Dan Isbell
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danielrisbell.bsky.social
Dan Isbell
@danielrisbell.bsky.social
880 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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danielrisbell.bsky.social
The American people do want to hear more about Dershowitz, but not for the reasons Weiss imagines:
Wikipedia screencap that reads: In 1995, Dershowitz served as the appellate adviser on the murder trial of O. J. Simpson as part of the legal "Dream Team" alongside Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey.[9] He was a member of Harvey Weinstein's defense team in 2018[6] and of President Donald Trump's defense team in his first impeachment trial in 2020.[5] He was a member of Jeffrey Epstein's defense team and helped to negotiate a 2006 non-prosecution agreement on Epstein's behalf.
November 25, 2025 at 9:35 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
ETS announced a partnership with Study.com for official TOEFL test prep.

www.ets.org/newsroom/toe...
Official TOEFL Prep Launches with Study.com
Official TOEFL Test Prep from TOEFL iBT and Study.com delivers authentic, adaptive preparation for the enhanced 2026 test, launching January 21.
www.ets.org
November 23, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
bakerdphd.bsky.social
"Toner-Rodgers’s illusory success seems in part thanks to the dynamics he has now upset: an academic culture at MIT where high levels of trust, integrity and rigor are all—for better or worse—assumed"

Uh huh, now just who is given the assumption of rigor?

(🎁 link)

www.wsj.com/economy/aida...
An MIT Student Awed Top Economists With His AI Study—Then It All Fell Apart
Aidan Toner-Rodgers shot to academic fame in a field hungry for new insights and revelatory research. But a computer scientist thought something seemed off.
www.wsj.com
November 22, 2025 at 6:00 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
This is one of the wildest local news stories I've ever read - could be from a near-future dystopian sci-fi novel - and a mind-blowing failure of law and governance:

www.civilbeat.org/2025/11/hono...
Honolulu Officials Are Doing Little To Help ‘Hell-Hole’ Tenants
City officials have been unable to serve violation notices to building managers, who also have repeatedly failed to show up for court dates.
www.civilbeat.org
November 22, 2025 at 5:06 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Some sort of technical error has resulted in incorrect IELTS scores being issued for an undisclosed number of test takers;

thepienews.com/ielts-apolog...
IELTS apologises after technical issue leads to score changes
IELTS has announced that some test results issued between August 2023 and September 2025 are incorrect, with candidates now receiving revised scores.
thepienews.com
November 16, 2025 at 12:43 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Regretting the Japanese class for my 2nd grader:
November 15, 2025 at 5:50 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
This would impact everyone in my humble applied linguistics dept. It'd also make the large majority of most engineering, computer science (including AI researchers...), and biosciences faculty ineligible for grant funding.

How do you attract 600k Chinese students and push AI research like this?
donmoyn.bsky.social Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 11d
Academics who have advised a graduate student from China over the past years would be banned from federal funding. This would give the federal government one more lever to attack scientists. And how long before they expand the list of "hostile foreign" countries?
November 14, 2025 at 11:12 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
One actually useful function of genAI being everywhere: Easy to extract text from images. That and translation are the main reasons why I have the browser widget for Gemini. But it'd be great to see that built seamlessly into social networking sites for alt text generation for uploaded images.
November 14, 2025 at 9:31 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Another year, another story about how difficult Korea's College Scholastic Ability Test (수능, similar to SAT) is. This year, Kant showed up in several places, including the English portion of the exam:
www.koreaherald.com/article/1061...
A test question with the following text: 34. Kant was a strong defender of the rule of law as the ultimate guarantee, not only of security and peace, but also of freedom. He believed that human societies were moving towards more rational forms regulated by effective and binding legal frameworks because only such frameworks enabled people to live in harmony, to prosper and to co-operate. However, his belief in inevitable progress was not based on an optimistic or high-minded view of human nature. On the contrary, it comes close to Hobbes's outlook: man's violent and conflict-prone nature makes it necessary to establish and maintain an effective legal framework in order to secure peace. We cannot count on people's benevolence or goodwill, but even 'a nation of devils' can live in harmony in a legal system that binds every citizen equally. Ideally, the law is the embodiment of those political principles that all rational beings would freely choose. If such laws forbid them to do something that they would not rationally choose to do anyway, then the law cannot be ______________________________. [3점] benevolence: 자비심 ① regarded as reasonably confining human liberty ② viewed as a strong defender of the justice system ③ understood as a restraint on their freedom ④ enforced effectively to suppress their evil nature ⑤ accepted within the assumption of ideal legal frameworks
November 14, 2025 at 9:26 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
My PhD alma mater program recently celebrated its 20th anniversary! Here's to 20 more years (and beyond).

cal.msu.edu/news/celebra...
Celebrating 20 Years: Second Language Studies Program Honors Its Past and Looks to the Future
While Michigan State University’s Second Language Studies (SLS) Ph.D. program may have started by being in the right place at the right time, the efforts made by its administrators, faculty, alumni, a...
cal.msu.edu
November 13, 2025 at 10:09 PM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
We've gotta get this sentiment trending universally. I think the Roman sculpture avatar crowd could be brought on board too:

Fiat justitia ruat caelum
ashtonpittman.bsky.social Ashton Pittman @ashtonpittman.bsky.social · 13d
"This could take down Democrats, too."

I know. And I frankly wouldn't give even an itty bitty damn if it implicated every Democratic man in Congress, every Democratic hopeful for 2028 and every Democrat who has even thought about running for office.

Down with the sex predators, wherever they are.
November 13, 2025 at 6:15 AM
danielrisbell.bsky.social
Long but interesting read on AI tutoring - there's reason for optimism, but it doesn't come from unfettered use of off-the-shelf consumer AI platforms.

carlhendrick.substack.com/p/the-algori...
The Algorithmic Turn: The Emerging Evidence On AI Tutoring
Are We Approaching A Turing Test for Teaching?
carlhendrick.substack.com
November 11, 2025 at 10:12 PM
Reposted by Dan Isbell
royalsocietypublishing.org
The number of low-quality or fraudulent publications is rising to hundreds of thousands per year. It is time to reevaluate current publishing models and outline a global plan. Read the 'Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration': royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... #RSOS 🧪
November 11, 2025 at 8:35 AM
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 · 27d
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