Dan Isbell
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danielrisbell.bsky.social
Dan Isbell
@danielrisbell.bsky.social
870 followers 580 following 1.3K posts
Associate Professor of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, specializing in language assessment. Associate Editor at Language Learning journal (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679922). Views own. https://isbell.github.io/
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Reposted by Dan Isbell
statgendan.bsky.social
“changes in statistical significance are often not themselves statistically significant. … even large changes in significance levels can correspond to small, nonsignificant changes in the underlying quantities.”

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

#Statistics
The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” is not Itself Statistically Significant
It is common to summarize statistical comparisons by declarations of statistical significance or nonsignificance. Here we discuss one problem with such declarations, namely that changes in statisti...
www.tandfonline.com
November 9, 2025 at 12:39 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
dannybate.bsky.social
The German word for 'first', erste, is unsurprisingly unrelated to English's, but I like how each has a current cognate in the other language.

The English word is related to German Fürst 'prince' (the 'foremost', like Latin princeps), while the cognate of German erste can be found in 'erstwhile'.
November 9, 2025 at 6:29 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Exactly what I needed to ruin the R tutorial in next week's quant methods class:
November 7, 2025 at 7:08 AM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
usapolling.bsky.social
Nationwide Support For Mamdani Policies:

Speeding up affordable housing approvals: 83%

Penalizing landlords who significantly increase rent or violate tenant protections: 82%

Adding a 2% tax on income over $1 million: 72%

Raising corporate taxes: 72%

Data For Progress / Nov 3, 2025
November 5, 2025 at 8:19 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
America's Mayor (laudatory)
November 5, 2025 at 5:40 AM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
andrew.heiss.phd
Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...
In the first week of class, I had you read an article about how ChatGPT is philosophical “bullshit”, as well as this other post about AI and LLMs in this class. I’ve seen a surprising increase in the amount of ChatGPT-based weekly check-ins and graph interpretations in the exercises. (In the past, I’ve even had students tell me they PDFs of the slides into ChatGPT to generate interesting and confusing things.) Don’t do this! LLMs cannot find three things that you personally found interesting from the readings. LLMs are not you. It’s a huge waste of time for all of us to for me to spend time evaluating and grading output from ChatGPT. I want to read what you think and do, not what a computer invents. NoteMy personal stance on AI and LLMs Many of you have asked about how I think about and use LLMs in my own work (and in the class materials). Please check this short little page where I explain what I do with text, images, code, research, and learning. In short, I do not use LLMs to create any of the materials for this class, and I do not use them to grade or evaluate any of your work. I’ve even had several students submit completely made up stuff for mini projects and final projects. In your final project, your job is to take a dataset, make three different plots with it, and combine the plots into one graphic that tells some sort of story. I’ve (really truly) received projects like this: (a ChatGPT-generated plot of completely made up data from gapminder) At a very quick glance, that looks like a plausible image. But holy crap it falls apart fast, both comically and tragically. Comically because, like, look at the y-axis in the scatterplot; or the x-axis ticks in the population grown chart that are sometimes spaced every 20 years, sometimes every 10 years, and has 1980 there twice; or the weird blobs in the map. Tragically—and most importantly—literally nothing in this image is real and none of the annotations make sense and none of the colors make sense and everything here is completely meaningless and devoid of any information. It’s pure philosophical bullshit—an image “produced without concern for its truth.” That’s what I mean when I say that it’s a forgetful and unreliable resource. Lots of that code is helpful as an illustration of what’s going on. Lots of the explanation is good and fine. But it subtly changed its mind halfway through and didn’t realize it (because it can’t realize it! it’s just a chain of statistically likely text!) Hopefully you can see where this is dangerous for learning. It can often “teach” you wrong, and you can only recognize that if you know stuff already. It’s extra dangerous if you then take that example output, paste it into your exercise, and submit it. I’m not even concerned about the plagiarism aspect of that—code is code and there are only a few ways to write {dplyr} code that will do this, and it’s easy to adapt from real human-based examples online, so I’m less worried about stealing other people’s work here. I’m concerned that it’s not real data. It made up values of 1, 2, 3, and 4 for some countries to illustrate grouping and summarizing. That’s good and normal. None of that is real. Don’t treat it as real.
November 2, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
kmcmanus.bsky.social
From Nov 18, all articles accepted for publication in Studies in Second Language Acquisition will be #OpenAccess, published with a Creative Commons licence and freely available to read online #lingsky #langsky #SLA #linguistics

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Studies in Second Language Acquisition | Cambridge Core
Studies in Second Language Acquisition - Luke Plonsky
www.cambridge.org
November 2, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
warren.senate.gov
15 million Americans are going to lose their health care.
October 31, 2025 at 10:04 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
In a completely unrelated note, I wonder what the Discord and Signal chats for the Young Americans for Freedom and MSU College Republicans look like.

statenews.com/article/2025...
Republicans chastise MSU for ‘state funded division’ in teaching class - The State News
Republicans at the state and national level lambasted MSU for the syllabus of an introductory teaching course, which they claim promotes racism against white students.
statenews.com
October 31, 2025 at 6:44 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
A neat tidbit in the local sports linguistic landscape... place kicker Kansei Matsuzawa, who is originally from Japan and taught himself how to kick field goals by watching YouTube vids, has his surname written in Japanese kanji on his University of Hawaiʻi jersey.
October 30, 2025 at 6:34 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
And if anyone is having trouble wrapping their heads around this, it's the same dynamic as how married heterosexual men can be misogynist.
landbeforetim.bsky.social Timchat Torah @landbeforetim.bsky.social · 12d
I would love for white people to stop acting shocked JD Vance can be as racist as he is with a South Asian wife

Any mixed person can tell you it’s very common for mixed kids to have a racist white parent

And any nonwhite person can tell you interracial dating doesn’t mean you can’t be racist
October 29, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
tovelarsson.bsky.social
Hot off the press: Kim et al. (2026) in System on the effects of self-initiated L2 reading on phraseology. Available open access here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

From the grant-funded ComplEExity Project (Kaatari, Larsson, Wang, Sundqvist, & Kim).
The effects of extramural English reading on phraseology in L2 writing: A key phrase frames approach
Foreign/second language (L2) learners worldwide are increasingly exposed to English outside the classroom through self-initiated, extramural English (…
www.sciencedirect.com
October 24, 2025 at 6:11 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
npr.org
Del Toro's new Frankenstein adaption reimagines Mary Shelley's 1818 Gothic novel. Frankenstein was like a tech bro: "creating something without considering the consequences," he explains. n.pr/3L5exuu
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro says 'I'd rather die' than use generative AI
Del Toro's new Frankenstein adaption reimagines Mary Shelley's 1818 Gothic novel. Frankenstein was like a tech bro: "creating something without considering the consequences," he explains.
n.pr
October 25, 2025 at 6:11 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
F-1 to H-1B transitions to be exempt from $100K fee
F-1 to H-1B transitions to be exempt from $100K fee
The US’ new $100,000 H1-B visa fee will not apply to F-1 students and other visa holders changing status in the country, USCIS has clarified.
share.google
October 22, 2025 at 4:12 AM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
apnews.com
Jason Momoa prepared for his role in "Chief of War" with a personal language coach who lived with him for nearly a year.
Jason Momoa worked with a coach to speak Hawaiian authentically in 'Chief of War'
Jason Momoa prepared for his role in “Chief of War” with a personal language coach who lived with him for nearly a year. The Apple TV series premiered in August.
bit.ly
October 18, 2025 at 9:00 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Our new study on intelligibility and comprehensibility in the @britishcouncil.bsky.social Aptis General exam is out now in SiLA. Intelligibility distinguishes A1/above A1, but it's generally comprehensibility that is associated with higher levels of performance.

www.altaanz.org/7_sila_14_1_...
7._sila_14_1__Isbell et al.
Intelligibility and comprehensibility across Aptis Speaking tasks
www.altaanz.org
October 17, 2025 at 6:51 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Just throwing AI at education doesn't seem to work. ", but with AI" is in policy and attracting investments everywhere these days. I hope other countries can learn from Korea's unfortunate experience.

restofworld.org/2025/south-k...
AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea
South Korea’s AI learning program was rolled back after just four months following a backlash from teachers, students, and parents, underlining the challenges in embedding the technology in education.
restofworld.org
October 17, 2025 at 6:47 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
More on poorly thought out language policy designed to do harm and create pretext for punishing political foes:

thehill.com/policy/trans...
thehill.com
October 16, 2025 at 5:41 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
www.npr.org/2025/10/15/n...
Many rural schools rely on international teachers. Trump's visa changes threaten that
The Trump administration announced a $100,000 fee to accompany each H1-B visa. The fee could wreak havoc on rural school districts that rely on them to bring in teachers.
www.npr.org
October 15, 2025 at 4:41 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
originalsp.in
Thousands of posts from a private Young Republican Telegram chat reveal a culture of casual racism/antisemitism, rape jokes and celebration of Hitler/Nazism.

Some of the ringleaders are below: We live in a world where 4chan types now occupy positions of real power.
www.politico.com/news/2025/10...
Peter Giunta, chair of the New York State Young Republicans Bobby Walker, vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans William Hendrix, communications assistant for Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach Sam Douglass, Vermont state senator
October 14, 2025 at 7:12 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
ent3c.bsky.social
In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.
Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are
Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.
www.theatlantic.com
October 13, 2025 at 1:33 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
MwALT (Midwest Association of Language Testers) 2025 conference wrapped up today! Great sessions and great to catch up with colleagues in the Midwest (and quite nostalgic, as this was a conference I attended frequently in grad school).
October 10, 2025 at 11:08 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
cocchino.bsky.social
We're hiring! UT Linguistics invites applications for a position in computational linguistics to begin next academic year 2026-27 (rank of tenure-track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor with tenure). apply.interfolio.com/175156
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
October 8, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
langtestjournal.bsky.social
Free access until September 9, 2026!
September 27, 2025 at 6:19 AM