One of the questions I get quite a bit is “when do bodies turn to bone?” This may be a question relating to general curiosity about what has happened to the remains of a loved one, questions about the accuracy of popular TV shows, or concerns about whether one is going to run into an …
For the past two semesters, I’ve been teaching CEP 813: Electronic Assessment for Teaching and Learning, a course associated with MSU’s Master of Arts in Educational Technology and Graduate Certificate for Online Teaching and Learning. There’s a lot of great information in this course, but one of the highlights for me is the two-week unit …
Philip K. Dick’s first science fiction story 15 year old Philip K. Dick’s short story The Slave Race (his first published science fiction) appeared in the Young Authors’ Club column of The Berkeley Gazette (1944). From Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin. In the future, androids created to ease humans’ …
For the first time, I attended an argument live at the Supreme Court. I haven’t even read the transcript yet, and so my commentary is even more idiosyncratic than usual. But here goes. On Judicial Discipline If the Justices collectively had more judicial discipline, this would be one of their easiest cases, and likely would …
A recent article in the Detroit Free Press highlighted serious teacher shortages in Detroit Public Schools (DPS). There are currently at least 135 teaching vacancies in the district and more are anticipated after the holidays, when other teachers are not expected to return. This problem is not new – in September 2014, there were reportedly …
This second tribute to my father was written by my son Daniel, who gave me permission to post it here. ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ My dear Grandpa Gerry died yesterday at 91, at home near Seattle with Grandma Ann and three of my aunts by his side. He had a sharp and curious mind undimmed by age, …
My father died peacefully at his home near Seattle this morning, before dawn, at 91 years of age. Gerhard Emmanuel Lenski, Jr. was born (1924) and raised in Washington, DC. His father went by Gerhard, and my father went by “Gerry” (pronounced like Gary) his whole life. My father did his undergraduate and graduate studies …
This post on Medium initiates an experiment in public writing designed to facilitate transparency and refine my thinking in relation to issues I face in my role as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University. I welcome engagement here on the Long Road or there on Medium. When I write …
Such a fixation our culture has on guns and violence as a response to fear. From Dwight Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech warning against the Military Industrial Complex to the NRA’s no holds barred to make sure everyone has a gun on them at all times, our culture is sick, probably cancerous, and possibly stage 4. …
Here is a post for those Thornapple Blog readers who rely on me to keep them informed of all the doings in the murky world of food regulatory policy. Of course I have to caution any other innocent soul who happens to have stumbled onto the Blog that the readers who rely on me to …
In one of his early blog posts, Terence Tao (shown above with Paul Erdos in 1985) wrote Does one have to be a genius to do maths? The answer is an emphatic NO. In order to make good and useful contributions to mathematics, one does need to work hard, learn one’s field well, learn other …
Racially Motivated Hate Speech on Campus In recent weeks, the media has reported a rash of racist episodes on college campuses. The incidents range from the overt and fear mongering, such as the makeshift noose hung around the neck of the Black former university president James Meredith’s Statue at Ole Miss, to the suggestive and …
After a week of going through the ins and outs of my experience with the #educattentats hashtag, it’s time to see some results! Yesterday, I discussed how I used the ggmaps package to turn the text string “locations” in users’ Twitter profiles into latitude and longitude coordinates. Once you have those, plotting them on a …
One way of thinking about social welfare spending is in terms of spending focused on older adults and the forces within a country that lead to a “pro-elderly bias”. There is no doubt (or is there? another post for another day) that older adults have more power in some countries than others. In terms of …
On November 10, Michigan’s State Board of Education voted to adopt a new set of science curricular standards. By and large, these new standards are the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a set of curriculum standards designed to promote a conceptual understanding of science knowledge and the skills that scientists use. This follows a trend …
Let’s just say that you are an Iron Age herder living in Switzerland. You’re out walking through your flock of cattle, and one of them gets fiesty and kicks you in the head. Ouch. Over the next couple days, a pressure builds in your head and becomes unbearable. The elders in your village discuss the …
On December 1, 2015, the Football Scholars Forum held its 33rd session. The Michigan State University-based online think tank pre-circulated a shared list of readings that formed the basis for a wide-ranging, highly engaging discussion about the impact and aftermath of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Thirteen fútbologists from the United States, Canada, Britain, …
Plotting Twitter users’ locations in R (part 3: turning text to coordinates) In yesterday’s post, I described how I scraped Twitter users’ profiles to collect the locations (as text strings) that they list in those profiles. This was a fantastic leap forward for my eventual goal of indicating on a map the location of everyone …
My Blogiversary came and went without any acknowledgment from me. What can I say – I’m not very good at planning parties, or even remembering anniversaries (sorry Husband). Plus, as we like to say, time flies and it’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this for a year. It’s not entirely true that I forgot. …
“Counterfeit wine is almost as old as wine itself, a problem that [Roman Philosopher] ‘Pliny the Elder’ decried in first-century Rome.” A wine expert stated that “If someone is faking Miraval, a $25 rose, I could be drinking counterfeit rarities.” This is a review of the November 30, 2015 Wine Spectator Magazine article of the …
Yesterday, I mentioned discovering the French hashtag #educattentats that was created in the wake of the 13 November terrorist attacks. As far as I can tell, I discovered the hashtag shortly after it was created, so it’s been interesting to see how use of the hashtag has grown in the hours, days, and weeks since. …
The Education Policy Center at Michigan State University has recently released a paper titled Which Districts Get Into Financial Trouble and Why: Michigan’s Story. Written by Dr. David Arsen of Michigan State University, along with his colleagues Dr. Thomas A. DeLuca, Dr. Yongmei Ni, and Dr. Michael Bates, this piece examines which Michigan districts get into …
Expanding the educational opportunities for Pre-K students has been a focus of states and policymakers for the past several decades. President Obama and his administration doubled down on this investment by supporting programs and states to provide high-quality Pre-K programs to all young learners. As was written earlier on Green & Write children who are …
Yesterday, I posted for the first time in French, which was kind of exciting for me but less exciting for those of you who don’t read French. The good news is that yesterday’s post was, in effect, a prelude to a series of posts I’ll be doing this week (in English) about a French Twitter …
Over the past few years various CAP fellows, including myself, have examined sustainability at MSU. In contrast to modern sustainability research, which has focused exclusively on the present and future, CAP has examined how past practices functioned and how these have changed over time. Through the use of both archival and archaeological evidence, how past …