Tidbits on August 24, 2005
Bob Jensen at Trinity University 

Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 
Archives of Tidbits: Tidbits Directory --- 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/.

Bob Jensen's home page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/

Security threats and hoaxes --- http://www.trinity.edu/its/virus/

Congratulations to Trinity University for remaining (for the 14th straight year) the Number 1 "Top Masters College of the Western Region" --- http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/univmas/umwest/tier1/t1univmas_w_brief.php

Note:  If I don't answer email promptly, it's because I'm lecturing up in Columbus, Ohio and will not have time to tend to email for a few days.

Music: Classic Cat free downloads of classical music files --- http://www.classiccat.net/
           
            Free Recordings of Classical Piano Masterpieces (Click on "Recordings")--- http://www.pianosociety.com/

  Drum Machine (with great animation) --- http://opus.roguescholars.com/drummachine.html

What is "classical music?" --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music

Please check on your bank account --- http://www.scottstratten.com/movie.html

Train of Life (Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline) ---  
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/singingman7/TOL.htm

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor

Book of Clichés --- http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/sybev/cliche/
(Phrases to say in times of trouble ...repeat until you believe them)

MindZone - A great mental health site for teens --- http://www.copecaredeal.org/

Scott Stulberg's great photo show from far away places --- http://www.asa100.com/

Fighting alcoholism one half day (more or less) at a time
Now, a new wave of drugs is poised to radically change the way doctors approach the disease (alcoholism). Over the past decade, neurobiologists have been decoding the brain's addiction pathways, paving the way for a crop of targeted medications that act on brain receptors to blunt cravings, ease withdrawal symptoms and dull the euphoric effects of alcohol. In one of the most controversial developments, the new drugs may help alcoholics simply cut back their drinking, rather than give up alcohol completely, which some doctors say may be a more realistic goal for many patients.
Jane Spencer, "Fighting Alcoholism With a Pill:  Crop of Targeted Drugs Marks Major Shift In Treatment; NIH Issues Updated Guidelines," The Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2005; Page D1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112476081950920245,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal

Stress and the Female Faculty Member
Women in the professoriate are more stressed out than men. That’s probably not shocking to female professors (or many of their male colleagues). But a new study — based on both surveys and in-depth interviews and focus groups — attempts to provide new insights into that stress. And the study says that women are justified in their stress — answering strongly in the negative the question the study poses: “Are women faculty just worrywarts?  The education professors who conducted the study — Jennifer L. Hart of the University of Missouri at Columbia and Christine M. Cress of Portland State University — write that answering that question is important because many in academe may believe otherwise. The study — which has been accepted for publication in the journal Stress, Trauma, and Crisis — is based at a university whose identity was kept confidential. The researchers started by looking at faculty stress levels by going to the university’s data, as reported to a University of California at Los Angeles study on faculty attitudes.
Scott Jaschik, "Stress and the Female Faculty Member," Inside Higher Ed, August 23, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/23/stress

Sharing academic of the week --- "A Sociological Tour Through Cyberspace" by Michael Kearl at Trinity University 

I have thanked Mike for sharing on a number of occasions in issues of New Bookmarks.  Mike has one of the leading Web sites in sociology.  He constantly updates and adds to this site at http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/
His site begins as follows:

Over a quarter century ago columnist Lewis Lapham made the following observation:

There no longer exists a theater of ideas in which artists or philosophers can perform the acts of the intellectual or moral imagination. In nineteenth-century England Charles Darwin could expect On The Origin of Species to be read by Charles Dickens as well as by Disraeli and the vicar in the shires who collected flies and water beetles. Dickens and Disraeli and the vicar could assume that Mr. Darwin might chance to read their own observations. But in the United States in 1979 what novelist can expect his work to be read by a biochemist, a Presidential candidate, or a director of corporations; what physicist can expect his work to be noticed, much less understood, in the New York literary salons? ("A Juggernaut of Words," Harper's Magazine, June 1979: pp. 12-13).

Conditions have hardly improved in 2005. Now in the supposed "Information Age" six out of ten American households do not purchase a single book and one-half of American adults do not read one. Forty years ago in  1965 when the Gallup Organization asked young people if they read a daily newspaper, 67 percent said yes; thirty-five years later, roughly 20 percent answer affirmatively. And yet "they" say we are saturated with informational overload!

I am most interested in the potential of this cyberspace medium to inform and to generate discourse, to enhance information literacy, and to truly be a "theater of ideas." This site features commentary, data analyses (hey, we've become a "factoid" culture), occasional essays, as well as the requisite links, put together for courses taught by myself and my colleagues.  Additions and updates are made daily.  If you do give feedback on one of the message pads scattered across these pages and wish a reply, please include your e-mail address.

And now for some sites to stimulate the sociological imagination  

Sociological theory

Data resources and some useful web tools

Methods and statistics

Guide to writing a research paper

Exercising the imagination: Subject-based Inquiries

Op-Ed

Search engine for site--improved for the new millennium

Jensen Comment:
The philosophy of science is a dying discipline in part because it added philosophical terminology and discourse that did not have enough value added to scientists themselves as they got on with the work at hand, particularly social scientists.

Social scientists have moved on from debates over the scientific paradigm. I highly recommend examining how sociologists now proceed without getting all hung up on positivist or anti-positivist dogma --- http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/methods.html#ms 

I particularly like the following quotation from the above document:

Methodology entails the procedures by which social research, whether  quantitative and qualitative, are conducted and ultimately evaluated--in other words, how one's hypotheses are tested. Getting more specific, researchers' methodologies guide them in defining, collecting, organizing, and interpreting their data. Often the major breakthroughs in our understanding of social processes occur because of the novelty of the data used, the techniques by which it is gathered, or by the model or question directing its acquisition and/or interpretation.  And let's hear it for the findings that don't support the hypotheses at the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis and in the Index of Null Effects and Replication Failures.

Defining one's data: Precisely how does one go about and measure such theoretical concepts as altruistic behavior, esprit de corps, or anomie?  Even such apparent "no brainers" as religiosity, happiness, or social class reveal how methodological adequacy and validity are a function of the clarity of one's theory and its part.  Further, theory tends to be built into our measurement tools.  When, for instance, one measures temperature with a thermometer it is not the temperature per se that one sees but rather a phenomenon (mercury rising within a column) theoretically related to it.

For strategies for data collection see Bill Trochim's Research Methods Tutorials, including material on:

• the classical experiment design 
• sampling
• Polling 101 from the Roper Center
• participant observation
• content analyses of texts, video, television, and even postage stamps
• survey research
• unobtrusive measurements

Thinking about using the web for conducting a survey?  Available online is Matthias Schonlau, Ronald D. Fricker, Jr., and Marc N. Elliott's Conducting Research Surveys via E-mail and the Web.

Bob Jensen's threads on research in accounting are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession

The following link seems particularly relevant to the topic of accounting/economic research and publication:
Five Fundamental Errors in Economics Research --- http://www.dieoff.org/page241.htm

Mike also suggested some interesting new Web sites in an August 18 message:

Hi Bob—

As promised, you have been sent an invitation to join the Google mail gang.  Other goodies to download:

1. Picasa (photo software purchased by Google—did not know what to do with it so hence it’s free):  http://picasa.google.com/index.html
    
2. Stumbleupon—it’s right up there with Google as a personal favorite: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ .  Once you’ve downloaded and installed, it appears as another toolbar (available for Firefox people too).  Select the Menu option on the right and then Update Topics.  Broad category tabs on top open host of specific options to check off.
    
3. Favorite site of summer is, of course, Google Earth at http://earth.google.com/ .  Be sure to use the rotation option.  When zooming in.  Not knowing your New Hampshire address, I have not yet dropped by.
    
4. For the frequency of first names given to Americans by decade go to http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/ and then select Launch NameVoyager.

 Best,
 Mike

Jensen Comment:  Sociologists examine these databases from some interesting perspectives.  For example, one thing that interested Mike in the NameVoyager is the trend in the use of biblical names.

Dr. Kearl has an interesting document online called "Credit Card Crazy" --- http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/credcard.html

Bob Jensen's threads on the dirty secrets of credit card companies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#FICO

Dr. Kearl also clued me into Gmail from Google which at present you can only get if you are recommended to do so in a scheme that I do not quite understand.  You can read more about it at http://mail.google.com/mail/help/benefits.html

Email is supposed to be a productivity tool. So why spend time filing messages, then later trying to remember where you put them? And why delete important mail just to stay within some arbitrary storage limit?

Gmail makes email easy. With more than 2,000 megabytes of free storage, you never need to throw messages away. And with a powerful built-in Google search engine, you no longer need to set up folders, file your mail, or remember where you stored your messages. Just search for what you want. You'll not only find the message you have in mind, but all the other messages that are part of the same conversation – arranged in chronological order so you can easily put everything in context.

1) The secret is search
Google search is at the heart of Gmail. Fast, efficient, effective. Just type a few keywords into the search box and your message appears. You don't have to remember where you put your mail. That's our job.

2) It's all in how you look at it
With Gmail, you'll see your messages in context. If there was a reply to a message you sent or received, Gmail will automatically display it in chronological order with the original. This conversation view continues to grow as you respond and new replies arrive, making it possible for you to follow the whole back and forth discussion in one place.

I signed up for it and will tell you more about it at a future time.

August 19, 2005 message from David Fordham

Bob, some of us have been using Gmail for a long time. I for one have been on it for a couple of months.

The upside is that I can always find a message as long as I can remember a word or two in the message, header, title, etc.

Two downsides: I haven't yet found a wildcard for the search term, and sometimes a message I'm seeking doesn't have enough unique words to narrow the search down sufficiently.

Under the first drawback, I have to remember that I want "School of Accountancy" and not "School of Accounting", because there is no way to search on "School of Account*" or something similar.

The second drawback is a familiar one to anyone who's used search engines. Trying to find a message from a student whose name I can't remember but who asked a question about possibly meeting with me, can be a pain unless I can remember some specific wording that makes the message unique from the dozens of similar messages I get over the months.

However, in general, I'm very happy with it. I forward all my JMU mail to my gmail account. Gmail has a stupendous spam filter... every day my spam folder gets anywhere from 50 to 200 spam messages, and I can go several days without a spam message showing up in my in-box, and at the same time, I've never, ever, had a real message show up in the spam folder. That kind of percentage rates a gold star, in my book.

There are some minor annoyances to not having folders, but then, the ability to ADD your own labels (tags) to messages can help overcome some of the limitations. Think of "filing a message in multiple folders" when you add multiple labels to a message.

I don't believe the "never have to delete" claim, however. I've been using Gmail about four or five months, and I delete copiously -- especially the spam and old messages I send to trash... and I'm still using about 20% of my 2 gig quota. At this rate, I'll run out of room in about two years -- about the same as my JMU mail quota.

Enjoy Gmail.

David Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University

August 19, 2005 reply from John Schatzel [jschatzel@STONEHILL.EDU]

Gmail is "great." It stores every message you send and receive. Even if you delete a message (according to sources I have read) it remains in their database. Google uses the information to understand who you are and what you are likely to buy. They say that no Google employee will read your mail. That's because their IA mail readers are more efficient at doing it. Since it's a "free" service they have to make their money somehow. So that would be by selling or sharing your profile to interested parties such as vendors or the government (the government can demand access to this information under the Patriot Act). Then they "place a few highly relevant, text ads adjacent to the body of your email. and links to related web pages you might find of interest." Hence, while the benefits are many, the main cost of Gmail appears to be your privacy.

John Schatzel

August 19, 2005 reply from Scott Bonacker [lister@BONACKERS.COM]

Another nice thing about gmail is that you can send invitations to yourself, and open as many email accounts as you want. Use separate email accounts for each newsletter or listserv subscription, and access the messages from anywhere, and forget about capacity limits.

Scott Bonacker
Springfield, Missouri

August 19, 2005 message from Jagdish S. Gangolly [gangolly@INFOTOC.COM]

Bob,

One does not have to use gmail to do such search. You can do it with any mailer that is saved on your hard disk, if you use Google desktop search. In fact I use it even with outlook (which I have been condemned to use by all my Microsoftie colleagues).

Search is extremely easy with any mail system. In fact one of my colleague (also a luddite like me) never files mail in folders -- he has just two folders: inbox and sent. He uses pine mailer in unix. He has been happy using a combination of unix utilities such as grep, sort, awk,... to do all searches. A Luddite overkill in my opinion, but then we all march to different drummers, don't we? Unless we are lemmings :-))

Jagdish

August 21, 2005 message from Helen Mitewa [Helen.Mitewa@UTAS.EDU.AU]

Dear Bob,
I have been using Gmail for a while now. It is really good and I could recommend it to you. ;-)))
Cheers,
Helen

Updated home tests for colon cancer
A simple home-screening test for colon cancer, long derided as ineffective, is making a comeback. However, convincing consumers to use the tests may be tough.  A slew of new fecal occult blood tests, or FOBTs, have hit the market in recent months, incorporating improved technology that does a far better job of finding cancer and potentially cancerous polyps than the older version of the test. An editorial in the influential medical journal Gastroenterology this month calls for increased use of the new FOBTs, which, like the older version, test stool samples for blood or its components, an early sign of colon cancer.
Tara Parker-Pope, "A Low-Tech Way to Find Colon Cancer: Home Screening Tests Get More Reliable," The Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2005; Page D1

Free party school finder:  How does your college rate?
But there is one ranking each year that colleges truly despise — Princeton Review’s list of the top party schools (okay, they probably also dislike the company’s list called “Reefer Madness” ). And this year’s “winner” of the party school designation, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has continued the grand tradition of objecting vehemently to the honor.
Doug Lederman, "The Ranking Colleges Hate the Most," Inside Higher Ed, August 23, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/23/rank

Students party more and read less
A new survey of literary reading in America by the National Endowment for the Arts, ” Reading At Risk “ has once again raised the alarm about the cultural decline of America. This one provides the news that we read much less literature, defined as fiction and poetry, than we did some 20 years ago. Indeed, the decline is substantial (10 percent), accelerating and especially worrisome because the malady of literature non-reading particularly afflicts the younger members of society, that critical 18-24 year old group (which shows a 28 percent decline in this survey).
John V. Lombardi, "Students Read Less. Should We Care?" Inside Higher Ed, August 23, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/08/23/lombardi

Free Credit Reports Are Set to Go Nationwide
Beware of identity thief imposter sites for free credit reports
Identity thieves continue to proliferate, but soon all consumers will have access to at least one free method of surveillance. Beginning next month, a federal law expands nationwide to allow individuals to get free copies of their credit reports, once a year, from each of the three major credit-reporting agencies. As part of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, passed in late 2003 and aimed at combating identity thieves, the rule was rolled out across the U.S. over the past year, and culminates with the addition of the Eastern states, Puerto Rico and all U.S. territories next month. At that point, all consumers will have access to the reports from Experian, Equifax Inc. and TransUnion LLC. The official Web site where you can request the free reports is annualcreditreport.com, or you can call toll free 1-877-322-8228. (Don't contact the three credit companies individually.)
Tara Siegel Bernard, "Free Credit Reports Are Set to Go Nationwide:  But Consumers May See Pitches for Other Services And Imposter Web Sites," The Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2005; Page D2 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112475744986720188,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal

The recommended contact site is https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp

The FTC site is http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/credit/ycr_free_reports.htm

Pay to Get Your FICO Score
Your FICO credit score is crucial to your credit to your good name.  It can be altered without your knowing it due to fraud and errors.  Getting a free credit report may not give you a FICO scores as well.  The main advantage of the from http://www.myfico.com/ is that it will give you your FICO score from each of the three major credit reporting agencies.  Consumer Reports (August, Page 18) notes that credit scores nearly always differ between the three major credit reporting agencies.  You may miss something if you only get one agency’s score.

To monitor your FICO score, Consumer Reports (August 2005, Page 17) recommends that you get the $44.85 package from http://www.myfico.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on FICO scores are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm
In particular go to W:\users\rjensen\FraudReporting.htm#FICO 

The FTC site is at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/02/top102005.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on credit reports and FICO scores are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#CreditReports

Bob Jensen's threads on frauds and fraud reporting are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm

Florida fun:  Collect your government disaster relief before the hurricane hits
Waste and fraud dog the Federal Emergency Management Agency. After Hurricane Frances last summer, FEMA doled out $31 million to more than 10,000 residents in Miami-Dade County, Fla., for home repairs and new furniture, clothes, televisions, microwaves and refrigerators, even though the storm barely brushed the county. Many claims were attributed to phantom tornadoes, and six families alleged damage from ice and snow. Now comes word that FEMA paid $1.3 million for funerals for 319 Floridians who died last summer. But coroners have concluded as many as 236 of these "victims" died from natural causes, suicide or accidents unrelated to the storms. Claimants included the family of a millionaire who died two days before Hurricane Frances, two cancer victims, a man who succumbed to cirrhosis and heart failure five months after Hurricane Charley, 10 people who were not in Florida when they died, and two people who still may be alive. People didn't even have to prove they were next of kin to get paid off.
"Fraud in Florida," Waterbury Republican-American, August 23, 2005 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1468893/posts

Trip Advisor (travel helpers, including reviews) ---
From the Traveler’s Mouth --- www.tripadvisor.com 

Bob Jensen's travel helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#Travel

Tired of Renting? --- http://calculators4mortgages.com
Mortgage and loan calculators are one of the first steps in the mortgage process. First, find out what kind of mortgage works best for you. There are many choices out there! Do you want a fixed rate mortgage, or an adjustable rate mortgage? Then use these mortgage calculators to determine the amount of mortgage you can afford with the Pre Qualify Calculator. Also determine your new monthly mortgage payments. Mortgage calculators can also be used to calculate payments on debt consolidation mortgage loan and see your monthly savings! Use the Refinance Mortgage Calculator for this. Make it simple to work out how

How to find people, places, and databases --- http://www.melissadata.com/Lookups/

Internet Fraud --- http://www.fraud.org/internet/intset.htm

Consumer Ripoffs --- http://www.ripoffreport.com/

HowToComplain.com --- http://www.howtocomplain.com/

Complaints.com --- http://www.complaints.com/

Consumer Reports (not free) --- http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/

DMA Consumer Assistance --- http://www.dmaconsumers.org/

Bob Jensen's helpers for reporting frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm

StumbledUpon Online Books

Famous Farewells --- http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6537/fareidx.htm
Famous Last Words --- http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6537/

Book download frequencies --- http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top

Full 'Text Classics --- http://www.bookspot.com/features/fulltextfeature.htm

Great Books Index --- http://books.mirror.org/gb.titles.html

The University of Virginia's E-Book Library --- http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/subjects/subjects.html

Carnegie Mellon University's Universal Library --- http://www.ulib.org/html/

Page by Page Books --- http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/

A Glossary of Literary Criticism --- http://www.sil.org/~radneyr/humanities//litcrit/gloss.htm

Free audio book downloads --- http://www.freeclassicaudiobooks.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on where to find electronic books and journals are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#ElectronicBooks

Reviews and links to free tax preparation programs ---
Plan to Pay Uncle Sam ---  http://taxes.about.com

Updates on other tax helper sites from Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, August 2005 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2005/news_web.htm

Bob Jensen's tax helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation

Current Population on Earth --- http://www.worldometers.info/

Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) --- http://snipurl.com/9wu3

Sustaining the exponential growth in the human population on the planet earth
Vertical Farm ---  http://www.verticalfarm.com/

Bob Jensen's threads to economic and social indices --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics

Not enough wealth to spread around
The rapid growth in developing countries, combined with declining birth rates in some industrialized nations could affect the ability of the wealthy to aid the poor, said a demographer who prepared the group's report. "The countries of today's developing world are growing almost three times faster than the developed countries," said Carl Haub, a demographer for the Population Reference Bureau, a private research group. "The global population growth today has concentrated in the poorest countries and the poorest areas of those countries.
Henry Dunphy, "Group Ensures Global Population Growth," Yahoo News, August 23, 2005 ---
 http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050823/ap_on_re_us/world_population_1

I think it would look good on the San Antonio Riverwalk, but towing fees would be much higher
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a former San Francisco mayor, helped secure $3 million to tow the Iowa from Rhode Island to the Bay Area in 2001 in hopes of making touristy Fisherman's Wharf its new home. But city supervisors voted 8-3 last month to oppose taking in the ship, citing local opposition to the Iraq war and the military's stance on gays, among other things. "If I was going to commit any kind of money in recognition of war, then it should be toward peace, given what our war is in Iraq right now," Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said.
Brian Skolof, "San Francisco Shuns Retired USS Iowa,"  Breitbart.com, August 20, 2005 --- http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/08/20/D8C3PH0G0.html
Jensen Comment:  With it's various military bases and thousands of military retirees, San Antonio is a military-friendly place.

French countryside hit by a massive invasion of frogs
Destroying the frogs is not easy, however. The Gironde fisheries protection association attacked a pond full of bullfrogs with electricity a few years ago. The frogs fought back. The hunters battled with them for two hours. They killed just one frog before they gave up.  Assaults on the frogs have also been made with nets and by draining ponds, to little effect. Game-keepers and volunteers working for the Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage (National Hunting and Wild-life Agency) have now developed night-fighting techniques. The frogs are easier to locate at night because their eyes reflect torchlight.
John Lichfield, "French countryside hit by a massive invasion of frogs," The Independent, August 20, 2005 --- http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article307312.ece

At last there will be a way to efficiently store digital video
But this is no ordinary recording process. The disc has more than 60 times the storage capacity of a standard DVD, while the drive writes about 10 times faster than a conventional DVD burner. That means the disc can store up to 128 hours of video content--almost twice enough for the full nine seasons of Seinfeld--and records it all in less than three hours.
Holographic Memory
By Gregory T. Huang , "Holographic Memory," MIT's Technology Review, September 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/09/issue/feature_memory.asp?trk=nl

This headline made me chuckle down to my shorts
"Amazon.com Starts Selling Digital 'Shorts'," Newsday.com, August 20, 2005 --- http://www.newsday.com/technology/wire/sns-ap-amazon.com-shorts,0,3907353.story

Teachers Without Borders  --- http://www.teacherswithoutborders.org/

Education Without Borders --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm

From The Washington Post on August 19, 2005

Once a dot-com pipe dream, online education is now maturing into a viable market. How many students in the U.S. are studying online?

A. 7.4 million
B. 5 million
C. 2.6 million
D. 1 million

 

Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C)
The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve the quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines --- http://www.sloan-c.org/

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Ariz. High School Swaps Books for Laptops
Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no textbooks _ but it wasn't because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued iBooks _ laptop computers by Apple Computer Inc. _ to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks.
Arthur H. Rotstein, "Ariz. High School Swaps Books for Laptops," The Washington Post, August 19, 2005 --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/19/AR2005081900273.html?referrer=email

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm

Education Reform in the Parts of the Former Soviet Union
It is fair to say that since the Rose Revolution, our government has had its ups and downs. Yet we are still quite popular. Popularity has never been my goal, but public support has been useful because it helps bolster us as we try to bring about change. For example, Georgians -- like all other post-Soviet citizens -- used to hate their police force. Before our revolution, police in Georgia were trusted by less than 5% of the population. Today, following our reforms, our police enjoy approval ratings of more than 90% -- unheard of in this part of the world. Another poignant example is the state admission exams for higher educational institutions. For many decades, few areas of Georgian society harbored more corruption than the rotten educational system, where bribery had virtually become a way of life. This year, some 40,000 students took new statewide exams that were administered under the watch of TV cameras. For me the greatest surprise and indeed inspiration from this reform was not simply that we had no major complaints, but rather that for the first time cheating has been dramatically reduced. We expect that trend to continue. Students are taking part in the system and earning their way, not trying to game their way into school.
Micheil Saakashvili, "It Takes a Cultural Revolution," The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2005 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112440126169017045,00.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

With 70,595 Wi-Fi hotspot locations in 103 countries
JiWire's global hotspot directory makes it easy to find places to connect wherever you go.
WiFi Hotspot Finder Widget 2.0 --- http://www.jiwire.com/

Einstein Manuscript Surfaces
The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, scholars said Saturday. The handwritten manuscript titled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas" was dated December 1924. Considered one of Einstein's last great breakthroughs, it was published in the proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in January 1925.
"Einstein Manuscript Surfaces," Wired News, August 21, 2005 --- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68599,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_6

A science lab in your kitchen? Get hands-on with DIY science --- http://www.open2.net/
Note upper left corner for the link.)

Slanted Tax Cut Media Coverage
Media coverage of President Bush's tax cuts has been particularly slanted. During the 2003 tax-cut debate, three of every four major TV network news stories were negative. The favorite criticisms were liberal echoes that it would bust the budget and favor the rich. Earlier this year, a news story on National Public Radio announced that "as everyone knows, the primary cause of the budget deficit was the Bush tax cuts." No word yet on whom NPR is crediting with this year's revenue surge of $262 billion. Robert Rubin? Given all of this doom-and-gloom reporting, maybe the surprise is that Americans are nonetheless behaving with their typical optimism, buying goods and services, bidding up the stock market, and creating new businesses. They may repeat to pollsters what they hear on TV, but they are acting on what they see with their own eyes.
"Media Bears," The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2005; Page A12 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112441420216817412,00.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

The French aren't doing so bad as the French think
The French love to complain (about globalization), but the contradictory discourse that we hear today hides the fact that French corporations -- the Renaults, Totals, AXAs, BNP Paribas -- are successfully integrated in the world economy, generate record profits and are well represented in the Fortune Global 500 Index (where France has 39 companies listed, and Germany and Britain only 37 each). In fact, Danone is a fairly typical example of how large French firms have adapted to global competition, carved out quite a bit of the international market and focused on shareholder value -- all while keeping a French identity. But what about the rest of the country? It is often said that the very high French productivity, which makes such results at all possible, is simply a mechanical result of France's low work-participation rate. And what's the use of high-performing companies if the rest of the country can't keep up? The fact is that average French GDP growth per capita over the past 10 years (2%), has been very similar to that in the U.K. (2.3%) and the U.S. (2.1%). More interestingly, as pointed out in a March article by Denis Clerc in "Alternatives Economiques," France has actually enjoyed stronger job growth than the U.K. over that period (14% vs. 11%), and fewer of those jobs were created in the public sector -- 300,000, or 15%, of the new jobs in France are government jobs, versus 860,000, or 45%, in Britain.
Jerome Guillet, "Can-Do France," The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2005 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112441113694617328,00.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

Art History
Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre --- http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/toulouse_lautrec/lagoulue.html

Bob Jensen's threads on art history are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#History

KPMG scandal reveals the shady dealings of some large banks
Jonathan Weil, "How Big Banks Played Key Role In Tax Shelters," The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2005 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112440575755717142,00.html?mod=todays_us_money_and_investing

In February 1998, two managers at UBS AG in London received an anonymous letter warning that the Swiss bank's derivatives unit was "offering an illegal capital-gains tax evasion scheme to U.S. taxpayers." The cost to the Internal Revenue Service: "hundreds of millions of dollars a year," according to the missive.

"I am concerned that once IRS comes to know about this scheme they will levy huge financial/criminal penalties on UBS," said the letter, which named three UBS employees the author believed were involved. "My sole objective is to let you know about this scheme, so that you can take some concrete steps to minimise the financial and reputational damage to UBS."

UBS responded by halting all trades related to two KPMG LLP tax shelters, known as Foreign Leveraged Investment Program and Offshore Portfolio Investment Strategy, or Flip and Opis. Several months later, though, the bank "resumed selling the products, stopping only after KPMG discontinued the sales," according to an April report by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Citing UBS documents, the report said the bank appeared to have reasoned that its participation "did not signify its endorsement of the transactions and did not constitute aiding or abetting tax evasion." The identity of the 1998 letter's author, a self-described UBS "insider," hasn't surfaced publicly. A UBS spokesman declined to comment.

Continued in Article

Bob Jensen's threads on banking scandals are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#InvestmentBanking

Bob Jensen's threads on KPMG scandals are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm

More than you ever wanted to know about gardening
Ohio State University's WebGarden --- http://webgarden.osu.edu/

News editors debate the limits of confidentiality
Confidential sources are overused, but it has become impossible for journalists to cover the government without sources who routinely conduct "briefing and spinning sessions" under the cloak of anonymity, said Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, at a forum here July 17. When--if ever--a news organization's obligation to protect the identity of a confidential source should be trumped was a topic of intense, if collegial, debate between Whitaker and Jim Kelly, managing editor of Time, during a discussion about the beleaguered status of journalism.
Rod Searcy, "News editors debate the limits of confidentiality," Stanford Report, July 27, 2005 ---
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/july27/newsforum-072705.html

Mummy's secrets revealed
Frame by frame, layer by layer, the images of a mummified Egyptian child who died two millennia ago spring to life on a 25-foot screen, revealing every remarkable detail of the skeletal remains, down to the last vertebrae. The three-dimensional images, the result of high-resolution scans done at Stanford, reveal a girl of 4 to 5 years old with short, resin-coated black curls, a receding chin and an angular face reminiscent of her famous counterpart, King Tut. "The scans are spectacular," marveled Rebecca Fahrig, PhD, associate professor of radiology. "The fact that we were able to get such high-resolution images is pretty cool. Some of the detail in the teeth is absolutely phenomenal. You wouldn't get that with a normal scanner." The girl, who has been dubbed Sherit, ancient Egyptian for "little one," has been a resident of the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose for the last 75 years—her story a complete mystery until now, said museum curator Lisa Schwappach-Shirriff.
Ruthann Richter, "Mummy's secrets revealed," Stanford Report, August 10, 2005 ---
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/august10/mummy-081005.html

How is your salary/pay level relative to other persons in your job classification such as an Associate Professor of Accounting or an Assistant Professor of Psychology or a Senior Secretary or an Assistant Registrar in a university in Los Angeles? --- http://www.payscale.com/
This service has both free and premium services for many types of employers and employees.  It will give you email updates about how you and others like you are doing in terms of pay in your part of the world.  It does ask some rather private information about you in terms of education background, work experience, current employer, and current income.  I tried it out and was rather impressed with the service.  Keep in mind that  impacted by outliers.  For example, it is somewhat common in major universities for faculty who have been at the associate professor level in accounting for twenty years to make much less than new assistant and new associate professors of accounting.  This would distort the mean average pay for a new associate professor of accounting.  The data could also be impacted by small sample problems such as when there are few if any other employers like your employer in your region. 

This is a serious site that was recommended in the August 2005 issue of the Journal of Accountancy --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/aug2005/news_web.htm
It might be interesting to compare this database with the AAUP or AACSB database of faculty salaries which of course are not drilled down to particular cities and towns.  The average salary for full professors of accounting in the San Antonio area was surprisingly low to the point of being suspect.

August 23, 2005 message from nucz@mindspring.com

Good morning Bob,

I would like to put forth the website http://www.chooselaw.com  as a suggestion for inclusion on your webpage located at the address: http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm  and possibly any other pages you have which are relevant to the law and it's study. We are a new resource and just getting our legs under us and can use all the help you can give in regards to awareness of our free services.

Please feel free to look over our website and create a suitable description based on your honest evaluation, or drop us a note and we will supply any descriptive copy needed.

Thank you for consideration.

William

Jensen Comment:  I added this link to the following two sites:

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fees.htm

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#Law

A Populist Movement in Accounting Research

At the 2005 American Accounting Association meetings in San Francisco, the 2005-2006 President, Judy Rayburn from the University of Minnesota, gave a luncheon speech about the State of the AAA.  The AAA is not in the best of shape and comparisons are made with other academic associations in business studies such as finance and management.

What is especially interesting is the current populist movement going on in the AAA.  It is built upon the argument that the AAA journals and meeting programs became too detached from the accounting profession and problems within the profession.  There is a strong movement rising to change the editorial biases of the AAA’s top journals that have been tightly controlled by positivists demanding great rigor in empirical and analytical studies.  One problem is that such demands for rigor have limited researchers to rather uninteresting problems that derive outcomes of little surprise or interest.  

In many respects there is a current populist movement with respect to the entire academic tenure and performance evaluation process.   You can read a bit more about this at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession  

Bob Jensen

August 23, 2005 message from Tracey Sutherland [tracey@AAAHQ.ORG]

Given the lively discussion about Judy Rayburn's luncheon talk in San Francisco, I thought some would be interested in her PowerPoint slides which are posted on the AAA website -- you'll find them at http://aaahq.org/AM2005/menu.htm  . It was great to see many of you at the Annual Meeting -- special thanks to folks for discussing ideas for some of the teaching/learning related sessions developed by the VP for Education -- a session on using games in teaching accounting was an outcome of conversations on AECM.

Best regards, Tracey

Jensen Comment:  Katherine Schipper's Presidential Lecture slides are also available"

Katherine Schipper's Presidential Lecture (PowerPoint Slides)

Judy Rayburn's President's Talk (PowerPoint Slides)

I suspect the AAA is holding off on Denny’s speech until it is determined if Accounting Horizons is going to publish his paper.

Cynthia Cooper’s plenary speech on Wednesday is proprietary and will not be published by the AAA. You can, however, find some of her remarks in various places if you run a search on Google. There is a basketball star by that same name, so I suggest you run the search on “Cooper” AND “Worldcom”.

Cooper was one of Time Magazine's 2002 "Persons of the Year" --- http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2002/

Also see http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4153/is_6_60/ai_111737943

August 23, 2005 reply from Ken Crofts [kcrofts@CSU.EDU.AU]

Judy Rayburn’s slides . . . are also interesting, particularly drop in membership of AAA over the years.

Ken

StumbleUpon Searching --- http://www.stumbleupon.com/
Mike. Kearl clued me into a fascinating search site called StumbleUpon --- http://www.stumbleupon.com/about.html

StumbleUpon is an intelligent browsing tool for sharing and discovering great websites. As you click Stumble!, you'll get high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended (rated I like it) by friends and other SU members with similar interests. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and peers – you will automatically 'stumble upon' each others favorites sites.  In effect, StumbleUpon's members collectively share the best sites on the web. You can share any site by simply clicking I like it. This passes the page on to friends and like-minded people – letting them "stumble upon" all the great sites you discover.

Selecting Your Interests
After you join you will be asked to select topics which are of interest to you. Nearly 500 topics are available and you can select as many as you wish to help determine your preferences in web content. The more interests you select, the better StumbleUpon will be able to determine which sites you will like best. This lets StumbleUpon provide you with sites rated highly by other members with similar interests. You can also add, remove or modify your interests at any time.
 

Jensen Comment:  I found this site a little confusing to use, but I think I got the hang of it.  Now I find it quite useful for finding good sites.  Many of the hits are commercial sites.  It does clutter your browser window with yet another toolbar, although if you click on the View option in your browser you can choose to hide this and other browser toolbars. 

When learning StumbleUpon, it really helps to got to Menu, FAQs at http://www.stumbleupon.com/help.html
There is also an unofficial listing of FAQs at http://stumbleupon.theprawn.com/ 

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

Although many of the links are to commercial (fee) sites, many StumbleUpon hits under accounting were quite good, especially in financial statement analysis and valuation.

Risk Glossary --- http://www.riskglossary.com/

SQL Ledger --- http://www.sql-ledger.org/

Links on Valuation and Risk:

KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm
KartOO Searching --- http://www.kartoo.com/
Jensen Comment:  As the name StumbleUpon suggests in the module above, StumbleUpon more or less randomly brings up "good" sites under a give topic area.  Another search engine called KartOO brings up "good" sites a little less randomly due to the ability to fine tune with subtopics. 

For example, enter "Accounting" and note the many subtopics.  This is a very good search site when you want to drill down to details on a topic.  Try it again with "Accounting Education."  However, I find StumbleUpon a bit more imaginative in terms of interesting and varying sites.

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping."
Ed Zern, Field and Stream, 1959 --- http://bourke.ilanet.net.au/quotes.html

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain --- http://bourke.ilanet.net.au/quotes.html

I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do? Ronnie Shakes --- http://bourke.ilanet.net.au/quotes.html

Fraud Updates --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmark s go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 
Archives of Tidbits: Tidbits Directory --- 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/.

International Accounting News (including the U.S.)

AccountingEducation.com and Double Entries --- http://www.accountingeducation.com/
        Upcoming international accounting conferences --- http://www.accountingeducation.com/events/index.cfm
        Thousands of journal abstracts --- http://www.accountingeducation.com/journals/index.cfm
Deloitte's International Accounting News --- http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
Association of International Accountants --- http://www.aia.org.uk/ 
WebCPA --- http://www.webcpa.com/
FASB --- http://www.fasb.org/
IASB --- http://www.fasb.org/
Others --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm

Gerald Trite's great set of links --- http://iago.stfx.ca/people/gtrites/Docs/bookmark.htm 

Richard Torian's Managerial Accounting Information Center --- http://www.informationforaccountants.com/ 

Bob Jensen's home page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu