New results on the genetic architecture of autism support Mike Wigler’s Unified Theory. See earlier post De Novo Mutations and Autism. Recent increases in the incidence of autism could be mainly due to greater diagnostic awareness. However, the new result that women can be carriers of autism-linked variants without exhibiting the same kinds of symptoms …
Throughout its years of survey and excavation at Michigan State University, the Campus Archaeology Program has found only one pre-contact archaeology site on campus; that is, a site that pre-dates the arrival of Europeans into the region. Thus the majority of CAP’s research has concentrated on exploring the history of the university itself, which is …
Trojan Horse for America: Teach for America’s True Agenda 29 Sep 2015 Like many education reform initiatives (i.e., charter schools, merit pay), Teach for America was created out of what were once noble intentions: to provide bright, young teachers to fill vacancies in some of our nation’s most difficult to staff classrooms. What began as a fledgling start-up, …
I was out for my morning run today, and as I came around a bend in the road could see two little girls waiting for their bus off in the distance. Oblivious to their surroundings, they were left to their own devices. They could do whatever they wanted to do, with no adults to interfere …
I’ll be part of this roundtable discussion Saturday, Oct 3 in NYC. It’s open to the general public and will be live streamed at the YouTube link above. I’m pleased to be on the panel with (among others) Dean Simonton, a UC Davis psychology professor and author of numerous books related to the theme of …
Sometimes we are lulled into a belief that we actually know how biology works. Not that biology is simple, mind you, but after a while we “get the hang of it” and think we have it under control. Sure, we know that molecular biology is complicated: Genes have evolved for eons to be transcribed into …
© MariNaomi I am pleased to announce the availability of the Cartoonists of Color Dataset and the LGBTQ Cartoonists of Color Dataset. Both datasets are derived from the Cartoonists of Color Database (CoC). Dataset release is the result of a collaboration with CoC Database creator, artist, author, and illustrator MariNaomi. These datasets are provided in order to …
I’ve been meaning to write for a long time about the role of chance … luck … whatever you want to call it … in life, from the grand sweep of evolution to our individual existence. Well, just this morning, I came pretty close to demise by random genetic drift. Almost every weekday, I walk …
Here. Deleta Gasco Smith works for the Little Traverse Bay Band. She attended Holy Childhood for three years of elementary school. “When we were in the school we were actually completely forbidden to speak the language, and if we were caught, the punishment was swift and it was severe,” Gasco Smith says. Gasco Smith’s father …
We’ll finish up “food flics month” with the film I take to be the granddaddy of them all: Babette’s Feast. It came out way back in in 1987, before food was cool. Unlike the other three films we’ve mentioned, it is not a documentary. It’s based on a story by Karen Blixen set in 19th …
Jason Zweig writes about Philip Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project below. See also Expert Predictions, Perils of Prediction, and this podcast talk by Tetlock. A quick summary: good amateurs (i.e., smart people who think probabilistically and are well read) typically perform as well as or better than area experts (e.g., PhDs in Social Science, History, Government; …
The “Silly Season” in Education Reform 25 Sep 2015 So much silliness, so little time. Where to start? New York’s new commissioner of education, MaryEllen Elia, made some curious remarks in an interview with Politico recently, revealing a troubling level of unawareness with respect to the Common Core State Standards, education, schools, learning and children. …
This morning I will be sharing (along with Mary Wever) the work we all have been doing in online, hybrid and face to face MAET programs at the Exploring the Creative and Innovative Instructional Makerspaces at MSU session at the Hive. Much of the MakerSpace work in MAET centers around the course CEP 811: Adapting …
This list of the largest repositories of genetic data appeared in the 25 September 2015 issue of Science. Note that the quality and extent of phenotyping varies significantly. 23andME SIZE: >1 million GENETIC DATA: SNPs This popular personal genomics company now hopes to apply its data to drug discovery (see main story, p. 1472). ANCESTRY.COM …
Last week I had the privilege of teaching an upper-level French class here at MSU all about special collections, rare books, and rare book provenance. It was a blast! The students got a chance to work with some very old books (the earliest was printed in 1551 and the latest in 1845), transcribing and translating …
Next to “Will this be on the test?”, one of my least favorite questions is, “When will I ever use this?”. It bugs me on a few levels, but mainly I’m peeved that the perception is what I’m teaching them is not important or relevant, and that it often reveals that students really aren’t thinking …
I knew I had fallen off the regular posting merry-go-round, but was horrified when I realized that it’s been over a month! Is it a coincidence that my last post was titled “And so sabbatical ends”? No, it is not. I am happy to be back, but reentering the relatively more structured world of teaching, …
MSU Women’s Land Army milking cows, 1944. Courtesy of MSU Archives. My goal for CAP for this semester is to continue to research sustainability in food practices at MSU. Previous blog posts have discussed some of these topics, including the role of women and the entire local community during World War II in programs such …
Leprosy warning sign, via Flickr user Mandy Leprosy is a fascinating disease- not just for its effects, but for the social implications of having the disease. Leprosy was an epidemic disease that not only infected millions of people over a span of thousands of years, but it still remains a threat in Third World countries. …
This fall, our field team is out conducting electrofishing surveys on sixteen lakes in Michigan (video). Our goal is to determine if changes to shoreline habitats are impacting the growth, reproduction, and population sizes of Largemouth Bass. When we catch Largemouth Bass, we also compare what they were eating to the habitats in which they …
Here are some close-up shots from the giant manuscript antiphonary we wrote about a few months ago. Last Wednesday was the MSU Libraries Open House, and this was one of the wonderful items Special Collections set out to entice passers-by. Some of the students who stopped by affectionately referred to it as a “Harry Potter book,” …
In my new role I am lucky in that I get to meet people all across campus and I will get a chance to go into buildings I rarely get a chance to visit. As I returned to Erickson Hall for a meeting today I saw some great flyers for amazing events coming up in …
We had an opportunity to mention “Werewolves of London” back when we were celebrating the blue moon in July. We didn’t quote the verse that makes it a “food song”. Warren Zevon reports, “I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand. He was walking through the streets of Soho in the rain. …
James Lee talk at ISIR 2015 (via James Thompson) reports on 74 hits at genome-wide statistical significance (p < 5E-8) using educational attainment as the phenotype. Most of these will also turn out to be hits on cognitive ability. To quote James: “Shock and Awe” for those who doubt that cognitive ability is influenced by …
Ever wonder about those big numbers posted in a window in that tall building on the east side of Farm Lane, across from the entrance to the MSU Dairy Store? Right now, the digits read 63000. That’s the number of generations in an experiment that’s been running in my lab for over a quarter century. …
SUMMARY (150-word-brief): This is the MSU FFI review of the Food Safety Modernization Act Preventive Controls (FSMA-PC) Final Rule for Human Food and for Animal Food that was published yesterday. The Final Rule confirms that Food Fraud/Economically Motivated Adulteration (FF/EMA) must be addressed. FF/EMA is under Preventative Controls (Food Safety) and not Intentional Adulteration (Food …
From Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks. This part of Bourdieu’s oeuvre is, of course, required reading for all academics. By academics, I don’t just mean humanists and social scientists. Even those in the hardest of sciences and technology would benefit from considering the political / symbolic economy of their field. Why, exactly, did most …
Overhead image of the excavated privy During the summer, CAP field crew members excavated the remains of a privy on campus. For those not in the know (including myself until a couple months ago), a privy is a historic outhouse. Historic archaeologists have great interest in privies because they often contain artifacts of the past …
Chicago, September 16, 2015 – Here is a link to a PDF version of my presentation for later today at Process Expo in Chicago. This includes new content regarding the Food Fraud/ Economically Motivated Adulteration aspects of the Food Safety Modernization Act Preventative Controls Final Rule that will be officially published tomorrow. We will publish a …
I grew up out in the country in Iowa. Our address was RR1 = “Rural Route 1” :-) We had a creek, pond, dirtbike (motorcycle) track, and other fun stuff on our property. One of the things I enjoyed most was target shooting and plinking with my .22 — I’d just walk out the back …
Here are a couple photos from our first of two sugarbeet harvests yesterday up at the Saginaw Valley Research and Extension Center. The crew up on top of the sugarbeet harvester; taking weights and collecting samples for sugar analysis Sugarbeets entering the scale and being sub-sampled Tying the sample bags atop a moving harvester …
One of my favorite comedians is the brilliant Ron White, and one of my favorite “bits” of his is one that has to do with his bitingly funny critique of “storm watchers”–that intrepid breed of daredevils that speeds around the countryside following tornados and hurricanes, disregarding their own safety and well-being for the (dubious) thrill of getting …
This is another one of those Sundays where I am entrusting the blog to robots at WordPress. If things have gone according to plan, I am actually on my way home from Japan this Sunday. I’ve been in Japan giving an invited lecture at a big soil science conference. I’ve been excited about this for …
Nine months ago, we posted about these jars of water (http://msulconservationlab.tumblr.com/post/108193028342/this-row-of-jars-shows-how-much-discoloration) which hold samples from each subsequent washing of a book printed in the 1600s (http://catalog.lib.msu.edu/record=b2150582~S23a). I was making my merry way through the lab the other day when I noticed something growing in Jar 1. GROWING, you guys. I fear we have awakened an ancient …
A survey by economist Jayson Lusk at the Department of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University found, unsurprisingly, that Americans remain skeptical of GMOs: 82 percent surveyed supported mandatory labeling of foods made with ingredients grown from GMOs. However, an astonishing 80 percent of those Americans supported mandatory labeling of foods containing DNA! (The difference …
Understanding the cultural heritage of an institution is important – it not only helps us define who we are, but where we came from and how we can protect our history for future generations. During summer 2014, Dr. Lynne Goldstein taught a course on Methods in Cultural Heritage to a group of senior undergraduate and graduate …
I had lunch with a friend (and great colleague) this afternoon and he asked me if I knew of any coding/technology communities for his 10-year-old niece. She is interested in coding/making/tinkering, but, lives in a very small town. I checked to see if there was a CoderDojo in her area (they are popping up in …
Colleges ranked by Nobel, Fields, Turing and National Academies output This Quartz article describes Jonathan Wai’s research on the rate at which different universities produce alumni who make great contributions to science, technology, medicine, and mathematics. I think the most striking result is the range of outcomes: the top school outperforms good state flagships (R1 …
Recently, the Entertainment Industry Foundation, the 4 major networks and DonorsChoose.org, a crowd funding website that targets schools and teachers, announced “Think It Up,” a nationally-televised “edu-telethon” to be aired live on Friday, Sep. 11 by ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox at 8pm. According to the EIF, the purpose of this strongly STEM-slanted program is …
“It may be difficult for a tribe with a few thousand members to run a justice system on par with a state or the federal government.” Brief of Dollar General Corporation to the Supreme Court (p. 9) Dollar General Corporation filed its opening brief with the U.S. Supreme Court last week in the case of …
Read Toby Young’s new article The Fall of the Meritocracy. The adoption of civil service and educational placement examinations in England and France in the 19th century was consciously based on the Chinese model (see Les Grandes Ecoles Chinoises). Although imperfect, exams work: we have no better system for filtering talent. But few are willing to acknowledge …
Critics of the proposed “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” agreement with Iran and six other world powers fail to address the double standards that run rampant with the nuclear club. Of the current nuclear club members (US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) only China and India have pledged a non-first …
“Well it’s another burrito. It’s a cold Lone Star in my hand. It’s a quarter for the jukebox boys, play the sons of the mother lovin’ Bunkhouse Band.” This would be Gary P. Nunn explaining “What I Like about Texas”. He goes on to mention Mi Tierra, which has come up once before in the …
Two years ago (two years and one day if you’re being picky), I posted a pointer to a Spanish language web site hosted by Francisco Yuraszeck (professor at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Viña del Mar, Chile). The site, Gestión de Operaciones, is listed in the resources box on the right. Recently, Francisco …
I usually am quite careful when it comes to my phone: use phone case, apply the screen protector, things like that. But I suppose accident happens regardless. So, during the first week of August, I accidentally dropped a big screwdriver on the phone (don’t ask why) and heard a “crack” sound. Uugghh… my heart dropped …
Jessica Intermill has published “Competing Sovereigns: Circuit Courts’ Varied Approaches to Federal Statutes in Indian Country” in the September 2015 issue of the Federal Lawyer. The article details the Sixth Circuit’s varied approaches in Little River Band of Ottawa Indians Tribal Government v. NLRB and NLRB v. Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort (en banc petition …
Project Information Literacy has released a new interview with Mary-Ann Winkelmes, of the Transparency in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Project. Winkelmes has been an advocate for making the “why” and “how” of education explicit to students, a teaching strategy that is gaining traction within the world of information literacy instruction. You can read …
I returned from my first trip to China. Happily I was able to recover enough to get back into the field, but alas only once. We hiked to the border of Wolong Nature Reserve and the reserve to the north, Caopo. This area had excellent panda habitat and we found four different fecal samples. From …
It is the first week of school here at Michigan State University, and not surprisingly, we’ve got super high temperatures and crazy humidity. It feels like you’re entering a steam room when you step outside. The start of the school year means I get to start looking forward to cooler weather. I love Michigan in …
I was asked recently to write something about my leadership style / management philosophy. As a startup CEO I led a team of ~35, and now my office has something like 350 FTEs. Eventually, hands on leadership becomes impossible and one needs general principles that can be broadly conveyed. I have a “no drama” leadership …