Reverend Hahn forwarded the "Fire Rainbow"
picture taken in late February on the
northern border of Idaho and Washington states.
Fire Rainbow (circumhorizontal arc) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_rainbow
Also see
http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/firerainbow.asp
The phenomenon is quite rare because the ice crystals must be aligned
horizontally to refract the high sun.
Reverend Hahn fills in many Sunday while our
Sugar Hill Community Church searches for a
new pastor. His sermons are always interesting with great examples and
entertaining quotations.
He's been a pastor or invited speaker in nearly 200 churches over his long and
varied career.
Crossing Franconia Notch is always a worry this time of year, but he and his
wife Irene do this in all seasons so we can hear his inspiring messages in
our small church. We're happy whenever we get more than 20 worshipers on a given
Sunday. But were a close knit bunch in our sweaters and snow boots.
It's the season cabin fever.
There's just been too much winter in
New Hampshire ---
http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?s=7940256
It's moving in from second to first in terms of total
snowfall since 1900 in New Hampshire. Strangely most blizzards have been
followed by thawing and thick ice. Hence we don't have ten feet on the ground. At the moment
there's less than a foot of snow left after the heavy rains on Saturday followed
by very high winds and some snow yesterday. Wind gusts here reached 40 mph and
well over 100 mph on Mt. Washington on March 9.
| Temp |
Wind |
Gust |
W. Chill |
|
-2.7°F |
270° (W), 105.2 mph |
111.6 mph |
-43.7°F |
I'm still waiting for a backordered part for my
new Sears Craftsman snow thrower that's been on the fritz all winter, but it doesn't
matter much now. I fell on the ice a couple weeks ago and broke three ribs. I
couldn't handle the snow thrower at the moment. But Sears promises to have my
machine fixed for the Fourth of July. My ribs should be healed by then.
The picture below show's the dreariness of it all after we
had some new snow this week end.
But my fat friend seems to be surviving nicely
on our wild cranberry bush (perhaps the berries are fermented by now). I'm not
even sure what type of bird this is, but he and his mates seem to be our most
active cranberry eaters. Sometimes he looks at me as if he's trying to figure
out what I'm doing at daylight this time of year pecking away at my computer.
Pathetic isn't it! Maybe I should join him in getting high on winter
cranberries.
Tidbits on March 10, 2008
Bob Jensen
For earlier editions of Tidbits go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/.
Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures
---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations
Bob Jensen's Threads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's Home Page is at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/
CPA
Examination ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination
On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long
and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was
generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My
wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm
Bob Jensen's blogs and various threads on many topics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
(Also scroll down to the table at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ )
Global Incident Map ---
http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
Set up free conference calls at
http://www.freeconference.com/
Also see
http://www.yackpack.com/uc/
Free Online Tutorials in Multiple Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Google Maps Street View ---
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Tips on computer and networking
security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm
If you want to help our badly injured troops, please check out
Valour-IT: Voice-Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops ---
http://www.valour-it.blogspot.com/
Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Accounting professor Joyce Berg (University of Iowa) describes
how to buy and sell presidential candidates in an electronics market ---
http://feedroom.businessweek.com/index.jsp?fr_story=a3127ad1b0fd6bf20892e609c463863db3d8d1d3
"Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos," by Aaron Rowe, Wired
Science, March 2, 2008 ---
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/top-10-amazing.html
Science Videos ---
http://www.scivee.tv/
Evolution of Normal Fault Systems During Progressive
Deformation [Quick Time Video]
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/structure/activities/6662.html
The Virtual Body ---
http://www.medtropolis.com/vbody.asp
The Future is Digital (with video) ---
http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/FIDArchive.html
Autism and Amanda Baggs ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Baggs
"The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know," by
David Wolman, Wired Magazine, February 25, 2008 ---
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-03/ff_autism
It's not just YouTube. It's HBO. While NBC
didn't fare so well bringing
a web series to the boob tube, HBO is hoping to
have better luck hawking their content to the web. The
premium cable channel has created a signature channel
on YouTube which will air highlights from shows like, Entourage,
The Wire, Flight of the Conchords, and
Extras, along with full length episodes of In Treatment
and the documentary Habla y Habla, which takes an
in-depth look at what it's like to be a Latino in the U.S.
Sonia Zjawinski, Wired News, February 27, 2008 ---
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/02/hbo-uploads-vid.html
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
Patriotic Melodies ---
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/patriotic/patriotic-home.html
Pianist
Leif Ove
Andsnes has a smiling, generous air about him—even when he's been pulled
into a radio studio, after dark, to get bounced back and forth between a
Steinway and an inquisitive host. Hear Leif Ove Andsnes play Grieg in the WGBH
studio ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19238898
He frequently sang with Maria Callas
Italian Tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano Dies at 86 ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87869165
Tammy Hall on Piano Jazz ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87812521
Piano Jazz ---
http://www.npr.org/programs/pianojazz/
Swan Lake With Frogs (Outstanding Performance)
---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOqxSaW05p4
Dirt Roads (Midi) ---
http://famguardian.org/Subjects/FamilyIssues/Articles/DirtRoads/DirtRoads.htm
Barry Manilow ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Manilow
Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials)
---
http://www.slacker.com/
Photographs and Art
Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various
types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
The 2008 Statistical Abstract ---
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/
Other statistics sources ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
University of Rochester shares its Abraham Lincoln letters
online ---
http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=379
Also see
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/20364/?nlid=912
Muse India ---
http://www.museindia.com/
The Future is Digital (with video) ---
http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/FIDArchive.html
From the Scout Report on February 29, 2008
Concerned about the education of young people, the Common
Core organization releases the results of a recent survey Teens losing touch
with historical references
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-02-26-teens-history_N.htm
History Surveys Stumps U.S. Teens ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/education/27history.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy http://www.bartleby.com/59/
Bill Moyers Journal: Interview with Susan Jacoby
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02152008/watch2.html
Digital History
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/
19th Century Textbooks
http://digital.library.pitt.edu/nietz/
When Richard Brodhead (now
the president of Duke University) was dean of
Yale College in 2004, he put it this way in
a commencement address:
“By a conservative estimate, the things members
of the class of 2004 collectively learned in
Yale courses that you have already forgotten is
probably equal to the sum of human knowledge
gained since the early Renaissance.” He added:
“Such inevitable forgetting is not a scandal in
education, because the original act of learning
taught something more deeply valuable and left a
deeper trace: trained deep habits of mind that
survived the specific content that was
originally attached to them and can then be put
to a different use”.
Bernard Fryshman, "Content Control — This
Time From Friends," Inside Higher Ed,
March 6, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/03/06/fryshman
Jensen Comment
This rings especially true about my two years of
learning Russian and reading a lot of
Pushkin (and not
Pravda) as an undergraduate. I remember
my Russian teacher better than I remember the
Russian language.
The
request is familiar to American ears: "Bring them home." But in
Iraq, where I've just met with American and Iraqi leaders, the
phrase carries a different meaning. It does not refer to the
departure of U.S. troops, but to the return of the millions of
innocent Iraqis who have been driven out of their homes and, in
many cases, out of the country. As for the question of
whether the surge is working, I can only state what I witnessed:
U.N. staff and those of non-governmental organizations seem to
feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt to
scale up their programs. And when I asked the troops if they
wanted to go home as soon as possible, they said that they miss
home but feel invested in Iraq. They have lost many friends and
want to be a part of the humanitarian progress they now feel is
possible. It seems to me that now is the moment to address the
humanitarian side of this situation. Without the right support,
we could miss an opportunity to do some of the good we always
stated we intended to do.
Angelina Jolie
(Actress Angelina Jolie recently visited Iraq in her role as a
"goodwill ambassador" for the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees. In a Washington Post op-ed, Jolie urges a continued
U.S. presence in Iraq for humanitarian reasons), "Staying to
Help in Iraq," The Washington Post, February 28, 2008 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/27/AR2008022702217.html
It's quite a contrast with the attitude of
Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama, who
said last summer that even
preventing genocide was not a sufficient reason for a continuing
presence in Iraq. What does it say about the Democratic Party
that it seems poised to nominate someone who, on the most
pressing concern of the day, is less morally serious than a
Hollywood starlet (and official U.N. Ambassador)?
Wall Street
Journal Editors, "Best of the Web Today," March 1, 2008
Long-range rockets fired from the Gaza
Strip into Israeli cities the past few days were manufactured in
and imported from Iran, according to Israeli security officials
speaking to WND. In a major escalation, Hamas the past few days
has been firing long range Grad rockets at the strategic Israeli
port city of Ashkelon, home to some 125,000 Israelis about 11
miles from Gaza. Ashkelon houses a major electrical plant that
powers most of the Gaza Strip.
Aaron Klein,
"Iranian rockets slam Israel," WorldNetDaily, March ,,
2008 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=57868
Iran wants Iraq all to
itself (especially since Iraq is now producing more oil than
when Saddam ruled Iraq)
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
heading home from Iraq after a two-day visit, again touted the
closer relations between Iraq and Iran and reiterated his
criticism of the United States. "We believe that the forces
which crossed oceans and thousands of kilometers to come to this
region, should leave this region and hand over the affairs to
the people's and government of this region," Ahmadinejad said.
Ahmadinejad's visit follows trips to Iran last year by top
officials of Iraq's Shiite-led government, who have been
fostering a closer relationship with predominantly Shiite Iran
since the Saddam Hussein regime was toppled. His visit was
greeted warmly by Iraq's Shiite Muslim leadership, who have had
longtime links with Iran that predate the overthrow of Hussein.
At the same time, many Sunni Muslims in Iraq dislike the Iranian
regime and have demonstrated against his visit.
"Iran's president
says foreigners must leave Iraq," CNN, March 3, 2008 ---
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/03/03/iraq.iran/index.html
Jensen Comment
When Iran gets control of all Iraq's oil reserves, Iran will no
longer be a "foreigner" in Iraq. But will the Sunni's simply
roll over and play dead or will they go back to to terrorist
tactics? Can Iran really protect the the Shiite-led government
from vicious terror? That's a real dilemma the next U.S.
President and the next leaders of the House and Senate must face
up to if they race to pull the U.S.-led "surge" out of Iraq.
When asked about the this problem, Obama and Clinton deflect the
question by pointing the so-called Bush errors of taking out
Saddam. That's history at this point. The question that no
matter how we got into Iraq, should we surrender the oil and all
non-Sunni factions to Iran? How much will our pull out help
Ahmadinejad's declared purpose of erasing all Jews from the
Middle East? Will World War III commence if the U.S. stands
aside and lets the Middle East to explode into a civil war?
Isn't it strange how we look back at Saddam's rule as the good
old days of vicious suppression of Iran and its Shiite-allies in
Iraq?
Believe it or not, it's the New York
Times. Even more astonishing is this sentence, lower in
the piece: "For that reason, the
American liberation tasted sweetest to the Shiites, who for the
first time were able to worship freely." The "American
liberation"? Wow, we're pretty sure that's a New York Times
stylebook no-no.
James Taranto, "The Limits of Fanaticism," The Wall
Street Journal, March 4, 2008
Most books about poverty are downright depressing. The figures—1
billion people live on less than $1 a day, according to the U.N.
Development Program—are depressing. The complexity of the
problem—poverty is connected to poor health is connected to lack
of clean drinking water is connected to lack of education—is
daunting. And spend any time at, say, the Web site of the World
Bank, the organization that's "Working for a World Free of
Poverty," according to its tagline, and you start to sense a
disconnect between the experts' fancy "comprehensive development
frameworks" and poverty-mapping techniques, and the daily needs.
But one new book on the subject,
Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail
by Paul Polak, offers optimism. Optimism not just for those
fighting poverty and those fighting to get out of it, but for
any company interested in a basically untapped 1 billion-person
market. That optimism is based on the author's real-world
experience as the founder of International Development
Enterprises (IDE), a nonprofit organization that develops and/or
markets products such as treadle pumps and drip irrigation
systems that have already helped 17 million people lift
themselves out of poverty.
Jessie Scanlon,
"Giving the Poor a Means to Work," Business Week,
February 22, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2008/id20080222_960476.htm?link_position=link14
The death Wednesday (Feb. 27)
of William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review and a key
player in intellectual debate, prompted discussion in some
circles of his role in higher education. Buckley’s career was
launched with God and Man at Yale, a critique of his alma
mater, and his magazine devoted considerable critical attention
to higher education. In
a symposium on Buckley published on his magazine’s Web site,
William J. Bennett, the former
education secretary, credited Buckley with having “made” many
conservative scholars’ careers by publishing them and giving
them a broader audience. The magazine’s
Phi Beta Cons blog reminded readers
of one of Buckley’s most famous quips: that he would “sooner be
governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston
telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the
faculty of Harvard University.” A critical look at the impact of
Buckley’s writing on higher education can be found on the blog
College Freedom,
where God and Man at Yale is explored as a tool for
attacking professors and their academic freedom.
Inside Higher Ed,
February 28, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/28/qt
Also see
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/business/media/28buckley.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
It is commonplace to say that Bill Buckley brought American
conservatism into the mainstream. That's not quite how I see it.
To me he came along in the middle of the last century and
reminded demoralized American conservatism that it existed. That
it was real, that it was in fact a majority political entity,
and that it was inherently mainstream. This was after the
serious drubbing inflicted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New
Deal and the rise of modern liberalism. Modern liberalism at
that point was a real something, a palpable movement formed by
FDR and continued by others. Opposing it was . . . what exactly?
Robert Taft? The ghost of Calvin Coolidge? Buckley said in
effect, Well, there's something known as American conservatism,
though it does not even call itself that. It's been calling
itself "voting Republican" or "not liking the New Deal." But it
is a very American approach to life, and it has to do with
knowing that the government is not your master, that America is
good, that freedom is good and must be defended, and communism
is very, very bad. He explained, remoralized, brought together
those who saw it as he did, and began the process whereby
American conservatism came to know itself again. And he did it
primarily through a magazine, which he with no modesty decided
was going to be the central and most important organ of
resurgent conservatism. National Review would be highly
literate, philosophical, witty, of the moment, with an élan, a
teasing quality that made you feel you didn't just get a
subscription, you joined something. You entered a world of
thought.
Peggy Noonan,
"May We Not Lose His Kind," The Wall Street Journal,
February 29, 2008; Page W16 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120423170697200693.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Though liberals do a great deal of talking
about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to
learn that there are other points of view.
William F.
Buckley, Jr.,
Up from Liberalism
(1959)
The attempted assassination of Sukarno
last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in
the room was killed except Sukarno.
William F.
Buckley, Jr., National Review, 1957
I am obliged to confess I should sooner
live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in
the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the
two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
William F.
Buckley, Jr., 1963 statement, as quoted in The Quote
Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by
Ralph Keyes, p. 82
Idealism is fine, but as it approaches
reality, the costs become prohibitive.
William F.
Buckley, Jr., The Cynic's Lexicon : A Dictionary of
Amoral Advice (1984) by Jonathon Green, p. 34
The cost of the drug war is many times
more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the
licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of
non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who
experiment with drugs.
William F.
Buckley, Jr., Address to the New York Bar
Association (Summer 1995); published in "The War On Drugs Is
Lost" in National Review Vol. 48, No. 2 (12 February
1996)
Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs
have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society
is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean
that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens
who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and
property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the
drugs sought after by the minority.
William F.
Buckley, Jr., Address
to the New York Bar Association (Summer 1995); published in "The
War On Drugs Is Lost" in National Review Vol. 48, No. 2
(12 February 1996)
One can't doubt that the American
objective in Iraq has failed. ... Our mission has failed because
Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army
of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for
civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are
latently there, but they have not been able to contend against
the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and
grenades and pistols.
William F.
Buckley, Jr., "It Didn't Work" in National Review
Onlin e(2006-02-24)
The Iraqis we hear about are first
indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the
scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they
join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault
of the Americans.
William F.
Buckley, Jr., "It Didn't Work" in National Review
Onlin e(2006-02-24)
I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is
creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the
feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all
afternoon.
William F.
Buckley, Jr., As quoted in The Book of Positive
Quotations (2007) by John Cook
Selected Videos of
William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley%2C_Jr.
With all the talk about how Mr. McCain
needs to unify his party, lost has been the question of whether
some people will let him. Washington Republicans know he's their
best shot at retaining the White House. Yet many remain
ambivalent about him -- not because they question his
conservatism, but out of resentment that he may get in the way
of their earmarks. This has resulted in a behind-the-scenes
brawl, as spend-happy Republicans resist efforts by wiser heads
to fall in behind Mr. McCain's anti-earmark message. At best,
the spenders risk an embarrassing pummeling by their own nominee
that could hurt them in their own re-election campaigns. At
worst, they could undercut one of Mr. McCain's more persuasive
messages. They shouldn't count on Mr. McCain cutting them slack.
He's always reveled in publicly humiliating pork-barrelers,
including those in his party, and seems gleeful at the prospect
of using his new podium to continue his crusade. He has no
reason to back down now. Unorthodox as he's been on some
conservative issues, on earmarks Mr. McCain has the full backing
of an American public.
Kimberly
Strassel, "Earmark Nation," The Wall Street Journal,
March 7, 2008; Page A14 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120485472308918409.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Jensen Comment
It shows you how corrupt politics is in Washington when our
elected representatives will cross over party lines just to get
at the best hog farmer who will not put them on an earmarking
diet.
Ohio, Indiana and Michigan are losing auto
jobs, but many of these "runaway plants" are not fleeing to
China, Mexico or India. They've moved to more business-friendly
U.S. states, including Texas. GM recently announced plans for a
new plant to build hybrid cars. Guess where? Near Dallas. In
2006 the Lone Star State exported $5.5 billion of cars and
trucks to Mexico and $2.4 billion worth to Canada. Ohio Governor
Ted Strickland, a Democrat who supports Mrs. Clinton, blames his
state's problems on President Bush. But Ohio's economy has been
struggling for years, and most of its wounds are self-inflicted.
Ohio now ranks 47th out of 50 in economic competitiveness,
according to the American Legislative Exchange Council. Ohio
politicians deplore plant closings even as they impose the third
highest corporate income tax in the country (10.5%) and the
sixth highest personal income tax (8.87%). A common joke is that
Ohio lays out the red carpet for companies -- when they leave
the state. By contrast, Texas has no income tax, a huge
competitive advantage.
"Texas v. Ohio,"
The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2008; Page A16 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120450306595906431.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Over the weekend, Chicago lifted itself to
the top of a tax dishonor roll: The city's cumulative sales-tax
rate is now the steepest of any major metropolitan area in
America, at 10.25%. That blows past the former valedictorian,
Memphis (9.25%), as well as New Orleans (9%), Denver (8.6%), and
even New York and Los Angeles. Congratulations . . . Not so
coincidentally, the $426 million that the county optimistically
expects to collect each year will also fund somewhere between
700 or 800 new patronage jobs, and maybe more, which were
lobbied for by the public-employees unions. A scathing report
from a federal court monitor, released Friday, depicts rampant
abuse in county hiring practices. Laurence Msall, president of
the nonpartisan Chicago Civic Federation, argues that the county
already spends its $3 billion budget irresponsibly, pointing to
more than $100 million in possible reforms. Mr. Msall notes
dryly that the county is "not only refusing to tighten its belt,
it's acting as if it doesn't have to wear a belt." Then again,
it'd be business as unusual if patronage were somehow extracted
from Chicago's machine politics. Too bad for the city's actual
businesses and residents.
"Second City No
More," The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2008; Page
A16 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120467859057311951.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Football legend Red Grange loved to tell
the story about the time he visited Calvin Coolidge at the White
House.As the tale goes, when an aide made the introductions by
saying, “Mr. President, this is Red Grange of the Chicago
Bears,” Coolidge replied, “Great! I love circus acts.”True
story? Political folklore? What we do know, and we’ll know it
forever, is that President Bush really did stand at a podium on
the South Lawn yesterday and speak these words: “I’m sorry
(baseball star) Manny
Ramirez
isn’t here. I guess his grandmother died
again.”
Steve Buckley,
Boston Herald, February 28, 2008 ---
Click Here
Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks
on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a
Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News
has learned. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have been critical
of the long-standing North American Free Trade Agreement over
the course of the Democratic primaries, saying that the deal has
cost U.S. workers' jobs. Within the last month, a top
staff member for Obama's campaign telephoned Michael Wilson,
Canada's ambassador to the United States, and warned him that
Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian
sources. The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms
would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face
value.
"Obama staffer gave
warning of NAFTA rhetoric," CTV, February 27, 2008 ---
Click Here
Obama facts and unfair innuendos ---
http://www.freedomsenemies.com/_more/obama.htm
If he rides the wave
all the way to the Democratic presidential
nomination, Barack Obama could do himself a
huge favor by picking a prominent New Yorker
to round out a dream ticket. No, not Hillary
Clinton. Think about this: Vice President of
the United States Michael Bloomberg. Between
McCain's resurgence and Obama's rise, the
stars failed to align for a Bloomberg
third-party run, as he himself said last
night. But 2008 could still deliver an
election that breaks all molds. That's
because Bloomberg is uniquely positioned to
complement Obama's strengths and compensate
for his weaknesses. Here's how: --- By
giving Obama instant economic credibility.
Josh Greenman, "Barack Obama's dream
ticket: Mike Bloomberg for vice president,"
New York Daily News, February 26,
2008 ---
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/02/28/2008-02-28_barack_obamas_dream_ticket_mike_bloomber.html
She torched
her home with her family inside to get
the insurance money, avoid foreclosure
and be with a new boyfriend, authorities
said.Chronicle
News Service/Emily ZoladzSheryl
Christman waits in the jury box in Judge
Dennis Kolenda's court for her
sentencing Monday afternoon. But that
was not enough to make Sheryl Christman
see any jail time for the potential
20-year felony .
. .
In December, Christman pleaded no
contest to the arson. Christman said she
did not expect the fire to spread so
quickly. She torched mattresses in the
attached garage and expected it to "go
up the wall" at most. Instead, the blaze
consumed the garage, spread to the attic
and heavy smoke could be seen 10 miles
away from the home, located near 68th
Street and Kalamazoo Avenue.
John S. Hausman, "Woman gets no jail
time for GR arson," Muskegan
Chronicle, Februiary 27, 2008 ---
http://blog.mlive.com/chronicle/
Meanwhile, from an infinity of online
sources, heads are being filled with data, information, and
images, from all manner of sources — responsible, sensible,
loony, exploitative, and malevolent. Fencing off children from
much of this stuff has become a major parental concern, as well
as a hopeless task, given children’s zest for the forbidden and
preternatural facility at the keyboard.
Dan Greenberg,
"We've Got a Monster on the Loose: It's Called the Internet,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/index.php?id=247
Senior members of the military wing of Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah organization were caught today in the
process of carrying out a terrorist attack, WND has learned. All five terrorists
involved in the incident, members of Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, were on a
new list of gunmen granted amnesty in October by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as a
stated gesture to help bolster Abbas. The terrorists were given amnesty on
condition they disarm, refrain from attacks and spend three months in PA
detention facilities and another three months confined to Nablus, the northern
West Bank city in which they reside. But today the pardoned terrorists engaged
in a firefight with the Israel Defense Forces in Taal, a village outside Nablus,
where they were supposed to be confined to PA facilities.
Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily,
February 27, 2008 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=57466
ElBaradei (U.N. head of nuclear inspections) has taken a
break from his usual scolding of the West to tell the
Iranians that they need to start opening their military
facilities to snap inspections. At the moment, the
Iranians only allow inspections at two facilities,
despite intelligence and evidence that the Iranians
conduct military research on nuclear weapons at other
places. Specifically, the Iranians have never given any
satisfactory response about their
“Green Salt” project.
They also have blocked access to
Parchin, where some suspect
that the Iranians perform most of their military efforts
on nuclear technology.In fact, it’s instructive to look
at both Green Salt and Parchin in light of the NIE. The
New York Times mentions neither, but both arose as
issues during the period of time when the latest NIE
asserts that Iran had stopped pursuing nuclear weapons.
In 2005, two years after the supposed cessation, the US
started making intelligence public about Green Salt,
which is a mid-state between uranium ore and useful
fissile material. The next year, Iran finally released
information it had deliberately hidden from the IAEA on
their processing, but refused to provide any further
explanation.Parchin’s involvement in the nuclear program
came to light in 2003. The IAEA conducted a preliminary
inspection at Parchin, but Iran refused access in 2005
to any further inspections. The facility reportedly
hides a large underground R&D laboratory dedicated to
nuclear-weapons development. However, last November, a
series of mysterious explosions
there occurred, leaving many wondering exactly what
happened and what might be left.
"World: Maybe that NIE was wrong after
all," Hot Air, March 3, 2008 ---
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/03/world-maybe-that-nie-was-wrong-after-all/
The attacks by the janjaweed, the fearsome Arab
militias that came three weeks ago, accompanied by government bombers and
followed by the Sudanese Army, were a return to the tactics that terrorized
Darfur in the early, bloodiest stages of the conflict. Such brutal,
three-pronged attacks of this scale — involving close coordination of air power,
army troops and Arab militias in areas where rebel troops have been — have
rarely been seen in the past few years, when the violence became more episodic
and fractured. But they resemble the kinds of campaigns that first captured the
world’s attention and prompted the Bush administration to call the violence in
Darfur genocide.
Lydia Polgreen, "Scorched-Earth
Strategy Returns to Darfur," The New York Times, March 2, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/world/africa/02darfur.html
Another sensible Roberts Court ruling, another
uproar. "The Supreme Court's decision strips consumers of the rights they've had
for decades," seethed the always-seething Congressman, Henry Waxman. To
decipher: The Court last week restored a measure of rationality to the way
government regulates medicine, while foiling a tort bar plot to rewrite federal
statutes via state lawsuits. The decision resolved a high-profile 1996 suit
against Medtronic, a major medical device maker. A man's balloon catheter
ruptured during an angioplasty, and his lawyers argued that its design was
faulty and its labeling inadequate. The Court disagreed, ruling in Riegel v.
Medtronic that federal power under the Constitution's Commerce Clause is to be
broadly interpreted. In this case it pre-empted state product liability laws for
devices, like Medtronic's catheter, that had undergone the Food and Drug
Administration's most rigorous "Class III" approval process.
"Medical Double Jeopardy," The Wall Street Journal, March
1, 2008, Page A8 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120432817128404103.html?mod=todays_us_opinion
There was a time, and it was pre-Al Gore, when
buying organic meant eggs and tomatoes, Whole Foods and farmer's markets. But in
the past two years, the word has seeped out of the supermarket and into the home
store, into the vacation industry, into the Wal-Mart. Almost three-quarters of
the U.S. population buys organic products at least occasionally; between 2005
and 2006 the sale of organic non-food items increased 26 percent, from $744
million to $938 million, according to the Organic Trade Association. Green is
the new black, carbon is the new kryptonite, blah blah blah. The privileged
eco-friendly American realized long ago that SUVs were Death Stars; now we see
that our gas-only Lexus is one, too. Best replace it with a 2008 LS 600 hybrid
for $104,000 (it actually gets fewer miles per gallon than some traditional
makes, but, see, it is a hybrid). Accessorize the interior with an organic
Sherpa car seat cover for only $119.99. Consuming until you're squeaky green. It
feels so good. It looks so good. It feels so good to look so good, which is why
conspicuousness is key.
Monica Hesse, Greed in
the Name of Green: To Worshipers of Consumption: Spending Won't Save the
Earth," The Washington Post, March 5, 2008 ---
Click Here
In January, French educators were alarmed by reports
of
a rise in student prostitution as a means of paying
for college. Now similar concerns are being raised in Australia.
The Age reported Sunday that 40 percent of
the female sex workers in Melbourne’s brothels are enrolled in the city’s
universities. The general manager of Melbourne’s largest brothel told the
newspaper that university students often were his best employees because
“they’re career oriented and know exactly what they want to get out of the job.”
He added that when the students aren’t with clients, “we allow them to get out
their laptops and study in a spare room.”
Inside Higher Ed, March 3, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/03/qt
U.S. prostitution can be understood in the context
of the cultural normalization of prostitution as a glamorous and
wealth-producing “job” for girls who lack emotional support, education, and
employment opportunities. The sexual exploitation of children and women in
prostitution is often indistinguishable from incest, intimate partner violence,
and rape.
Melissa Farley (2006) Prostitution,
Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not Know in Order To Keep the
Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly," Yale Journal of Law and
Feminism, Volume 18, 2006, pp.109-144.
On one cruel day in the summer of 1995, some 7,000
people, men and young boys, were herded out of the town of Srebrenica by General
Ratko Mladic, of the Bosnian Serb army, and executed in cold blood. When it fell
to the Serbs, the town was flying the flag of the United Nations, it was a "safe
area," patrolled by Dutch troops. But the peacekeepers had simply handed it over
to the Serbs and made their way to safety. Srebrenica shamed Bill Clinton who
had tried his best, over 30 long, bloody months, to stay out of the war for
Yugoslavia. (Here he was true to the policy of his predecessor, George H.W.
Bush, who along with his advisors, believed that America had no dog in that
Balkan fight, as the inimitable James Baker so famously put it.) After
Srebrenica, appeasement of the Serbs came to a swift end, and America would give
the Muslims of Bosnia a chance at some normalcy. America was now in the Balkans,
the Muslim children of the Ottoman Empire had become wards of the Pax Americana.
And so a Balkan mantra would come to pass: "The Yugoslav crisis began in Kosovo,
and it will end in Kosovo." It was on the outskirts of Pristina, Kosovo's
principal city, on June 28, 1989, that Slobodan Milosevic, the arsonist who lit
the fuse of Yugoslavia's wars, recast himself from a communist party hack into a
great nationalist avenger. It was a day fraught with symbolism: the anniversary
of what the Serbs take to be the central drama and epic of their history, their
defeat in 1389 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, on the Field of Blackbirds. In
their self-pitying epic, fate had been cruel to the Serbs -- their capital,
Belgrade was destroyed 40 times, their holy lands in Kosovo lost to the
infidels, overwhelmed by the Albanians. Kosovo may indeed have been the cradle
of the Serbian Church: But in the 1980s and 1990s, the Serbs were deserting
Kosovo by the day, and by the time it descended into mayhem, they accounted for
less than 10% percent of the province's population.
Fouad Ajami, "On Kosovo's
Fields," The Wall Street Journal, February 29, 2008; Page A17
In the
case of “Chicago 10 (2007
movie),” the perspective is shallow
as well as narrow. Events are not simply yanked out of the past
and detached from their contemporary global significance. They
are shown without concern for long-term causes or effects.
Incidents and images are presented without any reference at all
to a larger narrative in which they might have some meaning. No
effort is made to discuss the effects of the Chicago protests
and the conspiracy trial in American politics. And that really
takes some doing.When we talk about the “culture war” now, the
expression is usually just a very tired metaphor. But what
happened outside the Democratic convention was an early battle
in it, and a very literal one.The turmoil gave many people a
sense that the whole country was hurtling towards a much greater
showdown. That prospect has dimmed for the protesters who
marched in the streets, then, but it never really did for the
“silent majority,” as the winner of the presidential campaign
later that year put it.
Scott McLemee, "The
Whole World Was Watching," Inside Higher Ed, March 5,
2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/03/05/mclemee
In a solar thermal plant, mirrors concentrate
sunlight onto some type of fluid that is used, in turn, to boil water for a
steam turbine. Over the past year, developers of solar thermal technology such
as Abengoa, Ausra, and Solel Solar Systems have picked up tens of millions of
dollars in financing and power contracts from major utilities such as Pacific
Gas and Electric and Florida Power and Light. By 2013, projects in development
in just the United States and Spain promise to add just under 6,000 megawatts of
solar thermal power generation to the barely 100 megawatts installed worldwide
last year, says Cambridge, MA, consultancy Emerging Energy Research.
Peter Fairley, MIT's Technology
Review, February 29, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20356/?nlid=906
"The MSA: Segregation Not Integration," by Robert Spencer,
FrontPageMagazine.com, Friday, February 29, 2008 ---
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=3D713728-A526-456D-9356-C1A6A380FF80
Muslim students at Australian universities
have demanded that class schedules be changed to work around their prayer
times, and that male and female students be provided with separate
cafeterias and recreational areas.
This is in line with similar initiatives
in the United States, where the Muslim Students Association carries, on the
“Muslim Accommodations Task Force” page of its website, pdfs of pamphlets
entitled “How to Achieve Islamic Holidays on Campus,” “How to Establish a
Prayer Room on Campus,” and “How to Achieve Halal Food on Campus.”
The MSA directs Muslim students to present
these demands in the context of multiculturalism and civil rights. “Most
campuses,” explains the publication on getting recognition of Islamic holy
“include respecting diversity as a part of their mission statement. They
consider enrollment of diverse students an asset to the community, as they
enhance the classroom learning experience and enrich student life. Try to
find these statements specific to your campus, and explain that recognition
of Islamic holidays would serve as a practical example of upholding these
ideals.”
Such recognition would also serve to right
wrongs done to Muslims on campus: “If any cases of bias against Muslims took
place on campus in the recent past, present the proposal as an opportunity
to foster cooperation and increase understanding.” It would be a simple
matter of civil rights: “Additionally, if special holiday recognition is
being offered to other faith communities (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant),
Muslims have strong grounds to make a petition for equal consideration of
their holiday requirements.”
It’s ironic that such calls for equal
consideration would be made in service of an agenda that is so interested in
being separate: the calls for separate eating and exercise facilities are a
strange discordant note in a movement that claims for itself the mantle of
the American civil rights movements. By the MSA’s lights, the Muslim Rosa
Parks would insist on sitting in a separate place on the bus, and Muslim
students would demand the right not to have to eat at infidel lunch
counters.
This is one of the primary reasons, but by
no means the only reason, why the increasingly shrill demands in Western
countries for accommodation of Muslim practices are not the latest
manifestation of the push for equal rights for minorities, notwithstanding
the posturings and protestations of Muslim leaders. Demanding a place at the
table is not the same thing as demanding a separate table of one’s own. In
the civil rights movement, black Americans were working for full inclusion
in the larger secular democratic culture, not trying to carve out their own
enclave within it. If anything, they had that already, and that was the
problem: if the Supreme Court could conclude in Brown vs. the Board of
Education of Topeka that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of
separate but equal has no place,” because “separate educational facilities
are inherently unequal,” then they are still unequal.
And just as they were deemed unequal in
1954 because they abetted cultural attitudes that exalted one group as
superior to the other, so also today: the demands of Muslim groups for
separate facilities are in the service of a supremacist ideology that
emanates from the Qur’anic assertions that Muslims are the “best of people”
(3:110) while unbelievers are the “vilest of created beings” (98:6).
Unbelievers are unclean (9:28) – which leads to the conclusion, reasonable
to the pious, that Muslims should be chary of contact with them. Every
Western capitulation made to demands for Muslim accommodation only feeds
these supremacist notions, and works directly against the actual goals of
the civil rights movement, which were equal justice and equal rights for
all.
What’s more, the MSA, the chief proponent
of the growing Muslim accommodations movement in the United States, was
listed as a “friend” of the Muslim Brotherhood in the infamous 1992
memorandum which spoke of the “grand Jihad” aimed at “eliminating and
destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its
miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is
eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other
religions.” The victory of Allah’s religion over other religions is a
Qur’anic imperative: “And fight them until persecution is no more, and
religion is all for Allah” (8:39), and it is an inherently supremacist
imperative, in which non-Muslims pay a special tax from which Muslims are
exempt, the jizya, “with willing submission and feel themselves subdued”
(9:29).
Instead of capitulating to Muslim demands
for separate facilities, university administrators and public officials
ought to question those making the demands about their overall goals, and
about the incongruity of claiming that creation of their own enclave is a
matter of equality of rights for all.
But when will we have university
administrators and public officials with that kind of courage and foresight?
Jensen Comment
If
Christian's demanded footbaths, special daily time for praying, and segregated
cafeterias for religious/cultural purposes the ACLU will sue any school that
gives special considerations to Christians. But it's doubtful that that ACLU and
the liberal press will come down as hard on schools that cave in to Muslim
demands.
The problem with giving special consideration to different religions and
cultures in our schools is that it is unconstitutional and even repulsive to
give special consideration to only one or two religions and cultures apart from
all religions and cultures. This is perhaps why the ACLU has fought so hard
against Christianity since the Christianity has had some special privileges
built into schools since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. And the
ACLU has won in almost every instance for the last 60 years. Now what will the
ACLU do when faced nose to nose with Muslim demands for schools and other public
facilities like prisons, small town jails, airports and government buildings?
Should boys and girls have separate dining facilities or should only Muslim boys
and Muslim girls have separate dining facilities in K-12 schools?. Should there
be segregated classrooms? If the ACLU concedes to one religion and culture, why
not others? Should Federal laws be passed granting homeschooling funds and
privileges nationwide for only Muslims?
In fairness, the majority of Muslims in the United States are not making
unrealistic demands or pushing too hard for the ACLU to become their advocates
for religious privileges in public facilities and services. But it will be
interesting to see how the ACLU reacts when and if the time comes like is
happening today in Australia, Canada, and Europe.
Economic Stimulus Payments Information Center
Starting in May, the Treasury will begin sending
economic stimulus payments to more than 130 million households. To receive a
payment, taxpayers must have a valid Social Security number, $3,000 of income
and file a 2007 federal tax return. IRS will take care of the rest. Eligible
taxpayers will receive between $300 to $600 if single or $600 to $1,200 if
married filing jointly. Millions of retires, disabled veterans and low-wage
earners who usually are exempt from filing a tax return must do so this year in
order to receive a stimulus payment. But there are more details to know about.
Find out more here and visit this page regularly for the latest updates.
From the IRS: Economic Stimulus Payments Information Center ---
http://www.irs.gov/irs/article/0,,id=177937,00.html
Jensen Comment
Although I think this is a horrible
Keynesian
tinkering with the economy by a deficit-bound government that cannot afford this
election-year give away, there are some important things to know about the
latest economic stimulus program. For example, not everyone or every family is
eligible for a check. For those who don't normally file, a tax return (Form
1040A) must be filed on or before April 15, 2008 to get a check
Taxpayers in my viewpoint should opt for the electronic payments option to
avoid mix ups or theft in mail delivery. Also beware of scam artists who phone
or write claiming to be from the IRS. The IRS anticipates an explosion of scams
trying to get at your stimulus payment. The good news from a business standpoint
is that the scam artists will spend the money. The bad news is that it’s your
money that might get scammed.
Index ---
http://www.irs.gov/irs/article/0,,id=177937,00.html
|The Basics | Scenarios | Frequently Asked Questions Social Security | Veterans
Benefits | Low Income |
| Scam Alert News Releases, Audio, Fact Sheets and
Legal Guidance |
March 6, 2008 reply from Linda A Kidwell
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
Because many senior citizens living on social
security do not normally file tax returns at this point, our students are
doing a special VITA session at the local senior center. The event is being
widely publicized. The point is to get them to file those returns so they
will get those payments. You might consider recommending it to your VITA
volunteers too!
Linda
Jensen Comment
If Congress wants to help low income elderly and other poor souls why should I
get a bigger stimulus-check than they get? Why should virtually all taxpayers
get a rebate that the government plain and simple cannot afford?
There are better ways to help elderly such as broader coverage of Medicaid,
although it bothers me that fraud is so rampant in the Medicaid system. The
heirs have carefully scammed years ahead to siphon off the savings and
properties of their parents so that Medicaid gets stuck with the bill and the
heirs go on cruises.
Actually the amounts of money received by recipients are so small that they
do virtually nothing ease each person’s burdens. And if the truth is known the
amount of stimulus to the economy is a joke (except may for Wal-Mart that
doesn’t really need it all that bad).
Ed Scribner (Accounting
Professor from New Mexico State University) sent be the souvenir below showing
my picture (Ha Ha).
But along these "Fortune" lines I would have to call the
following March 3 message from Denny Beresford an understatement. In spite of
giving away billions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Charitable Foundation,
Warren
Buffet's portfolio, according to
Forbes Magazine, jumped from $52 billion (Rank
2 in the World in March 2007) to$62 billion (Rank
1 in the World in March 2008).
Warren Buffett's always interesting annual letter to shareholders
for2007 is now available at ---
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2007ltr.pdf
Denny
Humanities departments may take hope in the fact that
Warren Buffet has a Bachelor of Arts undergraduate degree (Nebraska) and rose to
become the most respected and wealthy (self-made) businessman in the world. He
also has a M.S. degree in Economics (Columbia). I have serious reservations
about the new thrust for corporations and large professional firms in accounting
and law to "script" (read that alter the curriculum) in schools as described
below in spite of their best intentions. Think of Warren Buffet majoring in
liberal arts at Nebraska.
"High Schools Add Classes Scripted by Corporations Lockheed, Intel Fund
Engineering Courses; Creating a Work Force," by Anne Marie Chaker, The Wall
Street Journal, March 6, 2008; Page A1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120476410964115117.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
In a recent class at Abraham Clark High School in
Roselle, N.J., business teacher Barbara Govahn distributed glossy classroom
materials that invited students to think about what they want to be when
they grow up. Eighteen career paths were profiled, including a writer, a
magician, a town mayor -- and five employees from accounting giant Deloitte
LLP.
"Consider a career you may never have imagined,"
the book suggests. "Working as a professional auditor."
The curriculum, provided free to the public school
by a nonprofit arm of Deloitte, aims to persuade students to join the
company's ranks. One 18-year-old senior in Ms. Govahn's class, Hipolito
Rivera, says the company-sponsored lesson drove home how professionals in
all fields need accountants. "They make it sound pretty good," he says.
Deloitte and other corporations are reaching out to
classrooms -- drafting curricula while also conveying the benefits of
working for the sponsor companies. Hoping to create a pipeline of workers
far into the future, these corporations furnish free lesson plans and may
also underwrite classroom materials, computers or training seminars for
teachers.
The programs represent a new dimension of the
business world's influence in public schools. Companies such as McDonald's
Corp. and Yum Brands Inc.'s Pizza Hut have long attempted to use school
promotions to turn students into customers. The latest initiatives would
turn them into employees.
Companies that employ engineers, fearful of a
coming labor shortage, are at the movement's forefront. Lockheed Martin
Corp. began funding engineering courses two years ago at schools near its
aircraft testing and development site in Palmdale, Calif., saying it hopes
to replenish its local work force. Starting in 2004, British engine-maker
Rolls-Royce PLC has helped fund high-school courses in topics such as engine
propulsion. Intel Corp. supports curricula in school districts where
engineering concepts are taught as early as the elementary level.
Schools, for their part, have embraced corporate
support as state education funding has remained flat for a decade and
declining housing values now threaten to eat into property-tax revenues.
Teachers, meanwhile, often welcome the lesson plans, classroom equipment and
the corporate-sponsored professional development sessions.
But however well-intentioned, such corporate input
may blur the line between pure academics and a commercial agenda, critics
say. "When you have a corporation or any special interest offering an
incentive, you are distorting the educational purpose of the schools," says
Alex Molnar, an education-policy professor at Arizona State University who
directs the school's Commercialism in Education Research Unit.
Schools Should Decide
The hiring priorities of a company or industry, Mr.
Molnar says, can change quickly. On the other hand, he says, schools should
provide a broad and consistent foundation of knowledge and skills. Deciding
what to teach is "first and foremost, a series of choices," he says.
Historically, those choices have been made by school officials and
professional educators, based on the interests of their community's
children, not on the shifting needs of industry.
Nonetheless, many school officials are receptive.
Tamika Bauknight, the Roselle district's director of curriculum and
instruction, concedes that corporate self-interest is at work in the
curriculum provided by Deloitte, whose career-choice materials include
profiles of the company's chairman of the board and an audit manager. But
she believes students benefit. "If through the curriculum they consider
becoming an accountant and thinking about Deloitte," she says, "that isn't a
bad thing."
Businesses have sought to shape public-school
lessons before, but past initiatives focused more on teaching trades. In the
early 20th century, companies fostered industrial education in high schools
to feed their factory needs. More recently, Cisco Systems Inc. has offered
information-technology certification to students who learn
computer-networking skills. Now, by contrast, companies are seeking to start
training students for professions that often require university degrees.
Robotics for Middle Schoolers
One of corporate-sponsored curricula's largest
conduits into U.S. classrooms is Project Lead the Way, a nonprofit
organization based in Clifton Park, N.Y., that develops engineering
coursework used in more than 2,000 schools nationwide. For high schools, it
offers eight full-year engineering courses, including digital electronics
and civil engineering. It also provides five 10-week units for middle
schools on topics such as robotics.
Project Lead the Way was formed 10 years ago with
an initial $1.5 million grant from a foundation run by Richard Liebich,
chief executive of a tool-manufacturing company based in Orchard Park, N.Y.
Mr. Liebich said he could never find enough engineers to hire, and
envisioned an entity that could help by creating engineering courses for
pre-college students. The group's curriculum is technical, with no
textbooks. Open-ended questions and problems encourage students to be
creative, the organization says.
Project Lead the Way says its courses are
offered as electives, and aren't meant to supplant core subjects typically
taught in school.
"What these companies bring is contemporary
expertise that can sometimes be insulated in a purely academic environment,"
says Niel Tebbano, Lead the Way's vice president of operations. With a
traditional, theoretical approach to math or sciences, he says, "you get the
young people asking, 'Why do I need to learn this?'" The lack of real-world
application for this knowledge, he says, "has been the albatross around
public education's neck."
The group concedes that companies may contribute to
the nonprofit to ensure their own interests are reflected in lessons. The
National Fluid Power Association, an industry trade group based in
Milwaukee, Wis., paid the group $100,000 to hire fluid-power experts to
ensure that concepts on hydraulics and pneumatics would be incorporated into
the courses.
In another case, a senior engineer in the
Indianapolis-based unit of engine maker Rolls-Royce, which had been funding
Project Lead the Way courses in a handful of local schools, noticed what he
considered a lack of material on propulsion. So he helped write a new lesson
for the project's aerospace course. Now, the class has an optional six-day
"Introduction to Propulsion" unit that includes a PowerPoint presentation on
a gas turbine engine "by kind permission of Rolls Royce."
That same aerospace course is scheduled for
revision again, and this time Lockheed Martin is contributing $146,000 to
have a say in the new version. A presentation shown to company executives
outlining Lockheed's educational efforts specifies that "increasing general
interest in math and science for all students" is "not our goal." Nudging
students toward Lockheed, the presentation says, is.
Lockheed is bracing for a worker shortage. The
company estimates that about half of its science- and engineering-based work
force will be retiring in the next decade or so. Meanwhile, interest in
engineering as a career is declining among U.S. students. In a 2007 survey
of more than 270,000 college freshmen conducted by the Higher Education
Research Institute at UCLA, 7.5% said they intended to major in engineering
-- the lowest level since the 1970s. National-security restrictions preclude
the Bethesda, Md., company and other major defense contractors from
outsourcing many jobs overseas.
"We're already within the window of criticality to
get tomorrow's engineers in the classroom today," says Jim Knotts, director
of corporate citizenship for Lockheed. "We want to address a national need
to develop the next generation of engineers -- but with some affinity toward
Lockheed Martin."
Lockheed is particularly eager to refresh the
engineer pool at its giant facility in Palmdale, Calif. Here, at the
southern edge of the Mojave Desert, the company works alongside aerospace
giants Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., designing aircraft and testing
them near an Air Force facility known as Plant 42. Luring workers to this
flat, parched area is a challenge, Lockheed and local officials concede. So
the company, working with local schools, is hoping to develop its own
talent.
Since the 2005-06 school year, Lockheed has
provided $45,000 to fund Project Lead the Way's engineering courses at three
high schools in the local Antelope Valley Union High School District. The
company's contribution pays for materials and supplies for at least three
yearlong courses at each school.
David Vierra, superintendent of the Antelope Valley
Union district near Palmdale, welcomes the corporate presence to an area
that relies on engineers to feed its economy. Young workers with family ties
there may be more likely to put down roots. "We're trying to develop a
home-grown engineer," he says.
Continued in article
Jensen Comments
I know there are pros and cons in all of this, and I definitely have some close
humanities colleagues who will literally hit the ceiling when they read about
corporate scripting of curricula. Actually the term "corporate” is that C-word
in their vocabulary. I hope that backers of corporate scripting of curricula
will find a more diplomatic way of bringing the entrenched “liberal arts”
faculty in on this initiative.
Question
What are the longer-term advantages of a career-oriented major (e.g., a
professional program) versus an academic-oriented major (e.g., a liberal arts
major)?
"Employment and the Undergraduate Degree," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed,
March 5, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/05/jobs
During a period of
economic uncertainty, it’s not much fun
seeing data from generally more prosperous
times. A
new report from
the U.S. Department of Education’s National
Center for Education Statistics takes a look
at employment trends over a 10-year span
starting in 1993, and the outlook was
positive for college graduates. It took time
for some to find a job with “career
potential,” the report notes, but most had
done so by 2003.
The path differed somewhat, particularly in
the early career years, for students
depending on their focus. Those with “career
oriented” majors appeared to become more
established in the workforce earlier than
did their counterparts with “academic”
majors, according to the report.
. . .
“The image
is if you major in an academic subject you’ll be flipping
burgers all your life,” Humphreys said. “This report doesn’t
show that. It does show that [students with career-oriented
majors] get into their career track more quickly, but
suggests that in a few years, there’s not a big difference
in job satisfaction.”
Humphreys
added that while the NCES data is important and relevant,
it’s also somewhat dated. The business environment is
“changing faster than ever,” Humphreys said, and business
leaders are telling the group that it’s most important that
students have a broad set of transferable skills.
AAC&U’s
survey of 300 employers, conducted
last year, showed that new hires had the skills needed for
entry-level work but often lacked the background needed to
take on advanced assignments. (That report didn’t
differentiate among majors.)
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Update on Second Life Virtual Worlds in Accounting, Finance, and Business
March 8, 2008 message from Steven Hornik
[shornik@BUS.UCF.EDU]
I just wanted to pass these
along for those interested in using Virtual Worlds. The first three
articles are related to business school uses of Second Life that appeared in
the Financial Times earlier this week. Followed by a link to a story about
Deloitte's involvement with a virtual world to help teens learn business.
Finally, I've provided links to my blog in which I briefly discuss the
announcement and release yesterday by Second Life of a new viewer in which
Web pages can be brought in-world and thus shared - its static right now but
gives a glimpse of what is coming down the road. And one describing students
using Second Life for completing financial accounting HW assignments.
Financial Times Articles:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/42855396-e8c3-11dc-913a-0000779fd2ac.html
--From first steps to flight - an avatar's journey
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5689e7bc-e8c3-11dc-913a-0000779fd2ac.html
-- A Second Life for classrooms with vision
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f81e8e4-e8c4-11dc-913a-0000779fd2ac.html
--Students take a leap into the virtual world
Deloitte uses Virtual World to Teach Teens About Business
http://snipr.com/21a4z [publications_mediapost_com]
Web on a Prim (almost there):
http://www.mydebitcredit.com/2008/03/07/second-lifes-web-on-a-prim-is-getting-closer/
SL HW assignments:
http://www.mydebitcredit.com/2008/02/29/91-avatars/
_____________________________
Dr. Steven Hornik
University of Central Florida
Dixon School of Accounting
407-823-5739
Second Life: Robins Hermano
http://mydebitcredit.com
yahoo ID: shornik
Bob Jensen's threads on Second Life are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
Question
When will the presidential candidates tackle the real economic crisis facing the
United States?
It's the Dollar, Stupid
If the reality of a collapsing dollar and foreign
exchange turmoil starts to bite consumers where they keep their pocketbooks --
for example, if the U.S. finds it necessary to raise interest rates to entice
foreigners to buy the government bonds that finance our deficit -- the affects
of currency misalignment could quickly move from the realm of dry treatises to
the hyperactive world of live, televised political debate. Media consultants may
grow apoplectic at the thought of having to reduce seemingly complex options
into clever sound bites: Does the candidate advocate a new global monetary order
linked to a universally-recognized reserve asset as a mechanism to guard against
tinkering by self-serving governments? ("Gold: Money We Can Believe In.") Or is
it possible to defend the existing, do-your-own-thing approach to currency
relations, which undermines stable trade and capital flows at the expense of
global prosperity? Meanwhile, foreign-exchange market specialists earn big
profits by gambling -- some $3 trillion daily -- on where currencies might go
next. It's time the candidates devote less time on the minutiae of configuring
the next economic stimulus package, or renegotiating the North American Free
Trade Agreement. They should be thinking about how they will confront the
imminent global currency crisis.
Judy Shelton, "It's the Dollar, Stupid," The Wall Street Journal, March
5, 2008; Page A17 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120468065700512153.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
"The Mess of Mandated Markets: New federal biofuel standards passed
last year will distort the development of innovative technologies," by David
Rotman, MIT's Technology Review, March/April 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20226/?nlid=921
Few things prompt
Washington policymakers
to forget their
professed belief in the
efficiency of free
markets faster than
$100-a-barrel oil
prices--or even the
threat of them. In one
of the most notable
recent examples, as the
price of crude oil edged
toward the $100 mark
late last year, the U.S.
Congress passed, and
President Bush quickly
signed, the Energy
Independence and
Security Act of 2007.
Among its various
provisions, the energy
bill prescribes a
minimum amount of
biofuel that gasoline
suppliers must use in
their products each year
through 2022. The new
mandates, which
significantly expand the
Renewable Fuels Standard
of 2005, would more than
double the 2007 market
for corn-derived
ethanol, to 15 billion
gallons, by 2015. At the
same time, the bill
ensures the creation of
a new market for
cellulosic biofuels made
from such sources as
prairie grass, wood
chips, and agricultural
waste. The standards
call for the production
of 500 million gallons
of cellulosic biofuel by
2012, one billion
gallons by 2013, and 16
billion gallons by 2022.
Not surprisingly, the
ethanol industry is very
happy. The Biotechnology
Industry Organization, a
Washington-based trade
association whose
members include both
large manufacturers and
startup companies
developing new
cellulosic technologies,
suggests that "this
moment in the history of
transportation fuels
development can be
compared to the
transition from whale
oil to kerosene to light
American homes in the
1850s." The new push for
biofuels, the trade
association continues,
is "larger than the
Apollo project or the
Manhattan project" and
will require the
construction of 300
biofuel plants, each
with a capacity of 100
million gallons, at a
cost of up to $100
billion.
In
short, the federal
government has
legislated the growth of
a sizable industry. The
often stated aim of the
biofuel standards is to
reduce greenhouse-gas
emissions and dependence
on foreign oil. And
biofuels, particularly
cellulosic ones, could
arguably play a
significant role in
achieving both those
goals (see "The
Price of Biofuels,"
January/February 2008).
But quite apart from the
value of ethanol and
other biofuels, the
creation of markets by
federal law raises
fundamental questions
about the best way to
implement a national
energy policy. Can
legislated markets
survive economic
conditions and policy
priorities that change
over the long term? And
what role should the
government play in
promoting specific
technologies?
Mandated consumption
levels break the
"one-to-one link"
between market demand
and the adoption of a
technology, says Harry
de Gorter, an associate
professor of applied
economics and management
at Cornell University:
"As an economist, I
don't like it.
Economists like to let
the markets determine
what [technology] has
the best chances." The
new biofuel mandates are
"betting on a particular
technology," he says.
"It is almost impossible
to predict the best
technology. It is almost
inevitable that
[mandates] will generate
inefficiencies." While
de Gorter acknowledges
that some economists
might justify mandated
markets as a way to
promote a desired social
policy, he questions the
strategy's
effectiveness.
"Historically, there are
no good examples of it
working in alternative
energy," he says.
One reason economists
tend to be wary of
mandated consumption
levels is that they can
have unintended
consequences for related
markets. Producing 15
billion gallons of
conventional ethanol
will require farmers to
grow far more corn than
they now do. And even
with the increased
harvest, biofuel
production will consume
around 45 percent of the
U.S. corn crop, compared
with 22 percent in 2007.
The effects on the
agricultural sector will
be various and complex.
|
|
|
|
Livescribe, the pen that records audio while you take notes ---
http://www.livescribe.com/smartpen/videos.html
Notes on the Smart Pen
The
smart
pen that Wired Campus flagged back in May was
unveiled last week at a technology conference in Palm Springs, Calif. The
company behind it, LiveScribe, has been aggressively marketing the device to
college students with the slogan "Never miss a word." It's basically a
combination recording machine and camera. Users take notes while a minirecorder,
embedded in the pen, records whatever is being said. Later, to clarify the
written notes, the user can touch the pen to a specific passage and listen to a
recording of the instructor speaking those words. A tiny camera links what is
being written to what is being recorded. In a takeoff on television commercials
for pharmaceuticals, the smart-pen advertisement below features a student who
suffers from "restless mind syndrome." The pen is offered as a panacea.
Livescribe has set up a Facebook page to push the pen, and
offers to pay college students to promote the
device on their campuses. It's also advertised on the Web site
ThePalestra, where Andy Van Schaack, a senior
lecturer at Vanderbilt University, who is an adviser to LiveScribe, is seen
praising the pen. Will the pen, which sells for about $200, take off with
college students? Will it be used as a crutch for students who are too tired or
distracted to listen to their professors?
Andrea L. Foster, "Notes on the Smart Pen," Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2719&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
See a video at
http://assistivetek.blogspot.com/2008/01/livescribe-pulse-smartpen-to-ship-in.html
But during exams and case discussions in class be careful what scratch “paper”
students are using with the Smart Pen---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19892/?nlid=749&a=f
Bob Jensen's threads on gadgets are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#Technology
March 8, 2008 reply from David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
I’m repeating myself here, but if you allow
students to have smart pens during examinations and case discussion, be
careful what they’re using for scratch “paper” with those pens - Bob Jensen
Bob, if you can repeat yourself, then I'll take the
liberty to repeat myself.
Professors in the classroom who hold themselves out
as a repository of knowledge and who dedicate themselves to transferring
this knowledge to their students have been beta-maxed by the Internet and
various high-tech devices.
Decades of research into how humans learn has led
to a revolution in the collegiate classroom, a revolution that has largely
failed to reach accounting classrooms, I might add. Instead of fearing the
use of smart pens on exams and communication devices during exams, I think
we should embrace their use.
In my opinion, I think that modern college students
have adapted to the knowledge-is-everywhere environment and have become
quite skilled in locating knowledge and regurgitating it (more adept than we
ever were). Where we as professors go wrong is that we force students to
take tests in unrealistic environments. Not only is a pen and paper test
unrealistic and irrelevant in the first place, but we further hamstring our
students by limiting them to only pen and paper and their unexercised
memories, denying them access to knowledge banks and friends during the test
period. If we place unrealistic and unreasonable testing restrictions on our
students, then I see the pandemic of "cheating" as a rational response on
the their part.
Back in 2005 I examined syllabi from 1000+
professors in accounting, economics, marketing, management, and finance, and
concluded that well over 98% of undergraduate business courses were still
built around the glorification of knowledge and its transfer. I think this
shows the potential magnitude of the market for smart pens.
David Albrecht
Question
Have you been waiting on pins and needles waiting for Business Week's 2008
rankings of Business Schools?
See
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_10/b4074049186360.htm
Jensen Comment
There are some important things to keep in mind. Firstly, the rankings of
different news services (particularly Business Week versus US News versus
The Wall Street Journal) are largely in the eyes of the beholders these news
services choose for the rankings. US News uses business school deans who
are heavily influenced by research criteria such as whether a business school is
offering compensation to attract the so-called top research faculty. The Wall
Street Journal uses job recruiters who are influenced by what they think
schools offering the "best buys" for top graduates. Business Week uses
80,000 business school graduates and more than 600 corporate recruiters.
It's never clear to me how any evaluator, in particular a graduate of one
particular business school, is capable of ranking more than 100 schools of
business that she or he knows virtually nothing about. Once a school is in the
top 25 it pretty much stays in the top 25 because evaluators rely so heavily on
previous-year rankings. What else do they have to go on?
Actually there are many dysfunctional aspects of college rankings in general.
The media is not really doing education a service here ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
March 5, 2005 reply from hnouri
[hnouri@TCNJ.EDU]
Bob:
I could be wrong but I do not think graduates of a
school rank other schools. According to Business Week
There are five sources for the undergraduate
ranking: a student survey, a recruiter survey, median starting salaries for
graduates, the number of graduates admitted to 35 top MBA programs, and an
academic quality measure that consists of SAT/ACT test scores for business
majors, full-time faculty-student ratios in the business program, average
class size in core business classes, the percentage of business majors with
internships, and the number of hours students spend preparing for class each
week. The test score, faculty-student ratio, and class size information come
from a survey to be completed by participating schools; the internship and
hours of preparation data come from the student survey.
With regard to students' survey, Business Week
notes:
The survey consists of about 50 questions that ask
students to rate their programs on teaching quality, career services, alumni
network, and recruiting efforts, among other things. Using the average
answer for each of the questions and each question's standard deviation, we
calculate a student survey score for each school.
More information can be found at
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2008/bs20080226_182953.htm
"Does class size matter?" PhysOrg, February 28, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123418382.html
No more vexing problem in education exists today
than the achievement gap in this country. The difference between the
extremes has rightfully attracted national attention, and one of the most
popular policy proposals is to reduce class size—not surprising, since
benchmarks are easily measured.
In his provocative article for the March 2008 issue
of Elementary School Journal, “Do Small Classes Reduce the
Achievement Gap between Low and High Achievers? Evidence from Project STAR”,
Spyros Konstantopoulos (Northwestern University) explores the hard data and
finds that some of our basic assumptions about class size may be incorrect.
Konstantopoulos worked with data on mathematics and
reading achievement provided by Tennessee’s Project STAR (Student/Teacher
Achievement Ratio), an unprecedented four-year longitudinal class-size study
encompassing over 11,000 K-3 students in 79 schools.
The project found, not surprisingly, that smaller
class size is a better situation for the children at all achievement levels,
and previous analyses saw rising achievement on average. For most advocates,
parents, and policy makers, this was enough. But when Konstantopoulos dug
deeper, he found that the children who are already high achievers benefited
the most from the extra attention afforded by smaller classes.
Low achievers also benefited from being in small
classes (compared to low achievers in regular size classes), but they did
not benefit not as much as high achievers. Unfortunately, he also found that
the smaller classes produced higher variability in achievement which
indicates that the achievement gap between low and high achievers is larger
in small classes than in regular size classes, especially in kindergarten
and first grade.
Do smaller classes help students? Yes...and no.
Konstantopoulos finds that “although all types of students benefited from
being in small classes, reductions in class size did not reduce the
achievement gap between low and high achievers” He concludes by calling for
more observational studies of classrooms themselves, as we still do not know
how to address one of the most vexing problems—the achievement gap between
students—facing educators and policy-makers, today.
Source: University of Chicago
Bob Jensen's threads on class size issues are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ClassSize
"Satire as Racial Backlash Against Asian Americans," by Sharon S. Lee,
Inside Higher Ed, February 28, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/28/lee
Imagine for a minute if student leaders at elite
college campuses devoted themselves to mocking black people or Jewish people
or gay people. I’m not talking about drunk students posting pictures of
their offensive parties on Facebook, but student newspaper editors – thought
of as being both smart and progressive – giving space over for the sole
purpose of making fun of people because of their background. It’s hard to
imagine. And yet recently this phenomenon of racial caricatures as “satire”
has emerged with Asian Americans as the object of the jokes.
Why Asian
Americans? After all, Asian American college students tend
to make headlines as super students, attending prestigious
private and public colleges at rates way above their state
demographics (hence they are “over-represented") and as
excelling academically above and beyond any other racial
group, whites included. This “model minority” image is not
new and has been around since at least the late 1960s, with
Asian Americans often embraced as symbols of the merits of
hard work and individual effort, all undertaken without
complaint or political agitation. So ... shouldn’t that mean
that Asian Americans would be seen as well integrated —
academic and otherwise — with white students?
Indeed,
this image and the stereotype that all Asian American
college students are high achieving have led to a belief
that they are well integrated into higher education. I would
go so far as to say this model minority image has also
conveyed that racism and racial hostility are no longer
issues for Asian American students. It is not uncommon for
colleges to exclude Asian Americans from affirmative action
recruitment efforts and services for “minority” students.
Yes, it is true that unlike African Americans, Latinos, or
Native Americans, many Asian ethnic groups —
though not all — do not struggle
with severe under-representation in college matriculation or
retention rates. However, does this mean that they are not
racial minorities and do not continue to confront racial
issues on campuses? In my years as a student and
administrator on various university campuses, I have been
troubled by what I have observed to be the increasing
exclusion of Asian Americans from “minority” student or
diversity discussions. Asian Americans are not seen as
contributing to diversity though, in and of themselves, they
are extremely diverse. They are frequently not identified as
being minority students; when I see conference papers,
journal articles, or Web discussion on “minority” students,
I look for any mention of Asian Americans, only to find,
more often than not, their omission. The focus now seems to
be on “underrepresented minorities” — or code for “minority,
but not Asian American.” Asian Americans have been what I
call “de-minoritized,” erased from these discussions.
By no means
do I want to detract from the critical issues of
representation that persist for African American, Latino,
and Native American students; under-parity is a serious
signal of inaccessibility and hostility for students of
color grounded in long and problematic history. However, I
do not subscribe to the presumption that the opposite of
under-representation (over-representation) means that a
racial non-white group has achieved integration and full
acceptance. In fact, in the case of Asian Americans, their
over-presence in competitive institutions such as Ivy League
colleges has heightened a sense of backlash that takes
highly racialized overtones and contributes to a negative
campus climate for this “high achieving” group. Enter the
campus paper satire, the latest manifestation.
As many
Asian American studies scholars have pointed out, Asian
Americans are depicted as model minorities but they are also
portrayed as foreigners, disloyal to America, and
suspicious. Despite generations of citizenship in the United
States (after years of denial of naturalization rights for
Asian immigrants), Asian Americans are still seen as foreign
and un-American, often as the “enemy” during economic and
military crises, as during the World War II incarceration of
Japanese Americans, during the 1980s economic recession and
competition with Japan’s automotive industry that lay the
backdrop to the beating and death of Vincent Chin, and
currently with post-September 11 depictions of South Asians
and Muslims as terrorists. Dual images of Asian Americans as
model minorities, people to be praised and emulated and
embraced, and foreign threats, people to be watched,
monitored, and distrusted, have long been a part of U.S.
history.
Recently,
Asian American college students have emerged in the media in
this foreigner/ invading guise — as the butt of “satirical”
jokes published by college student papers. Whether or not
these articles are “satires” or offensive representations is
not my point. My focus is on the powerful and racialized
imagery evoked — the jokes that continue to depict Asian
Americans as foreign, un-American, inscrutable, non-English
speakers— basically as anything but a regular college
student on a university campus. And my focus is on the fact
that often times not many people are laughing at these
satires.
For
instance, in October of 2006, Jed Levine published a
“modest proposal for an immodest proposition”
for the UCLA Daily Bruin. Speaking as a white
male, he identified as an “underrepresented minority” and
pointed to Asian Americans as the real problem who took away
admissions slots from Black and Latino students and proposed
a solution to the “Asian invasion” as funneling “young Maos
and Kim Jongs” into a new UC campus “UC Merced Pandas.” In
January 2007, the Daily Princetonian published its
annual “joke issue” that included
a satire of “Lian Ji", a twist on Jian Li, the Chinese
American student at Yale,
who filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department for
Civil Rights claiming his
rejection from Princeton was due to his ethnicity. The joke
article, from “Lian’s” point of view was written in broken
English, complaining that Princeton did not accept “I the
super smart Asian,” and touting the stereotypical nerdy
Asian American credentials of winning record science fair
awards, memorizing endless digits of pi, and playing
multiple orchestral instruments simultaneously for the New
Jersey youth orchestra. Ultimately, “Lian” accepts his fate
at Yale saying, “I mean, I love Yale. Lots of bulldogs here
for me to eat.”
Most
recently, Inside Higher Ed reported on yet another
satire in the University of Colorado at Boulder paper,
The Campus Press, which resulted in controversy and a
statement by the chancellor.
In the satire, Max Karson, noticed
the tensions that Asian American students exhibited towards
whites. While pointing out the racial tensions on both
sides, Karson deduces that Asians just hate whites, and it
was “time for war.” Such efforts included steps to find all
Asian Americans on campus (easily identifiable by areas of
campus they frequent and by their ability to do a calculus
problem in their heads), forcing them to eat bad sushi with
forks; and a test for them to display emotions beyond a
normal deadpan (read: inscrutable) face. At the end, Asian
homes will be redecorated “American” style, replacing rice
cookers with George Forman Grills and the like.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads about controversies in higher education are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Question
Can lowly American "Dr." degrees be illegal in Germany even if the doctoral
degrees are from Stanford, Harvard, Cal Tech, Princeton, Yale, and UC Berkeley?
You must have a superior Ph.D from Germany to be a "Dr." or is that "Herr Dr.?"
"American Ph.D.s Face German Prosecution for
Impersonating "Drs." by Alexis Madrigal, Wired News, March 5, 2008 ---
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/american-phds-f.html
Several
American scientists face up to a
year in German prison for using
the honorific "Dr." on their
websites and business cards,
Chemical and Engineering News
reports.
According
to German law, only individuals
receiving doctorates from
European Union universities may
use the title without receiving
permission from the authorities.
Both state and national law
prevent the use of "Dr." by
lowly American Ph.Ds, but the
federal penalty carries the
stiffer fine:
Breaking the state law is
punishable with a fine akin
to that associated with a
traffic ticket. However,
breaking the federal law is
punishable by a larger fine
or up to one year in jail...
Up to
seven American researchers
associated with the
highly-respected
Max Planck Society
institutes
have faced or are facing
charges, although one scientist
described the problem as no more
than "a big annoyance." After
all, if the doctors, merely tack
a Ph.D. on the end of their
names, rather than a Dr. in
front, they guarantee staying
out of the Justizvollzugsanstalt.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
With this silly law in place, when I accompany my wife to Germany I'm strictly
Mr. Erika better yet just plain Bob. Of course in England I cannot be a
Bobby. I’ve always thought the use of the “Dr.” in front of a name should be
reserved for practicing MDs.
Question
Does the bursting of the subprime bubble shatter the theory of Black-Scholes
hedging of market risk?
"Inside Wall Street's Black Hole," by
Michael Lewis, National Business News, March 2008 Issue ---
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/02/19/Black-Scholes-Pricing-Model/?PMID#
The striking thing about the seemingly endless
collapse of the subprime-mortgage market is how egalitarian it has been.
It's nearly impossible to draw a demographic line between the victims and
the perps. Millions of ordinary people ignorant of high finance have lost
billions of dollars, but so have the biggest names on Wall Street, and both
groups made exactly the same bet: that real estate values would never fall.
Stan O'Neal, the former C.E.O. of Merrill Lynch, was fired for the same
reason the lower-middle-class family in the suburban wasteland between Los
Angeles and San Diego may have lost its surprisingly nice home. Both
underestimated the likelihood of an unlikely event: a financial panic. In
retrospect, the small army of Wall Street traders who lost tens of billions
of dollars in subprime-mortgage investments looks as naive and foolish as
the man on the street. But there's another way of viewing this crisis. The
man on the street, for the first time, acted on the same foolish principles
that have guided the behavior of sophisticated Wall Street traders for the
past few decades.
If you had to pick a moment when those principles
first appeared a bit shaky, you could do worse than the 1987 stock market
crash. Black Monday was the first of a breed: a panic that suggested
disastrous economic and social consequences but in the end had no serious
effects at all. The bursting of the internet bubble, the Asian currency
crisis, the Russian government bond default that triggered the failure of
the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management—all of these extreme events
seemed, in the heat of the moment, to have the power to change the world as
we know it. None of them, it turned out, was that big of a deal for the U.S.
economy or for ordinary citizens. But the 1987 crash marked the beginning of
something else too—a collapse brought about not by real or even perceived
economic problems but by the new complexity of financial markets.
A new strategy known as portfolio insurance,
invented by a pair of finance professors at the University of California at
Berkeley, had been taken up in a big way by supposedly savvy investors.
Portfolio insurance evolved from the most influential idea on Wall Street,
an options-pricing model called Black-Scholes.
The model is based on the assumption that a trader can suck all the risk out
of the market by taking a short position and increasing that position as the
market falls, thus protecting against losses, no matter how steep. Nearly
every employee stock-ownership plan uses Black-Scholes as its guiding
principle. A pension-fund manager sitting on billions of U.S. equities and
fearful of a crash needn't call a Wall Street broker and buy a put option—an
option to sell at a set price, limiting potential losses—on the S&P 500.
Managers can create put options for themselves, cheaply, by shorting the S&P
as it falls, and thus, in theory, be free of all market risk.
Good theory. The glitch was discovered only after
the fact: When a market is crashing and no one is willing to buy, it's
impossible to sell short. If too many investors are trying to unload stocks
as a market falls, they create the very disaster they are seeking to avoid.
Their desire to sell drives the market lower, triggering an even greater
desire to sell and, ultimately, sending the market into a bottomless free
fall. That's what happened on October 19, 1987, when the sweet logic of
Black-Scholes was shown to be irrelevant in the real world of crashes and
panics. Even the biggest portfolio insurance firm, Leland O'Brien Rubinstein
Associates (co-founded and run by the same finance professors who invented
portfolio insurance), tried to sell as the market crashed and couldn't.
Oddly, this failure of financial theory didn't
lead Wall Street to question Black-Scholes in general.
"If you try to attack it," says one longtime trader of
abstruse financial options, "you're making a case for your own
unintelligence." The math was too advanced, the theorists too smart; the
debate, for anyone without a degree in mathematics, was bound to end badly.
But after the crash of 1987, individual traders at big Wall Street firms who
sold financial-disaster insurance must have smelled a rat. Across markets—in
stocks, currencies, and bonds—the price of insuring yourself against
financial disaster rose. This rise in prices and the break with Black-Scholes
reflected two new beliefs: one, that huge price jumps were more probable and
likely to be more extreme than the Black-Scholes model assumed; and two,
that you can't manufacture an option on the stock market by selling and
buying the market itself, because that market will never allow it. When you
most need to sell—or to buy—is exactly when everyone else is selling or
buying, in effect canceling out any advantage you once might have had.
"No one believes the original assumptions anymore,"
says John Seo, who co-manages Fermat Capital, a $2 billion-plus hedge fund
that invests in catastrophe bonds—essentially bonds with put options that
are triggered by such natural catastrophes as hurricanes and earthquakes.
"It's hard to believe that anyone—yes, including me—ever believed it. It's
like trying to replicate a fire-insurance policy by dynamically increasing
or decreasing your coverage as fire conditions wax and wane. One day, bam,
your house is on fire, and you call for more coverage?"
THE PROBLEM
This is interesting: The very theory underlying
all insurance against financial panic falls apart in the face of an actual
panic. A few smart traders may have abandoned the theory, but the market
itself hasn't; in fact, its influence has mushroomed in the most fantastic
ways. At the end of 2006, according to the Bank for International
Settlements, there were $415 trillion in derivatives—that is, $415 trillion
in securities for which there is no completely satisfactory pricing model.
Added to this are trillions more in exchange-traded options, employee stock
options, mortgage bonds, and God knows what else—most of which, presumably,
are still priced using some version of Black-Scholes. Investors need to
believe that there's a rational price for what they buy, even if it requires
a leap of faith. "The model created markets," Seo says. "Markets follow
models. So these markets spring up, and the people in them figure out that,
at least for some of it, Black-Scholes doesn't work. For certain kinds of
risk—the risk of rare, extreme events—the model is not just wrong. It's very
wrong. But the only reason these markets sprang up in the first place was
the supposition that Black-Scholes could price these things fairly."
Continued in artricle
Jensen Comment
Although the Black-Scholes Model may be popular when companies are valuing stock
options, the fact of the matter is employees tend not to like this model for
employee stock options because they place a higher premium on the possibility
that the options will take at worthless value ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory/sfas123/jensen01.htm
Things to Consider When Valuing Options
"How to “Excel” at
Options Valuation," by Charles P. Baril, Luis Betancourt, and
John W. Briggs, Journal of Accountancy, December 2005 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/dec2005/baril.htm
This is one of the best articles for accounting educators on issues of
option valuation!
Research shows that
employees value options at a small fraction of their Black-Scholes
value, because of the possibility that they will vest underwater. ---
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3014835
"Toting Up Stock
Options," by Frederick Rose, Stanford Business, November 2004,
pp. 21 ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0411/feature_stockoptions.shtml
How to value
stock options in divorce proceedings ---
http://www.optionanimation.com/MarlowHowToValueStockOptionsInDivorce.htm
How the courts
value stock options ---
http://www.divorcesource.com/research/edj/employee/96oct109.shtml
Search for the
term options at
http://www.financeprofessor.com/summaries/shortsummaries/FinanceProfessor_Corporate_Summaries.html
"Guidance on fair
value measurements under FAS 123(R)," IAS Plus, May 8, 2006 ---
http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
Deloitte &
Touche (USA) has updated its book of guidance on FASB Statement No.
123(R) Share-Based Payment:
A Roadmap to Applying the Fair Value Guidance to Share-Based Payment
Awards (PDF 2220k). This second edition
reflects all authoritative guidance on FAS 123(R) issued as of 28 April
2006. It includes over 60 new questions and answers, particularly in the
areas of earnings per share, income tax accounting, and liability
classification. Our interpretations incorporate the views in SEC Staff
Accounting Bulletin Topic 14 "Share-Based Payment" (SAB 107), as well as
subsequent clarifications of EITF Topic No. D-98 "Classification and
Measurement of Redeemable Securities" (dealing with mezzanine equity
treatment). The publication contains other resource materials, including
a GAAP accounting and disclosure checklist. Note that while FAS 123 is
similar to
IFRS 2 Share-based Payment, there are
some measurement differences that are
Described Here.
Bob Jensen's
threads on employee stock options are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory/sfas123/jensen01.htm
Bob Jensen's
threads on fair value accounting are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#FairValue
Bob Jensen's
threads on valuation are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/roi.htm
Cuomo's Latest Targets Include Universities' Deals With Credit-Card
Providers
Agreements with credit-card providers, however, appear
to be only a portion of what Mr. Cuomo is now exploring. A deputy counsel to the
attorney general, Benjamin M. Lawsky, this week outlined wide-reaching plans to
broaden the office's investigations into conflicts of interest in the
arrangements between colleges and companies that do business with the
institutions or their students and alumni. The new investigative work will
involve banking, health-insurance, textbook, food-service, and credit-card
companies that have business relationships with hundreds of American colleges,
Mr. Lawsky told a gathering of educators and guidance counselors from school
districts on New York's Long Island on Wednesday, Newsday reported.
Paul Basken, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 29, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/02/1898n.htm?utm_source=aw&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on the dirty secrets of credit card companies, banks,
and credit rating agencies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#FICO
Bob Jensen's threads on the accountability of colleges and conflicts of
interest are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Accountability
March 6, 2008 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
ACADEMIC LITERACY AND NEW MEDIA
"The process of composing texts in a world full of
new media technologies requires us to reconfigure teaching and learning in
remarkably innovative and, perhaps, ungrammatical ways."
In "Re-Inventing the Possibilities: Academic
Literacy & New Media"
(FIBRECULTURE JOURNAL, issue 10, 2007), Cheryl Ball
and Ryan Moeller present a webtext that both discusses and "demonstrates the
possibilities of using new media to teach students critical literacy skills
applicable to the 21st century." The authors express their perspectives as
"converging narratives," sometimes speaking individually, sometimes
together, and providing the reader visual cues in the text. The paper is
available at
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/ball_moeller/index.html
Fibreculture Journal [ISSN 1449-1443] is a
peer-reviewed international journal that "explores the issues and ideas of
concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social
formations." For more information, contact: Dr. Andrew Murphie, School of
Media and Communications, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of
New South Wales, Sydney 2052 Australia;
email: a.murphie@unsw.edu.au ;
Web:
http://journal.fibreculture.org/
......................................................................
NEW MODELS OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
"In the past, it was useful to equate scholarly
communication with the publication of monographs and journals, a process
that could be clearly distinguished from other communication practices
employed by scholars.
The substantial expense, organized effort, and
prolonged production and distribution process all readily distinguished
communication involving tangible publications. These historic distinctions
are now substantially blurred. As most forms of communication become
untethered from the production of physical artifacts, some of the
terminology of scholarly communication has been stretched to adapt. At the
same time, publishing itself has become a term of much fuzziness." In "Talk
About Talking About New Models of Scholarly Communication" (JOURNAL OF
ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING, vol. 11, no. 1, Winter 2008), Karla L. Hahn considers
some "dangers" that could impede creation of new scholarly communication
systems, including:
"Too many believe that change can wait."
"Focusing on the publishing market can become
myopic."
"Scholarly communication cannot be considered
somehow distinct
from the research process."
Hahn, Director of the Office of Scholarly
Communications at the Association of Research Libraries, argues that greater
dialogue is needed between scholars and researchers and the library
community that supports them. She proposes questions to get the conversation
started.
Some include:
"Who has access to the scholarly communication
system and
scholarly publications?"
"What do quality and value mean in the Internet
age?"
"What is the right balance between the market and
the gift
economy that underpins all research and scholarly
publishing?"
"What are appropriate roles of research
institutions in
supporting change in scholarly communication and
providing
publishing infrastructure and dissemination
capabilities?"
The paper is available at
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0011.108
The Journal of Electronic Publishing [ISSN
1080-2711] is "a forum for research and discussion about contemporary
publishing practices, and the impact of those practices upon users. . . . [C]ontributors
and readers are publishers, scholars, librarians, journalists,students,
technologists, attorneys, retailers, and others with an interest in the
methods and means of contemporary publishing." For more information,
contact: University of Michigan Library, Scholarly
Publishing Office, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1104 USA;
email:
jep-info@umich.edu ; Web:
http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org/
......................................................................
LEARNING TRENDS IN LEARNING TRENDS
To celebrate its 500th issue, the editor of
LEARNING TRENDS newsletter invited readers to share their thoughts about how
the delivery of training and education has changed over the past ten years
and what trends they see as a result of new technologies and pedagogies. The
issue is available at
http://www.masieweb.com/p7/LearningTRENDS-500.pdf
Elliot Masie's Learning Trends is published by The
Masie Center.
Current issues are available at
http://trends.masie.com/
Subscription information is available at
http://trends.masie.com/
For more information, contact: 95 Washington St.,
PO Box 397, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 USA; tel: 518-350-2200;
email:
emasie@masie.com;
Web:
http://www.masie.com/
......................................................................
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES IN 2008
Each year since 2001, MIT's TECHNOLOGY REVIEW has
published a list of ten emerging technologies -- those "most likely to alter
industries, fields of research, and even the way we live." Some in the area
of information technology include:
-- Modeling Surprise
"Definition: Surprise modeling combines data mining
and machine learning to help people do a better job of anticipating and
coping with unusual events."
"Impact: Although research in the field is
preliminary, surprise modeling could aid decision makers in a wide range of
domains, such as traffic management, preventive medicine, military planning,
politics, business, and finance."
-- Offline Web Applications
"Definition: Offline Web applications, developed
using Web technologies such as HTML and Flash, can take advantage of the
resources of a user's computer as well as those of the Internet."
"Impact: Developers can quickly and cheaply build
full-fledged desktop applications that are usable in a broad range of
devices and operating systems."
-- Reality Mining
"Definition: Personal reality mining infers human
relationships and behavior by applying data-mining algorithms to information
collected by cell-phone sensors that can measure location, physical
activity, and more."
"Impact: Models generated by analyzing data from
both individuals and groups could enable automated security settings, smart
personal assistants, and monitoring of personal and community health."
The complete article is available at
http://www.technologyreview.com/specialreports/specialreport.aspx?id=25
Technology Review [ISSN 1099-274X] is published six times a year by
Technology Review, Inc., a Massachusetts Institute of Technology enterprise.
For more information, contact Technology Review, One Main Street, 7th Floor,
Cambridge, MA 02142 USA; tel: 617-475-8000; fax: 617-475-8042; Web:
http://www.technologyreview.com/
......................................................................
ACCESSIBLE TECHNOLOGY GUIDE
"Accessible Technology: A Guide for Educators,"
Published by Microsoft, "provides information about accessibility and
accessible technology resources to help educators worldwide ensure that all
students have equal access to learning with technology." The document
includes accessibility fact sheets, tutorials, demo, videos, and other
training materials that may be used for non-profit educational and training
purposes. The 48-page guide is in MS Word format and can be downloaded at
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/education/default.aspx
For more on the accessibility of Microsoft
products, the company maintains a website at
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/
with demos and tutorials.
Bob Jensen's threads on education technologies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Question
Do currency fund managers earn their astronomical fees?
"NYU Stern Finance Professor’s New Research Shows Most Actively Managed
Currency Funds Fail to Outperform a New Benchmark," Business Wire, February 26,
2008 ---
Click Here
Do most currency fund managers deserve their high
fees? According to a new study by NYU Stern Finance Professor Richard Levich
and co-author Momtchil Pojarliev, Head of Currencies at Hermes Investment
Management, the answer is no. Their study is the first to challenge
conventional wisdom that professional currency hedge fund managers earn very
large returns and that the appropriate benchmark is zero. Arguing that the
appropriate benchmark is not zero, but rather the realized return on several
easily replicated currency strategies (Carry, Trend, Value and Volatility),
Professor Levich and Mr. Pojarliev find that just as equity fund indexes
tend to outperform mutual fund managers, a collection of currency return
indices outperforms most currency fund managers.
Performing an analysis for an index of many
currency funds, and also for 34 individual funds over the 2001-06 period,
Professor Levich and Mr. Pojarliev find that:
- 75 percent of
currency fund managers do not outperform a benchmark based on several
easily implemented trading strategies
- Most returns
that currency fund managers earn are related to a few simple trading
styles, or trading factors
- 25 percent of
managers in the sample do earn genuine excess returns; and some of those
appear related to timing ability
Their findings could put pressure on fees charged
by currency fund managers since it is possible for investors to easily
replicate most returns of currency managers at low cost by using newly
created exchange traded funds related to the author’s
new benchmark for performance.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
"IRS Survey: Most U.S. Taxpayers are
Honest," SmartPros, February 27, 2008
Fear of an audit is only one
factor behind most people's belief that they should pay their fair share of
taxes, according to a survey by the IRS Oversight Board.
Ninety-five percent of those
polled last August either completely or mostly agreed that it is every
American's civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes. That figure was up
one percentage point from a similar survey taken last year.
The board, comprised of
private sector advisers to the Internal Revenue Service, also found that 84
percent said that it was not at all acceptable to cheat on your income
taxes, down slightly from 86 percent in 2006.
Eight percent said it was
permissible to cheat "a little here and there" and five percent backed
cheating "as much as possible."
The survey, the result of
more than 1,000 interviews, also showed that 89 percent completely or mostly
agreed that those who cheat on their taxes should be held accountable. Sixty
percent said it was everyone's personal responsibility to report anyone who
cheats on his or her taxes.
Asked about factors that
influence honesty in taxpaying, 54 percent said fear of an audit was a major
factor or somewhat of a factor. That was down from 61 percent in 2006.
Overall, the IRS audits about 1 percent of individual returns.
Another 61 percent said
third-party reporting of their income influenced their decision to be
honest, while 87 percent listed personal integrity as having a great deal or
some influence.
The poll had a margin of
error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Jensen Comment
If I had to pick one thing that has done to most in recent years to improve
honesty I would have to say it is 1099 reporting of outside income coupled with
the IRS ability to scan these reports into a database. This has not had as much
impact where employers of outside contractors do not file 1099 forms (such as
when you hire a man or woman to paint and paper your living room), but it has
helped for reporting interest, dividends, lecture fees at universities and
conferences, reviewer fees, etc.
Bob Jensen's tax helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
"Two Ways to Keep Track of Your Travel Plans
A Virtual Assistant, A Site to Chat Up Fellow Travelers," by Katherine
Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2008; Page D5 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120407311019995113.html
This week, I tested two free Web
sites that don't try to steal users away from their trusted travel Web
sites. Instead, these sites attempt to make your already booked reservations
more useful and accessible.
I tested two such sites: TripIt
Inc.'s
www.TripIt.com,
which acts as a virtual assistant to generate
schedules using your reservations; and Groopvine (http://Groopvine.Groople.com),
a feature offered by Groople, Englewood, Colo., that brings social
networking to group travel plans. Both travel aids became available in
September, though Groopvine has been released only in its beta, or testing,
stage.
As someone who makes travel
arrangements for about 10 work-related or personal trips every month, I paid
close attention to the simplicity and usefulness of these sites. TripIt's
straightforward approach makes it addictive: When I forwarded travel
confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com, the information in each reservation
was automatically assessed, compiled and organized into a schedule, which
was emailed to me in seconds.
Groople (a mashing of the words
"Groups" and "People") started four years ago as a site that helped big
groups book hotels, flights and other travel arrangements. Groople's new
Groopvine tool offers group booking, but it focuses on working as an online
forum where trips can be discussed among those in the traveling group.
Photos, polls, videos and Web feeds can be added to each group's trip page,
prompting everyone to participate in the trip planning -- or at least get
excited about it.
I found a few hiccups on both sites.
TripIt duplicates plans on a schedule if you accidentally forward a
confirmation email more than once, and it works with most but not all
reservations. Groopvine's trip pages are rough around the edges in some
places, obscuring key features and making certain flight and hotel ideas
impossible to share with the group. But each site is helpful in its own way.
TripIt is a refreshing switch from
the Web sites that force people to create usernames and passwords before
doing anything. I started using TripIt by forwarding an Expedia email
reservation to plans@tripit.com
. Less than a minute later, I received an email from
TripIt that included a link to my itinerary of flights, local weather
forecasts for the duration of my vacation and maps related to where I was
going. This email also included an assigned account ID (the email address
from which I forwarded the reservation) and a password that I easily changed
from within the account's Web settings.
Along with this first test from
Expedia, I forwarded a variety of other reservations to TripIt including
bookings for a hotel in Atlanta, a rental car in Washington, D.C., and a
round-trip Amtrak train from D.C. to Wilmington. I forwarded the
reservations from various email addresses (as long as they were listed in my
account), and each reservation was added to the right itinerary according to
date.
TripIt can also accept forwarded
restaurant reservations made on OpenTable or TopTable and will sort these
into the itinerary.
This Web site's idea of asking users
to do very little to get a fully organized schedule works well, though
everything can be edited. I unknowingly forwarded the same car rental to
plans@tripit.com twice and two car reservations appeared on my itinerary,
making me think I booked two cars until I saw the confirmation number
repeated and deleted one. Attractive pre-loaded icons or your own photos can
be added to the top of each schedule, as well as other plans for while
you're traveling, including images and Web links.
A feature called TripIt To Me lets
you retrieve anything loaded into TripIt by simply emailing a command to the
site, such as "Get Flight Tomorrow." This worked well on my BlackBerry.
I started using Groopvine by signing
up and creating a trip page for an annual vacation. I walked through steps
to create my page, which I titled and set to a certain color scheme. I chose
pink hues and added various sections to my page for displaying polls (to get
votes from invited travelers), photos, videos, RSS feeds (for news related
to the trip destination, for instance), weather, group discussions and
useful Web sites.
I invited a group of friends to join
my trip, and everyone accessed the trip page without needing to first become
a member of Groopvine. Instead, usernames and passwords are automatically
created for return sign-ins. In a few short steps, I made one poll asking
friends where they thought we should go and another to ask them how many
days they preferred to spend on vacation.
My fellow travelers and I added
photos to the page that showed up in handsome Web 2.0 fashion, popping out
from the screen in a box overlaid on the page at the click of a button. But
I was disappointed that more of the site didn't take advantage of this
technology, which saves users from jumping to new Web pages. While browsing
hotels and flights -- two important parts of travel arrangements -- I was
directed to sites away from my personalized trip page.
Users can share hotel suggestions
with the group by selecting up to five at once and asking others which they
prefer, including details like room rates and amenities. When starting a
trip, you must choose from a list to tell Groopvine what the trip is for
(i.e. class reunion, sports team travel, family vacations, etc.). From that
information, Groopvine suggests certain hotels depending on your group. A
school trip, for example, would automatically return results with hotels
rather than motels because motels don't keep kids as contained and safe.
But in a search for Arizona hotels, I
couldn't share any of my choices with the group without first booking rooms.
Groople says 70% of its hotels are shareable before booking, so I guess I
picked the wrong city. I looked at flights and fares from various airlines,
but (again) couldn't share my findings with the group unless I booked a trip
first or knew specific details about flight options. Groople says sharing
flight information before booking -- as is done with hotels -- isn't
possible yet, though the company is working on finding a way to do it.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's travel helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Travel
T-Mobile Service Ties Cellphones to Home, With Some Sacrifices
The service, being introduced this month in two test
cities, Seattle and Dallas, allows you to use a cellphone account with any
corded or cordless home phone, with multiple extensions, for just $10 a month.
That very low price gets you unlimited domestic calls. This new T-Mobile
service, tentatively called Talk Forever Home Phone, is likely to be available
nationally in a few months. It works via a special Wi-Fi wireless router that
you must buy, with a two-year contract, for a one-time charge of $50. The
router, which can either replace or supplement your existing wireless router, is
essentially a stationary cellphone that marries an in-home Wi-Fi network to the
T-Mobile cellphone network.
Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2008; Page B1
---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120415596595997989.html
"Fair dues: Corporate tax dodging places a greater burden on those
least able to pay. It's time we made the multinationals play by new rules,"
by Prem Sikka, The Guardian, March 4, 2008 ---
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/prem_sikka_/2008/03/fair_dues.html
Corporations are
engaged in a relentless race-to-the-bottom. Companies boost
their profits and executive remuneration by diluting or
abandoning employee pension schemes and tax contributions.
The UK
state pension
is already one of the lowest in the
western world and amount to just 17% of average earnings,
compared to an average of 57% for the European Union. Nearly
30,000 pensioners die each winter because they cannot afford to
heat their homes. In a United Nations
study of
child welfare in 21 major countries, the UK was ranked last. Yet
companies and their advisers rarely reflect on their latest tax
dodge and the social squalor that they create.
HSBC
infrastructure, 3iInfrastructure and Babcock and Brown
Partnerships
are the latest examples of Private
Finance Initiative (PFI) companies creating elaborate corporate
offshore structures to avoid tax. No additional wealth or
economic activity is created, but the financial engineering
results in low taxes to enrich a few. In the age of reverse
socialism, companies are happy for the taxpayers to finance the
cost of policing, security, courts, trade consuls, subsidies,
embassies and the environmental clean-up, as long as they can
avoid the costs. Normal people continue to bear of cost of this
corporate welfare programme.
Successive
governments have done little to check the race-to-the-bottom.
The UK is the world's biggest sponsor of tax havens, often known
as
Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories.
Their secrecy, low regulation and low tax
have made them a magnet for the tax avoidance and the rules
avoidance industries. The UK is legally and morally responsible
for their good governance, but has done little to improve
regulation or public accountability. The
Treasury select committee should
examine the governance of these boltholes. Given the increasing
role of UK-sponsored tax havens in global tax avoidance, a
special select committee could be formed to examine their role.
The PFI
companies are paid by the tax payer, but by locating their
operations in tax havens, they have eroded the UK tax base. As a
result, normal people have to bear a higher burden of taxes.
Corporate affairs remain shrouded in secrecy. Local and central
governments are the biggest spenders and should not award any
public contract to companies located in tax havens. As full
details of these entities are not publicly known, it is
inappropriate to give them any public monies. The successful
bidders for public contracts should guarantee that they would
remain in the UK for the entire duration of the contract.
In a
globalised world, companies are easily able to establish
residence and control in tax havens. As companies are taxed on
the basis of their residence and control, they are easily able
to avoid taxes in the places where they generate profits. Thus
the PFI companies make money in the UK, but avoid taxes by
claiming to be resident elsewhere. The easiest way of tackling
this is to change the basis of taxation and tax them according
to their economic activity: that is, they should pay tax in the
UK on the basis of the profits made in the UK. Such an approach
often known as "apportionment
formula (pdf)" is already applied by
states within the US and can be applied by EU member states to
counter this erosion of tax authorities.
Public
information and disclosure is another way of checking this
relentless descent to the bottom. All companies bidding for
significant public contracts should be required to explain the
taxes that they have paid in the five preceding years. Indeed,
company tax returns should be publicly available so that
concerned citizens can see the tax avoidance schemes and alert
the authorities.
All
multinational companies should be required to adopt what is
known as the
country-by-country approach (pdf).
Under this, they would be required to publish a table showing
the jurisdictions from which they operate, together with income,
profits, assets, liabilities, tax and employees in each. This
would help to mobilise questions about corporate structures and
tax avoidance. Thus we might see, for example, that News
Corporation has lots of economic activity in the UK but
pays little or no tax.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's fraud updates ---
"PayPal: Steer clear of Apple's Safari
According to PayPal, unlike its competitors, Safari has no built-in phishing
filter to warn users when they are visiting suspicious Web sites," by Robert
McMillan, PC World via The Washington Post, February 29, 2008 ---
Click Here
If you're using Apple's Safari browser, PayPal has
some advice for you: Drop it, at least if you want to avoid online fraud.
Safari doesn't make PayPal's list of recommended
browsers because it doesn't have two important anti-phishing security
features, according to Michael Barrett, PayPal's chief information security
officer.
"Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they
need to do, to protect their customers," Barrett said in an interview. "Our
recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7
or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera."
Safari is the default browser on Apple's Macintosh
computers and the iPhone, but it is also available for the PC. Both Firefox
and Opera run on the Mac.
Unlike its competitors, Safari has no built-in
phishing filter to warn users when they are visiting suspicious Web sites,
Barrett said. Another problem is Safari's lack of support for another
anti-phishing technology, called Extended Validation (EV) certificates. This
is a secure Web browsing technology that turns the address bar green when
the browser is visiting a legitimate Web site.
When it comes to fighting phishing, "Safari has got
nothing in terms of security support, only SSL (Secure Sockets Layer
encryption), that's it," he said. Apple representatives weren't immediately
available to comment on this story.
An emerging technology, EV certificates are already
supported in Internet Explorer 7, and they've been used on PayPal's Web site
for more than a year now. When IE 7 visits PayPal, the browser's address bar
turns green -- a sign to users that the site is legitimate. Upcoming
versions of Firefox and Opera are expected to support the technology.
But EV certificates have their critics. Last year,
researchers at Microsoft and Stanford University published astudyshowing
that, without training, people were unlikely to notice the green address-bar
notification provided by EV certificates.
Still, Barrett says data compiled on PayPal's Web
site show that the EV certificates are having an effect. He says IE 7 users
are more likely to sign on to PayPal's Web site than users who don't have EV
certificate technology, presumably because they're confident that they're
visiting a legitimate site.
Over the past few months, IE 7 users have been less
likely to drop out and abandon the process of signing on to PayPal, he said.
"It's a several percentage-point drop in abandonment rates," he said. "That
number is... measurably lower for IE 7 users."
Opera, IE, and Firefox are "safer, precisely
because we think they are safer for the average consumer," he added. "I'd
love to say that Safari was a safer browser, but at this point it isn't."
Bob Jensen's threads on phishing and other
schemes are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#SpecialSection
What amazes me is the amount of money this
teenager and his junior partners stole without anybody close to him realizing
how rich he'd become. He engineered about a $20 million theft in U.S. dollars.
"New Zealand teenager charged in cyber crime
network," MIT's Technology Review, February 29, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/20361/?nlid=909
A New Zealand teenager allegedly at the center of
an international cyber crime network appeared Friday in court where he was
charged with computer hacking crimes.
Computer programmer Owen Thor Walker, 18, was
charged with two counts of accessing a computer for dishonest purpose,
damaging or interfering with a computer system, possessing software for
committing crime, and two counts of accessing a computer system without
authorization.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in
prison.
Walker did not enter a plea when he appeared
briefly in Thames Magistrate's Court in northern New Zealand. He was
released on bail. Bail conditions were not immediately available.
Walker was arrested in November last year in the
northern city of Hamilton as part of an international investigation into a
cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers and
skimming millions of dollars from victims' bank accounts.
''We worked closely with U.S. and Dutch authorities
on this investigation. This arrest is significant not just to New Zealand
but the international community as well,'' police spokesman Detective
Inspector Peter Devoy said.
''Very few people who carry out this sort of
offending are ever prosecuted so the resolution of this case has huge
international implications,'' he said. He did not elaborate.
The case is part of an international crackdown on
hackers who allegedly assume control of thousands of computers and amass
them into centrally controlled clusters known as botnets.
The hackers can then use the computers to steal
credit card information, manipulate stock trades and even crash industry
computers, authorities said when the case first surfaced in late November.
When he was first detained, police said the
teenager, known by his cyber identification ''AKILL,'' was head of an
international spybot ring that has infiltrated computers round the world
with their malicious software.
Police said he was also responsible for placing
advertising spam on about 1.3 million computers worldwide through computers
based in the Netherlands.
Police questioned the New Zealand teenager last
year and eventually released him without charge, saying he was still part of
the investigation. Friday's hearing was the first time charges against him
were detailed.
Eight people have been indicted, pleaded guilty or
have been convicted since the investigation began last June. Thirteen
additional warrants have been served in the U.S. and overseas in the
investigation.
The FBI estimates that more than one million
computers have been infected and puts the combined economic losses at more
than US$20 million (euro13.2 million).
"U.of Pennsylvania
Student Pleads Guilty to Helping to Attack University's Network,"
by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2, 2008 ---
Click Here
An undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania
pleaded guilty in federal court on Friday to assisting in a coordinated
attack on the university’s computer network that led to a server crash in
2006.
The student, Ryan Goldstein, had been indicted on a
charge of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, but under an agreement with
prosecutors pleaded guilty to the less-serious charge of aiding and abetting
another computer hacker to break into a computer remotely,
Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Mr. Goldstein
could get six months in prison for the offense.
A university spokeswoman told
The Daily Pennsylvanian that she could not
comment on whether the guilty plea would affect Mr. Goldstein’s status as a
student.
A federal Joint Terrorism Task Force would later
conclude that Gasper had been the victim of a new type of nasty hoax, called
"swatting," that was spreading across the United States. Pranksters were phoning
police with fake murders and hostage crises, spoofing their caller IDs so the
calls appear to be coming from inside the target's home. The result: police SWAT
teams rolling to the scene, sometimes bursting into homes, guns drawn. Now the
FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a
17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as "Li'l Hacker." Because he's
underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li'l Hacker's last name. His first name is
Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because
he is blind from birth. If he's guilty, the attack is at once the least
sophisticated and most malicious of a string of capers linked to Matt, who
stumbled into the lingering remains of the decades-old subculture of phone
phreaking when he was 14, and quickly rose to become one of the most skilled
active phreakers alive. "Who's the best out there?" says Jeff Daniels, a veteran
phone hacker and an admitted mentor to Matt. "The little blind kid is one of the
best. And that's a fact."
Kevin Poulson, Wired News, February 29, 2008 ---
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2008/02/blind_hacker
Bob Jensen's threads on computing and
networking security are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm
If you're tired of the stale old accountics
research, start thinking history, XBRL, and codification! Also find out what
history professors are doing with some stale old history.
Below you will find a history education/research application of
Second Life.
It occurred to me that something similar might be done in accounting history.
Several possibilities come to mind:
- Accounting History of the World ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
- History of the FASB/IASB and the evolution of standards since 1960 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#MethodsForSetting
- History of Financial Reporting of Microsoft Corporation ---
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/financial/default.mspx
Also see the Microsoft Pivot Table video files at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/MicrosoftInvestorRelationPivots/
You can find some Excel files that Microsoft no longer serves up at the
above link.
It also occurred to me that the time is ripe for some multimedia tutorials
(read that
Camtasia videos) and Second Life applications of the new SEC Interactive
Financial Reports using XBRL ---
http://www.sec.gov/xbrl
It also occurred to me that the time is ripe for some multimedia tutorials
(read that
Camtasia videos) and Second Life applications of the new FASB Codification
Project ---
http://asc.fasb.org
If you're tired of the stale old accountics
research, start thinking history, XBRL, and codification! Also find out what
history professors are doing with some stale old history.
"Historical Maps in Second Life David
Rumsey's antique maps feature in an innovative build in the virtual world," by
Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, February 29, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20357/?nlid=906
A new installation inside
Second Life
is bringing alive one of the world's largest
collections of antique maps. Called the
David Rumsey Maps Island (registration required),
the Second Life site is San Francisco map collector David Rumsey's latest
high-technology plan to share his collection with as large an audience as
possible. (See "From
Lewis and Clark to Landsat.")
Rumsey started collecting maps about 20 years ago.
In 1997, he began digitizing his maps, many of which now appear on his
website. Launched in 1999 with 2,000 maps, the website now features more
than 17,500 maps.
The island features a gallery in the center where
visitors can view maps and receive free maps and other digital souvenirs.
Surrounding the gallery is a topographical rendering of an 1883 map of
Yosemite Valley; users can toggle between two-dimensional and 3-D displays.
Along the skyline, two great globes, one terrestrial and the other
celestial, turn, animated by an enormous clockwork that can provide
front-row seats for avatars who fly inside. Visitors can also travel through
an 1836 map of Old New York by J. H. Coton.
It's this map that Rumsey says is his favorite
place on the island. "There's something about walking on it that is just
fantastic," he says. "I love walking from Battery up to Harlem and feeling
the history."
Nathan Tia, associate creative director for
Centric, the agency that created the site for Rumsey, says that the build
presented technical challenges. For one thing, Second Life didn't naturally
support scanning at the high resolution needed to fully showcase the maps,
causing the team to have to scan maps in pieces and stitch them together by
hand. Tia says that he wants to find a way to make the Yosemite terrain,
currently in phantom form, a solid surface that visitors can walk on.
Cory Ondrejka, formerly the CTO of Linden Lab, the
company that maintains Second Life, and now a visiting professor at the
University of Southern California, in Annenberg, is impressed by the
island's construction, which he says plays to the strengths of Second Life.
"It's a really wonderful example of taking a traditional media, such as
maps, and making it cutting edge," he says. In particular, he adds, the
island takes advantage of how big a space Second Life is, making striking
use of horizons and encouraging visitors to enable the maximum draw distance
allowed by viewers so that they can see as far as possible. "It isn't just a
virtual copy of an art museum, nor is it a virtual copy of a website,"
Ondrejka says. "I suspect that anyone doing a large-scale art installation
[in Second Life] in the future will have visited this place."
Bob Jensen's threads on Second Life, including accounting education
applications, are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#SecondLife
Bob Jensen's threads on Camtasia are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm
In one
century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering
remedial English in college.
Joseph Sobran as quoted by Mark
Shapiro at
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-11-27-07.htm
"A Third of Public-School Students in Mass. Need Remediation at College,
Report Says," by Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education,
February 28, 2008 ---
Click Here
More than one out of three students at public high
schools in Massachusetts who go on to a public college or university in the
state require remedial preparation, according to a report released today.
The “School-to-College Report,” the first of its
kind in the state, is a joint effort of the Massachusetts Board of Higher
Education and Department of Education. The report, to be officially
presented to the board on Friday, shows that 37 percent of the public-school
students took at least one remedial course during their first semester of
college.
The report, which is not yet posted online, was
made possible by a new database linking elementary, secondary, and higher
education in the state. It used data for students who completed high school
and entered college in 2005.
From the Carnegie Foundation for
Advancement in Teaching in December 2007
Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) ---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/programs/index.asp?key=26
Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community
Colleges (SPECC) is a partnership of
The William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. A
multi-site action-research project, SPECC focuses on teaching and learning
in pre-collegiate mathematics and English language arts courses at 11
California community colleges. These courses, which cover material often
termed "developmental" or "basic," serve as prerequisites to transfer-level
academic courses. On each campus, faculty members are exploring different
approaches to classroom instruction, academic support, and faculty
development. Their inquiry into the effects of these approaches engages a
wide range of data, including examples of student work, classroom
observations, and quantitative campus data. The ultimate goal of their
investigations, and of SPECC as a whole, is to support student learning and
success through a culture of inquiry and evidence.
From the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching ---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/
"Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC),"
Carnegie Perspectives Newsletter, February 7, 2008
The theory behind Carnegie's
Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC)
work is central to many of our programs: teaching is
traditionally solitary work, undertaken behind closed doors. Unlike professions
that have many avenues, both written and interactive—for documenting practice
and learning from it—teachers are typically unable to benefit from the work of
their peers. Yet, the acts of teaching and learning need to be
made more visible.Windows on Learning, the aspect of SPECC that Molly Breen
writes about in this month's Perspectives, is one of our
responses to this challenge. Breen, who is part of the SPECC team,
empathetically describes the situation faced by a new hire at a community
college, and beautifully allows us to understand the frustration of faculty who
are struggling to ensure student success. Carnegie has created a forum—Carnegie
Conversations—where you can engage publicly with the author and read and respond
to what others have to say about this article at
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/february2008 .
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Question
What is the winner in the debate between "rote learning" and 'inquiry-based"
methods of learning mathematics?
Sixty professors at the University of Washington
have signed an open letter to the Legislature complaining that college
freshmen struggle to solve middle-school-level mathematics problems and are
“confounded by simple algebra,” the
Associated Press reports.
The faculty members hope that the letter, which was
distributed to legislators late last week, will influence efforts to revise
statewide math standards for public schools.
Some petitioners worry that the state’s new
guidelines for math curricula will be shaped primarily by education experts
who tend to favor “inquiry-based” methods of instruction that focus on
underlying mathematical concepts rather than rote learning of formulas.
Such methods don’t work, contends
Clifford
F. Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at
Washington, and have led to an increase in the number of students taking
remedial math classes in college.
Not everyone sees the situation as so dire. No
professors in the university’s College of Education signed the letter, and,
according to an official in the office of the state superintendent of public
instruction, the latest data indicate that only 2 percent of Washington
public high-school students end up in remedial classes in college.
“Washington math isn’t a disaster,”
Ginger Warfield,
a lecturer in the university’s math department told
the AP. “By many measures, we’re fine, and relative to the rest of the
country, we’re much better.”
Jensen Comment
The phrase "relative to the rest of the country" doesn't give Washington much
hope in its K-12 math education. That sigh of relief does not take any state
very far.
"The race is not always to the
richest," The Economist, December 6, 2007 ---
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10251324
SPOOKED by the effects of globalisation on their
low-skilled citizens, rich countries have been pouring money and political
energy into education. In the United States, it has been proclaimed that no
child will be left behind. Whether this programme, launched by George Bush
in 2002, has raised standards will be a big issue in the 2008 presidential
election. Next year Britain will introduce ambitious new qualifications,
combining academic and vocational study. For the industrial countries of the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), average
spending on primary and secondary schooling rose by almost two-fifths in
real terms between 1995 and 2004.
Oddly, this has had little measurable effect. The
latest report from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment
shows average attainment staying largely flat. This tome, just published,
compares the reading, mathematical and scientific progress of 400,000
15-year-olds in the 30 OECD countries and 27 others, covering 87% of the
world economy. Its predecessors in 2000 and 2003 focused on reading and
maths respectively. This time science took centre stage.
At the top are some old stars: Finland as usual did
best for all-round excellence, followed by South Korea (which did best in
reading) and Hong Kong; Canada and Taiwan were strong but slightly patchier,
followed by Australia and Japan. At the bottom, Mexico, still the weakest
performer in the OECD, showed gains in maths; Chile did best in Latin
America.
There is bad news for the United States: average
performance was poor by world standards. Its schools serve strong students
only moderately well, and do downright poorly with the large numbers of weak
students. A quarter of 15-year-olds do not even reach basic levels of
scientific competence (against an OECD average of a fifth). According to
Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, Americans are
only now realising the scale of the task they face. Some individual states
would welcome a separate assessment.
. . .
Letting schools run themselves seems to boost a
country's position in this high-stakes international tournament: giving
school principals the power to control budgets, set incentives and decide
whom to hire and how much to pay them. Publishing school results helps, too.
More important than either, though, are high-quality teachers: a common
factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top
ranks of graduates.
Another common theme is that rising educational
tides seem to lift all boats. In general—the United States and Britain may
be exceptions—countries do well either by children of all abilities, or by
none. Those where many do well are also those where few fall behind. A new
feature in this year's study is an attempt to work out how differences
between schools, as opposed to differences within them, determine
performance (see chart). Variation between schools is big in Germany (to be
expected, as most schools select children on ground of ability). But results
also vary in some countries (like Japan) with nominally comprehensive
systems. In top-performing Finland, by contrast, the differences between
schools are nearly trivial.
Continued in
article
Too Much Need for Remedial Education in College ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#RemedialNeeds
"Colleges Expect Heroics from Professors, Without Fixing Themselves, a
President Says," by Elyse Ashburn, Chronicle of Higher Education,
March 3, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/03/1914n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Educational reforms have failed time and again
because colleges look to professors to rise above organizational
dysfunction, the president of Valencia Community College in Orlando, Fla.,
told a crowd of college officials here on Sunday.
Colleges send faculty members off for training in
the most up-to-date teaching methods, technological tools, and models for
student success, and "they come back to the same screwed-up organization,"
said Sanford C. Shugart, speaking at the annual conference of the League for
Innovation in the Community College.
If colleges are going to change teaching—and the
impact it has on student-learning outcomes—they must change their entire
culture, he said. One of the key steps in accomplishing that, he said, is
throwing out the notion that, at open-access institutions like community
colleges, some students are simply going to be sifted out.
Rather, Mr. Shugart said, colleges must realize
that anyone can learn anything, under the right conditions. And colleges
should not expect faculty members alone to create those conditions.
That means colleges should send people out to make
sure that classrooms aren't too cold or too hot for students to concentrate.
It means colleges should think about how the layout of a campus affects
learning. It means they should ask students about their impressions of their
campuses and classrooms, and make necessary adjustments.
Administrators have to remember that students are
people, and that they experience college campuses as people, not as data
points, he said.
Still, Mr. Shugart said that he was long a secret
skeptic about the ability of all students to learn: "I wondered even as
recently as a year ago whether the sociological factors our students were
wrestling with were so powerful that we couldn't move the needle."
But Valencia has started seeing results. Over the
past three years, the college has focused in particular on improving student
outcomes in six basic math and English courses. In five of those courses,
achievement gaps between low-income and minority students, and their
wealthier and white counterparts are now gone, he said. "I have hope like
never before that the vision for equity can be achieved."
Former Harvard President Derek Bok paints an even gloomier picture.
The Former President of Harvard Takes a Dark
View of the State of Learning and the Future State of Learning
Both Harry Lewis and Derek Bok have entered a devastating judgment on
contemporary university leadership ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Bok
Question
What are the favorite books of students and how do they correlate with SAT
scores?
"A Page-Turning Mash-Up," by Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education,
March 4, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2793&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
It’s hardly scientific but certainly
interesting: A Web site that correlates colleges’ average
SAT scores with college students’ “favorite book” preferences on
Facebook.
To come up with
Booksthatmakeyoudumb, Virgil Griffith, a graduate
student at the California Institute of Technology, visited Facebook and
determined the 100 most-mentioned “favorite books” at colleges. Then he put
the data together with the average combined SAT
scores of students at those colleges.
The Five Highest-Scoring Books (and Average
SAT)
1. Lolita (1317)
2. 100 Years of Solitude (1308)
3. Crime and Punishment (1307)
4. Freakonomics (1275)
5. Catch-22 (1233)
Ranking 87th: “I Don’t Read” (968). That’s not a
book title, folks.
Mr. Griffith has released
Musicthatmakesyoudumb as well.
He also developed
WikiScanner, where users can track edits to Wikipedia entries back to
the IP address of the editor.
"More on Books and Music and Their Connection to SAT Scores," by Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education,
March 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2797&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Though the statistics on Virgil Griffith's
Booksthatmake
youdumb, which,
as
Wired Campus reported yesterday, correlates
colleges’ average SAT scores with college students’ “favorite book”
preferences on Facebook, can be humorous and provocative, it's interesting
to look at how arbitrary the rankings seem. For example: Ray Bradbury's
dystopian book-burning tome Fahrenheit 451 ranks 96 (average SAT:
893) on the list, falling below another high-school reading-list classic,
Of Mice and Men (1007), or just not reading at all (968). Mr. Griffith,
a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, has released
yet another iteration of Facebook number crunching with
Musicthatmakesyoudumb.
Here's a look at where some of college students'
favorite bands fall on the SAT spectrum.
- Beethoven (presumably the composer) ranks
first in the list with an average score of 1371.
- Rapper Lil Wayne (889) ranks the lowest.
- Linkin Park (1073), Nirvana (1083), Outkast,
and Frank Sinatra (1104) all lie just above the average SAT score.
- Justin Timberlake (989) is on the low end, but
Britney Spears didn't even make the list.
I've reported on this before, but the Chronicle published the
following March 5 tidbit.
Microsoft wants to help students get their lives
together (their learning lives, at least), and Tuesday it rolled out a
product to help. As part of
Live@edu,
the company’s free Web-based email and calendar suite,
Microsoft unveiled
Office Live
Workspace, which lets students access their work
online and share it with others. Live@edu is in use at more than 600
colleges.
“The most visible new feature is the activity
panel,” said Guy Gilbert, a Microsoft group product manager, in an interview
with The Chronicle Monday. “Suppose you are in a work group with
other students. You can look at the panel and see everything that anyone has
done since you last logged on. And links in the panel take you right to that
object,” whether it is a document, a spreadsheet, contact list, or database.
Users can also set up e-mail alerts that notify
them any time an item is changed.
The service has been running in beta for several
months, and of its estimated 100,000 users, 20 to 30 percent are in higher
education, Mr. Gilbert says. Microsoft has worked with 13 colleges to
fine-tune the service, including Florida Community College at Jacksonville,
Vanderbilt University, and the University of Wisconsin at Parkside.
And if the new service doesn’t seem familiar to
users of
Google Docs, don’t worry. Microsoft’s arch rival
also promises real-time collaboration, and the two companies seem to be
running neck and neck in the education marketplace.
Bob Jensen's threads on tools of education technology are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
How a single teacher can influence many lives!
"My Meeting With Mephistopheles," by Heidi Storl, Chronicle of Higher
Education's Chronicle Review, February 29, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i25/25b02001.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=e
| I
think now that I might have met Mephistopheles in college, though at
the time I thought only that I was encountering my first
philosopher. I was a biochemistry major, looking forward to a career
in genetics. I still needed to fulfill a number of those
basic-education requirements that students seem either to get out of
the way early or put off until the bitter end. As I stood in the
registration line, memorizing the molecular structures of proteins,
fate intervened. The easy history course that I had planned to take
was full. Determined not to lose my spot in line, I scrambled to
come up with another course and chose philosophy.
The professor was a little late for the
first philosophy class. He was a short, bearded man with a limp, and
my first thought was that if he wore the right kind of hat, he'd
make a perfect elf. But then he looked at each of the 10 students in
turn, and spoke: "Does God command an action because it is good, or
is an action good because God commands it?"
Whoa! I sat up, put my chemistry notes
away, and started thinking. Fifty minutes later, I was exhausted. As
I walked to my next class, two thoughts jumped about in my head.
First, I liked — really liked — the way I had felt in philosophy:
out of breath, struggling to keep up with the argument, my mind on
fire. Second, what was this course going to do to my GPA?
Several weeks later, I put my chemistry
notes away for good. A year later, I entered graduate school in
philosophy, having taken only three courses in the discipline —
"Introduction to Philosophy," "Introduction to Ethics," and
"Introduction to Logic." My passion for the field made my change of
direction possible.
In the years since then, three things have
continued to fascinate me: manifestations of Mephistopheles,
superstitions, and passion. For me, the three shed light on the
problem that Martha Nussbaum wrote about in "Liberal Education and
Global Responsibility," "jolting the imagination out of its
complacency, and getting it to take seriously the reality of lives
at a distance."
That quote is embedded in a larger
discussion of the essential features of the liberal arts: critical
thinking, world citizenry, and an empathy born out of the narrative
imagination. At first glance, my fascinations may seem at odds with
those basic skills. After all, how can superstitions survive a
critical analysis? Similarly, people who experience manifestations
of Mephistopheles have long been recognized as psychotic. Yet I
believe all three have helped me "take seriously the reality of
lives at a distance." That is not easy going, but it is a hallmark
of a liberally educated person.
Nussbaum seems to suggest that our
imaginations need to be "jolted" out of the smug slumber of our
daily lives. Whether we sit passively in front of the television or
the computer, get in the zone as we play sports, or shop till we
drop, we learn quickly how to lose ourselves. So "jolting the
imagination out of its complacency" is no small task. Moreover, we
can't predict if and when it will actually happen. There is no
12-step process or project manual to follow. The awakening of one's
mind just happens. The trick is to recognize when it occurs, and to
harness the associated energy, or spiritedness, and use it to help
us live wisely.
That is why I'm so interested in
Mephistopheles. I can still see the mural of Mephisto on the wall of
Auerbach's Keller; the smells and tastes of the place remain fresh;
and when I return as an adult, I can almost feel the spirits of the
tavern. Goethe was right: Mephisto lives there. As a child, I didn't
know it, but I have realized it since my awakening in that
philosophy class.
There too, as I've already suggested, I
encountered Mephistopheles in person. Though I didn't see him
coming, I recognized him when I saw and heard him, and I made a
Faustian bargain with him. My imagination — actually, my life — had
been jolted. Nothing would be the same again, because my perspective
and attitude toward life had fundamentally shifted. I wasn't
comfortable anymore. I didn't know where I was going or what I might
do when I got there. But I did all at once possess a passion, a
heartfelt yearning, for the travels of the mind — and I survived.
Heidi Storl is a professor of philosophy at Augustana College,
in Rock Island, Ill. |
February 29, 2008 reply from Patricia Doherty
[pdoherty@BU.EDU]
Thank you for this article, Bob. It reminds me of
why I majored as an undergraduate in psychology and philosophy. The two most
influential professors in my college years were a history professor whose
area of research and writing was church history, and a philosophy professor
who specialized in comparative religions. I am certain that during my
college years I had few original thoughts, but if I did have the odd one, it
was stimulated by these two men. The philosophy professor taught us that we
didn't have to believe in "God," but we had to have a better reason for not
believing than "I don't believe in that stuff." I also remember that the
history professor would often begin a class by reading to us a passage from
Will Cuppy's "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody."
My undergraduate liberal arts education was one of
the few things I did right!
Pat
Ethics
for Managing Study Abroad
The
Forum on Education Abroad today
released its code of ethics for the field, a set of
“aspirational” but not prescriptive guidelines covering six main
areas: truthfulness and transparency; responsibility to
students; relationships with host societies; observance of law
and good practice; conflicts of interest; and gifts, gratuities,
discounts, rebates and compensation. The guidelines are meant to
apply to program providers and college study abroad offices
alike, and they come at a time that the field is facing more
scrutiny than ever before.
Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, March 3, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/03/abroad
Bob Jensen's threads on study abroad scandals are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#StudyAbroadAccountability
"Teaching Social Justice in Higher Ed," by Thomas R. Tritton,
Inside Higher Ed, March 3, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/03/03/tritton
Like many
places, Harvard has a “shopping period” where students can
explore lots of course options before committing themselves
to sign up and do real work. I had two scheduled shopping
sessions, fretted over whether anyone would come, and was
relieved when about 20 students arrived. We dove into issues
of justice straight away when I told the potentials that if
more signed up than I wanted in the course, I would run a
lottery to see who was selected. One student vigorously
argued such a system wasn’t just because this course was
exactly why she came to graduate school, and it simply
wouldn’t be fair to deny her a place based on chance. She
ended up not enrolling at all. Another wanted any
over-enrollment to be sorted out by the students themselves,
not the authoritarian professor. This took me back to my own
college days in the 1960s when we didn’t trust anyone over
30.
In the end 12
students signed up. Ten were seeking masters degrees, the
other two doctorates. With the consumerist shopping period
behind us, and with no need for a lottery, we set to work.
The
first reading assignment was
Why Social Justice Matters,
by Brian Barry, a professor of
political philosophy at Columbia University. This is a
scholarly book that examines the theory and scope of the
term “social justice”. Of course, most people have their own
view of what this subject encompasses, so I asked the class
to try their hand at defining the field even before reading
what the good professor had to say. They quickly came up
with “elimination of bias” and “meeting basic human needs
for all”. Warming to the topic, the students also included
in their definition “awareness of society’s needs, not just
our own” as well as the more confrontational “ability to
question power”. Who says the spirit of rebellion is lacking
in contemporary students?
Barry’s
approach is one of distributive justice where fairness and
equality are achieved in all aspects of society, not just in
administration of the law. He covers the expected
conglomeration of social challenges — income, healthcare,
housing, discrimination, jobs, education, environment,
globalization. Students react well to such material, even
when presented in an academic format, but they quickly
realize there is no objective standard of what is just.
Those of a more conservative persuasion believe social
justice can be achieved through the logic of free markets.
More liberal types think in the language of economic
egalitarianism or of human rights. The former are more
inclined to promote equality of opportunity while the latter
seek income redistribution. As one might predict, scholarly
writing is tilted towards the liberal and it is difficult to
find serious work from rightward perspectives. This is a
challenge, at least if you are trying to teach a university
course that examines all points of view. Asking students to
argue points of view opposite their own is one approach to
the dilemma, although not always a successful one on
subjects that ignite deep loyalties.
We
turned next to bell hooks and her book
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope.
My students are in a School of
Education, after all, so it seemed right to have a book
about the subject. Professor hooks is hard to categorize,
being one part educator, another part social gadfly, and yet
another part reformer for justice. The students adored her,
and relished the unconventional way she thinks about higher
education as a combination of autobiography, history, and
literary analysis. Discussing the book also revealed the
stress marks that accompany any analysis of race and class.
This came through, for example, in a mini-debate about
whether a scholar — purportedly developing an objective
social analysis — should reveal intimate personal details
about close friends and family. Luckily, the multicultural
makeup of the group allowed them to work with the stresses,
which of course is exactly why we want our classrooms to be
diverse.
The
final reading assignment was one of the world’s leading
intellectuals, Martha Nussbaum, and her work
Frontiers of Justice.
Not an easy book, as it deals with John Rawl’s seminal
A Theory of Justice, as
well as a historical account of social justice theories from
Rousseau to Kant to Hume. But Nussbaum was willing to tread
where none of these previous thinkers were able to make
progress, namely to three heretofore unsolved aspects of
justice: disability; non-human animals; and global justice.
Although the reading was challenging at times, the students
found Nussbaum opening their minds in ways they might have
been resistant to beforehand. One of Nussbaum’s ideas that
nudged the students thinking was her conferral of basic
human rights upon animals. While some found this difficult,
or even absurd, at first, the argument from a theoretical
social justice perspective can be convincing even to the
formerly skeptical. I think that’s what is supposed to
happen in the classroom.
Once we
finished the reading assignments, I did what any clever
faculty member does with advanced students — put them in
charge of running the class. Well, not entirely, because it
would have been a dereliction of duty to abandon my
professorial role, but I did assemble them in groups of
three and let each group select pertinent readings and lead
a class session on a selected topic in social justice. I
suggested they consider questions like: can colleges and
universities make an impact in this area? If so, is it most
effective with a research or a teaching focus? If the answer
to the preceding question is teaching, is curricular or
extra-curricular the most effective format? Who are likely
partners outside the academy? Can such social justice
concepts (as, for example, with ethics or writing) be taught
across the curriculum, or are specific courses needed? What
would a university curriculum look like on a particular
aspect of social justice? How can you encourage more than
one viewpoint be presented on inherently controversial
issues? To what extent can or should academic critique
influence the public/political agenda?
After
suitable negotiation, the groups settled on four topics:
healthcare and social justice; justice for non-human
species; diversity and social justice; housing and social
justice. They did a spectacular job of researching the
topics, engaging the class in high intensity discussion, and
then writing a research paper. So good, in fact, that I
ended up succumbing to mass grade inflation, a malady I
routinely bad-mouthed when in an administrative position.
So what
did I learn? I reaffirmed my sense that students are
idealistic (and keep their professors so). I appreciated
that students will read hard and challenging material,
especially if they can connect it to real situations. I
learned that one can engage social justice concepts from
nearly any disciplinary perspective, and thereby make almost
any course better.
And I
learned how much fun it is to teach, a lesson easy to forget
when toiling as a college president.
Continued in article
"Academic Freedom in the Wired World," by Scott Jaschik, Inside
Higher Ed, March 6, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/06/oneil
Robert M. O’Neil has been a player on academic
freedom issues from many perspectives. He has been a university president
(University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin System), a legal scholar
(law professor at U.Va.), and First Amendment advocate (director of the
Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression). He has also
been chair of the American Association of University Professors’ committee
on academic freedom. That background informs his new book,
Academic Freedom in the Wired World: Political Extremism, Corporate Power,
and the University, just published by Harvard
University Press.
O’Neil recently responded to e-mail questions about
the themes of the book.
Q: How do the severity of threats to academic
freedom today compare to other periods in U.S. history?
A: While there has surely been no shortage
of grave threats to academic freedom in the early 21st century, current
conditions are not comparable to the dark days of the McCarthy era, which
were clearly the worst of times within memory. Especially with regard to
threats from sources that were rampant in the early to mid 1950s —
disclaimer-type loyalty oaths, legislative investigations, campus speaker
bans, security screens and the like — even the gravest of current
governmental pressures tend to pale in comparison. What suggests to some
observers an ominous shadow of McCarthyism is, however, a new set of threats
to free inquiry on the university campus — from private “vigilante” groups
that target professors and even students on Web sites and blogs, legislative
demands for “balance” and removal of “bias” from the classroom, mounting
restrictions on corporate-sponsored research, and constraints on electronic
communications that would not be tolerated in print media.
Q: How has the 9/11 aftermath most changed
academic freedom?
A: Despite much early apprehension,
reprisals against outspoken faculty critics in the months after the
terrorist attacks proved to be far milder than might have been feared.
Remarkably few adverse personnel actions resulted for established scholars
and teachers — in sharp contrast to McCarthyism — and the few that did occur
reflected highly unusual conditions. Yet there have been grave consequences
in several other areas. Notably harsh has been the exclusion or denial of
visas to visiting scholars — not only from the Middle East and Islamic
countries, but from other nations where 9/11 and terrorism have no visible
role. Several of these actions have been successfully challenged through the
courts, though a disturbing number of other barred visitors (notably
Islamicist Tariq Ramadan) remain beyond U.S. borders without either adequate
explanation or avenues of recourse. The other most notably affected area is
that of research; the vague concept of “sensitive but unclassified” has been
far more widely used to constrain university investigators without formal
classification, and thus chill freedom in the laboratory, despite the
absence of a legally reviewable justification for such limitations. In other
(though probably more predictable) ways, the use of biohazardous materials
has been further restricted in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on academic freedom are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
“How many professors does it take to change a light
bulb?”
Answer: “Whadaya mean, “change”?”
Bob Zemsky, Chronicle of Higher
Education's Chronicle Review, December 2007 ---
Click Here
"'Tired' Professors Can Be Rejuvenated," by Peter Seldin, Chronicle
of Higher Education, Volume 54, Issue 26, Page A36. March 7, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i26/26a03601.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
At a recent national conference, four colleagues
and I got together for dinner and spent a good bit of the evening talking
about teaching. We are in different academic disciplines but have all worked
in college or university teaching-improvement programs. We found that the
subject we discussed the most was how to improve the teaching of "tired"
faculty members.
Who are tired faculty members? Most often, but
certainly not always, they are senior professors. The majority are between
the ages of 50 and 65 and have worked at their institutions for many years.
They have risen through the ranks to top positions and have earned tenure.
Year after year, they teach the same courses, often with the same notes. In
truth, they are just not teaching as effectively as they did in the past or
could do in the future — as reflected in their sliding student ratings.
Those faculty members are, of course, never
publicly identified as "tired," but from the literature and practical
experience we know that there are many ways to improve their teaching.
Programs vary from campus to campus, based on differences of history,
mission, and views about what can and should be done. No specific strategy
is likely to be effective in every case; institutions should adapt the
approaches used by others to their specific circumstances. But, based on my
research over the years, I have found that the most successful institutions
do one or more of the following:
Provide opportunities for reflection.
Colleges should organize structured conversations among senior faculty
members so they can discuss their beliefs about teaching and learning. It is
important to raise open-ended questions, such as: What has been your most
significant teaching accomplishment? Which teaching method do you use most
effectively? Least effectively? How would you describe your attitude toward
teaching? Has it changed in recent years? In what ways? What one thing would
you most like to improve about your teaching? How do you motivate superstar
students? How do you motivate those who are struggling?
Such exchanges can foster dialogues in which values
are revealed and confronted. They require the kind of intellectual labor
that many academics love and at which they excel. Faculty members often
discover that it is all right to share their views and concerns about
teaching with colleagues, that others have similar doubts or concerns, and
that one can learn from the experiences of others.
Teach faculty members new skills. Older
professors may especially benefit from training and information that can
help them modify their long-term instructional styles. Institutions can
offer programs on lecturing clearly, conducting discussions wisely, and
assessing student learning accurately. Or they might advise professors on
how to handle cheating, assign grades, deal with problem students, or reduce
students' feelings of anonymity. Also valuable are workshops on the
effective use of educational technology, course design, service learning and
field experience, and small-group instruction.
Offer financial support. Special grants can
help faculty members experiment with new teaching methodologies, attend
conferences on teaching, and purchase readings, reports, CD's, and
periodicals that can enrich their teaching. The investment need not be
large; in many cases, a grant of just $450 can re-energize a tired faculty
member. And it carries with it an important message: We haven't forgotten
you. You are still valued here. You are important to this institution.
Establish mentor programs. Professors with
decades of experience in the higher-education trenches can be effective
career counselors for junior faculty members and graduate students. They can
help them get started, develop professional networks, excel at teaching and
scholarship, write for publication, navigate the tenure track, manage their
time, and create a balance between their work and life outside the campus.
Such efforts can, in turn, re-energize the faculty members who are serving
as mentors.
Combine student ratings with constructive
suggestions. Improvements in instruction are more likely to be made if
the department chair or teaching-improvement consultant interprets student
ratings in specific behavioral terms and recommends concrete strategies for
change. Thus, a student-rating form that probes specific teaching behaviors
should be coupled with written descriptions of successful teaching
practices matched to the instructor's lowest-rated items. In that way,
faculty members will receive simple, practical suggestions they can
immediately use to improve their teaching.
Facilitate classroom innovation. Each
faculty member should be encouraged to brainstorm with others about new and
different ways to teach course material. How might a class be taught with a
greater emphasis on technology? On group work? On projects? On service
learning and field experience?
Assign short-term, nonteaching projects. A
professor can get a welcome break from the routine of teaching by serving,
for example, as an assistant dean or director of institutional assessment
for a year or two. Similarly, chairing a major institutional task force at
the college can provide healthy variety in an academic career. Meanwhile,
such activities enable the institution to take advantage of the faculty
member's different talents.
Videotape classroom instruction. Campus
administrators should help professors see firsthand any areas for
improvement. It is best to schedule a meeting with the faculty member to
decide what the camera will focus on — what he or she would like to learn
from the videotape. Colleagues and teaching consultants can help analyze the
tape, but they should always keep the focus on how the faculty member
teaches rather than whether he or she is good or bad at it.
Help professors give something back.
Colleges should look for convenient ways for faculty members to contribute
within the institution or outside it. Professors might volunteer time and
expertise to assist their institutions with a major project, like serving on
a fund-raising or athletics-department committee or directing an orientation
session for new faculty members. Or they might join a committee working to
improve the quality of education in the local high school.
Continued in article
Peter Seldin is distinguished professor emeritus of management at Pace
University, in Pleasantville, N.Y. His most recent book is Evaluating
Faculty Performance: A Practical Guide to Assessing Teaching, Research, and
Service (Anker Publishing Company, 2006).
Jensen Comment
I'm more inclined to encourage "tired" professors to join an active listserv in
their disciplines and in education. Also they should be encouraged to follow
some blogs such as the Chronicle of Higher Education blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Education Tutorials
Critical Thinking Web (over 100 free tutorials) ---
http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/
The Future is Digital (with video) ---
http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/FIDArchive.html
Textile Exchange ---
http://www.teonline.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch
Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials
Some Top Science Blogs ---
http://wiki.scienceblogging.com/scienceblogging/show/Science+Blogs
"Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos," by Aaron Rowe, Wired Science, March
2, 2008 ---
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/top-10-amazing.html
Science Videos ---
http://www.scivee.tv/
From the University of Pittsburgh
Birds of America (435 birds mounted online) ---
http://digital.library.pitt.edu/a/audubon/
Evolution of Normal Fault Systems During Progressive Deformation (Quick Time
Video)
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/structure/activities/6662.html
The Virtual Body ---
http://www.medtropolis.com/vbody.asp
Bob Jensen's threads on free online science,
engineering, and medicine tutorials are at ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Social Science and Economics Tutorials
Electoral Geography 2.0 ---
http://www.electoralgeography.com/new/en/
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (some multimedia) ---
http://www.cceia.org/
American Public Transportation Association
http://www.apta.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and
Philosophy tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Law and Legal Studies
FindLaw ---
http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/supreme.html
Westlaw ---
http://web2.westlaw.com/signon/default.wl?bhcp=1&fn=_top&newdoor=true&rs=WLW7.02&vr=2.0
The Future is Digital (with video) ---
http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/FIDArchive.html
American Public Transportation Association
http://www.apta.com/
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Math and Statistics Tutorials
February 29, 2008 message from XXXXX
Dear Dr. Jensen,
I have accessed your web site and found it to be
very helpful. I am working on a dissertation and need to find an instrument
(survey) that has validity and reliability and that will measure student
satisfaction with the use of iPODs in a course. With all of your knowledge
and expertise, I thought I would take a chance and ask if you possibly could
point me in a direction to find such a survey. I appreciate your time
assistance.
February 29, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi XXXXX,
First you might read about what some other schools and people are saying
about student hope and satisfaction in this area ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Laptops
Second you might want to contact professors at places like Duke University
that have quite a lot of experience with students use of Ipods. I think
there was more hype than subsequent happiness with the results.
The next thing that I recommend is that you carefully read the module at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_survey
Also see
http://www.answers.com/topic/statistical-survey
I do not know of a similar survey where you can borrow the survey
questions. I suspect that you will have to design your own, and this is a
most difficult undertaking. Consider first the goals of using iPods in a
course. Then design your questions with those goals in mind. Then test your
questions first with survey experts (such as you might find in the Sociology
or Marketing Departments) and then conduct a pilot study with students
before administering the survey.
The Survey Monkey can be helpful in designing surveys ---
http://www.surveymonkey.com/
Mike Kearl has some great helpers for survey research ---
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/methods.html#ms
You can find some useful resources at
http://www.auditnet.org/sampling.htm
After reading the above basics, you might next consider online surveys.
For this I strongly recommend the following publication:
- A 2001 RAND Corporation
report, CONDUCTING RESEARCH SURVEYS VIA EMAIL AND THE WEB [ISBN:
0-8330-3110-4], discusses the pros and cons of using email and the
Web to conduct research surveys. The authors (Matthias Schonlau,
Ronald D. Fricker, Jr., and Marc N. Elliott) provide an overview of
the various aspects of the research survey process, guidelines for
choosing the type of Internet survey to use, and suggestions for
designing and implementing Internet surveys. The report is available
for purchase in paperback or online in PDF format, at no charge, at
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1480/
(the above document description loads very slowly)
Internet-based surveys, although still
in their infancy, are becoming increasingly popular because they
are believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to
conduct than surveys using more-traditional telephone or mail
methods. Based on evidence in the literature and real-life case
studies, this book examines the validity of those claims. The
authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using e-mail
and the Web to conduct research surveys, and also offer
practical suggestions for designing and implementing Internet
surveys most effectively. Among other findings, the authors
determined that Internet surveys may be preferable to mail or
telephone surveys when a list of e-mail addresses for the target
population is available, thus eliminating the need for mail or
phone invitations to potential respondents. Internet surveys
also are well-suited for larger survey efforts and for some
target populations that are difficult to reach by traditional
survey methods. Web surveys are conducted more quickly than mail
or phone surveys when respondents are contacted initially by
e-mail, as is often the case when a representative panel of
respondents has been assembled in advance. And, although surveys
incur virtually no coding or data-entry costs because the data
are captured electronically, the labor costs for design and
programming can be high.
Note Chapter 4 in particular ---
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1480/MR1480.ch4.pdf
Frimette Kass-Shraibman suggested Mental Measurements Yearbook Source:
Buros Institute of Mental Measurements ---
http://www.ovid.com/site/catalog/DataBase/120.jsp
Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics and statistics tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
History Tutorials
University of Rochester shares its Abraham Lincoln letters online ---
http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=379
Also see
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/20364/?nlid=912
Long-time Indonesian leader Suharto
Suharto: A Declassified Documentary Obit ---
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB242/index.htm
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (some multimedia) ---
http://www.cceia.org/
March 4, 1890: Bridge Tech Takes a Great Leap Forth ---
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/03/dayintech_0304
From the Scout Report on February 29, 2008
Concerned about the education of young people, the Common Core
organization releases the results of a recent survey Teens losing touch with
historical references
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-02-26-teens-history_N.htm
History Surveys Stumps U.S. Teens ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/education/27history.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy http://www.bartleby.com/59/
Bill Moyers Journal: Interview with Susan Jacoby
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02152008/watch2.html
Digital History
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/
19th Century Textbooks
http://digital.library.pitt.edu/nietz/
Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Law and Legal Study Tutorials
The Future is Digital (with video) ---
http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/FIDArchive.html
Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law
Language Tutorials
Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages
Writing Tutorials
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
From the Scout Report on February 29, 2008
Opera 9.26 ---
http://www.opera.com/
The Opera browser has been around for sometime, but
this latest version contains a few new features that are worth a look.
Visitors will note that they can now use the "Speed Dial" feature for
improved navigation to frequently-used sites and that there is also an
embedded fraud protection feature as well. This version is compatible with
computers running Windows 95 and newer.
Acoo Browser 1.80 ---
http://www.acoobrowser.com/
Based on Internet Explorer, this latest iteration
of Acoo Browser offers tabbed document windows, customizable toolbars, and
dockable panel groups. As with many other browsers, Acoo also offers an
online bookmark manager that is quite handy, and a built-in webpage
analyzer. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 98 and
newer.
Concerned about the education of young people, the Common Core
organization releases the results of a recent survey Teens losing touch with
historical references
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-02-26-teens-history_N.htm
History Surveys Stumps U.S. Teens ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/education/27history.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy http://www.bartleby.com/59/
Bill Moyers Journal: Interview with Susan Jacoby
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02152008/watch2.html
Digital History
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/
19th Century Textbooks
http://digital.library.pitt.edu/nietz/
Updates from WebMD ---
http://www.webmd.com/
Does gingko biloba affect memory?
Taking the supplement ginkgo biloba had no clear-cut benefit on the risk of
developing memory problems, according to a study published in the February 27,
2008, online issue of Neurology, the medical Journal of the American Academy
of Neurology.
PhysOrg, February 27, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123349870.html
The three-year study involved 118 people age 85 and
older with no memory problems. Half of the participants took ginkgo biloba
extract three times a day and half took a placebo. During the study, 21
people developed mild memory problems, or questionable dementia: 14 of those
took the placebo and seven took the ginkgo extract. Although there was a
trend favoring ginkgo, the difference between those who took gingko versus
the placebo was not statistically significant.
The researchers made an interesting observation
when they examined the data at the end of the trial. Taking into account
whether people followed directions in taking the study pills, they found
that people who reliably took the supplement had a 68 percent lower risk of
developing mild memory problems than those who took the placebo. Without
further study, it is unclear if this difference is real or just a chance
occurrence.
On a cautionary note, the study also found that
people taking ginkgo biloba were more likely to have a stroke or transient
ischemic attack, or mini stroke. Seven people taking ginkgo had strokes,
while none of those taking placebo did. “Ginkgo has been reported to cause
bleeding-related complications, but the strokes in this case were due to
blood clots, not excessive bleeding, and were generally not severe,” said
study author Hiroko Dodge, PhD, of the Department of Public Health and
Center for Healthy Aging Research at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
Continued in article
Researchers: Chia seeds are good for you
Several U.S. researchers maintain the seeds used in
products such as Chia Pet are actually good for the human body, it was reported
Sunday. The research that determined the seeds are high in omega-3 fatty acids
comes as the omega-3 supplement market in the United States is reaching new
heights, the Chicago Tribune reported. To date, the health trend is responsible
for a $500 million-a-year industry as more U.S. citizens attempt to gain added
health benefits from the products. Chia seeds are derived from Salvia hispanica,
a mint-related plant, and chia is regulated as a food by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration. While research into the plant seeds has been minimal, the
Tribune said one ounce of them has been found to contain 4 grams of protein, 11
grams of fiber and 137 calories.
PhysOrg, March 3, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123768556.html
Some Experts Doubt Obesity Epidemic
Go on, have another doughnut. According to some experts
whose views are public health heresy, the jury is still out on how dangerous it
is to be fat. "The obesity epidemic has absolutely been exaggerated," said Dr.
Vincent Marks, emeritus professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of
Surrey. Marks is among a minority of skeptics who doubt the severity of the
obesity problem. They claim that the data about the dangers of obesity are mixed
and there is little proof that being fat causes problems including high blood
pressure, heart disease and cancer. Such views contradict nearly everything
doctors have been saying for years. Being fat has long been blamed for
conditions like diabetes, which can lead to heart, kidney and nerve diseases.
There is also increasing evidence that certain cancers may be linked to weight
gain. "The evidence linking obesity to diabetes and cardiovascular disease is
very strong," said Dr. James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at
the University of Colorado. "Type two diabetes rarely happens in people who
aren't obese." But obesity contrarians say that there's no data proving why
being fat - in itself - would be dangerous. "There's no good causal connection,"
said Eric Oliver, author of Fat Politics and a political science professor at
the University of Chicago. Blaming obesity for diabetes and heart attacks,
Oliver says, is like blaming lung cancer on bad breath rather than on smoking.
Excess weight may actually be a red herring, Oliver says, since other factors
like exercise, diet or genetic predispositions towards diseases are harder to
measure than weight. In addition to questioning the dangers of being fat,
researchers like Marks also criticize oft-repeated alarmist projections about
the rise in obesity - like the British government's warning that nearly half of
Britain will be obese by 2050. Those simply aren't based on good evidence, they
say.
Maria Cheng, PhysOrg, March 5, 2005 ---
http://physorg.com/news123875808.html
Jensen Comment
There is better evidence that obesity is very dangerous for people with other
diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
Autism and Amanda Baggs ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Baggs
"The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know," by
David Wolman, Wired Magazine, February 25, 2008 ---
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-03/ff_autism
Blind Irishman sees with the aid of son's tooth in his eye
An Irishman blinded by an explosion two years ago has
had his sight restored after doctors inserted his son's tooth in his eye, he
said on Wednesday. "I thought that I was going to be blind for the rest of my
life," McNichol told RTE state radio. After doctors in Ireland said there was
nothing more they could do, McNichol heard about a miracle operation called
Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) being performed by Dr Christopher Liu at
the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton in England. The technique, pioneered in
Italy in the 1960s, involves creating a support for an artificial cornea from
the patient's own tooth and the surrounding bone.
PhysOrg, February 27, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123333657.html
Bedbug Epidemic in Dorms and Hotels
Increased travel in general, both domestic and foreign,
is thought to be one factor in the resurgence of bed bugs. Still, no one can say
for certain why, or why now, more than thirty years after the pest was last on
the radar screens of exterminators. Some experts blame the ban on pesticides
like DDT. However, less thorough application of chemical treatments may be the
real issue, as bed bugs are experts at escaping contact insecticides. Lastly,
the popularity of secondhand furniture from thrift stores and garage sales means
bed bugs can find new homes with warm bodies.
Eric Eaton., "Don't Bug Me!" The Irascible Professor, February 28, 2008
---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-02-28-08.htm
Antipsychotic Abilify Cleared for Use in Youths
Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
said the Food and Drug Administration approved the supplemental new-drug
application for Abilify to treat manic and mixed episodes associated with
Bipolar I Disorder in patients 10 to 17 years old. The antipsychotic drug
already has been approved to treat bipolar disease in adults. Japan-based Otsuka
discovered Abilify; the companies have an agreement to co-promote the drug in
the U.S. until 2012. Bristol records 65% of U.S. sales.
The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2008; Page B5 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120451339224306953.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
You can read more about Aripiprazole/Abilify at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilify
Study examines how men and women view marital and parental time pressures
Only about one-fifth of employed women and men are
completely satisfied with the time they spend with their spouse and their
children according to a recent study published in the Journal of Family Issues.
“Typically in past studies, full-time workers and parents tend to be more time
pressured than those who work part time or who don’t have children,” says Dr.
Susan Roxburgh, associate professor of sociology at Kent State University. In a
study funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, Roxburgh
examined how employment and parenthood influence time pressures pertaining to
marital partners and the parental role. She found that men are significantly
more likely to want more time with their spouses, while women were more likely
than men to say they wanted to improve the quality of time they spend with their
spouse. Both women and men equally were likely to say that they wanted to slow
down the pace of time spent with their spouse. However when it comes to time
spent with children, only women felt that a hectic pace affected the time they
spent with their children.
PhysOrg, February 28, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123424323.html
Dementia diagnosis brings relief, not depression
When it comes to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease,
what you don't know may not kill you, but knowing the truth as soon as possible
appears to be the better approach — one that may improve the emotional
well-being of both patients and their caregivers, suggests new research from
Washington University in St. Louis.Medical advances have made it possible to
diagnose Alzheimer's at very early stages, but a 2004 review of research found
about half of all physicians were still reluctant to inform patients of an
Alzheimer's diagnosis. While many physicians fear a dementia diagnosis would
only further upset an already troubled patient, this follow-up study found quite
the opposite. "We undertook this study because we wanted there to be some data
out there that addressed this question and that we could show to physicians and
say, 'Most of the people don't get depressed, upset and suicidal. So, this fear
that you have about telling them and disturbing them is probably not legitimate
for most people,'" says Brian Carpenter, Ph.D., associate professor of
psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. The study, published in
the current Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, is co-authored by
Carpenter and colleagues in the Division of Biostatistics, the Department of
Neurology and the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the University's School
of Medicine.
PhysOrg, March 3, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123780230.html
Low testosterone levels associated with depression in older men
Older men with lower free testosterone levels in their
blood appear to have higher prevalence of depression, according to a report in
the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. Depression affects between 2
percent and 5 percent of the population at any given time, according to
background information in the article. Women are more likely to be depressed
than men until age 65, when sex differences almost disappear. Several studies
have suggested that sex hormones might be responsible for this phenomenon.
Osvaldo P. Almeida, M.D., Ph.D., F.R.A.N.Z.C.P., of the University of Western
Australia, Perth, and colleagues studied 3,987 men age 71 to 89 years. Between
2001 and 2004, the men completed a questionnaire reporting information about
demographics and health history. They underwent testing for depression and
cognitive (thinking, learning and memory) difficulties, and information about
physical health conditions was obtained from a short survey and an Australian
health database. The researchers collected blood samples from the participants
and recorded levels of total testosterone and free testosterone, which is not
bound to proteins. A total of 203 of the participants (5.1 percent) met criteria
for depression; these men had significantly lower total and free testosterone
levels then men who were not depressed. After controlling for other factors—such
as education level, body mass index and cognitive scores—men in the lowest
quintile (20 percent) of free testosterone concentration had three times the
odds of having depression compared to men in the highest quintile.
PhysOrg, March 03, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123784047.html
Only 44 percent satisfied with sex life
A British condom maker says fewer than half of all the
people it surveyed are satisfied with their sex lives. The Durex Sexual
Wellbeing Survey asked 26,000 people worldwide in-depth questions about aspects
of their health, well-being, social circumstances, education, beliefs, sex lives
and attitudes to sex, the company said Monday in a news release. While 60
percent of those surveyed said sex is an enjoyable, vital part of life, only 44
percent said they were fully satisfied with that aspect of their lives. The
survey found that frequency of sex and sexual satisfaction peaks between the
ages of 20 and 34 but people over the age of 65 are still having sex more than
once a week. Eighty-two percent of people who are sexually satisfied said they
feel respected by their partner during sex, 36 percent would like more quality
time alone with their partner, 31 percent would like more fun and better
communication and intimacy with their partner, and 29 percent would like a
higher sex drive.
PhysOrg, March 4, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123833176.html
Comparison of antipsychotic treatments in adolescents with schizophrenia
There is a wealth of scientific literature
available on the treatment of adults diagnosed with schizophrenia. However,
there is a paucity of data to guide the treatment of children and adolescents
with schizophrenia. “Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has
recently approved the use of aripiprazole and risperidone for adolescents with
schizophrenia, few controlled data are available to help guide clinicians
regarding the management of children and adolescents with schizophrenia who fail
to respond to these standard 'first-line' antipsychotic treatments,” according
to Dr. Sanjiv Kumra. Dr. Kumra is one of the authors of a new study to be
published in the March 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry, which was undertaken
to help fill this gap in knowledge. The authors recruited 39 children, 10-18
years of age, who had already failed to respond to at least two antipsychotic
treatments, to participate in a 12-week, double-blind, randomized study – the
most rigorous of clinical trial designs. After initial assessments, the patients
received treatment with either clozapine or “high-dose” olanzapine (doses that
exceed the package insert recommendations) and were monitored for improvement in
their symptoms. The researchers discovered that clozapine was approximately
twice as likely to produce a treatment response as olanzapine. Both positive
symptoms (psychosis) and negative symptoms (blunted emotional response, reduced
motivation) responded better to clozapine. John H. Krystal, M.D., Editor of
Biological Psychiatry and affiliated with both Yale University School of
Medicine and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System, comments on the findings:
“Olanzapine is among the most effective antipsychotic medications, so the
distinctive effectiveness of clozapine in this study could be very important.”
PhysOrg, February 28, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123416879.html
“Is There Hardening of the Heart
During Medical School?” asks
a new study appearing in
March’s Academic Medicine.
"Tomorrow’s Doctors: Less Empathetic
Tomorrow Than Today," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, February 29, 2008
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/29/medical
“Empathy is one
of the most highly desirable professional traits that
medical education should promote, because empathic
communication skills promote patient satisfaction and
adherence to treatment plans while decreasing the likelihood
of malpractice suits. Patients view physicians who possess
the quality of emotional empathy as being better
caregivers.”
The article
analyzes changes in the scores of 419 students at the
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences on the Balanced
Emotional Empathy Scale over the course of medical school.
Students from four classes completed the survey measuring
emotional empathy at the beginning of each of four years
(the authors do not track them into residency and beyond).
Other studies on empathy in medical school — which have
yielded conflicting results, the study states — have focused
on so-called “imaginative empathy.” That’s described as a
cognitive ability to “role play” or imagine another person’s
thoughts and feelings, as opposed to the emotional, or
innate, reaction studied here.
"Multitasking not all it's cracked up to be," AccountingWeb,
March 1, 2008 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=104706
Recent scientific studies reveal the hidden costs
of multitasking, key findings as technology increasingly tempts people to do
more than one thing (and increasingly, more than one complicated thing) at a
time. Joshua Rubinstein, Ph.D., of the Federal Aviation Administration, and
David Meyer, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Evans, Ph.D., both at the University of
Michigan, described their research a fwe years ago in the Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, published by the
American Psychological Association (APA).
Whether people toggle between browsing the Web and
using other computer programs, talk on cell phones while driving, pilot
jumbo jets or monitor air traffic, they're using their "executive control"
processes -- the mental CEO -- found to be associated with the brain's
prefrontal cortex and other key neural regions such as the parietal cortex.
These interrelated cognitive processes establish priorities among tasks and
allocate the mind's resources to them. "For each aspect of human performance
-- perceiving, thinking, and acting -- people have specific mental resources
whose effective use requires supervision through executive mental control,"
says Meyer.
To better understand executive control, as well as
the human capacity for multitasking and its limitations, Rubinstein, Meyer
and Evans studied patterns in the amounts of time lost when people switched
repeatedly between two tasks of varying complexity and familiarity. In four
experiments, young adult subjects (in turn, 12, 36, 36 and 24 in number)
switched between different tasks, such as solving math problems or
classifying geometric objects. The researchers measured subjects' speed of
performance as a function of whether the successive tasks were familiar or
unfamiliar, and whether the rules for performing them were simple or
complex.
The measurements revealed that for all types of
tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another,
and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took
significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs also
were greater when subjects switched to tasks that were relatively
unfamiliar. They got "up to speed" faster when they switched to tasks they
knew better, an observation that may lead to interfaces designed to help
overcome people's innate cognitive limitations.
The researchers say their results suggest that
executive control involves two distinct, complementary stages: goal shifting
("I want to do this now instead of that") and rule activation ("I'm turning
off the rules for that and turning on the rules for this"). Both stages help
people unconsciously switch between tasks.
Continued in article
Question
What will it take for Europe to "love America again?"
"Liebe Europäer," by George Weigel, The Wall Street Journal, February
28, 2008 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120416764622098835.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
In a recent article in Die Zeit, former West German
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt confessed that he wants to "love America again."
He listed 10 conditions for a lovers' reconciliation, each reflective of the
political, environmental, economic, secularist and multicultural shibboleths
of the contemporary European left. Herr Schmidt's romantic yearnings may be
requited in the event that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is the next
president of the United States. Other Americans, however, think that the
real issue is this: How can we respect Europe again?
Let me suggest the ways.
- Recover a sense of moral realism. Europeans could
stop imagining the EU as a Kantian utopia of perpetual peace, absolved from
the grubbiness of worldly strife. Europeans could also refrain from sneering
at what they imagine to be American moral self-righteousness about a
conflicted world, which is in fact moral realism. Such a change in European
attitudes would likely have a salutary effect on policy: Every NATO member
would, for example, actually fight in Afghanistan, rather than withdrawing
from the action behind rules of engagement meant to appease ill-informed
popular opinion and the European peace movement.
- Sacrifice for defense. Three percent of GDP is
the stated goal for defense spending among NATO members. European states
rarely reach it. Make the 3% goal real, and spend it in ways that develop
real military capability. A Europe worth respecting wouldn't depend on
American airlift capability to do anything seriously militarily.
- Enlarge the community of European democracies. As
the U.S. bound its own security to Europe's during the Cold War, so Europe
should extend a democratic welcome to Ukraine and Georgia by offering a NATO
Membership Action Plan at the alliance's April meeting in Bucharest. The
newer European democracies and NATO members are the most enthusiastic about
such a plan. Europe's NATO elders should follow their lead, irrespective of
the squawking that will ensue from Moscow.
- Restore cultural self-confidence. Europeans
should admit that multiculturalism, ghettoization and tolerating enclaves of
rule by Shariah provide no real answers to the challenges of large-scale
immigration from the Arab Islamic world. A Europe worth respecting would
stop appeasing Islamists and jihadists and affirm the moral, not merely
pragmatic, superiority of Western notions of human rights and the legal and
political equality of men and women. European intellectuals like Marcello
Pera, Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann and, yes, Pope Benedict XVI have
all deplored the self-loathing embedded in contemporary European high
culture; Schmidt and those for whom he speaks should listen to them. A
Europe worth respecting would relearn its own historic worth. And having
done that, it would stop kowtowing to Islamist blackmail, which is bad for
moderate Muslims and lethal for Europe's future.
- Jettison secularist mythology. Gratefully
acknowledge the role that Christian ideas of human dignity, social pluralism
and moral responsibility have played in setting the cultural foundations of
21st-century Europe's commitments to democracy, human rights and the rule of
law. Recognize that the civilization of the West was produced by the
fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome -- biblical religion,
Greek rationality and the Roman idea of a law-governed polity. Confront the
intellectual and moral incapacities that Europe experiences in defending the
truth of its commitments to freedom, justice and equality, many of which are
the unhappy result of Europe's decades-long frolic in the postmodern sandbox
of skepticism and relativism.
- Declare energy independence from Putin's Russia.
A Europe worth respecting would acknowledge that its dependence on Russian
energy creates a grave strategic vulnerability and would overcome national
corporate interests in reversing that.
- Have the political courage to make necessary
structural reforms. America is no model here, given our sorry failure to
deal with either Social Security reform or immigration reform. Perhaps EU
members like Germany, by implementing the economic changes that every person
capable of reading a balance sheet knows are necessary, could set an
example.
- Fix the EU democracy deficit. The new Lisbon
Treaty, intended to guide the affairs of the enlarged EU, is not only
written in obscure, even Orwellian language. It seems unlikely to be put to
a popular referendum in most EU member states. This top-down imposition of
what amounts to constitutional law is another example of the consolidation
of political authority in Brussels-based EU institutions that lack
democratic accountability. One can't respect the EU as a democratic
community when bureaucratic authoritarianism is its default decision-making
mode.
- Tell the greens to stop hurting poor people.
Anticorporate, Green-fed European superstitions about genetically modified
foods, and the European Union's self-indulgent agricultural policy, are two
significant factors in perpetuating hunger throughout the world. Enough is
enough: Look at the data, not the propaganda of European environmentalists.
- Put America to shame culturally. Stop whining
about the vulgarities of American popular culture and then buying it as fast
as it's produced. Make something better. Lead a Western renaissance in
literature, film, theater and music. In doing so, Europeans will rediscover
that they have something to offer the world besides guilt and guilt's
first-cousin, moral posturing. They can offer the riches of the world's
greatest cultural heritage, which is something worth both defending and
advancing.
Mr. Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public
Policy Center in Washington and author, most recently, of "Faith, Reason,
and the War on Jihadism" (Doubleday, 2007).
Obsolete Skills (some things young whipper snappers can't do)---
http://obsoleteskills.com/
Forwarded by Gene and Joan,
Senior Center
It was entertainment night at the Senior Center . Claude the hypnotist
exclaimed: 'I'm here to put you into a trance; I intend to hypnotize each and
every member of the audience.'
The excitement was almost electric as Claude withdrew a beautiful antique
pocket watch from his coat. 'I want you each to keep your eye on this
antique watch. It's a very special watch. It's been in my family for six
generations.' He began to swing the watch gently back and forth while quietly
chanting, 'Watch the watch, watch the watch, watch the watch...'
The crowd became mesmerized as the watch swayed back and forth, light
gleaming off its polished surface. Hundreds of pairs of eyes followed the
swaying watch, clearly under the spell of the hypnotist, when suddenly, the
family heirloom slipped from the hypnotist's fingers and fell to the floor,
shattering into a hundred pieces. "Shit!!!' said the hypnotist.
It took three days to clean up the Senior Center.
Jensen Comment
This reminds me of the true story when a nurse at a senior care center decided
to play a joke on the incoming night staff by loading the patients up with
Ex-Lax. The laxative worked beyond expectations and the night shift had to work
furiously to repeatedly change diapers. This was indeed and unethical and horrid
thing to do to patients in her charge. The nurse was fired the next day for good
cause!
Forwarded by Lynn
FINALLY..THE BLONDE JOKE TO END ALL BLONDE JOKES
A blonde woman was speeding down the road in her little red sports car and
was pulled over by a woman police officer who was also a blonde.
The blonde cop asked to see the blonde driver's license.
She dug through her purse and was getting progressively more agitated. "What
does it look like?" she finally asked.
The policewoman replied, "It's square and it has your picture on it."
The driver finally found a square mirror in her purse, looked at it and
handed it to the policewoman.
"Here it is," she said. The blonde officer looked at the mirror, then handed
it back saying, "Okay, you can go. I didn't realize you were a cop."
Forwarded by Gene and Joan
Whether Democrat
or Republican, I think you'll get a kick out of this!
A little boy goes to his dad and asks, 'What is Politics?'
Dad says, 'Well son, let me try to explain it this way:
I am the head of the family, so call me The President.
Your mother is the administrator of the money, so we call her the
Government.
We are here to take care of your needs, so we will call you the
People.
The nanny, we will consider her the Working Class.
And your baby brother, we will call him the Future.
Now think about that and see if it makes sense..'
So the little boy goes off to bed thinking about what Dad has said.
Later that night, he hears his baby brother crying, so he gets up to
check on him . He finds that the baby has severely soiled his
diaper. So the little boy goes to his parent's room and finds his
mother asleep. Not wanting to wake her, he goes to the nanny's room.
Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole and sees his father
in bed with the nanny.
He gives up and goes back to bed .
The next morning, the little boy says to his father, 'Dad, I think I
understand the concept of politics now. '
The father says, 'Good, son, tell me in your own words what you
think politics is all about.'
The little boy replies, 'The President is screwing the Working Class
while the Government is sound asleep. The People are being ignored
and the Future is in deep sh*t'
Tidbits Archives ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron"
enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and
other universities is at
http://www.searchedu.com/
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Facts about the earth in real time --- http://www.worldometers.info/
Interesting Online Clock
and Calendar
---
http://home.tiscali.nl/annejan/swf/timeline.swf
Time by Time Zones ---
http://timeticker.com/
Projected Population Growth (it's out of control) ---
http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm
Also see
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Populations.html
Facts about population growth (video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Projected U.S. Population Growth ---
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/projections75.html
Real time meter of the U.S. cost of the war in Iraq ---
http://www.costofwar.com/
Enter you zip code to get Census Bureau comparisons ---
http://zipskinny.com/
Sure wish there'd be a little good news today.
Three Finance Blogs
Jim Mahar's FinanceProfessor Blog ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
FinancialRounds Blog ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Karen Alpert's FinancialMusings (Australia) ---
http://financemusings.blogspot.com/
Some Accounting Blogs
Paul Pacter's IAS Plus (International
Accounting) ---
http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
International Association of Accountants News ---
http://www.aia.org.uk/
AccountingEducation.com and Double Entries ---
http://www.accountingeducation.com/
Gerald Trite's eBusiness and
XBRL Blogs ---
http://www.zorba.ca/
AccountingWeb ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/
SmartPros ---
http://www.smartpros.com/
Bob Jensen's Sort-of Blogs ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/JensenBlogs.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called New
Bookmarks ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called
Tidbits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud
Updates ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Online Books, Poems, References,
and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm
Shared Open Courseware
(OCW) from Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and Other Sharing
Universities ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Free Textbooks and Cases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Mathematics and Statistics Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics
Free Science and Medicine Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science
Free Social Science and Philosophy Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social
Free Education Discipline Tutorials ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm
Teaching Materials (especially
video) from PBS
Teacher Source: Arts and
Literature ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit.htm
Teacher Source: Health & Fitness
---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/health.htm
Teacher Source: Math ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/math.htm
Teacher Source: Science ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/sci_tech.htm
Teacher Source: PreK2 ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/prek2.htm
Teacher Source: Library Media ---
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/library.htm
Free Education and
Research Videos from Harvard University ---
http://athome.harvard.edu/archive/archive.asp
VYOM eBooks Directory ---
http://www.vyomebooks.com/
From Princeton Online
The Incredible Art Department ---
http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/
Online Mathematics Textbooks ---
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html
National Library of Virtual Manipulatives ---
http://enlvm.usu.edu/ma/nav/doc/intro.jsp
Moodle ---
http://moodle.org/
The word moodle is an acronym for "modular
object-oriented dynamic learning environment", which is quite a mouthful.
The Scout Report stated the following about Moodle 1.7. It is a
tremendously helpful opens-source e-learning platform. With Moodle,
educators can create a wide range of online courses with features that
include forums, quizzes, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and surveys. On the
Moodle website, visitors can also learn about other features and read about
recent updates to the program. This application is compatible with computers
running Windows 98 and newer or Mac OS X and newer.
Some of Bob Jensen's Tutorials
Accountancy Discussion ListServs:
For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a
ListServ (usually for free) go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/
AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc
Roles of a ListServ ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm
|
CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access. |
Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA. |
AccountantsWorld
http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as
accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed
assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and
taxation. |
Business Valuation
Group
BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag
[RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM] |
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
190 Sunset Hill Road
Sugar Hill, NH 03586
Phone: 603-823-8482
Email:
rjensen@trinity.edu