www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Great to see the first paper from this side project out in PS. I’m grateful to have had the chance to work with Franziska and Jos.

love to read in a historical document that something happened "由于种种原因" is this the archival silence that I have been reading about?

Currently in FirstView: In “Measuring Media Criticism with ALC Word Embeddings,” @cbarrie.bsky.social, Neil Ketchley, @aasiegel.bsky.social, and Mossaab Bagdouri introduce a method for estimating media criticism using à la carte word embeddings which requires only minimal computational resources.

we need to destroy DST and all other morning person scams.

OCR is one of AI's oldest challenges (first systems: early 1900s!) Modern vision-language models have transformed what's possible: handwriting, 100+ languages, math formulas, tables, signature extraction... New @hf.co guide on OCR huggingface.co/blog/ocr-ope...

"News Media Reporting Patterns and our Biased Understanding of Global Unrest" - a cool paper that gets at something I've wondered: how much does a selection effect drive what we see in conflict datasets coded from news stories? Quite a bit, it turns out! esoc.princeton.edu/WP32 #polisky #statssky

some real bangers among my student projects and essays so far this year. at least one proposal that I am _so_ excited for. lots more grading to do, but yeah. it's good. these students can cook.

"Offers a compelling analytical framework to understand the intricate relationship between the state, platforms, and citizens in shaping digital governance in China." Governing Digital China by Daniela Stockmann & Ting Luo, Coming Soon #ChinesePolitics 🗺️ https://cup.org/3IslBk0

I'm starting to explore {simDAG}, a nifty #rstats package that has a nice API for specifying DAGs and then simulating data from them: robindenz1.github.io/simDAG/

Another week, another VLM-based OCR model! Nanonets just released OCR2 - a 3B parameter vision-language model for document OCR 📄 You can run it with one command on @hf.co Jobs (no local GPU needed)

We @ChinaDataLab and @UCIGCC launch med the China Policy Document Navigator, a first-of-its-kind database giving researchers curated access to thousands of hard-to-find Chinese policy documents. Learn how to use it and register here: chinadatalab.ucsd.edu/viz-blog/chi...

1/2 Good Scott Kennedy and Scott Rozelle piece on how China's strength in technology and manufacturing and its weak domestic demand are two sides of the same coin. They note that "No reform is costless. If China sought to address the structural... foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/10/c...

I published two pieces on women in China this week! First, a review essay @chinabooksreview.com on two Fang Fang novels, Soft Burial & The Running Flame (tr. Michael Berry). Gendered oppression has persisted during the socialist period and capitalist reforms, despite the CCP's promise of liberation.

I met Jerry only once, as a grad student picking up scholars from the airport. When I picked up Jerry and his wife, I was unprepared for a spirited discussion of my work on the procuratorate (complete with a trademark “This is very important work you are doing”). www.chinafile.com/conversation...

Rest in peace, Jerry.

NEW SHIFT KEY What China’s New Climate Pledge Says About Its Power Grid We chat with @michaeldavidson.bsky.social about China’s new Paris Agreement pledge — and the policies + factions that have made its grid run on coal *and* solar. I learned a lot in this one. heatmap.news/podcast/shif...

this morning a spider (!) jumped on me (from where? I wish I knew) and I spilled my coffee everywhere in case anyone wondered what kind of day I was having

We find that, against conventional wisdom, Global South publics do not discriminate against Chinese investment projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia academic.oup.com/cjip/article...

For the Mid-Autumn Festival, I translated the 17th century failson, epicure, and memoirist Zhang Dai's account of the annual Mid-Autumn singing competition on Tiger Hill in Suzhou. www.burninghou.se/p/mid-autumn...

is pearl still the best intro to DAGs? Looking for something that assumes as little as possible (for a student but also me because I remember nothing TBH)

mods are asleep post Chinese experimental political reforms

“改革干部选用制度的新尝试”（中共宁波市委组织部、宁波市人事局） 《中国人事管理》1987年第一期。

I want to apologize to all the professors i secretly cursed for not responding to my emails and to apologize to everyone whose emails i'm not responding to but jesus why are there so many emails and people and things and we're in the middle of so many layers of crisis

vindicate me! this was a good joke!!!

some insider lore that the people truly crave: this paper was almost about people thanking their cats

I just learned about the `truncate` argument in {lubridate} functions, which means NO MORE HACKY paste0(year, "-01-01") code to build dates when converting years to dates in #rstats

it’s research morning, time to clean some ocr results

"Xi aims to establish China as the fulcrum of an emerging multipolar world, and he is advancing a new, more active diplomatic strategy to realize that goal." Jeffrey Prescott and @juliangewirtz.bsky.social write on shifting centers of gravity in a new article for @foreignaffairs.com.

There are individual anecdotes that they're useful for coding. I even have some myself. But AFAIK every systematic experiment finds they're not that useful, eg, metr.org/blog/2025-07... Feels similar to last year's vibes economy debate. But I don't want to drop a 15-post thread in your mentions.

if you know who i am: no you don't

I updated my R Bootcamp slides if anyone is looking for an introduction to using R. Attempts to cover basics, ggplot, simple regression, and quarto. kevinreuning.com/workshops/r_...

considering asking my students to do a role play exercise as Chinese analysts on Wednesday, but I suspect the results would just depress and infuriate everyone

one of the goals of my us-china relations course has been to shed some light on the inputs and institutions to US policymaking (at least historically). one of their primary interests has been in intelligence (in china and the US) and its failures (perhaps because we started with the korean war)

{tinytable} 0.14.0 for #RStats makes it super easy to draw tables in html, tex, docx, typ, md & png. There are only a few functions to learn, but don't be fooled! Small 📦s can still be powerful. Check out the new gallery page for fun case studies. vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/vi...

them: so what are you working on? me: i've been thinking this niche, settled question from the academic literature 20 years ago is due for a massive, years-long, mixed-method data collection and analysis effort that might slightly modify its conclusions them: so the usual then? me: yeah

After 7 yrs of work, the special issue "China in Compliance" is out with @reggovjournal.bsky.social. The focus is to unpack how #compliance works in globalizing China. #Cambodia #Kyrgyzstan #Tajikistan #Fiji #Vanuatu #Singapore #Taiwan #Ethiopia #Hungary onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...

Im begging the NYT to spend time talking to people who actually teach and work at universities. Especially ones that don't have billion dollar endowments. My issues are AI use, crumbling infrastructure, vanishing staff, unfunded state mandates, a customer service model of education...

Help! ─ 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁 open to work ─ Remote/Austin → www.rexdouglass.com With new tools, I've been cooking: ▸ Machine-vision pipelines — RIOS Intelligent Machines ▸ Information-extraction pipelines — Microsoft ▸ Interactive SMS surveys — Pantheon Insights

Happy book release day to Resilience Beyond Rebellion! I couldn’t be more proud (or relieved) to finally see this in the world. Interested in rebel orgs? Conflict termination? Organizational theory? Fun side quests about etymology? A random anecdote about the US navy? Ofc you are! a.co/d/64Tulfh

anyone have /undergrad-friendly/ treatments of the socialist calculation debate? bonus points for: recent treatment, thoughtfully discussing contemporary technology

anyone know why Gong Xiangrui (龚祥瑞)'s biography took forever to publish? i know what you're wondering: why do you care? because, reader, of my love for the game. but also because while best known for working on constitutions, he started (and then wrote again later) ... on civil service systems!

Literary Chinese for a foggy morning, courtesy of Xin Qiji 辛棄疾 (1140-1207): 何人半夜推山去？ 四面浮雲猜是汝。 Someone came in the night and stole our mountain away. Drifting clouds surround me. (Was it you?)

A defining feature of the elite coalition that sustained the US innovation ecosystem was a shared vision of wealth-through-knowledge-dominance. Performative, superficial investments in science were the domain of countries where elites were wealthy primarily through cheap labor (Mexico).

I have had a few chats with @josephtorigian.bsky.social on his book but this one really turned out well and we addressed some core issues about the party and its history www.ncuscr.org/video/the-pa...

had my first weirdly homophobic experience in Hartford, not great. 👍🏻 porchfest was fun though. weird neighborhood music festival is a good idea. and hopefully they got lots of good food donations

The new {marginaleffects} release for #RStats (0.30.0) comes with two new vignettes: 1. Speed up computation with automatic differentiation (often 10x gains) marginaleffects.com/bonus/perfor... 2. Power analyses with {marginaleffects} and {DeclareDesign}. marginaleffects.com/bonus/power....

Do managerial bureaucrats impact the quality of service provision for difficult-to-monitor tasks? In my JMP, I argue that they do but that the type of bureaucrats having an impact is not what gets most attention in the literature (and from politicians / media). Preprint: doi.org/10.31235/osf... 🧵