Last month I described my testimony at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on getting better information about college. One of the topics mentioned by a few of the House committee members was the issue of the return on the investment in college as measured by what students are earning today. There has been much interest in getting …
As I prepared to write this post, I found myself distracted by dozens of “important” little things – sending text messages, reading I “should” do, and trying to plan out my week. Many of these things needed to be done, but did I have to do them today? Were they more important than writing this …
Many of us are preparing to enter the academic job market this fall and are wondering where to start and how to navigate this unfamiliar and intimidating terrain. In a recent professional development talk at Michigan State University, Dr. Sowande’ Mustakeem offered the following suggestions from her own successful experience on the job market: Begin …
In the past few days, I attended two different workshops co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering. The workshops were: the International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science and Engineering (SECSI) and the International Workshop on Conducting Empirical Studies in Industry (CESI). I’ve learned one major thing from both of these workshops: Software …
We’ve been waiting for these thinking machines for a long time now. We’ve read about them, and seen them in countless movies. They are just technology, right? And we’ve gotten really good at this technology thing! But where are the machines? In a previous post I’ve hinted at the big problem in serious Artificial Intelligence …
I’m a pretty big advocate of anything open — open source, open access, and open science, in particular. I always have been. And now that I’m a professor, I’ve been trying to figure out how to actually practice open science effectively What is open science? Well, I think of it as talking regularly about my …
I just finished reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, an excellent book about the HeLa cell line cultured from cancerous cells taken from Henrietta Lacks. In addition to raising some really interesting and astonishing questions about the appropriate (mis)use of patients’ tissue samples, a section about George Gey caught my eye and made me …
The Michigan Natural Resources Commission has approved a wolf hunting season here in Michigan, just one day after Governor Snyder signed legislation authorizing the Commission to determine whether to allow such hunting. In recent years, Anishnaabe tribes (Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa) in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have opposed state-sanctioned wolf-hunting.  Wolves are important in the religious teachings of Anishnaabe people, …
Last month I described my testimony at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on getting better information about college. One of the topics mentioned by a few of the House committee members was the issue of the return on the investment in college as measured by what students are earning today. There has been much interest in …
It is spring and spring always reminds me of reading The Great Gatsby with my 11th graders. It helps now that Baz Luhrmann’s movie is coming out soon and I imagine that if I still were reading it with 11th graders we would rendezvous at the theater dressed in flapper costumes (of course I have …