Above is Erika and her friend Natalie Bean
beside Erika's lift.
Our basement is now so stocked for the winter that it looks like Wal-Mart.
Below are several autumn pictures from our living room.
Below is a picture of my work station in the
front porch.
Just outside the window you can see our fat Blue Jays eating wild cranberries.
Below are pictures of my outside
studio/office and my newly-painted wishing well.
Great electronic "books" from the University of Texas and
Princeton University
Dante Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise (a
multimedia learning experience) ---
http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/
Also see Princeton University's contribution (in Italian or English) ---
http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp/
Princeton's versions have both
lectures and multimedia!
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen (1775-1817) ---
Click Here
Mansfield Park
by Jane Austen (1775-1817) ---
Click Here
Emma
by Jane Austen ---
Click Here
Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen (1775-1817) ---
Click Here
Persuasion
by Jane Austen (1775-1817) ---
Click Here
Sense And Sensibility
by Jane Austen (1775-1817) ---
Click Here
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T S Eliot, Choruses from ‘The
Rock’ as quoted by John Brignell ---
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/2007 October.htm
"Role of Islam in Rwanda" ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1922398/posts
From PBS Frontline Television
Much of the genocide in Rwanda, including deaths of his U.N. peacekeepers, can
be traced to the rotten leadership of Kofi Annan, then head of the UN during the
Clinton Presidency ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/video/
The death toll from a devastating suicide bombing in
northern Afghanistan rose to 52 on Wednesday, making it the worst single suicide
bombing in the country since 2001, government officials said . . . On Tuesday, a
suicide attacker detonated a large bomb as a parade of schoolchildren, teachers
and elders welcomed a parliamentary delegation from Kabul. “Based on the tally
by the police department,” said Mohammad Alam Rasikh, the provincial governor,
“so far, 52 people were found dead and 102 are injured.”
The New York Times, November 7, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/world/asia/08afghan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Europe Wants U.S. Coal: I wonder if Sweden, the home of the Nobel
Prize, also increased its demand for coal?
Even though it costs more to ship across the Atlantic than it does to by it in
U.S. commodities markets
Now that the price of coal is at a historic low relative to oil, there's no
stopping consumers and producers alike from embracing Al Gore's nightmare. A ton
of U.S. coal is so cheap at about $47 that European utilities will pay $50 to
ship it across the Atlantic, according to Galbraith's Ltd., a 263-year-old
London shipbroker. While oil and coal cost the same as recently as 1998, West
Texas Intermediate crude is five times more expensive after climbing to a record
$96.24 on Nov. 1. Peabody Energy Corp., Consol Energy Inc. and Arch Coal Inc.,
the three biggest U.S. coal companies, forecast the largest increase in exports
in 20 years, degrading the call for a moratorium on coal plants by former U.S.
Vice President and this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore. Coal use
worldwide has grown 27 percent since 2002, three times faster than crude, said
BP Plc. U.S. East Coast coal has risen 71 percent, while oil tripled on the New
York Mercantile Exchange.
Christopher Martin, "Gore Nightmare
Wins as Europe Pays to Ship U.S. Coal (Update1), Bloomberg News, November
5, 2007 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aCDV150sCm1I&refer=home
Total coal imports have increased dramatically ---
http://www.coalportal.com/production_trade_data.cfm?data_type=Import
One commenter underscores the futility of seeking
the answer to dependence on foreign oil in ethanol by noting that the United
States consumes 150 billion gallons of gasoline a year (excluding all other
derivatives of oil, including diesel fuel and kerosene). To produce the
equivalent energy content in ethanol would, the commenter suggests, require
harvesting 600 million acres of corn (versus the current 90 million), covering
an area of nearly a million square miles--an area larger than all U.S. farmland.
Richard Posner, The Becker-Posner
Blog, November 4, 2007 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
Jensen Comment
And this says nothing about requiring immense amounts of natural gas for the
conversion of corn into ethanol. Ethanol is a farm subsidy, but it is no cure
for the energy crisis.
"We're hearing, particularly from African-American
women, on this issue. Michelle and I have talked about it and prayed about it,"
and the couple is confident about the job the Secret Service is doing to protect
him. Concerns about his safety "shouldn't be an excuse or a reason" for blacks
not voting for him, he said.
DeWayne Wickham quoting Barach Obama, "The Safety Dance,"
The Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2007 ---
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/11/obama-tries-to-.html?loc=interstitialskip
Jensen Comment
We might extrapolate this reasoning to a hypothesis that many people who voted
for George Bush in the 2004 election did so because they hoped he'd be murdered.
It doesn't matter how many Oscar winners are in
front of or behind the camera — audiences are proving to be conscientious
objectors when it comes to this fall's surge of antiwar and anti-Bush films.
Both "In the Valley of Elah" and, more recently, "Rendition" drew minuscule
crowds upon their release, which doesn't bode well for the ongoing stream of
films critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration's wider war on
terror. "Rendition," which features three Oscar winners in key roles, grossed
$4.1 million over the weekend in 2,250 screens for a ninth-place finish. A
re-release of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" beat it, and it's 14 years old.
Christian Toto, Washington Times,
October 25, 2007 ---
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071025/NATION/110250083/1002
The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary
pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th
anniversary of their father's death and celebrate the growing solidarity between
"the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo
Chavez, the Venezuelan president. There were fraternal greetings and smiles all
round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of
the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of
Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for
the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and
hated communism and the Soviet Union." Che's daughter Aleida wondered if
something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God,"
she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the
commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted
back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become
non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the
Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.
Sarah Baxter, The London Times,
October 21, 2007 ---
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2701379.ece
The British conservative Enoch Powell once famously
said that all political careers end in failure. John Bolton's career, as we read
in the opening pages of "Surrender Is Not an Option," began with the
defeat of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, on which he had served
as a teenage volunteer. It is a disarming start to the memoir of a man usually
caricatured as a bombastic tub-thumper. In any case, history records that John
Bolton bounced back from this disappointment, rose through the Republican ranks
in the 1980s and, after loyal service interpreting Floridian chads during the
2000 election count, found himself propelled into high office. He tells the rest
of the story with a focus, brutality and exasperation that will give pain and
pleasure in all the right places. Among Mr. Bolton's pungent chapter titles
("Sisyphus in the Twilight Zone," "Why Do I Want This Job?"), my favorite may be
"Following the Yellow Cake Road on North Korea." Certainly "The Wizard of Oz"
would have served as good preparation for Mr. Bolton's two Bush-era portfolios:
undersecretary of state for arms control (2001-05) and U.S. permanent
representative to the United Nations (2005-06). Mr. Bolton often finds himself
in a fantasy-fueled Munchkinland in which all the problems of the Middle East
are blamed on Israel and the Iranian quest for a nuclear bomb is either denied
or ignored--or justified as a legitimate response to U.S. and Zionist hegemony .
. . In the end, history will record all this as a question of judgment. If Iran
is peacefully persuaded to stop short of the final turn of the screwdriver--or
even if Tehran uses a nuclear device it develops "responsibly"--then Ms. Rice,
Mr. Powell and "the Euroids" will be vindicated. But if--as seems more
likely--the Iranians develop a deliverable nuclear device and put it in the
hands of the zealots currently running the country, then we shall rue the day
that John Bolton stepped down. After all, to adapt Goldwater, restraint in the
pursuit of durable solutions is no virtue, and robustness in pursuit of American
interests is no vice.
Brendan Simms, "Blunt Diplomacy: John Bolton's new
memoir shows tha the's no neocon," The Wall Street Journal,
November 6, 2007
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010828
Saban Center for Middle East Policy ---
http://www.brookings.edu/saban.aspx
When people are free to do as they please, they
usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer ---
Click Here
The surgeon general really
needs to slap a health warning on the New York Times. My blood
pressure increases a few points every time I read it. This week, the newspaper
of record pimped the Next Great American Education Fad: In-school yoga classes.
According to the piece, “Less
Homework, More Yoga, From a Principal Who Hates Stress,”
the head of Needham High School in the Boston suburbs is
pushing “stress reduction” through better stretching and breathing. Principal
Paul Richards, who last earned nationwide mockery when he ditched publishing the
honor roll, is part-Oprah, part-Deepak Chopra, part-Richard Simmons, and all edu-babble.
Michelle Malkin, National Review
Online, October 31, 2007 ---
Click Here
A good review from the critics is just another stay
of execution.
Dustin Hoffman ---
Click Here
They hold elections in November because November is
the best time of year for picking out a turkey.
Maxine ---
http://pressroom.hallmark.com/maxine_dotcom.html
Voting is like choosing your favorite mosquito out
of a swarm.
Maxine ---
http://pressroom.hallmark.com/maxine_dotcom.html
The Democratic strategy is to attach an
anti-arbitration provision to nearly every new law in order to limit non-lawsuit
dispute settlement. Thus a House lending bill this week bans pre-dispute
arbitration agreements related to mortgages, another House bill bans them in
cases involving whistleblowers, and the Senate farm bill bans them even in
meatpacking contracts. The mother of them all is a bill that lunges to fulfill
the trial bar's long-cherished dream: prohibiting all Americans from voluntarily
agreeing at the start of any business relationship to settle disputes without
litigation. Arbitration, which avoids the cost and time of going to court, has
proven to be a popular form of alternative dispute resolution. Even lawyers
concede its virtues. In 2003, an American Bar Association survey found that 78%
of lawyers "believe that arbitration is generally timelier than litigation, and
56% feel it is more cost effective."
"Party at Ralph's (as in Nadar), The Wall Street Journal,
November 7, 2007; Page A22 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119439707749084617.html?mod=todays_us_opinion
Jensen Comment
The trial lawyers are already counting the sugar plums of a Democratic landslide
in 2008
U. S. Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, has spent the better
part of the last decade running for president. He actively sought the office in
2000 and lost handily to George W. Bush. Since that time, he has done everything
he could think of to antagonize the base of his own party. Former Sen. Fred
Thompson, R-TN, acts as if the thought of running for president just occurred to
him five minutes ago. Some days he acts as though it still hasn't occurred to
him. For very different reasons, these two men, with their totally different
approaches to politics, have probably...
Doug Patton, "For Thompson And
McCain, It's Too Little Too Late," GOP USA, November 6, 2007
http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/dpatton/2007/dp_11061.shtml
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
You can't say Charlie Rangel lacks for ambition. The
House Ways and Means Chairman has been saying he wants to pass "the mother of
all tax reforms," and even that doesn't do justice to the trillion-dollar tax
baby he delivered unto Washington yesterday. No one thinks his plan has a chance
of becoming law this year, but its beauty is as a signal of Democratic
intentions for 2009. In proposing what would be the largest tax increase in
history, Mr. Rangel is showing the world what he wants the tax code to look like
if Democrats run the entire government. None of the Presidential candidates will
admit this before November 2008, but give Mr. Rangel credit for having the
courage of Hillary Clinton's convictions.
"Trillion-Dollar Baby Charlie Rangel's very revealing tax
increase," The Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2007 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010781
Charlie Rangel and other liberal leaders want to
raise tax rates even if it means lower tax revenues . . . Nobel Peace laureate
Al Gore believes global warming is "an inconvenient truth." Here are some
economic truths that America's liberal leadership finds too inconvenient to
support. Tax rate reductions increase tax revenues. This truth has been proved
at both state and federal levels, including by President Bush's 2003 tax cuts on
income, capital gains and dividends. Those reductions have raised federal tax
receipts by $785 billion, the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S.
history. In fiscal 2007, which ended last month, the government took in 6.7%
more tax revenues than in 2006. These increases in tax revenue have
substantially reduced the federal budget deficits. In 2004 the deficit was $413
billion, or 3.5% of gross domestic product. It narrowed to $318 billion in 2005,
$248 billion in 2006 and $163 billion in 2007. That last figure is just 1.2% of
GDP, which is half of the average of the past 50 years.
Pete Du Pont, "Inconvenient Tax
Truths," The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2007 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=110010798
The next country to adopt Reaganite tax reduction
policies likely will be Scotland. Alex Salmond, who serves as "First Minister"
and heads his government's ruling coalition, was in New York recently to ring
the bell at the New York Stock Exchange and deliver a message to the global
investor community that his nation is hungry for investment. The occasion was
the Royal Bank of Scotland's new listing on the Big Board . . . In 1900,
Scotland was one of the world's three richest nations in per capita income, but
it turned socialist, as so many European nations did, after World War II. It got
rich again the easy way in the 1980s with the discovery of North Sea oil. But
high taxes have inhibited capitalizing on the petro-dollars to create a
sustained economic expansion. Scotland's problem now is that it only controls
15% of its tax system. The U.K. has veto power over the rest, including
reductions in corporate taxes. But if British P.M. Gordon Brown signs off on the
tax cut, Scotland may be able to duplicate the Irish Miracle in the years ahead.
"We want to imitate the Irish success story," Mr. Salmond says. Ireland's
tax-cutting policies aren't just a model for Scotland but for the U.S., which
lately finds itself lagging in global competition because of relatively high tax
rates on job creators.
Stephen Moore,
Opinion Journal, October 31, 2007
A
mandatory
University of Delaware program requires residence
hall students to acknowledge that "all whites are racist" and offers them
"treatment" for any incorrect attitudes regarding class, gender, religion,
culture or sexuality they might hold upon entering the school, according to a
civil rights group.
Bob Unruh, WorldNetDaily,
October 30, 2007 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58426
After the program was brought to light in the media, Delaware dropped this program ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58475
Dictatorships bear paradoxes. I came across a set of
them 10 years ago, when I hosted a dinner for two female Iranian medical
students who'd come to Yale Medical School on a rare academic exchange program.
These impressive women had climbed to the top 10th percentile in a man's
profession, in a man's country. But I was stunned to learn that -- despite 16
years of education at some of Iran's premiere schools -- neither had ever heard
of the word "Holocaust," or thought of Hitler as anything but the German
equivalent of Napoleon. Tehran's Holocaust denial did not begin with President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It began in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution and the
subsequent miseducation of the entire post-revolutionary generation. The
Holocaust did not exist in the textbooks of my two young guests, and there was
hardly any literature about it in Persian . . . The good news is that Iran is
now home to a highly rebellious young generation that is deeply disenchanted
with the status quo and suspicious of government propaganda in all its forms,
including misinformation about Jews and Israel. Iranians actually possess a
healthy curiosity toward Israel. In the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon's
Hezbollah, for example, young Iranians were reportedly not interested in
supporting Hezbollah, and were vehemently against their government's investment
in it. Unfortunately, Mr. Ahmadinejad steals the spotlight. With his threats
toward Israel and his dreams of a nuclear Iran he has engendered a fear, however
legitimate, that too often blinds Western and Israeli leaders of the broader,
more complex realities of the Iranian people. American, European and Israeli
media are full of dire warnings about the threat of a nuclear Iran. There is
little mention of the plight of the Iranians themselves, or the ripe opportunity
presented by a nation disenchanted with 30 years of theocratic rule: A people
that has historically been friendly to Jews, can, with some effort, be so once
again.
Roya Hakakian, "Holocaust Denial and
Tehran," The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2007 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119405232890781222.html
The new album from The Eagles, Long Road Out of
Eden, is just one long, sustained attack on the integrity of the United States
and is as bad as any loud-mouthed Dixie Chicks diatribe. With songs prosaically
about Global Warming and the evil American “empire,” seemingly the only one of
the band who just wanted to entertain the fans was Joe Walsh, the others too
puffed up with their own sense of superiority to bother. Unfortunately, what we
have here just another exclamation from pampered rock stars that they are
smarter, more environmentally friendly and more caring than the rest of us...
but be sure and buy more albums for gifts folks!
Warner Todd Huston, NewsBusters,
November 5, 2007 ---
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/warner-todd-huston/2007/11/05/eagles-new-album-slamming-america-throughout
When does MSNBC give up on Olbermann? Even the hard
core looney lefties are tired of his constant complaining and Bush Derangement
Syndrome. You can only listen to the whining, moaning, blaming, and bitching so
long before even the hard core get sick of it.
"Olbermann's Tanking Ratings Against BIllO," Inside Cable News,
November 2, 2007 ---
http://insidecable.blogsome.com/2007/11/02/thursdays-numbers-62/
O’Reilly Factor- 2,723,000 viewers at 8:00 p.m. on November 2, 2007
Countdown w/ Olbermann- 793,000 at 8:00 p.m. on November 2, 2007
Audiences are tired of Keith Oberman's negativism in general and predictions
that the U.S. is going down the toilet. He needs to carefully study "Hits
the Nail on the Head" ---
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/hitnail.asp
Example videos from the always-whining CNBC commentator who never smiles:
A totally incompetent Condoleza Rice is untrustworthy (NBC's Keith Olbermann
calls our Secretary of State an outright liar) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ASBuh72Re8
The beginning of the end of America
(NBC's Keith Olbermann) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqxmPjB0WSs
General Petreaus is really
General Betray Us? (NBC's Keith Olbermann calls our top general in
Iraq an outright liar) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rLSna0bqc8
Thousands of Hezbollah guerrillas staged secret
military maneuvers without weapons or uniforms near Israel's border in southern
Lebanon, a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper reported Monday. The Lebanese
government downplayed the report as probably just a simulation. Al-Akhbar, a
pro-Hezbollah newspaper, said Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah personally
supervised the maneuvers, which it reported were carried out in the last three
days and were the biggest ever staged on Israel's border by the Shiite Muslim
militant group. Monday's report marked the first time Hezbollah, with its highly
secretive military wing, revealed such exercises through a newspaper. The
maneuvers, if confirmed, could pose a major challenge to a U.N.-brokered
cease-fire that ended last year's war with the Jewish state.
Sam H. Ghatta, "Report: Hezbollah
Stages Maneuvers," ABC News, November 5, 2007 ---
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=3819207
Dumping, the practice of selling goods in foreign
markets at lower prices than you charge for them in your home market, is the
protectionists' favorite bogeyman. In the past, the EU has used antidumping
measures to slap higher import duties on, for example, shoes from China, plastic
bags from Thailand, bed linens from Pakistan, television sets from Korea and
salmon from Norway. These duties are not small change. The tax on iron tubes
from South Korea, requested by a group called the "Defense Committee of EU Steel
Butt-Welding Fittings Industry," is nearly 12 times higher than the standard EU
tariff on this product. Antidumpers like to represent the process by which such
decisions are made, and the calculations on which they are based, as technical
and objective. That's simply not true. Antidumping calculations always require
difficult judgments -- to determine if dumping has actually taken place and if
domestic industries have actually been harmed by it. Exporters to the EU often
find themselves on the losing side of those judgments. What's more, the EU
antidumping authority invariably neglects to properly examine whether the net
effect of a punitive tariff is good for the European economy. The effect is
certainly not positive in all cases, and probably not even in most cases. In the
first place, a duty inevitably raises the prices that consumers pay. That's
fairly straightforward and acknowledged by antidumping authorities themselves.
Brian Hindley and Fredrik Erixon,
"Dumping Protectionism," The Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2007
---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119386549181678122.html
It took more than six years to try former Philippine
President Joseph Estrada for plunder. It took barely six weeks for current
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to pardon him after his conviction. While
that's her prerogative, the signal it sends about the battle on corruption in
Manila isn't encouraging. Mr. Estrada was charged in 2001 with enriching himself
to the tune of $93 million through various schemes such as kickbacks from an
illegal gambling operation while he was president from 1998 to 2001. The verdict
handed down in September by Manila's special anti-corruption court stretched to
183 pages. The judges found Mr. Estrada guilty of most, although not all, of the
counts laid against him and sentenced him to 40 years in jail, effectively a
life term for the 70-year-old.
"The Estrada Effect," The Wall Street Journal, October 31,
2007 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119377821028276694.html
With the holidays approaching, a Wall Street
colleague may sidle up and suggest a contribution to the SIV Superfund. Your
esoteric reading is likely to lead you astray here. This is not a campaign to
cure the simian immunodeficiency virus, a subject that recently occupied you for
hours on Wikipedia. It's a self-help bailout fund organized by banks for their
friendly neighborhood "structured investment vehicles." . . . Banks are supposed
to know better than to borrow short and lend long, which can be profitable as
heck until short-term rates skyrocket or short-term lenders disappear
altogether. No, banks didn't commit this folly directly. They set up
off-balance-sheet SIVs to borrow short and lend long, while shifting some of the
proceeds back to the bank sponsors as fat "fees." Citigroup, for one, collected
$24 million last year from its biggest SIV, equivalent to about 38% of the
profits funneled to outside investors. But weren't the outside investors
supposed to bear any loss? Otherwise the banks were obliged to recognize the
SIVs on their own balance sheets with suitable reserves. Yet now you hear
murmurs that banks offered informal guarantees and staked their "reputational
capital" to lure investor cash into the SIVs. Some say that contributing to the
superfund would be contributing to "moral hazard," i.e., encouraging bad
behavior.
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., "UnimpresSIV,"
The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2007; Page A20 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119377701493476654.html
Bob Jensen's "Rotten to the Core" threads are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
Enthusiasts for government-financed health care
don't seem to mind playing Pangloss. All is for the best in the best of all
possible systems, which would have the government as single payer, aka "Medicare
for all." The frequent claim is that eliminating profits and private
administrative expenses would more than pay for the cost of covering all the
uninsured. Well -- no, as demonstrated in a new study by Benjamin Zycher, a
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former senior economist for the
Reagan Council of Economic Advisers. He estimates that the real economic costs
of moving to single payer would be at least twice those of today's semimarket
patchwork. "Administrative" costs, generally speaking, are those not directly
funding medical care but instead spent to deliver insurance benefits. Sure
enough, on paper Medicare's are about 3% of outlays, compared to 11% to 14% for
the private system. But Mr. Zycher notes that a more accurate measure of
Medicare's administration would include other indirect federal services, such as
tax collection, which round them up by about double. Fold in the incentives for
the uninsured to consume more medical services under single-payer than they do
now, and those "savings" are revealed as make-believe.
"Medicare for All?" The Wall Street Journal, October 29,
2007; Page A18 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119362351042074490.html
Not Even One Conservative for Tokenism: Duke is for Democrats and so
is the University of Iowa
The University of Iowa's history department and
Duke's history department have a couple of things in common. Both have made
national news because neither has a Republican faculty member. And both rejected
the application of Mark Moyar, a highly qualified historian and a Republican,
for a faculty appointment. Moyar graduated first in the history department at
Harvard; his revised senior thesis was published as a book and sold more copies
than an average history professor ever sells. After earning a Ph.D. from
Cambridge University in England, he published his dissertation as "Triumph
Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965" with Cambridge University Press, which has
received even more attention and praise. Moyar's views of Vietnam are
controversial and have garnered scorn and abuse from liberal historians,
including the department chair at the University of Iowa, Colin Gordon. Moyar
revealed on his resume that he is a member of the National Association of
Scholars, a group generally to the right of the normal academic organization.
Gordon and his colleagues at Iowa were undoubtedly aware of Moyar's conservative
leaning and historical view. Moyar is undoubtedly qualified. He is
unquestionably diverse; his views are antithetical to many of the Iowa
professors' views. Yet the Iowa department hired someone who had neither
received degrees from institutions similar to Cambridge and Harvard nor
published a book despite having completed graduate school eight years earlier
(history scholars are expected to publish books within approximately six years
of finishing their doctorates). In the Iowa history department there are 27
Democrats and zero Republicans. The Iowa hiring guidelines mandate that search
committees "assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences, diverse
backgrounds and ideology to the university community." After seeking a freedom
of information disclosure, Moyar learned that the Iowa history department had,
in fact, not complied with the hiring manual. It seemed that Moyar was rejected
for his political and historical stands. Maybe it was an unlikely aberration.
But Moyar told the Duke College Republicans earlier this fall that he is
skeptical because an application of his a few years ago at Duke for a history
professorship progressed in much the same way it proceeded in Iowa.
The Duke Chronicle, November 1,
2007 ---
Click Here
Court papers released Thursday in Britney Spears'
custody dispute with Kevin Federline show she spends lavishly on clothes and
entertainment, and doesn't save or invest any of her roughly $737,000 monthly
income....she spends zero on education, savings and investments and gives $500 a
month in charitable contributions..
The Washington Post, November 2, 2007 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110200876.html
Sometimes its really hard to understand the actions of students
The student, who was not identified, had
complained that swastikas appeared on her door over a period of several days
last month. A hidden camera positioned in response to the postings in
Mitchell Hall, one of the school dormitories, led police to interview the
student, who admitted responsibility, according to spokesman Tracy Schario.
The student will not face student judicial action and officials will
determine whether any District or federal laws were broken, Schario said.
"Another 'Hate' Hoax," The Washington Post, November 6, 2007 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/05/AR2007110501434.html
Police officers in Bannockburn, Ill., have charged a black female
student at Trinity International University with sending the threatening
notes that led the institution to evacuate its minority students last
week. The student will be charged with disorderly conduct and a hate
crime. Her name has not been released. According to the police, the
student confessed that she had sent the notes because she wanted to
convince her parents that she should leave the university, which is
located outside of Chicago. Law enforcement and Trinity International
officials now believe that the university’s minority students were never
in danger. The notes made specific threats of violence toward minority
students and prompted the university to send all of its minority
students to off-campus hotels. The evacuation attracted nationwide
attention from the news media . . .
Scott Jaschik, "Hoax at Trinity International," Inside Higher Ed,
April 27, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/27/hoax
Annual Index of Economic Freedom ---
http://www.heritage.org/index/
War Veterans versus Children's School Desks ---
http://www.snopes.com/glurge/nodesks.asp
Question
Where do you rank in terms of annual income and total net worth?
Jensen Comment
It may surprise you how many full professors are in the top percentiles in terms
of academic-year salaries (before tax) plus supplementary income and how many
senior professors have TIAA-CREF and other savings net worth in the top 10th
percentile. The top fifty percent of income earners purportedly pay over 97% of
all taxes (income, FICA, property, estate, gift, sales taxes, and other)
collected from individuals in the U.S.
You can read more about tax collections at
http://www.askquestions.org/articles/taxes/
"Where Do You Stand on America's
Wealth Spectrum?" by Lee Eisenberg, Yahoo Finance, November 6, 2007 ---
http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/103815/Where-Do-You-Stand-on-America's-Wealth-Spectrum
Annual
income parking ramp
|
Income
level (percentile) |
Median
income (rounded) |
|
Level VI
(90 to 100) |
$170,000 |
|
Level V (80
to 89.9) |
$99,000 |
|
Level IV
(60 to 79.9) |
$65,000 |
|
Level III
(40 to 59.9) |
$40,000 |
|
Level II
(20 to 39.9) |
$24,000 |
|
Level I
(less than 20) |
$10,000 |
Source: Before-Tax
Family Income, 2001
Federal Reserve Board Survey
So does making $170,000 a year make a person
rich? Last year a plurality of respondents (29
percent) in a survey by The New York Times said
that "rich" was making between $100,000 and
$200,000 a year. Unfortunately, the survey
didn't break out how many people in that salary
range considered themselves rich. If the people
I talk to are any indication, very few do.
Of course, income is only
one part of the equation defining where you
stand.
Net worth is more telling. Net worth, as
every financially precocious schoolchild knows,
is the sum of one's assets --
home equity, investments, savings
accounts, retirement funds, cars, furnishings
and such things as jewelry, furs, wine
collection, old baseball cards -- minus all
outstanding liabilities such as
mortgage balance, revolving and
credit card debt, college loans and so
on. Across all households, the national median
net worth is $86,000. Half of your fellow
citizens have more than that, half less. As you
see, there's a massive disparity between the
haves and have-nots.
Net worth parking ramp
|
Net worth
(percentile) |
Median net
worth (rounded) |
|
Level VI
(90 to 100) |
$833,600 |
|
Level V (80
to 89.9) |
$263,100 |
|
Level IV
(60 to 79.9) |
$141,500 |
|
Level III
(40 to 59.9) |
$62,500 |
|
Level II
(20 to 39.9) |
$37,200 |
|
Level I
(less than 20) |
$7,900 |
Source: Family Net
Worth, 2001 Federal Reserve Board Survey
We
live in a country that once celebrated itself as
egalitarian, yet 1 percent of the population --
nearly 3 million people -- currently has as much
money as the 100 million people at the bottom of
the ramp.
Yet when I ask those at the top of the ramp how
they feel about the future, whether their
fortunate place on the ramp gives them a measure
of confidence about it, they shake their heads.
They give me a look that says, "What planet do
you park on?"
You and your broker If you're not parked near
the top of the ramp, you're of little or no
interest to financial services firms and
financial advisers. There's no money to be made
at these levels. Last year, a handful of Wall
Street firms told their brokers they would no
longer receive commissions on accounts holding
less than $50,000. This effectively tells people
with nano-Numbers to get lost. But for the Wall
Street firms, there's gold on the floors above.
The greater the household assets, the more fees
and transaction costs can be extracted from an
account. The result is a flood of advertising
that captures a lifestyle so gloriously affluent
it's enough to make everybody feel poor.
Those who manage Numbers break customers down
into innumerable segments to better target them
through their marketing efforts. These segments
take into consideration all the usual
demographic characteristics, such as age, income
and net worth. Other segmentation models define
you according to psychographic qualities:
personal interests, leisure-time activities,
whether you are active or passive when it comes
to managing your affairs -- including, for
instance, how comfortable you are using a
computer. Once a financial services company
figures it has your Number, it will use what it
thinks are the most effective channels to get
its hands on it. It will place advertising in
the magazines and newspapers you read and the
television shows and Web sites you browse. And
it will probe you incessantly through the
mailbox, testing or selling financial products
and services.
The Number industry divides people on the top
floors of the garage into three broad segments
of wealth, each of which is nicely profitable.
The biggest and broadest affluent segment
consists of people with investable assets of
between $200,000 and $1 million to $2 million.
This group is sometimes referred to as mass
affluent, and it would be fair to think of it as
the meat and potatoes of the financial services
business. If you're at the lower end of that
range -- if you have, say, $300,000 in your
accounts -- you're definitely of prime interest
to the brokers and customer reps at Merrill
Lynch, Smith Barney, Vanguard and the rest. But
they need to be careful lest you cost them
money.
To assign a real live broker (oops, financial
consultant) to a client who keeps too low a
Number is tantamount to Safeway assigning a
personal shopper to anyone who comes in to buy a
quart of milk. Still, there are profitable ways
for financial services firms to serve smaller
customers: the telephone, assuming they can keep
the calls short and to the point and, better
still, the online channel, where self-service is
highly cost-effective. This is not to say that
firms aren't happy to see you walk into their
investment centers for a quick hello and a
fill-out-the-papers session. They'll shake your
hand, put an arm around your shoulder, even pour
you a cup of coffee. After that, the more you
manage your own modest Number, the better for
them and the more cost-effective for you.
The next segment up from mass affluent is where
the action gets white hot. This parking level
belongs to those designated as high net worth
individuals (or HNWIs). There are no universal
criteria here. Generally, HNWIs have invested
assets of at least $1 million, although some
companies also target younger households with
healthy six-figure incomes, knowing that their
net worth is likely to reach target levels in
the near future. Right now there are well over 7
million high net worth households in the United
States, with a forecasted growth rate of 16
percent a year and projected assets of $32
trillion. Yum.
If their marketing efforts are any indication,
Wall Street firms see HNWIs as the happiest
people in the world, no matter that so many of
them are, rightly or wrongly, distressed over
their long-term prospects. Distress is not
what's pictured in the ads. The ads are filled
with images of zippy seniors who flash large
white teeth and incredibly healthy gums. They
dance. They jog. They bike. They fish. They
golf. They snuggle. According to the ads, life
is a theme park expressly designed for the
middle-aged. Graying boomers waltz across their
living rooms, raise glasses to one another on
the decks of ocean liners and exchange smiles
secure in the knowledge that a surefire
blue-steel erection is just a pill away. These
ads remind us that we are living in the Golden
Age of Aging. Not only are we younger and
healthier than middle-aged people used to be,
many of us would probably have been blind,
disabled or dead by now had we had the bad luck
to have been born just a tiny bit sooner.
Valet parking If you've made it onto the top
levels of the ramp -- say you have at least $5
million in investments -- you are deemed to be
an ultra high net worth individual (or UHNWI).
This is a very nice position to hold in life,
all the sweeter thanks to recent federal tax
cuts. People earning $10 million a year hand
over a smaller percentage of their income to the
government than those earning a tenth of that
and -- to a great degree -- escape the "gotcha"
snare of the alternative minimum tax, according
to The New York Times. The treatment extended to
a UHNWI approaches that accorded to royalty. As
a UHNWI, you aren't offered a cardboard cup of
day-old sludge from a Mr. Coffee machine. Now
you qualify for a china cup of freshly brewed
java from a gleaming French press. They'd better
get another grinder or two. The Boston
Consulting Group reports that 3,000 new
households a year lay claim to $20 million or
more in invested assets. Should you be among
them, put your feet up and just whistle for
service.
If getting yourself to a firm's teak-paneled
office is too much of a schlep, the investment
advisers will high-tail it to you. They'll be
more than delighted to take you to dinner at the
best place in town and toast your success with
the finest vintages on the menu. They go to this
expense because they obviously respect your
business prowess and find you personally
charming. Mostly, though, they admire you for
your assets. They will ply you with leather
binders filled with laser-printed pie charts,
bar graphs and three-dimensional wave diagrams.
Over dessert, they will produce PowerPoint
slides that show how your nest egg will incubate
and eventually burgeon into a soaring phoenix
that will carry your Number higher and higher,
all thanks to their nurturing and personal
attention.
There is yet one more place to park, higher up
and more exclusive still. This spot is for
people for whom even discreet, private banking
is déclassé. On this level of the ramp you forgo
the wealth managers at even the toniest trust
companies and rely instead on your own "family
office," complete with its own in-house
investment manager and staff.
Typically, families with family offices have
$100 million, $500 million, $1 billion, enough
to blow off even the Lehmans, the Goldmans and
the Northern Trusts of the world. At present,
there are approximately 5,000 family offices
around the country. Family offices are not for
strivers -- at least not yet. But family offices
may be going the way of fractional jets, shared
yachts and high-end vacation-home clubs. People
with only 20 million Numbers have begun to band
together to create, in effect, multifamily
offices to oversee their investments and estate
planning.
Back down on the street, though, it's another
world. Most people have to circle the block,
just looking for a way to get into the damn
garage.
Wikipedia has a great module on the history
and theory of taxation ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax
Who Pays America's Tax Burden, and Who Gets the Most Government Spending?
by Andrew Chamberlain, Gerald Prante and Scott A. Hodge
Special Report No. 151
March 22, 2007
Tax Foundation
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/2282.html
Executive Summary
While many studies answer the question of who pays taxes in America, the
question of who gets the most government spending is often overlooked. Just
as some Americans bear a larger portion of the nation's tax burden than
others, some Americans also receive a larger share of the nation's
government spending.
This report summarizes the key findings of a
comprehensive
2007 Tax Foundation study of federal, state and
local taxes and government spending. The results show that when we consider
the distribution of government spending as well as taxes, it provides a
dramatically altered view of how U.S. fiscal policy affects Americans at
different income levels than is apparent from the distribution of tax
burdens alone.
Overall, we find that America's lowest-earning
one-fifth of households received roughly $8.21 in government spending for
each dollar of taxes paid in 2004. Households with middle-incomes received
$1.30 per tax dollar, and America's highest-earning households received
$0.41. Government spending targeted at the lowest-earning 60 percent of U.S.
households is larger than what they paid in federal, state and local taxes.
In 2004, between $1.03 trillion and $1.53 trillion was redistributed
downward from the two highest income quintiles to the three lowest income
quintiles through government taxes and spending policy.
These findings suggest tax distributions alone do
not tell Americans how much the nation's fiscal system is helping or hurting
low-income households. To answer that, we must look beyond tax burdens to
government spending as well. Lawmakers who ignore the distribution of
government spending risk making policy judgments based on an incorrect set
of facts about the United States fiscal system.
Jensen Comment
Keep in mind that there are all sorts of definitional and externality problems
when it comes to measuring how much is “received” from the government versus how
much is “taxed.” For example, when a when the government provides each tobacco
farmer with an allotment or quota on the amount of tobacco that can be grown per
acre, the tobacco price is artificially increased without necessarily receiving
a check from the government. The same thing happens to businesses and
individuals who benefit from import or other quotas. The same thing could be
accomplished by not having such allotment quotas and reimbursing farmers (from
the government) for price differentials. Also the government may force direct
transfer payments in the private sector in lieu of taxing and redistributing
payments from Peter to pay Paul.
Bob Jensen's taxation helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
Google Reader and Other Readers
That Find News Feeds of Interest to You
First you should read about Google
Reader at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader
Bob Jensen's
take on blogs and listservs and Wikis ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
The tidbits below are consistent with what I’ve written many times.
The tidbits below are also available at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
From the Author of "Dilbert"
"Giving Stuff Away on the Internet," by Scott Adams, The Wall
Street Journal, November 1, 2007; Page A19 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119388143439778613.html
I spend about a third of my workday blogging.
Thanks to the miracle of online advertising, that increases my income by 1%.
I balance that by hoping no one asks me why I do it.
As with most of my life decisions, my impulse to
blog was a puzzling little soup of miscellaneous causes that bubbled and
simmered until one day I noticed I was doing something. I figured I needed a
rationalization in case anyone asked. My rationalization for blogging was
especially hard to concoct. I was giving away my product for free and hoping
something good came of it.
I did have a few "artist" reasons for blogging.
After 18 years of writing "Dilbert" comics, I was itching to slip the leash
and just once write "turd" without getting an email from my editor. It might
not seem like a big deal to you, but when you aren't allowed to write in the
way you talk, it's like using the wrong end of the shovel to pick up, for
example, a turd.
Over time, I noticed something unexpected and
wonderful was happening with the blog. I had an army of volunteer editors,
and they never slept. The readers were changing the course of my writing in
real time. I would post my thoughts on a topic, and the masses told me what
they thought of the day's offering without holding anything back. Often
they'd correct my grammar or facts and I'd fix it in minutes. They were in
turns brutal and encouraging. They wanted more posts on some topics and less
of others. It was like the old marketing saying, "Your customers tell you
what business you're in."
At some point I realized we were collectively
writing a book, or at least the guts of one. I compiled the most popular
(mostly the funniest) posts and pitched it to a publisher. I got a
six-figure advance, and picked a title indirectly suggested by my legion of
accidental collaborators: "Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey-Brain!"
As part of the book deal, my publisher asked me to
delete the parts of my blog archive that would be included in the book. The
archives didn't get much traffic, so I didn't think much about deleting
them. This turned out to be a major blunder in the "how people think"
category.
A surprising number of my readers were personally
offended that I would remove material from the Internet that had once been
free, even after they read it. It was as if I had broken into their homes
and ripped the books off their shelves. They felt violated. And boy, I heard
about it.
Some left negative reviews on Amazon.com to protest
my crass commercialization. While no one has given the book a bad review for
its content, a full half of the people who comment trash it for having once
been free, as if that somehow mattered to the people who only read books on
paper. In the end, the bad feeling I caused by not giving away my material
for free forever will have a negative impact on book sales.
I've had mixed results with giving away content on
the Internet. I was the first syndicated cartoonist to offer a comic on the
Internet without charge (www.dilbert.com). That gave a huge boost to the
newspaper sales and licensing. The ad income was good too. Giving away the
"Dilbert" comic for free continues to work well, although it cannibalizes my
reprint book sales to some extent, and a fast-growing percentage of readers
bypass the online ads with widgets, unauthorized RSS feeds and other
workarounds.
A few years ago I tried an experiment where I put
the entire text of my book, "God's Debris," on the Internet for free, after
sales of the hard copy and its sequel, "The Religion War" slowed. My hope
was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the sequel.
According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved it
because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for
free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market
value for my work at zero. Oops.
So I've been watching with great interest as the
band "Radiohead" pursues its experiment with pay-what-you-want downloads on
the Internet. In the near term, the goodwill has inspired lots of people to
pay. But I suspect many of them are placing a bet that paying a few bucks
now will inspire all of their favorite bands to offer similar deals. That's
when the market value of music will approach zero.
That's my guess. Free is more complicated than
you'd think.
Mr. Adams is the creator of "Dilbert" and author of "Stick to Drawing
Comics, Monkey-Brain!" (Portfolio, 2007).
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing and open courseware ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Do you know the difference between the following literature
classifications?
- Epic?
- Novel?
- Novella?
- Novelette?
- Short story?
- Flash fiction?
Here's a somewhat interesting Wikipedia module on "Word Count" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_count
The following is from MS Help for MS Word users
|
Some of the
content in this topic may not be applicable to some
languages.
- To count words in selected
text only, select the text you want.
If you don't select any text,
Microsoft Word counts the words in the whole document.
- On the Tools
menu, click Word Count.
Word displays counts for words,
paragraphs, lines, and characters.
- To add or remove footnotes and
endnotes from the count, select or clear the
Include footnotes and endnotes check
box.
You can quickly recount the number
of words, paragraphs, lines, and characters by using the
Word Count toolbar. In the
Word Count dialog box, click Show Toolbar,
and then close the dialog box.
Note Footnotes and endnotes
are included in the count depending on whether the
Include footnotes and endnotes check box
is selected in the Word Count dialog box. |
|
Of course it is difficult or impossible to get your computer to count words
that are embedded in picture files such as pictures of exhibits.
Is there any software for counting words of all documents in a Website (apart
from words in pictures?)?
Frankly I doubt it!
Question
Have you considered student writing assignments for entries into (or
commentaries on existing entries)
Wikepedia?
"When Wikipedia Is the Assignment," by Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed,
October 29, 2007 ---
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/29/wikipedia
Wikipedia:
time-saver for students, bane of professors everywhere.
Or is it?
If
there’s one place where scholars should be able to question
assumptions about the use of technology in the classroom
(and outside of it), it’s the
annual Educause conference,
which wrapped up on Friday in Seattle. At a
morning session featuring a
professor and a specialist in learning technology from the
University of Washington at Bothell, presenters showed how
Wikipedia —
often viewed warily by educators
who worry that students too readily accept unverifiable
information they find online — can be marshaled as a central
component of a course’s syllabus rather than viewed as a
resource to be banned or reluctantly tolerated.
That’s
what
Martha Groom, a professor at the
university’s
Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences
program, tried to do for the first time last fall by
requiring term papers to be submitted to the popular,
user-edited online encyclopedia. The project comes at a time
when instructors and administrators
continue to debate the boundaries of certain technologies
within the classroom and how to adapt
to students’ existing online habits.
At first
glance, a college term paper and a Wikipedia entry appear to
have little in common. Term papers are intended for an
“extremely limited audience, namely, me,” as Groom pointed
out, they have little impact outside of the classroom and
are constrained to a specific “time” and “place” in the
world of ink-on-paper documents. “That is not a very good
model of scholarship, to say that anything you produce
[belongs] in this tiny space,” she said.
On the other
hand, shared, public online documents have characteristics
in common with parts of the academic review process. “The
shift to thinking about placing the term paper as a
Wikipedia encyclopedia entry allows for another level of
peer review,” Groom said. Such entries have references and
citations; allow for a process of repeated, continual
editing; and encourage collaborations between authors.
They also
reach a much wider audience, through the Wikipedia site and
search engines. “How do you motivate students to do their
best work?” she asked — implying that the answer lies in the
possibility of others viewing it. The public nature of
Wikipedia content also means that, in theory, students would
be less likely to reuse others’ material as their own.
“[The
Wikipedia guidelines] very clearly state that ... the onus
is on you, not on them, so you’ll be the one who catches
anything if you [post] any copyrighted material,” said
Andreas Brockhaus, the manager of learning technologies at
the university.
Groom’s
first attempt at incorporating Wikipedia into a class came
in the fall of 2006, when she required her students to make
a major revision to an existing article or to create one of
their own, with a minimum of 1,500 words, for 60 percent of
the grade. The assignment, for her course on environmental
history and globalization, encompassed an initial proposal,
a first draft, revisions and peer review, after which
students would post the final article to the Web site. For
the next semester, and after student feedback, Groom decided
to lower the weight of the assignment (to 40 percent of the
grade) and have students work in groups.
She
first required her students to complete Wikipedia’s
online tutorial, which takes users
through the basic steps of creating an account, editing
articles and participating in discussions. But learning how
to use Wikipedia didn’t necessarily pose the biggest
obstacle. Some students, used to sustaining arguments in
papers and essays, had trouble adapting to the Wikipedia
style, Brockhaus said.
“How
do you write for an encyclopedia?” he asked, referring to
the site’s consensus-based model that values a neutral tone
over strict balance and places and emphasis on non-original,
verifiable sources. For example, an article on
evolution wouldn’t grant equal
space to intelligent design because of existing scientific
and scholarly agreement. (Not coincidentally, this is the
standard used by most academics in their scholarship and
teaching.)
Not used to
being edited on the fly by people they’ve never met, some
students might also have felt uneasy about another feature
inherent to Wikipedia’s design: constant revisions by
regular contributors. Brockhaus suggested that was part of
the experience, and that students posting material to the
site would have to stop viewing their work as “sacrosanct.”
Continued in article
Also see
http://physorg.com/news113071167.html
Jensen Comment
The good news is that students are less likely to cheat if their writing is
going to be easily available for anybody in the world to read. The bad news is
that students who do plagiarize are likely to be caught, and getting caught
becomes an embarrassment to the instructor and the college in addition to
humiliating the student.
But the most good news in accountancy is that these assignments will add to
the dearth, especially relative to finance, of good accountancy modules in
Wikipedia. Accountants have sadly neglected to write Wikipedia entries and to
write comments on existing entries. I once submitted some modules. The Wikipedia
Editor wrote back, with courtesy, explaining that Wikipedia could not become my
Website. My submissions were just too long and involved for Wikipedia.
Please try it yourself today. Wikipedia entries and edits to existing entries
can be typed directly in your Web browser (probably Internet Explorer or Mozilla
Firefox) and do not require any other software. It's easy and fun.
November 3, 2007 reply from David Raggay
[draggay@TSTT.NET.TT]
Prof.,
You wrote: “…bane of professors everywhere”
Is this a reference to the fact that the articles
might contain some inaccuracies?
David
November 4, reply from Bob Jensen
Hi David,
There are two
types of inaccuracies that may arise in anything that is written. The first
is the intentional and the second is the accidental.
In addition to inaccuracies there are biases/opinions that are not
necessarily “inaccurate” so much as they reflect beliefs such as religious
biases, political biases, and social biases. The world has more facts in
dispute than facts not in dispute. That’s the basis of virtually all
research.
Wikipedia is
more vulnerable to inaccuracies in the first-time entries than other
encyclopedias having modules that are carefully reviewed by other experts
before being allowed into print. I say “first-time entries” since Wikipedia
is more self correcting than other encyclopedias since experts from anywhere
in the world may make corrections of inaccuracies at any time. More
importantly they can add more facts and more new (linked) modules that
elaborate on topics. As a result, Wikipedia has millions of linked modules
that are better than those found in other encyclopedias. By way of example,
go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk
I suspect you could spend a lifetime on this topic alone following links
that are linked to links that are linked to links just on this topic alone
such that chasing down all references would be like trying to catch all of
Augustus De Morgan’s fleas ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_inf