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).

Thrilled that my paper "Partisan disparities in the funding of science in the United States" with Nic Fishman, @leahrosenstiel.bsky.social, and @dashunwang.bsky.social was published in @science.org today! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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... 🧵

Stackable syllabus! The State in Comparative & World Politics Autumn 2025, @umichpolisci

In June, an international network of humanists and technologists joined forces to advance historical text recognition and research at the Source Codes of the Past (SCOOP) conference at Princeton. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

is this your man? who is he?

Bookmarking for my US-China relations students.

CFP: Joint Conference of the Historical Society for 20th Century China and the Institute for Modern History, Academia Scinica Deadline: October 15 Please note that papers/panels can engage any aspect of China and/or Taiwan's long 20th Crntury All the info: hstcconline.org/announcements/

i wanted to understand the current landscape better, so i did a deep dive on current embedding sizes and architectures vickiboykis.com/2025/09/01/h...

my syllabus now only contains *30* week-long units. you don't want to know how many it started with.

Turns out that this organization was the "Beijing Institute of Organizational and Personnel Studies" headed by 阎淮 from 1986-1988. Yan I already knew as working at the Young Cadres desk of the Central Organization Dept. with some no-name called Li Rui. (I know, I know, I really kept you all waiting)

"A complex system of paybands also makes social insurance payments highly regressive, with low-income workers bearing a heavier burden than top earners, discouraging them from paying, a 2024 report by China's top legislature found."

The CCP’s triumph over the KMT shocked the world—even the Soviets bet on the KMT with more aid. My book, Domination and Mobilization, asks: how did the CCP survive and prevail? Domination and Mobilization offers three fresh arguments that explain the reversal of the century. 👇 cup.org/3G6WKB2

do not hit my dog with your car challenge [difficulty level: apparently impossible?] (luckily, he will be fine. my husband is fine. cars, however, are a menace and are not fine.)

posted too soon. they eventually stopped making mummies into paint ... in 1964.

TIL that in addition to *eating* mummified human remains from egypt and elsewhere, people, victorian-era europeans were using them to *make paint*.

Stumbled on this really cool #rstats package during work. Haven't tried it out yet, but looks like countrycode but for Chinese prefectures, a boon for sinologists.

chat, is this anything?

Delighted to report that I continue to push the boundaries of Chinese politics research (by laboring to answer questions about which no one cares). Today, I give you -- "How much did party intellectuals in organization work explicitly reference Deng Xiaoping's writings between 1989 and 2006?"

OK Chinese-political-history-knowers, I have two euphemisms I'd like help decoding, just to check my intuition. The context: I'm reading an "insider" history of the Chinese Civil Service System by 侯建良 (《公务员制度发展纪实》2007). When describing certain events from the 1980s, Mr. Hou can be quite cagey.

google scholar was a menace and good riddance to it if it goes. kevin is, as usual, right about how it was at least handmaiden to (or worse) a collapse in the meaning of citations deleterious to everyone and the devaluing of fields with book-based scholarship

why is it so loud???

just to add my $0.02 to this, i have been told i give good feedback and reviews by authors and editors. here's what I try to do (mix of substantive / language things): (1) write "the paper" rather than "the authors." it just lowers the rhetorical temperature. (2) follow journal guidelines [...]

Grad programs often don't teach folks how to write good reviewer reports. Here are some resources: 1. @brendannyhan.bsky.social review checklist: thepoliticalmethodologist.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/tpm_... 2. "How to Write an Effective Referee Report": aeaweb.org/articles?id=... What else?

people will continue to reveal what parts (up to the entirety) of their job/learning they consider "pointless bureaucracy," and will buy what technologists sell claiming to automate it away. sad ktb isn't on bsky anymore because this is extremely his ish

If you liked this thread, and you're like, "I bet that guy would make an awesome coworker," I'm currently on the job market - primarily looking for data scientist/quantitative researcher roles, but I'm flexible!

One of the best HTR/OCR and Layout detection models I have ever seen! And the size is soooo tiny!! @bcgl.bsky.social check this out! Curious about your thoughts for newspaper parsing. Free app: huggingface.co/spaces/Moham...

hell yeah dude

Working to port VLaMy to an entirely free mode where you can just cache all your data in the browser for a project. Slowly adding all the features from the full version to this user-free version. Available now on @hf.co @danielvanstrien.bsky.social Link: huggingface.co/spaces/wjbma...

it was me! and Alton was his typical combination of funny, smart, and kind as we got things kicked off for this project 🤘 excited to share some fun data soon with my new/old/not-that-old CDs 😎

Spent a some time yesterday helping someone (I'd tag them, but didn't ask any posting first) with a problem getting "old" data off a CD (if CD, not that old) that wanted a 98/NT/Win2k machine. They run Apple Silicon only these days. This project came in handy: mac.getutm.app (github.com/utmapp/UTM)

Delighted that Stanford SCCEI’s China Briefs reports on our study of a municipal social credit system in China. sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs...

can you imagine the journey the editors must have gone on to make this volume? to distinguish between aquatic breedstock cultivation and aquacultural animal feeding? the Encyclopédistes are swooning

today in 'delightful books i find,' meet the《中华人民共和国职业分类大典》 this 1999 volume sets out with the modest goal of listing *all* the occupations in the PRC (and their responsibilities). it then accomplishes this in a bit less than a million characters, complete with numeric codes. what a treasure

But instead of using Llama, I think I'm going to use ByT5, as they do here: arxiv.org/abs/2505.20429

For the HTR and OCR crew: New paper by Jonathan Bourne. He's been working to help DLOC handle OCR for a whole bunch of Caribbean historical newspapers. "Scrambled text: fine-tuning language models for OCR error correction using synthetic data" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

"Accountability and High-Effort Coping Strategies of Public Employees: Evidence From a Survey Experiment in China" by Yanwei Li & Hongbo Yu finds that learning-oriented accountability may reduce high-effort coping due to political risks. doi.org/10.1111%2Fpa...

scrolling through the blueskies while combining my two interests

i will never allow myself to be censored. my unhinged takes about the history of public personnel management (1976-1995) in china will not be silenced. those in power will never be able to stop me from posting weird forms i find for tracking the completion of other forms. i wi--

Today marks 38 years since the end of Taiwan’s 38-year martial law period—officially commemorating that Taiwan has now spent more time free of martial law than under it www.mnews.tw/external/mir...