is that its rate would have to be very high to raise enough money to fund the government. A rate of 30%, or even 23%, is high enough to invite its own major enforcement problems, so the tax police would still be very much with us.

As a political matter, the fair tax would offer a bull's-eye for Democrats, who would love to run against a plan that would instantly make most purchases 30% more expensive. Though the fair tax includes a complicated rebate system to shield the working poor, a levy on consumption would nonetheless hit hard the young, middle-income families that Mr. Huckabee is courting. It would also tax medical services and home prices, sure to be flashpoints this election season in particular.

In 2004, Democrats came from nowhere to nearly beat South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint by pounding his support for the fair tax. His opponent said it would raise taxes on 95% of state residents, and Mr. DeMint had to disavow his support. In the American system, such a radical change as the fair tax is possible only in a crisis, and we aren't living in one now.

Mr. Huckabee nonetheless writes that "when" his reform is enacted, "it will be like waving a magic wand releasing us from pain and unfairness." That glib naivete should provide some indication of how seriously the former Governor has thought through the political and policy complications of his biggest idea -- and also explain why, until recently, Mr. Huckabee was considered an implausible candidate.

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases on
the Spectrum of Data to Information to Knowledge

My search helpers are located at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

A professor wrote to me drawing a fine line between information and knowledge. Information is just organized data that can be right or wrong or unknown in terms of been fact versus fiction. Knowledge generally is information that is more widely accepted as being "true" although academics generally hate the word "true" because it is either too demanding or too misleading in terms of being set in stone. Generally accepted "knowledge" can be proven wrong at later points in time just like Galileo purportedly proved that heavy balls fall at the same rate of speed as their lighter counterparts, thereby proving, that what was generally accepted knowledge until then was false. "Galileo Galilei is said to have dropped two cannon balls of different masses from the tower to demonstrate that their descending speed was independent of their mass. This is considered an apocryphal tale, and the only source for it comes from Galileo's secretary." Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaning_Tower_of_Pisa#History

In my opinion there is a spectrum along the lines of data to information to knowledge. Researchers attempt to add something new and creative at any point along the spectrum. Scholars learn from most any point on the spectrum and usually attempt to share their scholarship in papers, books, Websites, blogs, and online or onsite classrooms.

That professor then mentioned above then asserted that Wikipedia and YouTube were information databases but not knowledge bases. He then mentioned the problem of students knowing facts but not organizing these facts in a scholarly manner. He conjectured that this was perhaps do to increased virtual learning in their development. My December 5, 2007 reply to him was as follows (off-the-cuff so to speak).

Although I see your point about information versus knowledge, the addition of the “Discussion tab” in Wikipedia changed the name of the game. As “information” gets discussed and debated and critiqued it’s beginning to look a whole lot more like knowledge in Wikipedia. For example, note the Discussion tab at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Design

And when UC Berkeley puts 177 science courses on YouTube (some of them in biology), it’s beginning to look a lot more like YouTube knowledge --- --- http://www.jimmyr.com/free_education.php

With respect to virtual learning, my best example is Stanford’s million+ dollar virtual surgery cadaver that can do more than a real cadaver. For one thing it can have blood pressure such that a nicked artery can hemorrhage. Learning throughout time is based on models and simulations of sorts. Our models and simulations keep getting better and better to a point where the line between virtual and real world become very blurred much like pilots in virtual reality begin to think they are in reality.

Much depends on the purpose and goals of virtual learning. Sometimes edutainment is important to both motivate and make learners more attentive (like wake them up). But this also has drawbacks when it makes learning too easy. I’m a strong believer in blood, sweat, and tears learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
When I put it into practice it was not popular with students of this generation who want it to be easy.

You note that:  “These students have prepared but it is poorly arranged, planned, and articulated.” One thing we’ve noted in Student Managed Funds (like in Phil Cooley’s course where students actually control the investments of a million dollars or more of a Trinity University's endowment) where students must make presentations before the Board of Trustees greatly improves students “planning and articulation.” You can read more about this at the University of XXXXX (December 4) at http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Note that the portfolios in these courses are not virtual portfolios. They’re the real thing with real dollars! Students adapt to higher levels of performance when the hurdles require higher ordered performance.

I prefer to think of higher order metacognition --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
For specific examples in accounting education see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
One of the main ideas is to make students do their own discovery learning. Blood, sweat, and tears are the best teachers.

Much of the focus in metacognitive learning is how to examine/discover what students have learned on their own and how to control cheating when assessing discovery and concept learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Higher order learning attempts to make students think more conceptually. In particular, note the following quotation from Bob Kennelly at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

We studied whether instructional material that connects accounting concept discussions with sample case applications through hypertext links would enable students to better understand how concepts are to be applied to practical case situations.

Results from a laboratory experiment indicated that students who learned from such hypertext-enriched instructional material were better able to apply concepts to new accounting cases than those who learned from instructional material that contained identical content but lacked the concept-case application hyperlinks. 

Results also indicated that the learning benefits of concept-case application hyperlinks in instructional material were greater when the hyperlinks were self-generated by the students rather than inherited from instructors, but only when students had generated appropriate links. 

Along broader lines we might think of it in terms of self-organizing of atomic-level information/knowledge ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization

I look forward to your writings on this subject when you get things sorted out. You’re a good writer. Scientist's aren't meant to be such good writers.

Wikipedia (heavily used by scholars in spite of authenticity risks)--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

Who is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? --- http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/09/who_is_mahmoud_ahmadinejad.html The Iranian-born author of the above article invites anybody to contact him with corrections at amil_imani@yahoo.com It would be great to see if and how the author tries to defend himself about contentious “facts.” Wikipedia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad It goes without saying that Wikipedia modules are always suspect, but it is easy to make corrections for the world. I think this particular model requires registration to discourage anonymous edits. What is often better about Wikipedia is to read the discussion and criticisms of any module. For example, some facts in dispute in this particular module are mentioned in the “Discussion” or “talk” section about the module --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad Perhaps some of the disputed facts have already been pointed out in the “Discussion” section. Of course pointing out differences of opinion about “facts” does not, in and of itself, resolve these differences. I did read the “Discussion” section on this module before suggesting the module as a supplementary link. I assumed others would also check the “Talk” section before assuming what is in dispute. Since Wikipedia is so widely used by so many students and others like me it’s important to try to correct the record whenever possible. This can be done quite simply from your Web browser and does not require any special software. It requires registration for politically sensitive modules. Wikipedia modules are often “corrected” by the FBI, CIA, corporations, foreign governments, professors of all persuasions, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. This makes them fun and suspect at the same time. It’s like having a paper refereed by the world instead of a few, often biased or casual, journal referees. What I like best is that “referee comments” are made public in Wikipedia’s “Discussion” sections. You don’t often find this in scholarly research journals where referee comments are supposed to remain confidential. Reasons for flawed journal peer reviews were recently brought to light at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReviewFlaws The biggest danger in Wikipedia in generally for modules that are rarely sought out. For example, Bill Smith might right a deceitful module about John Doe. If nobody’s interested in John Doe, it may take forever and a day for corrections to appear. Generally modules that are of great interest to many people, however, generate a lot of “talk” in the “Discussion” sections. For example, the Discussion section for George W. Bush is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_W._Bush Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

 

"Forget the Articles, Best Wikipedia Read Is Its Discussions," by Lee Gomes, The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2007; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118712061199497533.html

You already know about Wikipedia -- or think you do. It's the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the one that by dint of its 1.9 million English-language entries has become the Internet's main information source and the 17th busiest U.S. Web site.

But that's just the half of it.

Most people are familiar with Wikipedia's collection of articles. Less well-known, unfortunately, are the discussions about these articles. You can find these at the top of a Wikipedia page under a separate tab for "Discussion."

Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience -- so much so that it has become my habit to first check out the discussion before going to the article proper.

At Wikipedia, anyone can be an editor and all but 600 or so articles can be freely altered. The discussion pages exist so the people working on an article can talk about what they're doing to it. Part of the discussion pages, the least interesting part, involves simple housekeeping; -- editors noting how they moved around the sections of an article or eliminated duplications. And sometimes readers seek answers to homework-style questions, though that practice is discouraged.

But discussion pages are also where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn't say.

This is where the fun begins. You'd be astonished at the sorts of things editors argue about, and the prolix vehemence they bring to stating their cases. The 9,500-word article "Ireland," for example, spawned a 10,000-word discussion about whether "Republic of Ireland" would be a better name for the piece. "I know full well that many Unionist editors would object completely to my stance on this subject," wrote one person.

A ferocious back and forth ensued over whether Antonio Meucci or Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. One person from the Meucci camp taunted the Bell side by saying, "'Nationalistic pride' stop you and people like you to accept the truth. Bell was a liar and thief. He invented nothing."

As for the age-old philosophical question, "What is truth," it's an issue Wikipedia editors have spent 242,000 words trying to settle, an impressive feat considering how Plato needed only 118,000 words to write "The Republic."

These debates extend to topics most people wouldn't consider remotely controversial. The article on calculus, for instance, was host to some sparring over whether the concept of "limit," central to calculus, should be better explained as an "average."

Wikipedia editors are always on the prowl for passages in articles that violate Wikipedia policy, such as its ban on bias. Editors use the discussion pages to report these sightings, and reading the back and forth makes it clear that editors take this task very seriously.

On one discussion page is the comment: "I am not sure that it does not present an entirely Eurocentric view, nor can I see that it is sourced sufficiently well so as to be reliable."

Does it address a polarizing topic from politics or religion? Hardly. The article was about kittens. The editor was objecting to the statement that most people think kittens are cute.

These debates are not the only treasures in the discussion pages. You can learn a lot of stray facts, facts that an editor didn't think were important enough for the main article. For example, in the discussion accompanying the article about diets, it's noted that potatoes, eaten raw, can be poisonous. The National Potato Council didn't believe this when asked about it last week, but later called back to say that it was true, on account of the solanine in potatoes. Of course, you'd have to eat many sackfuls of raw potatoes to be done in by them.

The discussion about "biography" included random facts from sundry biographies, including that Marshall McLuhan believed his ideas about mass media and the rest to have been inspired by the Virgin Mary. This is true, said McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand. (Mr. Marchand also said McLuhan believed that a global conspiracy of Freemasons was seeking to hinder his career.)

Remember, though, this is Wikipedia, and while it tends to get things right in the long run, it can goof up along the way. A "tomato" article contained a lyrical description of the Carolina breed, said to be "first noted by Italian monk Giacomo Tiramisunelli" and "considered a rare delicacy amongst tomato-connoisseurs."

That's all a complete fabrication, said Roger Chetelat, tomato expert at the University of California, Davis. While now gone from Wikipedia, the passage was there long enough for "Giacomo Tiramisunelli" to turn up now in search engines as a key figure in tomato history.

Wikipedia is very self-aware. It has a Wikipedia article about Wikipedia. But this meta-analysis doesn't extend to "Wikipedia discussions." No article on the topic exists. Search for "discussion," and you are sent to "debate."

But, naturally, that's controversial. The discussion page about debate includes a debate over whether "discussion" and "debate" are synonymous. Emotions run high; the inability to distinguish the two, said one participant, is "one of the problems with Western Society."

Maybe I have been reading too many Wikipedia discussion pages, but I can see the point.

Jensen Comment
This may be more educational than what we teach in class. Try it by clicking on the Discussion tab for the following"

Credit Derivative --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_derivative

Capital Asset Pricing Model --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset_pricing_model

Socratic Method --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_Method

Moodle --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle

"Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits," by Katie Hafner, The New York Times, August 19, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/technology/19wikipedia.html?ex=1188532800&en=c387035de4ec887b&ei=5070

"CIA, FBI Computers Used for Wikipedia Edits," by Randall Mikkelsen, The Washington Post, August 16, 2007 --- Click Here
"CIA and Vatican Edit Wikipedia Entries," TheAge.com, August 18, 2007 --- Click Here

Jensen Comment
Wikipedia installed software to trace the source of edits and new modules.

Bob Jensen's threads on tools of education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

Global Warming Test:  The Issue of Milankovitch Orbital Variations

A geoscientist criticized the following link that I placed (and then removed from) the September 10 edition of Tidbits.
The Global Warming Test  --- http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/GlobWarmTest/start.html

 A reply from this geoscientist.

I owe you a longer response, so here goes:

 

Much of the information on the test is correct... but facts out of context can often mislead!

 

I have strong issues with several questions on those grounds:

 

Question 3 asks what the main cause of global warming is, and gives 3 possible choices. There are two major problems here. First the question is time dependent. Second, several "main" causes aren't even listed as possibilities. Some examples:  If I ask what the main cause of the warming that has occurred over the last 18,000 years is, the answer is Milankovitch orbital variations (which include more than the "eccentricities" listed in answer b), but if I ask what the main cause of global warming was in the late Mesozoic, the answer is CO2 released by tectonic activity. If I ask what the main cause of global warming was between 1992 and 1999, the answer is the diminishing effects of the SO2 released by the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. And if I ask what is the main cause of global warming has been over the past two centuries, the answer is increasing atmospheric greenhouse gasses, some of which are human produced.  Although the author discusses many of these causes on his answer page, clearly understanding relative time scales and interactions go way beyond his simplistic multiple choices.

 

Question 5 implies that something less than 1 degree C is negligible... but continuous changes of this magnitude in overall global averages implies that polar high temps are increasing more... since hotter equatorial regions stay relatively the same. This may be insignificant to the author, but ask a polar bear!

 

Question 6 implies that just because CO2 has been higher in the geologic past means we don't need to worry about current trends. This ignores two significant issues. First, solar output was much different in the past. Second, rate of change is more important for ecosystems than absolute changes. It took millions of years for CO2 to rise in the mid Mesozoic... not several centuries. Berner's data without error bars is also a bit misleading.

 

Question 7 has only simplistic answers. Sure, trees love CO2. But things we love can hurt us. Eat too many Twinkies and you die of clogged arteries. While forests like the CO2, individual species can't necessarily adapt to rapid climate changes. Your grandchildren won't see any Sugar Maples in New England, despite their use of CO2.

 

Question 9 depends on how one defines drastic. And check out the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine...

 

Question 10 is simplistic... all three means are important to determining how the Earth is changing. To say that high altitude temps are the only important measure is absurd. What is worse, the answer page still hawks the line that satellite data shows decreasing temperatures. This is well known error in early analyses that NASA has repudiated.

 

So the upshot is that there are many truths in this quiz. But that are presented along with untruths, and half truths in order to support a particular viewpoint. Whether that viewpoint is right or wrong is unimportant. Science must not seek to prove a point. That is what faith is for.

 

You may remember Ana Unruh, Trinity's first (and so far only) Rhodes Scholar. She is now a Senior Policy advisor for the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming (she is also now Ana Unruh Cohen). She likes to point out that climate models now been shown to be very accurate over the last 10-12 years but many politicians are unwilling to accept them, but the same politicians are willing to budget based on economic models that have much less basis in theory and much worse track records for predictive capability.

 

Below are some tidbits I added for this edition of Tidbits

The study by the Danish National Space Center rebuts a July study by UK scientists who allege there has not been a solar-climate link in the past 20 years. The Danish researchers, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, contend the UK study erroneously relies on surface air temperature, which, they say, "does not respond to the solar cycle." Over the past 20 years, however, the Danes argue, the solar cycle remains fully apparent in variations both of tropospheric air temperature and of ocean sub-surface water temperature.
"Sun still main force in climate change Rebuts widely publicized study this summer by UK scientists," WorldNetDaily, October 3, 2007 --- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57949

Google famously and charmingly admonishes itself, "Don't Be Evil." Google also cultivates the image of the ultragreen company, giving subsidies to employees to buy hybrid cards and spending millions to install 1.6 megawatts of photovoltaic panels at its Mountain View, CA, headquarters. So on the day that Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize for promulgating accurate climate science in the public interest, here's a riddle: why does Google lend its technical muscle to science-bashing and fact-distorting websites that mislead Gmail readers and other Google customers on global warming and climate change?
David Talbot, "Nobel Prizes, Climate Keywords:  Google helps organize the world's disinformation, too," MIT's Technology Review, October 12, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/21882/?nlid=601
David Talbot is the Senior Editor of MIT's Technology Review --- http://www.entforum.caltech.edu/Past_Archive/bios1202.pdf

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change --- http://www.ipcc.ch/

How do we know global warming isn't Mother Nature having a hot flash?
Maxine --- http://pressroom.hallmark.com/maxine_dotcom.html

Mr. Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time . . . I haven't seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer. Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we've seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.
John R. Christie, "My Nobel Moment," The Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2007; Page A19 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119387567378878423.html

"Carbon Offsets," by Richard Posner," Becker-Posner Blog, December 2, 2007 --- http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

The most serious drawback of the carbon-offsets movement is that it is likely to make the problem of excessive carbon emissions more rather than less serious, and this for three reasons. The first is that it creates the impression that modest reductions in the rate of annual increases in carbon emissions make a meaningful contribution to the fight against global warming. They do not. Given the limitations of the carbon-offsets movement that I have noted (its purely voluntary nature and the fact that only consumer emissions are affected), plus the fact that any reductions attributable to the movement are more than offset by continuing rapid increases in emissions by China, India, and other rapidly developing economies, the movement can at best limit only very slightly the rate of annual increase in carbon emissions, whereas the need is to reduce the level of those emissions. The reason is that, because atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans only very gradually (and the ability of the ocean to act as a "carbon sink" apparently is declining), a high annual level of carbon emissions tends to have a cumulative effect, so that even if that level were steady (rather than increasing, as it is), the atmospheric concentration would rise.

Second, the movement encourages the belief that anyone who reduces his carbon "footprint" (that is, the emissions of carbon dioxide that he causes) to zero has done his bit to combat global warming. My wife and I have two cars, two houses, and fly a certain amount, but according to TerraPass's calculation, we can reduce our carbon footprint (roughly 32 tons of carbon dioxide a year) to zero at a cost of $282 a year. Then I will feel good about myself. But if a million American families having similar carbon footprints eliminate them at this rather modest price, the result--a reduction of 32 million tons of carbon dioxide emitted per year--will be microscopic, as the worldwide hourly emission of carbon dioxide is 16 million tons. A million American families would be roughly 1 percent of the U.S. population. Suppose the carbon-offsets movement, which is recent, and is getting a boost from the increasingly ominous evidence of global warming, grows beyond my expectations, to a point at which 10 percent of the U.S. population is paying TerraPass or other carbon-offset providers to offset an average of 32 tons per family. The effect would be to reduce annual worldwide carbon emissions by 20 hours' worth, or about one-quarter of 1 percent, and the reduction would be greatly offset by the worldwide growth of emissions, currently running at about 3 percent a year.

Third, and most serious, the carbon-offset movement, combined with well-publicized projects by Google and other companies to reduce carbon emissions, creates the false impression that global warming can be tamed by voluntary efforts, just as cleaning up after dogs has been achieved by voluntary efforts, without need for legal compulsion. Global warming cannot be tamed by voluntary efforts, because the costs of significantly reducing carbon emissions in order to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (or at least stop it from increasing) are enormous. If people believe that voluntary efforts will suffice, there will be no political pressure to incur the heavy costs that will be necessary to avert the risk of catastrophic climate change.

Continued in article

"Carbon Offsets," by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker," Becker-Posner Blog, December 2, 2007 --- http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

The natural link between an offset system, whether compulsory or voluntary, and an emission trading system does dispose of the criticism that offsets are not desirable because they are like the indulgence system of the Middle Ages, In that system, sinners could purchase forgiveness for some of their sins without either having to repent, or having to agree not to sin anymore. Yes, an offset system does essentially involve buying the rights to pollute, but buying such rights helps get polluting into the hands of those businesses and consumers who get the most value from these rights. That is why the world has gravitated toward a cap and trade system rather than merely a cap system.

Another major problem with any carbon-offset system is that activities producing the so-called "offsets" may have happened anyway. For example, an initial and still popular type of carbon offset is to pay for the planting of trees in a reforestation project, particularly in the tropics. Forests help cool the atmosphere by storing carbon. It is quite difficult to determine whether any particular tree-planting program makes a net contribution to planting, rather than simply displacing other tree plantings that would have occurred anyway.

As one example, a country located in the tropics may have planned on a reforestation project for several reasons, including a reduction in the degree and rapidity of water runoffs during rainstorms. If a carbon-offset project began to plant trees in that forest, the country may cut back on its own efforts since these would be replaced by the tree plantings that serve as carbon offsets. TerraPass, an important company that sells carbon offsets, was accused of selling offsets in a methane recapturing project that allegedly would have happened without the TerraPass offsets (the company denied this claim; see the discussion in the Wikipedia article on "Carbon Offset").

In our complicated and interdependent global economic system, opportunities to create carbon offsets can be readily produced by both companies and governments without any significant affect on the scale of emissions. Mainly for this reason, but also because of the reluctance of most individuals to voluntarily pay significant costs for acting "green", a cap and trade system, despite its many flaws, is a far preferable direction to develop in order to cut down on carbon emissions.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's links to science tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is making freely available to high-school students and teachers a collection of material in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The material is available on a new Web site, an offshoot of its popular OpenCourseWare effort to put lecture notes and other information about every course online.
The Chronicle of Higher Education --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2573/mit-offers-learning-materials-to-high-schools
Jensen Comment
It's a shame that the Sloan School at MIT has not yet made accounting and business materials available for high schools. The bookkeeping, clerical, and boring-drudge portrayal of accountants in the nation's high schools is viewed as one of the most serious problems of the accountancy profession. In this MIT offshoot of OCW, the Sloan School could do a lot to help Dan Deines, the AICPA, and the AAA --- See the Taylor Report summary on Page 5 of
http://aaahq.org/pubs/AEN/2007/Fall2007.pdf

Bob Jensen's threads on accountancy careers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers

Bob Jensen's threads on the MIT OCW/OKI project making course materials available for over 1,500 college-level courses are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage Could Bring a Tax Windfall to States --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=104293

Voting Fraud
Was the Miss Universe contest rigged? --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=104302

Young Chimp Beats College Students ---  http://defamer.com/hollywood/ap/young-chimp-beats-college-students-696833.php
This was also on ABC News on December 3, 2007

Jensen Comment
After 40 years of teaching, why don't I find this surprising?
Having watched the tasks, I'm certain the chimp could also beat me. There were six chimps in these experiments. All showed superior memory for humans for the touch screen tasks used in the experiments. These were not easy tasks and all for peanuts.

"Japan researchers unveil housework robot," PhysOrg, November 27, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115375902.html 

Japanese researchers on Tuesday unveiled a new humanoid robot designed to lend a hand with housework, particularly the rapidly growing number of elderly people in the Asian country.

The 147-centimetre (four-foot-10) robot, pure white save for blue eyes and red arm joints, put its skills on display by helping an elderly person get out of bed and preparing breakfast.

While communicating with the person, the 111-kilogramme (244-pound) robot picked up tomato sauce from the refrigerator with four fingers and carried it with a piece of bread on a plate to the dining table.

With sensors and flexible joints, the robot is able to absorb potential shocks in case it bumps into users.

The robot was developed by Tokyo's elite Waseda University and named Twendy-One, an acronym derived from Waseda Engineering Designed Symbiont.

"In our super-ageing society, both strength and delicacy are required" for robots, Professor Shigeki Sugano said in presenting the humanoid. "Twendy-One is the first robot that can meet those conditions."

The professor said his team aims to sell the robot in 2015.

Japanese are famed for longevity, with more than 30,000 people aged at least 100 years old, a trend attributed to a healthy cuisine and active lifestyle.

But the longevity is also presenting a headache as the country has one of the lowest birthrates, raising fears of a future demographic crisis as a smaller pool of workers supports a mass of elderly.

Real-life Superheroes: 10 People with Incredible Abilities [w/ pics and vids] --- http://www.oddee.com/item_91848.aspx

"Blind, Deaf and Dumb," by Laurence Musgrove, Inside Higher Ed, December 3, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/12/03/musgrove  

They soon learn I don’t teach speed reading. I teach slow reading. I teach slow, concentrated, finger-on-the-page reading. I read to my students in my slow Texas drawl. I crawl with them through the passages and passageways. We mosey. We copy down sentences. We write paraphrases. We imitate sentences. We read a couple of lines. We ask questions. We pause. We read those lines again. I dedicate entire classes to silent, sustained, shared reading. We call it “reading lab.”

. . .

Having a productive relationship with text is also dependent upon hearing the text. Many of my students cannot hear what they read. Perhaps it is because they were not read to as children. Whatever the cause, they often cannot hear the voice of the text. Their eyes may be working, but their ears aren’t. Nothing on the lips and tongue either. What they can’t taste, they can’t consume. That’s why I read to my students. I’m their hearing aid. Their sommelier. Given my experience with the text, I help them learn the lay of the land. I help them find the right narrative path so they can follow it page after page. I’m an English instructor who also teaches voice.

I also know that many students sometimes go blind when they see text. It’s a shameful state of cultural affairs. Poetry-blindness is particularly tragic. Poetry unsettles the eye. It can make us dizzy, all this reading back and forth, up and down the page. But students easily go blind in the face of other texts, too. Lost and wandering aimlessly, they might as well give up, shut their eyes, and fall asleep for good.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that many students should go silent in the company of text. That they are unresponsive in class. That they should go dumb after going deaf and blind. That they have no sense and sensation of what they’ve read. That they look to their professors for short cuts, quick reads, and knowledge patches.

How to be a Good Wife --- http://www.snopes.com/language/document/goodwife.asp

With Pictures
In a politically correct age, they seem like outrageous anachronisms. And there is no doubt these adverts - many taken from the first half of the last century - reveal just how much women used to be caricatured as downtrodden housewives or hair-brained office girls. Now, a new book - You Mean A Woman Can Open It?: The Woman's Place In The Classic Age Of Advertising - brings together images which would surely cause a howl of protest if they were released today.
"The outrageously politically incorrect adverts from the time equality forgot," London Daily Mail, November 28, 2007 --- Click Here

Years ago, Marilyn Neimark conducted a study of the history of demeaning parts of General Motors Corporation’s six decades of annual reports ---
"The Hidden Dimensions of Annual Reports:  Sixty Years of Social Conflict at General Motors," by Marilyn K. Neimark (Marcus Weiner Publishing) --- http://markuswiener.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=170  

I don't know if Marilyn is still doing commentaries on WBAI radio in New York City.

Men Like Their Figures
November 28, 2007 message from Linda A. Kidwell [LKidwell@uwyo.edu]

This is a real advertisement from The Journal of Accountancy in 1951.  I came across it looking for the earliest article on the fraud triangle.  Wow!  Have times changed!  (well maybe only the business interpretation of the ad).

See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/1951AccountancyAdv.pdf

Linda Kidwell

November 29, 2007 reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU]

You know, this ad for the Comptometer really hit me - I immediately recalled my late mother (she passed away in 2004 at the age of 86) telling me when we were kids about how she operated a Comptometer at the office where she worked, I believe while my dad was away in the Pacific in WWII. Talk about a flashback, to see the ad for it now! I might just print and paste it on my office window.

Interestingly, to put a different slant on all this - such humor was at one time considered harmless. It was only when the few bad apples carried it too far, and turned it all into real harassment, that we began to "regulate" speech and behavior, and it has been a very slippery slope. It reminds me of the measures faculty take to prevent cheating. In both cases, the rules begin to take over, so that EVERYONE is restricted far beyond the original intent.

A school in this area has recently put a ban on ALL touching - that means 100%. If someone falls, don't offer a hand up. If they're distraught, better let them cry, because if you try to comfort them you can be expelled. Is this the world we want to live in? Can we once again back up just a step to the realm of reason, where sometimes, in the words of a pundit (don't remember which one), "a cigar is just a cigar?"

Sorry for the lecture - I must really be getting old!

" ... the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less." David Brooks

... ... is that supposed to be a good thing? Doherty

Patricia A. Doherty
Department of Accounting
Boston University School of Management
595 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA 02215

 

You can read about historian Jacques Barzun at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Barzun

Debbie Bowling forwarded an update on Professor Barzun in a recent column of San Antonio Express News --- http://www.mysanantonio.com/salife/stories/MYSA112507.01P.barzun.1789a60.html

Historian and author Jacques Barzun completed 'From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life' in San Antonio, where he has lived since 1997.

Amazon's reviews of From Dawn to Decadence are at http://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Decadence-Present-Western-Cultural/dp/0060175869

Other reviews are at http://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm?book_number=529

Question
Does it pay to evade taxes and, if so, why don't more people do it?

"Why so Little Tax Evasion?" by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, The Becker-Posner Blog, November 25, 2007 --- http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

All the rich countries are successful in raising sizable amounts of revenue from taxes with only a rather little tax evasion. Tax avoidance is the use of legal means to reduce taxes, whereas tax evasion uses illegal means. The federal government of the US raises almost 20 percent of American GDP through taxes on personal and business income, capital gains, estates, and the sale of gasoline and some other goods. The estimates from the 2001 IRS National Research Program indicate that the percent of income not reported is quite low for wages and salaries, but rises to over 50 percent for farm income, and about 40 percent for business income. Income tax payments overall are under reported by about 13 percent. What determines the degree of tax evasion?

If taxpayers responded only to the expected cost of evading taxes, evasion would be far more widespread. The reason is that only about 7 percent of all tax returns are audited (over a 7 year period), and typically the penalty on under reported income is only about 20 percent of the taxes owed. Virtually no one is sent to jail simply for evading taxes unless that evasion is on a very large scale, or involves massive fraud. If a person were to evade $1,000 in taxes, his expected gain would be 0.93x$1000 -0.07x$200 (=$1000/5) = $916. On these considerations alone, he should not hesitate to evade paying the $1,000, and presumably much more.

To be sure, the expected gain is not the right criterion since most taxpayers would be risk averse regarding audits and punishments, especially if there is some chance of much greater than the average punishment or likelihood of an audit. However, if the expected gain from evading $1,000 were $916, the degree of risk aversion would have to be huge, far higher than the risk aversion that is embodied in pricing of assets, for risk to explain why there is so little tax evasion.

This is not to say that possible punishments have no affect on the amount of tax evasion. Compliance rates are much higher when governments have independent evidence on a person's income since then the probability of audit when he under reports his income is much higher than when they do not have this information. For example, income from independent consulting to companies is better reported than tips on earnings, or than the incomes of farmers and other small business owners because employers report how much they paid to independent consultants, whereas no one reports how much they paid in tips, or how much they bought from a local store. A PhD study in progress at the University of Chicago by Oscar Vela also shows that persons in occupations where integrity is a more important determinant of success, such as law or medicine, are less likely to evade taxes. Presumably, any publicity that an individual in these occupations was convicted of tax evasion would damage his reputation and earnings.

Vela finds that considerations of reputation, along with more traditional variables in the tax evasion literature do help explain how much evasion occurs for different types of income. These variables include the likelihood of audits that varies for different classes of taxpayers, punishments for those audited, marital status (not surprisingly, married persons are less likely to evade taxes), the marginal tax rate, and the ease with which governments can match reported incomes with independent evidence on incomes, such as from 1040 and 1099 tax forms,

Note that tax avoidance as well as tax evasion tends to rise as the marginal tax rate increases. That is, with higher tax rates, individuals and businesses are both more likely not to report some of their income to the tax authorities, and also to search harder for ways to reduce how much of their income they are obligated to report. This implies, for example, that flattening the income tax structure would increase the amount of personal income reported to tax authorities because both the amount of evasion and the avoidance of the personal income tax would be reduced.

However, audits, punishments, and the other deterrence variables mentioned in the previous paragraphs do not fully explain why there is not much more tax evasion. I believe it is necessary to recognize that most people believe they have a duty, moral or otherwise, to report their taxable income more or less honestly. I intentionally say "more or less honestly" because a little cheating on taxes is usually considered to be ok, as long as it does not go too far. Individuals might not pay social security taxes on their payments to workers who clean their houses, and they might pay a mason in cash because he then gives them a lower price, but these same persons would be very reluctant to engage in large-scale tax evasion.

Similarly, most people do not believe it is moral to steal money even when there is little chance they will be found out, and they feel obligated to obey many other laws, even when that entails inconvenience and cost to themselves. There would be considerably more crime if individuals only obeyed laws when the expected cost of being caught, adjusted for risk, exceeded the benefits from disobeying these laws. To some extent, people obey many laws, including tax laws, because most other persons are doing the same. If so, their behavior might change radically if they lost confidence that others would pay their taxes and obey other laws.

Clearly, morality about obeying laws does not apply to all types of taxes, or all laws-people often cross a street when the light is red, do not stop at stop signs when riding their bikes, and do not report much of their tips. Moreover, in many countries of Latin America, Africa, and Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe, individuals do not even feel much obligation to pay ordinary income and other taxes. They evade except when they expect the chances of being caught are high, as with businesses paying value added taxes. These countries are unable to raise substantial amounts from taxes on personal incomes or businesses except when marginal tax rates are low. Instead they rely greatly on value added and other more difficult to evade taxes.

"Why so Little Tax Evasion? Richard Posner, The Becker-Posner Blog, November 25, 2007 --- http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

Becker presents persuasive evidence that the amount of tax evasion varies, as one would expect in a rational-choice model of taxpaying, with variance in the private costs and private benefits of evasion. I am inclined to believe that the private costs are higher than he suggests, which if true would mean that more tax compliance can be attributed to rational fear of punishment than he suggests and less to taxpayers' feeling a moral duty to pay taxes. For example, the civil penalties for tax evasion are quite severe (the fraud penalty is 100 percent of the amount of taxes evaded), and anyone charged with civil or criminal tax evasion will incur heavy legal and accounting expenses in defending against the charge. Although the audit rate is low, it is not random, but rather is higher for those taxpayers who are in the best position to evade taxes without being caught or whose tax returns raise a red flag because of unusually high deductions or other suspicious circumstances. And once one has been caught evading taxes, one can expect the rate of future audits of one's returns to be high. While it is true that underpayment of taxes is rarely prosecuted criminally, even when deliberate, criminal prosecution is likely if the tax evader takes steps to conceal the evasion, as by never filing a tax return, keeping phony books, or forging evidence of deductions. Moreover, the government does occasionally prosecute even small fry.

. . .

The general question that Becker raises of the moral costs of committing crime is a fascinating one. I would be inclined to search as hard as possible for nonmoral costs before concluding that morality is a major motivator of behavior, especially with regard to crimes, like tax evasion, that do not have an identifiable victim. In the case of many crimes, the benefits to most people of perpetrating them would be so slight (and often zero or even negative) that sanctions play only a small role in bringing about compliance; enforcement costs needn't be high in order to deter when nonenforcement benefits are low. Some examples: the demand for crack cocaine among white people (including cocaine addicts) appears to be very small. Both altruism and fear deter most people from attempting crimes of violence, quite apart from expected punishment costs. The vast majority of men do not have a sexual interest in prepubescent children. Well-to-do people often have excellent substitutes for crime: any person of means can procure legal substitutes for illegal drugs (for example, Prozac for cocaine, Valium for heroin). Fear of injury deters most people from driving recklessly or while drunk. People who have no taxable income are incapable of evading income tax. People who do have taxable income can obtain benefits from evading it, but the costs of evasion are, as I have emphasized, nonnegligible, so there is widespread compliance along with a good deal of evasion. I would therefore expect differences across countries in tax evasion to be related more to differences in penalties, collection methods, and so forth than to differences in morality. Americans may exhibit higher tax compliance than Italians, but Americans are not a more moral people than Italians.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I inclined to think that more people evade taxes than Becker and Posner suggest, although this evasion has declined due to added reporting of revenues, particularly 1099 forms for miscellaneous and investment income. Increasingly, without formal audits, the IRS is sending out bills for underreported 1099 income. In the United States, the IRS estimated in 2007 that Americans owed $345 billion more than they paid, or about 14% of federal revenues for FY2007. But these estimates are very soft numbers based largely on intense audits of a miniscule proportion of taxpayers filing returns --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Evasion

Contents 1 Tax avoidance 1.1 Country of residence 1.2 Double taxation 1.3 Legal entities 2 Tax evasion 2.1 Statistics 2.2 Illegal income and tax evasion 2.3 Economics of tax evasion 2.4 Evasion of customs duty 2.4.1 Smuggling 2.5 Evasion of Value Added Tax (VAT) 3 Control of evasion 3.1 Corruption by tax officials 3.2 Role of middleman 3.3 Level of evasion and punishment 3.4 Privatization of tax enforcement 3.5 Tax farming 3.6 PSI Agencies 4 The distinction in various jurisdictions 4.1 The distinction in the United States 4.2 The distinction in the United Kingdom 4.2.1 History of the distinction 5 Public opinion on tax avoidance 6 Responses to tax avoidance 7 Tax protesters and tax resistance 7.1 Definition of tax evasion in the United States 7.2 Application to tax protesters 7.3 Failing to file returns in the United States 8 Tax shelters 9 Quotes 10 See also 11 Notes 12 References 13 External links

You can learn a lot about taxation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax

Bob Jensen's tax helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation

"Ways to prevent cheating on online exams," by Gail E. Krovitz, eCollege Newsletter, Vol 8, Issue 6 November 15, 2007 ---
http://www.ecollege.com/Educators_Voice.learn

• Write every exam as if it is open book. As much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, we need to assume that students use resources on their exams (the book, Internet search engines and so on) and write our exams accordingly. Are all of our questions asking for information that can be gathered quickly from the textbook or from a simple Internet search? Then we should re-think our questions (see following guideline). Open-book exams have the potential to test higher level thinking skills, instead of just memorizing facts. Unfortunately, scores on open-book exams are often lower, as students don’t take exam preparation as seriously when they know they can use their book, so training in open-book exam-taking skills would be helpful (Rakes).
• Write effective multiple-choice exam questions. Because it is so easy to use prohibited materials during online exams, it is foolish to design tests that simply test factual information that is easily looked up. Although it is difficult to do, online exams are most effective when they test higher order thinking skills (application, synthesis and evaluation) and ask questions that cannot be answered by glancing at the book or a quick internet search.  See Christe, Dewey and Rohrer for more information about developing quality multiple-choice questions.
• Set tight time limits per question. Even with open book exams (and especially for ones that are not open book), it is important to give a tight time frame for the test, so students will not have time to look up each question in the book. The time limit chosen will obviously vary depending on subject matter, type of questions asked, etc. For strict fact recall, instructors might start by giving a total time based on allowing 60- 90 seconds per question and then adjusting as necessary based on their student body. More time would need to be given for higher-level thinking questions or for those involving calculations.
• Use large question pools to offer different, randomly-selected questions to each student. See “Tip: getting the most out of exam question pools” for a good description of using question pools in the eCollege system. The question pools must be large enough to minimize overlap of questions between tests. Rowe provides a chart comparing the average number of questions in common for two students with different question pool sizes and different numbers of questions drawn from the pool. For example, 5 questions drawn from a pool of 10 questions results in 2.5 questions in common between two students, while 5 questions drawn from a pool of 25 questions results in only 1 question in common between two students. You can consult the mathematical formula or go with common sense: a larger question pool is better for reducing the likelihood that students will get the same questions.  
• Manually create different versions of the exam with the same general question pools, but with scrambled answers for each question. For example, in one version of the exam, the correct answer could be B, while the answer choices are scrambled in the other version so the correct answer is D. You could use the Group function to assign half of the class to one exam, and the other half the class to the other one. Cizek cites research showing that scrambling questions and answer choices does reduce cheating, while simply changing the order of the same questions does not reduce cheating.  In fact, in a study of student’s perceived effectiveness of cheating prevention strategies, having scrambled test forms was the number one factor perceived by students to prevent cheating (Cizek).
• Assign a greater number of smaller tests instead of one or two large ones. This reduces the incentive to cheat, as each test isn’t as likely to make or break a student’s grade; the pressure of the midterm and final-only structure in some classes is a strong incentive to cheat on those exams. Also, this increases the logistical difficulties of cheating if a student is relying on someone else to help them or to take the test for them.
• Provide a clear policy for what happens if students cheat… and enforce it! There are many important things instructors can do from this perspective, such as discussing what constitutes cheating, the importance of academic honesty, any honor codes in place, what measures will be in place to prevent and detect cheating and the punishments for cheating. If students perceive that the instructor does not care about cheating, then incidents of both spontaneous and planned cheating increase (Cizek). Students know that most cheaters don’t get caught and that punishments aren’t harsh for those who do get caught (Kleiner and Lord). Research has found that punishment for cheating is one of the main deterrents to cheating (Kleiner and Lord).
• Set the exam Gradebook Review Date for after the exam has closed.  The Gradebook Review Date is when the students can access their graded exam in the Gradebook. If this date is set before the end of the exam, students who take the exam early could access their exam in the Gradebook (and usually the correct answers as well) and distribute the questions to students who would take the exam later.    
• Revise tests every term.  Sooner or later exam questions are likely to get out into the student world and get distributed between students. This is especially possible when students view their graded exams in the Gradebook, as they have all the time in the world to copy or print their questions (usually with the correct answers provided). Periodic changes to the test bank can help minimize the impact of this. Minor changes such as rewording the questions and changing the order of answers (especially if different versions with scrambled answers are not used) can help extend the useful life of a test bank.
• Use ExamGuard^TM if the feature is available at your school. ExamGuard prohibits the following actions while students are taking online exams: printing, copying and pasting anything into or from the assessment, surfing the Web, opening or using other applications, using Windows system keys functions or clicking on any other area within the course. Also note that ExamGuard prohibits students from printing or copying exam materials while viewing the exam in the Gradebook.  If you are interested in learning more about ExamGuard, please contact your Account Executive or Client Services Consultant.
• Give proctored exams in a traditional classroom. While this is not an option for many online courses, it is a route that some schools take, especially if they largely serve a local population. With proctored exams, instructors feel more in control of the testing environment and more able to combat cheating in a familiar classroom setting (or at least to have cheating levels on par with those seen in a traditional exam setting). In a study on cheating in math or fact-based courses, Trenholm concludes that proctoring is “the single greatest tool we presently have to uphold the integrity of the educational process in instruction in online MFB (math or fact based) courses” (p. 297).  Also, Cizek showed that attentive proctoring reduced cheating directly and by giving the impression that academic integrity is valued.

 

December 1, 2007 reply from Charles Wankel [wankelc@VERIZON.NET]

Thanks Bob for sharing.

Some of the points seem to fall back to face-to-face course ideas but others were very helpful. I found the emphasis on higher order thinking skills (application, synthesis and evaluation) to be a great one. I am going to try to work on putting synthesis into my students’ assignments and projects.

Charlie Wankel

St. John’s University,
New York

December 1, 2007 reply from David Raggay [draggay@TSTT.NET.TT]

Please be so kind as to refer me to the specific article or articles wherein I can find a discussion on “higher order thinking skills (application, synthesis and evaluation)”

Thanks,

David Raggay,
IFRS Consultants,
Trinidad and Tobago

December 1, 2007 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi David,

There are several tacks to take on this question. Charlie provides some key words (see above).

I prefer to think of higher order metacognition --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
For specific examples in accounting education see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
One of the main ideas is to make students do their own discovery learning. Blood, sweat, and tears are the best teachers.

Much of the focus in metacognitive learning is how to examine/discover what students have learned on their own and how to control cheating when assessing discovery and concept learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 

Higher order learning attempts to make students think more conceptually. In particular, note the following quotation from Bob Kennelly at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge 

We studied whether instructional material that connects accounting concept discussions with sample case applications through hypertext links would enable students to better understand how concepts are to be applied to practical case situations.

Results from a laboratory experiment indicated that students who learned from such hypertext-enriched instructional material were better able to apply concepts to new accounting cases than those who learned from instructional material that contained identical content but lacked the concept-case application hyperlinks.

Results also indicated that the learning benefits of concept-case application hyperlinks in instructional material were greater when the hyperlinks were self-generated by the students rather than inherited from instructors, but only when students had generated appropriate links.

Along broader lines we might think of it in terms of self-organizing of atomic-level knowledge --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization 

Issues are still in great dispute on the issues of over 80 suggested “learning styles” --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles
Assessment and control of cheating are still huge problems.

 Bob Jensen

December 2, 2007 reply from Henry Collier [henrycollier@aapt.net.au]

G’day Bob … I’m not sure whether David is asking for the Bloom citation or not. I do not disagree with your post in any way, but wonder if David is looking for the ‘start’ of the art/science. I have also suggested that he may want to look at Bob Gagne’s approach to the same issues. Perhaps William Graves Perry’s 1970 book could / would also be useful.

Best regards from spring time in New South Wales where the roses in my garden are blooming and very pretty.

Henry

December 4, 2007 reply from Sanz, Mary Jo [MSANZ@BENTLEY.EDU]

Hi David

Bloom’s Taxonomy (in the Cognitive domain) speaks to the higher order thinking skills you refer to.

This website provides a good description of Bloom’s Taxonomy

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/bloomtax.htm 

I’ve attached a Task-Oriented Question Construction Wheel based on Bloom’s Cognitive Domain.

Regards,

Mary Jo Sanz, M. Ed.
Instructional Designer for Online Programs
Bentley College

 

New Technology for Proctoring Distance Education Examinations
"Proctor 2.0," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, June 2, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/02/proctor

Bob Jensen's threads on online versus onsite assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on online versus onsite assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline

"Google's Cloud Looms Large: How might expanding Google's cloud-computing service alter the digital world?," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, December 3, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19785/?nlid=701 

To know how you'll be using computers and the Internet in the coming years, it's instructive to consider the Google employee: most of his software and data--from pictures and videos, to presentations and e-mails--reside on the Web. This makes the digital stuff that's valuable to him equally accessible from his home computer, a public Internet café, or a Web-enabled phone. It also makes damage to a hard drive less important. Recently, Sam Schillace, the engineering director in charge of collaborate Web applications at Google, needed to reformat a defunct hard drive from a computer that he used for at least six hours a day. Reformatting, which completely erases all the data from a hard drive, would cause most people to panic, but it didn't bother Schillace. "There was nothing on it I cared about" that he couldn't find stored on the Web, he says.

Schillace's digital life, for the most part, exists on the Internet; he practices what is considered by many technology experts to be cloud computing. Google already lets people port some of their personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos, Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But according to a Wall Street Journal story, the company is expected to do more than offer scattered puffs of cloud computing: it will launch a service next year that will let people store the contents of entire hard drives online. Google doesn't acknowledge the existence of such a service. In an official statement, the company says, "Storage is an important component of making Web apps fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives ... We're always listening to our users and looking for ways to update and improve our Web applications, including storage options, but we don't have anything to announce right now." Even so, many people in the industry believe that Google will pull together its disparate cloud-computing offerings under a larger umbrella service, and people are eager to understand the consequences of such a project.

To be sure, Google isn't the only company invested in online storage and cloud computing. There are other services today that offer a significant amount of space and software in the cloud. Amazon's Simple Storage Service, for instance, offers unlimited and inexpensive online storage ($0.15 per gigabyte per month). AOL provides a service called Xdrive with a capacity of 50 gigabytes for $9.95 per month (the first five gigabytes are free). And Microsoft offers Windows Live SkyDrive, currently with a one-gigabyte free storage limit.

But Google is better positioned than most to push cloud computing into the mainstream, says Thomas Vander Wal, founder of Infocloud Solutions, a cloud-computing consultancy. First, millions of people already use Google's online services and store data on its servers through its software. Second, Vander Wal says that the culture at Google enables his team to more easily tie together the pieces of cloud computing that today might seem a little scattered. He notes that Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are also sitting atop huge stacks of people's personal information and a number of online applications, but there are barriers within each organization that could slow down the process of integrating these pieces. "It could be," says Vander Wal, "that Google pushes the edges again where everybody else has been stuck for a while."

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on Google are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

Do middle-school students understand how well they actually learn?
Given national mandates to ‘leave no child behind,’ grade-school students are expected to learn an enormous amount of course material in a limited amount of time. “Students have too much to learn, so it’s important they learn efficiently,” says Dr. John Dunlosky, Kent State professor of psychology and associate editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. Today, students are expected to understand and remember difficult concepts relevant to state achievement tests. However, a major challenge is the student’s ability to judge his own learning. “Students are extremely over confident about what they’re learning,” says Dunlosky. Dunlosky and his colleague, Dr. Katherine Rawson, Kent State assistant professor of psychology, study metacomprehension, or the ability to judge your own comprehension and learning of text materials. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, their research primarily focuses on fifth, seventh and eighth graders as well as college-aged students, and how improving metacomprehension can, in turn, improve students’ self-regulated learning.
PhysOrg, November 26, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115318315.html

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

America’s Best Churches Ranked by U.S. News: A Spoof, by Charlie Clark, Inside Higher Ed, November 30, 2007 --- http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/30/clark

Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings

"No Excuses: a Wire-Free Way to Upload Photos Wi-Fi Device Transfers Digital Shots to PCs And Sites Automatically," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2007; Page D8 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119560027226199810.html

No matter how perfectly shot or emotionally meaningful your digital photos may be, if they aren't uploaded to your computer or to a Web site, no one else will ever see them as they languish in your camera. This problem has plagued the digital-photo industry for years, though the cameras themselves have improved.

Most users know how to upload photos, but don't want to hassle with USB cords and slow upload speeds when transferring images onto a computer or photo-sharing site. Camera docks and memory-card readers built into PCs have attempted to alleviate these transferring problems, but these so-called shortcuts still require a certain amount of dedication to the process.

In the past couple of years, a handful of companies have gone a step farther by introducing Wi-Fi enabled digital cameras, notably Nikon Inc. and Eastman Kodak Co. But this capability works only in certain cameras and even then requires users to walk through a number of steps to send the photos through a service created by the company instead of sending them to a computer or Web site.

Little Effort Needed

This week, I tested a refreshingly simple gadget that solves this problem and does what most technology products don't: It works in existing devices and requires next to no effort. The $100 Eye-Fi Card by Eye-Fi Inc. (www.eye.fi) is a two-gigabyte SecureDigital memory card with a built-in wireless chip. It slips into any camera with an SD-card slot, and whenever the camera is turned on, looks for a familiar Wi-Fi network and uploads your photos to your Mac or PC and one of 17 photo-sharing sites. After a quick, one-time setup, the user does nothing more than turning on the digital camera.

I thought this thing was too good to be true and set out to find its flaws. But after using it with two digital cameras (one brand new and the other over three years old), three different computers (each with different operating systems) and five photo-sharing sites, I'm convinced that the Eye-Fi is a terrific little tool. It works quickly and is a no-brainer to get going. The only people who won't like it are those who enjoy razzing their lazy friends for forgetting to share digital photos.

Minor Inconveniences

The Eye-Fi's flaws are minor enough to dismiss. For one thing, it doesn't work on Wi-Fi networks that use log-in pages like those in Starbucks; instead, it's meant to work on home networks or other "open" networks. Secondly, there's no way to know when Eye-Fi finishes transferring photos unless you check your computer. Finally, your digital camera must stay on for the duration of the wireless transfer, which slightly taxes battery power, and slower networks and/or transferring numerous higher-resolution photos will require a bit more juice. Likewise, Eye-Fi looks for Wi-Fi networks whenever the camera is on, though the company says this only uses a minimal amount of the camera's battery power.

The Eye-Fi Card comes in a small, colorful box that reminded me of a pop-up book: Pull one side and a quick-start guide appears on the right while the left swings out a piece holding the Eye-Fi card reader and SD card. This reader is only needed for the initial setup on each computer, which only took a few minutes per system.

I tried my Eye-Fi first on a Windows XP machine, plugging the card reader and card into a USB port. The software setup walks users through clear, quick steps like testing the computer's firewall to be sure it can work through it and asking which folder should be designated to receive wirelessly transferred images. Here, I also typed in my account information for sharing images on Kodak Gallery; later I added Shutterfly, Snapfish, Picasa and Flickr. Other online destinations included blogs like Vox and TypePad, along with social-networking giant Facebook. The last step instructed me to insert the Eye-Fi SD card into my camera to snap the first test photo of myself, making sure it was working properly.

Managing Your Photos

Transferred photos are all reflected in the Eye-Fi Manager, a Web-based, password-protected site that tells which images were uploaded to photo-sharing sites and the computer. Users can opt to only upload from the Eye-Fi to one or the other or both, but only one photo-sharing site and one Mac or PC can be selected at a time. Account information for any of the 17 sharing sites can be saved within Eye-Fi, making it a cinch to switch where you want to send photos.

Around the office, within my registered Wi-Fi network, I took photos that showed up seconds later on my computer screen. At home, I entered my password-protected network's information one time and watched as captured photos transferred wirelessly from my camera to either my Mac or Windows Vista laptop.

Quick Transfers

On average, it took about 40 seconds to upload each image to a Web site and about 40 seconds more after that for a photo to transfer onto my hard drive. I got home from a friend's cocktail party and set my camera on a table with its power on. Ten minutes later, I turned on my computer to check the transfer and 12 photos from the party were uploaded to my Kodak Gallery account and my iMac's hard drive.

Images upload in JPEG formats using their original, full resolutions. Some sharing sites change the formats for photos, but this varies between sites and isn't related to Eye-Fi.

Eye-Fi won't do absolutely everything for you, so for certain photo-sharing sites, you'll still need to log on to send out emails for sharing albums with friends. But double clicking on any of the images in the Eye-Fi Manager takes you directly to wherever that image lives -- whether on Picasa, Flickr, or your own hard drive.

I swapped the Eye-Fi SD card from one camera, an older Konica-Minolta Dimage X50 that still works well, to a new Kodak EasyShare V1253, which ironically has built-in photo emailing capability that isn't nearly as easy to use as Eye-Fi. The Eye-Fi didn't miss a beat and operated the same way in both cameras.

The Eye-Fi Card is as simple as it sounds and works with most cameras that use SD cards (for a complete list of compatible cameras, see http://support.eye.fi/compatibility/). If someone you know is constantly taking pictures that are never seen again by anyone else and they use a Wi-Fi network, Eye-Fi will serve as a carefree solution that takes the aggravation out of transferring photos to share with others.

Teenage Creeps Versus Academic Creeps

"I Was a Teen Aged Creep," by Beverly C. Lucey, The Irascible Professor, November 26, 2007 --- http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-11-27-07.htm

My father worked two jobs and had simple pleasures. Napping, television, and sitting in the sun. Keeping the hedge nicely trimmed. The Red Sox.

I went home for the weekend in late fall of my freshman year. Of course, I felt it was my job to educate my father. After all, I knew things, now. Important things.

I was taking Psyche 101 and had learned about phallic symbols and castration dreams.

I was taking English 101 and had learned that hanged men ejaculate when they die. That very word was used. Right there in class. By the professor, who was talking about Billy Budd and ...well, never mind the significance there.

I was taking Spanish I01 and flunking so we'll move along....

Biology 101. Now we're talking. We were just in the botany part, before the Hamster Happening, but I'd learned something very cool about plant life.

When I arrived home, with my Black Watch plaid zippered suitcase full of dirty laundry, my father was eating soup. He was happy to see me.

"Sit down. Come'ere. Tell me all about it. Are you having a nice time? Is it good, at college?"

"Yeah."

"Are you getting along with your roommate?"

"Yeah."

"Are you studying hard?"

"Yeah."

"What do you like most?"

At that point I realized the soup he was eating was cream of mushroom. "Biology."

"Really? I would have thought the football games. Biology? Like medical?"

"Sort of. It’s really interesting. For example, we learned all about mushrooms on a field trip."

"A field trip. That’s nice you are getting out."

"Anyway. Mushrooms are really neat. Did you know they are a fungus?"

"Stop it. You don’t know what you are talking about."

"Oh, yeah, I do. They are a fungus. I can prove it if you want me to ...but just think about it. I mean, we eat fungus. And athlete's foot, like you have, is a fungus, and...."

"You shut your mouth."

"I’m not kidding, dad. Your favorite soup there is made out of FUUNNNGGGGUSSSSSS." Likely I was hissing.

"Get out. Leave me alone. Get out of the house. Go visit Arlene, or something."

"Fine."

"Now I can't eat."

Why was I being so mean?

Continued in the article

Jensen Confession
I had a maturity problem later in life --- after I was an assistant professor at Michigan State University and a newly-minted PhD from la tee da Stanford. I was shocked into growing up when I accidently overheard The Accounting Review Editor (1968-1970) Charlie Griffin advising the incoming editor to "stop sending Bob Jensen manuscripts to review, because Jensen never accepts anything." In those days I'd delighted in not only rejecting manuscripts but in doing so with literary flare. I also did so in my public critiques. In one instance at a Journal of Accounting Research conference at the University of Chicago I delighted in calling a paper "Mock Turtle Soup" in reference to it being from Alice in Wonderland (Jensen's "Discussion of Comparative Values and Information Structures," in Empirical Research in Accounting: Selected Studies 1969, Journal of Accounting Research Supplement, University of Chicago, 1970, 168-181.)

Since overhearing Professor Griffin's comment I've attempted to be much more tolerant of scholastic efforts and much more judicious when I conclude something must be rejected. After that moment in 1970, I'm proud to state that I most certainly do not reject everything. And I most certainly was not a fearsome guardhouse lawyer when it came to tenure evaluations in the four universities where I served over 40 years. In fact puffed up jerks in some of the hiring and tenure evaluation meetings seemed very immature to me.

I also take comfort in not having been as immature and rude as some "scholars" of my day. At one of those JAR conferences at the University of Chicago, a professor stood up to critique a manuscript from one of his own colleagues at the University of Chicago. In those days, each presentation was critiqued by two professors following each main presentation. This particular professor with initials S.B. stood up and claimed that the manuscript assigned to him was garbage and not worth discussing. He then sat down. Nearly 40 years later the accounting professor, whose manuscript S.B. refused to discuss, won a major research award in the 2007 Annual Meetings of the American Accounting Association. He's doing some of the most leading edge academic accounting research these days.

By the way, S.B. was also very insulting and rude to another assistant professor at one of Tom Burn's Ohio State University research conferences. That assistant professor went on to become the Dean of the College of Business in an Ivy League university and a member of the Board of the FASB. I never heard of what became of S.B., a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. I don't think he published much research.

I think I changed my persona along the lines discussed in the following video:
Reviewer Persona & Shadow: Insights from Jungian Psychology, by our friend Dan Stone at the University of Kentucky ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0J7AfM4gRw

December 5, 2007 reply from Ed Scribner [escribne@NMSU.EDU]

Bob wrote:

…I never heard of what became of S.B., a psychology professor at the University of Chicago.

----------------

I did. Middle initial O. Went on to become a common household epithet.

Ed

Reviewer Persona & Shadow: Insights from Jungian Psychology, by our friend Dan Stone at the University of Kentucky ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0J7AfM4gRw

The near-monopoly of course management systems since 1994 has been Blackboard (Bb) since Bb was allowed by the Government to buy out its WebCT arch competitor --- http://www.blackboard.com/us/index.Bb

Question
What's next in course management since Blackboard is taking aim at its own foot with monopoly pricing?

Bob Jensen's threads on alternatives to Blackboard are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Blackboard.htm

Updates on Moodle --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm#Moodle

Updates on Sloodle and Second Life (virtual world learning) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
The above link includes accounting education applications of Second Life.

Question
In this edutainment generation of students, does virtual learning have to be fun?

"Virtual Labor Lost:  The failure of a highly anticipated game shows the academic limits of virtual worlds," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, December 5, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19817/?nlid=719

Academics are flocking to use virtual worlds and multiplayer games as ways to research everything from economics to epidemiology, and to turn these environments into educational tools. But one such highly anticipated effort--a multiplayer game about Shakespeare meant to teach people about the world of the bard while serving as a place for social-science experiments--is becoming its own tragedy.

The game, called Arden, the World of Shakespeare, was a project out of Indiana University funded with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant. Its creator, Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at the university, wanted to use the world to test economic theories: by manipulating the rules of the game, he hoped to find insights into the way that money works in the real world. Players can enter the game and explore a town called Ilminster, where they encounter characters from Shakespeare, along with many plots and quotations. They can answer trivia questions to improve their characters and play card games with other players. Coming from Castronova, a pioneer in the field, the game was expected by many to show the power of virtual-world-based research.

But Castronova says that there's a problem with the game: "It's no fun." While focusing on including references to the bard, he says, his team ended up sidelining some of the fundamental features of a game. "You need puzzles and monsters," he says, "or people won't want to play ... Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach."

Castronova has abandoned active development of Arden; he released it last week to the public as is, rather than starting up the experiments he had planned. Part of the problem: it costs a lot to build a new multiplayer game. While his grant was large for the field of humanities, it was a drop in the bucket compared with the roughly $75 million that he says goes into developing something on the scale of the popular game World of Warcraft. "I was talking to people like it was going to be Shakespeare: World of Warcraft, but the money you need for that is so much more," he says. Castronova also says that he was taking on too much by attempting to combine education and research. He believes that his experience should serve as a warning for other academics.

Ian Bogost, a video-game researcher and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, agrees. "It's very, very hard to make games in the best of circumstances, and a university is never the best of circumstances," he says. "I have serious doubts about not just the potential for success but even the appropriateness of pursuing development work of this kind in the context of the university." If researchers are going to build games for the purposes of research, Bogost says, he thinks it's important to look at the process realistically, and with a scientific eye. "In most disciplines, it's okay to fess up to what worked and what didn't. In laboratory work, you do this all the time ... If this is really research and not just production, then of course there are going to be these kinds of surprises."

Updates on Sloodle and Second Life (virtual world learning) --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
The above link includes accounting education applications of Second Life.

The history of course management systems --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm

Education Tutorials

New York Public Library: Webcasts --- http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/index.cfm?go=5

Global Education Digest 2007 --- http://www.uis.unesco.org/ev.php?ID=7002_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC

November 30, 2007 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

RECOMMENDED READING

"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.

Infobits subscriber Karen Ellis, founder of the Educational CyberPlayGround (http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/), recommends the

following:

STUDIO THINKING: THE REAL BENEFITS OF VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION By Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veneema, and Kimberly M. Sheridan New York: Teachers College Press, 2007

$24.95

ISBN 978-0-8077-4818-3

"The authors set out to tell us why arts education is important and to give art teachers a research based language they can use to describe what they teach, and what is learned. They reached their conclusions after studying a number of well-taught studio classes in two schools.

Over the course of a year, they observed what they call a 'hidden curriculum' that defines what art education is and what it does. Studio Thinking presents their findings in a cohesive model along with lesson examples and commentary. The authors say they want to 'change the conversation about the arts in this country' and that could happen if they can resurrect, or reinvigorate, some of their earlier work. Studio Thinking presents what the authors say is the right 'reason' for arts education as opposed to some other rationales, which they say, are just plain wrong."

-- Review by John Broomall, Executive director of the Pennsylvania

Alliance for Arts Education

http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Arts/StudioThinkingArtsAdvocacy.html

 

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

Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Scientific Commons --- http://www.scientificcommons.org/

From the University of Minnesota
Plant Information Online --- https://plantinfo.umn.edu/arboretum/default.asp

Physics Question of the Week ---  http://www.physics.umd.edu/lecdem/outreach/QOTW/active/questions.htm

An action doesn’t always result in a reaction (countering Newton's Third Law) ---
"Proving an aspect of the AB effect: when Newton's Third Law doesn't work," by Miranda Marquit, PhysOrg, December 4, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115985359.html

PhysOrg Science Newsletter --- http://physorg.com/

Get Body Smart: Respiratory System Interactive Tutorials & Quizzes --- http://www.getbodysmart.com/ap/respiratorysystem/menu/menu.html

Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science

Social Science and Economics Tutorials

Tony Tinker forwarded this Video Link
Credit squeeze explained --- http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c2c12708-6d10-11dc-ab19-0000779fd2ac.html
Bob Jensen's mortgage advice --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#MortgageAdvice

Subprime Mortgages: A Primer
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are demanding answers from regulators and lenders about subprime mortgages. Many worry that rising mortgage defaults and lender failures could hurt America's overall banking system. Already, the subprime crisis has been blamed for steep declines in the stock market. But just what is a subprime loan — and why should you care? Here, a primer:
"Subprime Mortgages: A Primer," NPR, March 23, 2007 --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9085408
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-prime_mortgage

The American Political Science Association --- http://www.apsanet.org/

Seen and Heard: Reclaiming the Public Realm with Children and Young People --- http://www.demos.co.uk/files/070928_DEMOS_S&H_Pamphlet.pdf

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social

Math Tutorials

Algebra & Trigonometry --- http://wps.prenhall.com/esm_blitzer_algtrig_2/

Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

History Tutorials

History of the United States --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Library 

Presidential Library --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Library

Jimmy Carter Library and Museum --- http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/

Ronald Regan Library and Museum --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Regan#Presidential_Library_and_Museum

George H.W. Bush Library and Museum --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H.W._Bush#Presidential_Library

William F. Clinton Library and Museum --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Clinton_Presidential_Center_and_Park

Other presidential libraries and museums (links are included in the sites below):

George Washington · John Adams · Thomas Jefferson · James Madison · James Monroe · John Quincy Adams · Andrew Jackson · Martin Van Buren · William Henry Harrison · John Tyler · James K. Polk · Zachary Taylor · Millard Fillmore · Franklin Pierce · James Buchanan · Abraham Lincoln · Andrew Johnson · Ulysses S. Grant · Rutherford B. Hayes · James A. Garfield · Chester A. Arthur · Grover Cleveland · Benjamin Harrison · Grover Cleveland · William McKinley · Theodore Roosevelt · William Howard Taft · Woodrow Wilson · Warren G. Harding · Calvin Coolidge · Herbert Hoover · Franklin D. Roosevelt · Harry S. Truman · Dwight D. Eisenhower · John F. Kennedy · Lyndon B. Johnson · Richard Nixon · Gerald Ford · Jimmy Carter · Ronald Reagan · George H. W. Bush · Bill Clinton · George W. Bush

Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm  

Language Tutorials

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages

Writing Tutorials

New York Public Library: Webcasts --- http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/index.cfm?go=5

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

"Government Drops Pursuit of Online Used-Book Buyers," by Ryan J. Foley, The Washington Post, November 28, 2007; Page D03 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/27/AR2007112702199.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of some people who bought used books through Amazon.com, newly unsealed court records show. The withdrawal came after a judge ruled that the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

The subpoena's "chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America," U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker wrote in a June ruling.

"Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon's customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases," the judge wrote in a ruling he unsealed last week.

Amazon, based in Seattle, said in court documents that it hopes Crocker's decision will make it more difficult for prosecutors to obtain records involving book purchases. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Vaudreuil said yesterday that he doubted that the ruling would hamper legitimate investigations.

Crocker, who unsealed documents against prosecutors' wishes, said he believed prosecutors were seeking the information for a legitimate purpose. But he said First Amendment concerns were justified and outweighed the subpoena's law enforcement purpose.

"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Crocker wrote. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else."

Continued in article

List of Top Academic Employers Evolves
Through its surveys and reports, the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) has stressed the importance of a wide variety of policies — and not just those about pay and benefits — in attracting and keeping young faculty talent. The project’s new list of “exemplary” higher education employers offers further evidence of that theme. List of Top Academic Employers Evolves Through its surveys and reports, the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education has stressed the importance of a wide variety of policies — and not just those about pay and benefits — in attracting and keeping young faculty talent. The project’s new list of “exemplary” higher education employers offers further evidence of that theme. Generally, private colleges dominate the list in categories related to compensation or other categories where finances would be a major factor. But on qualities related to the clarity of procedures (a category many junior faculty members take very seriously), publics tend to do much better. The Harvard University-based collaborative — known by its acronym, COACHE — has become an influential player in discussions of how to make colleges more “family friendly” and how institutions should prepare for a generation of professors who may not accept the traditional hierarchical model of many academic departments.
Scott Jaschik, "List of Top Academic Employers Evolves," Inside Higher Ed, December 5, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/05/coache

From the Scout Report on November 30, 2007

Safari 3.0.4 --- http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ 

This latest version of Safari contains a number of helpful additions that will come in handy. Along with such popular features as tabbed browsing and the integrated find feature, this version also comes with advanced cookie management tools and a host of new keyboard shortcuts. This version is compatible with computers running Mac OS X 10.4.9.

---

Jing --- http://www.jingproject.com/ 

Trying to grab screenshots for a project can be trying with some applications, but Jing makes the process quite seamless and stress-free. Jing allows users to grab screenshots and screencasts via a yellow interface device that sits on the screen at all times. This particular version of Jing is compatible with computers running Windows 98 and newer.

---

Members of the film industry, critics, and others ask: "What is animation?"

'Beowulf' vs. cartoons: Animated debate rages http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/ae/articles/1125animation1125.html

Nose on the Prize, but Which Oscar to Sniff? [Free registration may be required] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/movies/awardsseason/28rata.html

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

http://www.animationarchive.org/index.html

Animation History

http://animationhistory.blogspot.com/

Origins of American Animation, 1900-1921 [Real Player, Quick Time] http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/oahtml/oahome.html

Animation World Network

http://www.awn.com/

 

From The Washington Post on November 30, 2007

One exabyte equals how much video time?

A. 500 days
B. 5,000 hours
C. 50,000 years
D. 500,000 weeks

Jensen Comment
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exabyte
 

From The Washington Post on December 4, 2007

What is the name of the file that tells search engines to ignore parts of a Web site?

A. sitemap.index
B. search.xml
C. spider.doc
D. robots.txt

From The Washington Post on December 5, 2007

What was the top Yahoo search term for news stories in 2007?

A. Iran
B. Saddam Hussein
C. Virginia Tech
D. President Bush
 

Updates from WebMD --- http://www.webmd.com/

November 28, 2007

• Radiation Scans in Pregnancy Up
• Low Testosterone, Early Death?
• Panel: Ease Tamiflu Warning
• 11 Factors ID Hip Fracture Risk
• Black Women's Breast Cancer Risk

Trends

• Sleep Better When You’re Sick
• Got Diabetes? Get a Meal Plan
• Guy-Proof Your Diet
• Colds and Pregnancy: Taking Meds
• Is Your Ticker in Trouble?

December 2, 2007

• Group Wants to Cut Salt in Foods
• Curbing Respiratory Viruses
• Skin Aging Reversed in Lab Test
• Hip Replacement Benefits Last
• Awake During Surgery: How Rare?

December 3, 2007 

• Can CT Scans Raise Cancer Risk?
• Group Wants to Cut Salt in Foods
• Curbing Respiratory Viruses
• Skin Aging Reversed in Lab Test
• Awake During Surgery: How Rare?

December 4, 2007 

• Peanut Allergies Striking Sooner
• Fever Improves Autism Symptoms
• Divorce Not Earth-Friendly?
• Many Docs Bend Ethics Beliefs
• Pretty Is as Pretty Does

December 5, 2007

• Online Vaccine Videos Questioned
• Unsafe Sex Common for HIV+ Men
• Fit Beats Fat for a Longer Life
• Bed-Wetting Drug Warning
• Why High School Seniors Drink

 

 

 

Liquor's dandy,
But candy's quicker!

Got sugar? Glucose affects our ability to resist temptation
New research from a lab at Florida State University reveals that self-control takes fuel — literally. When we exercise it, resisting temptations to misbehave, our fuel tank is depleted, making subsequent efforts at self-control more difficult. Florida State psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues Kathleen D. Vohs, University of Minnesota, and Dianne M. Tice, Florida State, showed this with an experiment using the Stroop task, a famous way of testing strength of self-control. Participants in this task are shown color words that are printed in different-colored ink (like the word red printed in blue font), and are told to name the color of the ink, not the word. Baumeister found that when participants perform multiple self-control tasks like the Stroop test in a row, they do worse over time. Thus, the ability to control ourselves wanes as it is exercised. Moreover, Baumeister and colleagues found that the fuel that powers this ability turns out to be one of the same things that fuels our muscles: sugar, in the form of glucose.
PhysOrg, December 3, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115911234.html

Is your heart aging faster than you are?
Despite the increasing evidence that managing high cholesterol reduces cardiovascular events, many people do not achieve recommended lipid levels. This is due, in part, to patients’ lack of understanding about their risk factors and the potential benefits of lifestyle modifications and therapy.
PhysOrg, November 26, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115318051.html

The Longevity Pill?
Drugs much more powerful than the resveratrol found in red wine will be tested to treat diabetes. A novel group of drugs that target a gene linked to longevity could provide a way to turn back the clock on the diseases of aging. The compounds are 1,000 times more potent than resveratrol, the molecule thought to underlie the health benefits of red wine, and have shown promise in treating rodent models of obesity and diabetes. Human clinical trials to test the compounds in diabetes are slated to begin early next year, according to Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, MA, which developed the drugs. "As far as I'm aware, this is the first anti-aging molecule going into [testing in] man," says David Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, in Boston, and cofounder of Sirtris. (See "The Enthusiast.") "From that standpoint, this is a major milestone in medicine."
Emily Singer, MIT's Technology Review, November 28, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/19776/?nlid=695

Scientists: Teen Brain Still Maturing
The teenage brain, Laurence Steinberg says, is like a car with a good accelerator but a weak brake. With powerful impulses under poor control, the likely result is a crash. And, perhaps, a crime. Steinberg, a Temple University psychology professor, helped draft an American Psychological Association brief for a 2005 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for crimes committed before age 18. That ruling relies on the most recent research on the adolescent brain, which indicates the juvenile brain is still maturing in the teen years and reasoning and judgment are developing well into the early to mid 20s. It is often cited as state lawmakers consider scaling back punitive juvenile justice laws passed during the 1990s. "As any parent knows," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the 5-4 majority, youths are more likely to show "a lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility" than adults. "These qualities often result in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions." He also noted that "juveniles are more vulnerable or susceptible to negative influences and outside pressures, including peer pressure," causing them to have less control over their environment.
Malcolm Ritter, PhysOrg, December 3, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115880977.html

Mental illness and drug addiction may co-occur due to disturbance in part of the brain
Why do mental illness and drug addiction so often go together? New research reveals that this type of dual diagnosis may stem from a common cause: developmental changes in the amygdala, a walnut-shaped part of the brain linked to fear, anxiety and other emotions. A full report on why these “comorbid” disorders may develop appears in the December Behavioral Neuroscience, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
PhysOrg, December 3, 20074 --- http://physorg.com/news115880592.html

Some common treatments for sinus infections may not be effective
A comparison of common treatments for acute sinusitis that included an antibiotic and a topical steroid found neither more effective than placebo, according to a study in the December 5 issue of JAMA. Acute sinusitis (sinus infection) is a common clinical problem with symptoms similar to other illnesses, and is often diagnosed and treated without clinical confirmation. Despite the clinical uncertainty as to a bacterial cause, antibiotic prescribing rates remain as high as 92 percent in the United Kingdom and 85 percent to 98 percent in the United States, according to background information in the article. “Because there are no satisfactory studies of microbiological etiology from typical primary care patient practices, wide-scale overtreatment is likely occurring,” the authors write. Concerns about wide-spread antibacterial use include increasing antibiotic resistance in the community. Anti-inflammatory drugs such as topical steroids are also used as a treatment and may be beneficial, but there has been limited research.
PhysOrg, December 4, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news116008420.html

Doctors and patients poorly informed about herpes
Family doctors and patients with herpes are poorly informed about the viral infection, indicate the results of an online survey, published ahead of print in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections . . . The results showed that doctors overestimated the ongoing emotional impact of herpes infection. Patient distress was linked to the frequency of recurrent bouts of infection and a recent diagnosis. Doctors were also much less likely to recognise that patients worry more about passing on the infection to someone else than about the outbreaks themselves. Doctors believed that three out of four of their patients took antiviral treatment for their infection, but in reality fewer than one in three (29%) patients said they were doing this. The doctors also said that they had discussed the use of treatment to suppress infection with over half (59%) of their patients. But only one in four patients remembered having had such a discussion with their doctor. More worryingly, both doctors and patients underestimated the risks of passing on the infection during periods when there are no obvious outward symptoms, but when the skin sheds infectious viral particles (viral shedding). Doctors estimated that 45% of infections are passed on when there are no symptoms, while patients thought this happened in 51% of cases. The actual figure is 70%, say the authors. Patients were also ignorant about how the virus is passed on. Although virtually all of them recognised that herpes is contracted through sex, only two thirds said that this was the sole source. Almost one in five thought that herpes could be caught from toilet seats or blood transfusions. And almost one in 10 thought shaking hands could pass it on.
PhysOrg, November 26, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115309290.html

Drinking away anxiety -- a new program finds safer ways for college students to cope
Researchers from the University of Cincinnati are reporting on a pilot program aimed at curbing alcohol abuse among college students. Early promising results from this intervention program were presented Nov. 18 at the annual conference of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies in Philadelphia . . . The intervention program consisted of three sessions (one session per week, running about an hour-and-a-half) with the first session exploring the participant’s history of social anxiety and alcohol use and personal feedback on how the two could be interlinked. The second session examined social anxiety, drinking-related problems and family risk factors for both problems. The third session involved role-playing in a social situation with a research assistant, which provided the student with tools to effectively cope with anxiety while managing alcohol consumption. Follow-up meetings were conducted one month and four months after the series of three sessions.
PhysOrg, November 26, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115307721.html

Hazards of CT scans overstated
Concerns over possible radiation effects of CT scans detailed in a report yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine should not scare people away from getting medically needed CT scans, as the scans play a critical role in saving the lives of thousands of people every day, according to an official with the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).
PhysOrg, December 1, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news115742981.html

But the WebMD account is a little more scary --- http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20071128/radiation-related-cancers--rise

I put this tidbit in the medical section of Tidbits because it is so sick!
This is almost as bad as the Texas mother of a would-be cheerleader who tried to kill off the competition --- http://www.texnews.com/texas97/mom030197.html

"A Hoax Turned Fatal Draws Anger but No Charges," by Christopher Maag, The New York Times, November 28, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/us/28hoax.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. He was 16, owned a pet snake, and she thought he was the cutest boyfriend she ever had.

Josh contacted Megan through her page on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site, said Megan’s mother, Tina Meier. They flirted for weeks, but only online — Josh said his family had no phone. On Oct. 15, 2006, Josh suddenly turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded insults for an hour.

The next day, in his final message, said Megan’s father, Ron Meier, Josh wrote, “The world would be a better place without you.”

Sobbing, Megan ran into her bedroom closet. Her mother found her there, hanging from a belt. She was 13.

Six weeks after Megan’s death, her parents learned that Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, then 47, who lived four houses down the street in this rapidly growing community 35 miles northwest of St. Louis.

That an adult would plot such a cruel hoax against a 13-year-old girl has drawn outraged phone calls, e-mail messages and blog posts from around the world. Many people expressed anger because St. Charles County officials did not charge Ms. Drew with a crime.

But a St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Lt. Craig McGuire, said that what Ms. Drew did “might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

In response to the events, the local Board of Aldermen on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure making Internet harassment a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.

“Give me a break; that’s nothing,” Mayor Pam Fogarty said of the penalties. “But it’s the most we could do. People are saying to me, ‘Let’s go burn down their house.’”

St. Charles County’s prosecuting attorney, Jack Banas, said he was reviewing the case to determine whether anyone could be charged with a crime. State Representative Doug Funderburk, whose district includes Dardenne Prairie, said he was looking into the feasibility of introducing legislation to tighten restrictions against online harassment and fraud.

In seventh grade, Megan Meier had tried desperately to join the popular crowd at Fort Zumwalt West Middle School, only to be teased about her weight, her mother said. At the beginning of eighth grade last year, she transferred to Immaculate Conception, a nearby Catholic school. Within three months, Ms. Meier said, her daughter had a new group of friends, lost 20 pounds and joined the volleyball team.

At one time, Lori Drew’s daughter and Megan had been “joined at the hip,” said Megan’s great-aunt Vicki Dunn. But the two drifted apart, and when Megan changed schools she told the other girl that she no longer wanted to be friends, Ms. Meier said.

In a report filed with the Sheriff’s Department, Lori Drew said she created the MySpace profile of “Josh Evans” to win Megan’s trust and learn how Megan felt about her daughter. Reached at home, Lori’s husband, Curt Drew, said only that the family had no comment.

Because Ms. Drew had taken Megan on family vacations, she knew the girl had been prescribed antidepression medication, Ms. Meier said. She also knew that Megan had a MySpace page.

Ms. Drew had told a girl across the street about the hoax, said the girl’s mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter, a minor.

“Lori laughed about it,” the mother said, adding that Ms. Drew and Ms. Drew’s daughter “said they were going to mess with Megan.”

After a month of innocent flirtation between Megan and Josh, Ms. Meier said, Megan suddenly received a message from him saying, “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.”

They argued online. The next day other youngsters who had linked to Josh’s MySpace profile joined the increasingly bitter exchange and began sending profanity-laden messages to Megan, who retreated to her bedroom. No more than 15 minutes had passed, Ms. Meier recalled, when she suddenly felt something was terribly wrong. She rushed to the bedroom and found her daughter’s body hanging in the closet.

As paramedics worked to revive Megan, the neighbor who insisted on anonymity said, Lori Drew called the neighbor’s daughter and told her to “keep her mouth shut” about the MySpace page.

Six weeks later, at a meeting with the Meiers, mediated by grief counselors, the neighbor told them that “Josh” was a hoax. The Drews were not present.

“I just sat there in shock,” Mr. Meier said.

Shortly before Megan’s death, the Meiers had agreed to store a foosball table the Drews had bought as a Christmas surprise for their children. When the Meiers learned about the MySpace hoax, they attacked the table with a sledgehammer and an ax, Ms. Meier said, and threw the pieces onto the Drews’ driveway.

“I felt like such a fool,” Mr. Meier said. “I’m supposed to protect my family, and here I allowed these people to inject themselves into our lives.”

The police learned about the hoax when Ms. Drew filed a complaint about the damage to the foosball table. In the report, she stated that she felt the hoax “contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel ‘as guilty’ because at the funeral she found out Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”

Continued in article

Get Body Smart: Respiratory System Interactive Tutorials & Quizzes --- http://www.getbodysmart.com/ap/respiratorysystem/menu/menu.html

Read All About It!
These books, taken together, present a peerless portrait of journalism's high aims and low comedy.

BY TOM BROKAW
The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, December 1, 2007

1. "The Boys on the Bus" by Timothy Crouse (Random House, 1973).

The five books I've chosen to write about reflect my own attitudes about the craft I've practiced for 45 years now. They're a mix of the triumphs of journalism, the absurdities, the vanities and the importance of a free press in any society. For its revelations in the absurdities and vanities category, "The Boys on the Bus" has yet to be equaled. Timothy Crouse's breakthrough book about the press pack covering the 1972 presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon and George McGovern was the journalistic equivalent of Jim Bouton's locker-room view of major league baseball in "Ball Four," published two years earlier. Crouse punctured reporters' big egos and stripped away the self-righteous cover of objectivity. He also skewered the "womblike conditions" of pack journalism--operating, in this case, from the blinkered perspective of life on campaign planes and buses, in airport press conferences and at restaurants in the company of spin doctors.

2. "All the President's Men" by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Simon & Schuster, 1974).

Recently I attended a Washington dinner honoring, among others, a brave young journalist from Burma who told the audience that her determination to become a reporter began when she read about Watergate. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, backed by Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, were of course the reporters who drove the story of the Watergate burglary engineered by the Nixon White House in 1972. Even though we know how it turns out, "All the President's Men" is a suspenseful crime story in the tradition of Dashiel Hammett or Elmore Leonard. More important, it is a timeless textbook on the value of sheer doggedness to investigative reporting.

3. "Scoop" by Evelyn Waugh (Little, Brown, 1938).

"Scoop" is Evelyn Waugh's hilarious take on a mythical British press lord; his tabloid, the Daily Beast; and the fortunes of a nature writer, William Boot, who is mistakenly sent to East Africa as a war correspondent in the 1930s. It's all here--the pomposity and boorishness of publishers, the devious ways of preening, world-weary reporters, the wild improbability of many dispatches from the front. Whenever I reread "Scoop," I find myself cringing, laughing out loud and cheering on the hapless Boot. I try to keep him in mind whenever I step off a plane in, say, Somalia, Iraq or Afghanistan.

4. "Murrow" by A.M. Sperber (Freundlich, 1986).

Ann Sperber's voluminous biography of Edward R. Murrow, the George Washington of broadcast journalism, is a richly detailed, if sometimes dry, study of how Murrow became a demigod not only in journalism but also in America's wider culture. His Quaker, abolitionist ancestors in North Carolina, his growing-up years in Washington state, his side-door entry to journalism (he was first an interview-wrangling "director of talks" for CBS), his heroic reporting from London during the Blitz, and his ability through language and demeanor to come into your living room as a wise and caring friend: that was the full-dress Murrow whom I worshipped as a young man. Later, I had reservations about his theatrical style--the cigarette as prop, the ascot, the "Person to Person" celebrity-interview infotainment show he hosted. But Sperber's book is a chronicle of a great man and how he came to be a national treasure.

5. "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman (Viking, 1985).

Neil Postman's polemic is at once provocative, exaggerated, insightful, myopic and instructive. Instructive because Postman does raise appropriate warning flags about relying wholly on television as a medium for serious inquiry about ideas. Myopic because he fails to acknowledge television's role as a catalyst for learning. Favorable attention for a book on television spurs many more sales than a newspaper's positive review. He is right, however, when he observes that TV's entertainment values can smother rational discourse if the two are not kept in balance. As for his claim that the medium's "form excludes content," it is an exaggerated judgment. Take the subject of global climate change. Scientific arguments are of course essential to making the case, but it would be hard to deny how much the images of shrinking ice caps, rising sea levels and parched landscapes reinforce the arguments. Nonetheless, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," a cautionary tale, should be required reading for all broadcast journalists--and perhaps for their viewers as well.

Mr. Brokaw is the former anchor and managing editor of "NBC Nightly News." His most recent book is "Boom! Voices of the Sixties" (Random House, 2007).

 

Bumper Stickers for the Elderly --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/Bumperstickers02.htm

Teachers' Notes in Report Cards

Forwarded by Gene and Joan

These are supposedly actual comments made on students' report cards by teachers   In the New York City public school system. All teachers were purportedly reprimanded. Who knows? But they're funny anyway. They might also have been comments on RateMyProfessor --- http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/index.jsp    

01 Since my last report, your child has reached rock bottom and has started to dig.     

02. I would not allow this student to breed.     

03. Your child has delusions of adequacy.     

04. Your son is depriving a village some where of an 'idiot'.      

05. Your son sets low personal standards, and then consistently fails to achieve them.     

06. The student has a "full six-pack" but lacks the plastic thing to hold it all together.     

07. This child has been working with glue too much.     

08. When your daughter's IQ reaches 50, she should sell.     

09. The gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming.   

10. If this student were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered  --- Twice a week.     

11. It's impossible to believe the sperm that created this child, beat out 1,000,000 others .  

12. The wheel is turning, but the hamster is definitely dead.  

Forwarded by Gene and Joan

DIVORCE VS. MURDER

A nice, calm and respectable lady went into the pharmacy, walked up to the pharmacist, looked straight into his eyes, and said, "I would like to buy some cyanide."

The pharmacist asked, "Why in the world do you need cyanide?"

The lady replied, "I need it to poison my husband."

The pharmacist's eyes got big and he exclaimed, "Lord have mercy! I can't give you cyanide to kill your husband. That's against the law! I'll lose my license! They'll throw both of us in jail! All kinds of bad things will happen. Absolutely not! You CANNOT have any cyanide!"

The lady reached into her purse and pulled out a picture of her husband in bed with the pharmacist's wife.

The pharmacist looked at the picture and replied, "Well now, that's different. You didn't tell me you had a prescription."

Tidbits Archives --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.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/

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.

Three Finance Blogs

Jim Mahar's FinanceProfessor Blog --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
FinancialRounds Blog --- http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Karen Alpert's FinancialMusings (Australia) --- http://financemusings.blogspot.com/

Some Accounting Blogs

Paul Pacter's IAS Plus (International Accounting) --- http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
International Association of Accountants News --- http://www.aia.org.uk/
AccountingEducation.com and Double Entries --- http://www.accountingeducation.com/
Gerald Trite's eBusiness and XBRL Blogs --- http://www.zorba.ca/
AccountingWeb --- http://www.accountingweb.com/   
SmartPros --- http://www.smartpros.com/

Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Tidbits --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates --- http://www.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://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Shared Open Courseware (OCW) from Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and Other Sharing Universities --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Free Textbooks and Cases --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks

Free Mathematics and Statistics Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

Free Science and Medicine Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science

Free Social Science and Philosophy Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social

Free Education Discipline Tutorials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

Teaching Materials (especially video) from PBS

Teacher Source:  Arts and Literature --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit.htm

Teacher Source:  Health & Fitness --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/health.htm

Teacher Source: Math --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/math.htm

Teacher Source:  Science --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/sci_tech.htm

Teacher Source:  PreK2 --- http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/prek2.htm

Teacher Source:  Library Media ---  http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/library.htm

Free Education and Research Videos from Harvard University --- http://athome.harvard.edu/archive/archive.asp

VYOM eBooks Directory --- http://www.vyomebooks.com/

From Princeton Online
The Incredible Art Department --- http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/

Online Mathematics Textbooks --- http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html 

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives --- http://enlvm.usu.edu/ma/nav/doc/intro.jsp

Accountancy Discussion ListServs:

For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to   http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

AECM (Educators)  http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/  AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc Roles of a ListServ --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/  CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo (Practitioners)  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything  from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.

AccountantsWorld  http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1  This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.

Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com  This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM]

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