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