The COVID-19 pandemic is a lousy natural experiment for studying the effects of online learning

Accepted manuscrip

The pandemic's effect on demand for public schools, homeschooling, and private schools

The Covid-19 pandemic drastically disrupted the functioning of U.S. public schools, potentially changing the relative appeal of alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools. Using longitudinal student-level administrative data from Michigan and nationally representative data from the Census Household Pulse Survey, we show how the pandemic affected families’ choices of school sector. We document four central facts. First, public school enrollment declined noticeably in fall 2020, with about 3 percent of Michigan students and 10 percent of kindergartners using other options. Second, most of this was driven by homeschooling rates jumping substantially, driven largely by families with children in elementary school. Third, homeschooling increased more where schools provided in-person instruction while private schooling increased more where instruction was remote, suggesting heterogeneity in parental concerns about children’s physical health and instructional quality. Fourth, kindergarten declines were highest among low income and Black families while declines in other grades were highest among higher income and White families, highlighting important heterogeneity by students’ existing attachment to public schools. Our results shed light on how families make schooling decisions and imply potential longer-run disruptions to public schools in the form of decreased enrollment and funding, changed composition of the student body, and increased size of the next kindergarten cohort.First author draf

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted both school bullying and cyberbullying

Published versio

BOWiki: an ontology-based wiki for annotation of data and integration of knowledge in biology.

MOTIVATION: Ontology development and the annotation of biological data using ontologies are time-consuming exercises that currently require input from expert curators. Open, collaborative platforms for biological data annotation enable the wider scientific community to become involved in developing and maintaining such resources. However, this openness raises concerns regarding the quality and correctness of the information added to these knowledge bases. The combination of a collaborative web-based platform with logic-based approaches and Semantic Web technology can be used to address some of these challenges and concerns. RESULTS: We have developed the BOWiki, a web-based system that includes a biological core ontology. The core ontology provides background knowledge about biological types and relations. Against this background, an automated reasoner assesses the consistency of new information added to the knowledge base. The system provides a platform for research communities to integrate information and annotate data collaboratively. AVAILABILITY: The BOWiki and supplementary material is available at . The source code is available under the GNU GPL from

Lessons from Ten Cities

The Urban Design Laboratory - Fall 2010. Assignment 1: Re-Inhabiting the Urban Core - Lessons From Ten Cities - Two Weeks.Updated with edits per co-author Dr Richard Dagenhart, 11/23/2021This project focuses on the primary ingredient of urban form: the subdivision of urban territory into public and private domains (or public and private usage in some situations). Every project in existing urban cores - urban design, building or landscape - must understand the arrangement and dimension of lots, blocks and streets and their relationships to pre-existing ecological conditions, prior human occupation, previous interventions, political imprints and cultural desire. It is these relationships that irrigate this basic urban form with architecture and landscape potentials. Ideally at least one member of each team will have visited the selected city. The research must be accomplished quickly - realizing that the internet plus the library will have substantial information about each city. The documentation and analysis of each city will be presented in common format and graphics in three parts. First is the urban form in the city’s regional context, which may be geographic, topographic, ecological, political or some combination of those. This should reflect an understanding of the reasons for its location and its origins. Why was the city developed there in the first place? Second is the urban form itself, in three scales: 15K x 15k area of the urban core to show the primary urban form; a 7.5k x 7.5k area showing the urban core itself and its primary form characteristics, and a 1k x 1k area of blocks. The identical scales will allow visual comparisons among the five cities. Third will be a series of diagrams, illustrating the major design moves that created the distinctive urban form for each city. This might be understood as retroactive urban design - looking backward and then rebuilding them in sequence, based on your interpretation of the city's formal history. The conclusion of these diagrams will be a composite.Richard Dagenhar