Central bank independence score just decreased in my dataset, but my respect just increased. Risky precedent though?

This is so good. Both as a little political economy analysis of British pubs and as a guide to how to use machine learning to learn about humans.

3 thoughts on this from @laurenleek.eu. 1. Pubs close because of pubcos. 2. "Save the British pub" policies stuff cash into those same pubcos not "punters". 3. Reform wants to increase child poverty to do this. (4 It's brilliant and via @benansell.bsky.social ) open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Amazing analysis of pub closures in the UK, by @laurenleek.eu, and the corporate interests behind them. Some important political and policy implications open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

My brother wanted a London pub crawl. The result? My new Substack post: "Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next?" How private equity reshaped the local, which pubs are most at risk and most importantly what to do about it. open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

A bit late to the game, but I’ve been doomscrolling Moltbook/openclaw for the past hour or so (the social network for AI agents developing inside jokes, religions, posting security alerts, crypto scams and consciousness debates). Don’t know whether to be impressed, scared or underwhelmed:

Just saying, I spent twenty years in Emerging Markets watching countries pull this sort of thing with their Central Banks and am available for lucrative consulting gigs.

Keep Alphaville free* by investing in our Free** Jay Powell merch. * without cost ** not under the control of another as.ft.com/r/82db28aa-3...

She's at it again! Another outstanding Substack by @laurenleek.eu, this time looking under the hood of AirBnB listings in London. Amazing analysis, with important policy implications, e.g. this quote open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Must read. "Regulate the interface all you want, but if you ignore the underlying housing pressure, the problem will simply reappear in another form"

This is a fantastic piece of work, really opened up my eyes

Another great maps-as-social-data project from Lauren. Geek out, fellow map and data geeks.

"Regulate the interface all you want, but if you ignore the underlying housing pressure, the problem will simply reappear in another form."

I mapped 80k london airbnbs putting pressure on London housing. The result is annoying if you want a simple villain because airbnb is not to blame for this pressure. Anyway I also found 1,500 listings where you can book guilt-free: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle... Map: laurenleek.eu/airbnb_map

Do check out the 'What else we’ve been reading' section;) But, I might be a bit biased here though www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

If AI chatbots are becoming/are “core infrastructure,” 64% ever use and ~30% daily use and 16% multiple times a day among teens feels to me a little low? Or is that just me?

We’ve pushed out the Pareto frontier of efficiency vs. intelligence again. With Gemini 3 Flash ⚡️, we are seeing reasoning capabilities previously reserved for our largest models. This opens up entirely new categories of near real-time applications that require complex thought. More in thread ⬇️

Small update on the London Food Map project the full pipeline is now open-source here: 👉 github.com/laurencleek/... Still very much a work in progress - assumptions, coverage, and models will evolve. I've added 3 new features for now based on feedback, but more iterations coming!

You might like this data-driven article: "What drives the uneven geography of development" We show that which places get funding and which miss out depends on whether local governments learn from neighbours, build on past experience, and leverage (or lack) administrative capacity. @laurenleek.eu

@edzitron.com I thought you'd like this article @laurenleek.eu is a data scientist, so likes to analyse data (often using AI) and her summary is "AI today is neither a speculative mirage nor a stable general-purpose revolution. It is a boom running slightly ahead of its own fundamentals."

This is very cool. The manipulation-busters of the future will be hacks like this one: reengineering the system to expose the algorithms beneath and how they trick us...

Excited to be featured in @londoncentric.media - they interviewed me about the dashboard and implications: www.londoncentric.media/p/reform-uk-...

🏦 Obsolete but influential? @laurenleek.eu explores the surprising agenda-setting role of National Central Banks (NCBs) within the Eurosystem. 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This is extremely cool

"I needed a restaurant recommendation, so I did what every normal person would do: I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London and built a machine-learning model." Loved this. Monopoly-hacking, nosh-hunting, dash of political economy, All the Good Things. Can we do Barcelona, please? ♥️

Fantastic piece of work this

Amazing analysis considering how much I use Google maps and categorize all my fav / potential dining options.

This is an amazing analysis of how Google Maps shapes restaurant ratings and choice! Bravo @laurenleek.eu open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

“The Matthew Effect applied to kebab shops”

How Google Maps determines restaurant survival. This brilliantly unearths the political economy of the algorithm here. "You start seeing an algorithmic market - one where visibility compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly decided by code."

This is high quality data journalism and also means you can scoff at your friend's sheeple Google suggestions and use this dashboard instead

I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Just came across this paper in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Somehow missed it, but I think it’s genuinely important for social scientists - especially for anyone doing imputation or working with small, messy tabular data: a🧵

I was curious. AI: a boom or bubble? I made a metric. It has… opinions. 🔗 open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

the Epstein files have been trending on HuggingFace. > This dataset is provided for... > Evaluating information retrieval and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. > It is not intended for: Fine-tuning language models. ??

🚨New piece forthcoming in @jeppjournal.bsky.social . I tried to prove the ECB is politically responsive… and failed. But the failure turned into the discovery. Read more: Substack post: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle... Preprint: osf.io/gxrtc/files/...

As AI becomes ever more sophisticated, its effects on those (like me) who use online surveys and experiments may be dire. (As one coauthor called it -- the botpocalypse!) The second POAL methods brief by the excellent @laurenleek.eu digs deeper into the problem. Very important reading!

Second POAL methods brief by amazing @laurenleek.eu on how leading polling and survey providers deal with AI bots with tips for researchers fielding their own surveys too!

"Safeguarding data quality is no longer a single checkpoint but an end-to-end pipeline - one that reallocates substantial resources from sampling to continuous fraud monitoring" Read our new POAL Methods Brief by @laurenleek.eu on dealing with AI bots in surveys! Link: www.poal.co.uk/briefai.pdf

Why do some towns seem to win every grant while others can’t get a single project approved? @lorenzomascioli.bsky.social and I answer this question using all Italian NGEU projects in our paper forthcoming in Regional Studies. Here a Substack preview 👀 laurenleek.substack.com/p/what-drive...

This is impressive

A question I have also contemplated at times: would quantitative researchers make good quantitative traders? Some answers in Lauren's great blog 👇

Deeply jealous of how much fun Lauren has

I did that thing where I say, “I’m just going to explore this quickly,” and suddenly - as a complete non-expert - I’ve built a simple stock-trading algorithm. I wrote up the whole experience and what I learned (and I promise the explanations are very lightweight): open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

"While testing one dimension at a time can yield simple results, those effects may not generalise to richer, real-world contexts." Read our new POAL Methods Briefs on Conjoint Experiments from Thomas Robinson! Link: www.poal.co.uk/research/met...

Vandalism? Art? In London, it’s just Saturday.

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching a short intro to text classification with LLMs to the faculty at @fasosmaastricht.bsky.social. Interested? Materials: github.com/laurencleek/.... I've also made public a repo for an intro to GitHub course github.com/laurencleek/... I taught some time back!

If you’re interested in a far more advanced and more high-quality data-driven exploration of local inequalities and deprivation patterns in the UK, check out this excellent work by @laurenleek.eu. laurenleek.substack.com/p/we-all-end... laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-uks-lo...

Great thread from @juliusk.bsky.social revealing interesting patterns using the new English Indices of Deprivation (including how they relate to voting behaviour)!