One really hard thing when you're a head of department is hiring people from outside the UK. You tell them, "congrats, you've got the job", and you wait to tell them, "by the way, the university doesn't cover the cost of your visa, or the cost of your NHS surcharge"

They always start by saying it's legitimate to be concerned about flows, but ultimately the rage is about the stock. Think I've first said this as a silly quip ten years ago, and well, here we are

I've found it: the worst way of presenting election results ever web.archive.org/web/20210426...

We should view this as a huge boost for Oxford's student societies, who will benefit from the substitution of effort from "things that can be faked" to things that cannot. Congratulations Oxford University Dramatic Society!

Sad that the polisci conference season has ended? Why not watch my EPOP presentation on how to generate realistic party systems from scratch? youtu.be/_U0AaP15vyY?...

I'm looking at the CLEA dataset, trying to check some data validity and trying not to get hung up on the validity of some variables I don't really need. But now I want to know which month the Icelandic election of 1874 was held!

So, a university president fired a professor because they taught a course that discussed there being more than two genders, and now the university president is being fired for not having fired the professor quickly enough, is where we're at. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/u...

More technical post, building on a @chanret.bsky.social post on optimising an R function - learning how to integrate Rust approaches into R alexparsons.co.uk/blog/posts/2...

Absolutely the right comparison, but shows that the US is actually in a worse position. Rai was able to come up with some fig-leaves to cover their embarassment; ABC hasn't been able to do that at all.

Today in getting old: managing to strain my calf muscle walking down the stairs 😫

Huh -- could they call this a "Fairness Doctrine"? Just spitballing here.

Haggis pakora *is* *amazing*

I appreciate people who spread the gospel of Ctrl-V, but they are but preparing the way for those who preach about Ctrl-Shift-V

Always the quiet part out loud, always

Disney learned nothing from Andor.

🇮🇳 La presse indienne aux petits soins pour l'anniversaire des 75 ans de Modi. Il faut dire qu'elle est très largement subventionnée par l'Etat.

If this happened anywhere else, it would be a scandal for the organisation hosting + enabling it. We can't have a different set of rules exempting one billionaire promoter + protector of hatred from what applies to every other org if we want to protect our values, social norms and the rule of law.

What's the betting this is followed by "oops, officers exceeded their authority, the van will be restored at some date in the future" (sotto voce: well done lads)?

As a result of internal reorganisation, I am in a meeting where people are talking about "shadow schools". #DarkAcademia has never been more prosaic.

🚨Very honored to receive the Future Leaders Fellowship from @ukri.org I’ll use this 2.3 million £ investment to create the London Social Media Observatory, for cutting-edge research on social media and politics, and novel computational tools for social science research. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-an...

It's the Mondo Duplantis show once again!

Sad that the polisci conference season has ended? Why not watch my EPOP presentation on how to generate realistic party systems from scratch? youtu.be/_U0AaP15vyY?...

New political science analysis of the renewed push for preventive health: ‘Can it be any different this time around? doi.org/10.1016/j.so...

This is interesting on tell-tale phrases and their stats, but (as many academics will know) there's a huge gulf between noting a general increase and being able to say *of particular instances* that this is LLM-assisted

Long ago, in a study of the democratic attitudes in Germany, Dalton raised the possibility of “Fragebogendemokraten” (questionnaire democrats): people who hesitate to express their sincere dislike for “democracy” in surveys, providing instead the “socially desirable” response (1)

What an amazing thread (he says, as his hips slowly degrade)

Today's tepid take: "Stochastic terrorism" is a stupid term that people use when they want to sound smart and/or want to avoid using the plainer term "incitement to violence".

What a stat.

Seen recently but lost: an irate and falsely confident letter to the editor by some person who thought that a change had to be a change of five percentage points or more to be statistically significant. Anyone know where I can locate it so I can use it in an exam?

Arts and Humanities obviously going to complain about this - but what would (for example) an Andre Geim say?

Thoughts from me on the UK government's elections policy paper. In short: many good things, but several points don't go far enough, and there is one big mistake.

Next Labour Deputy Leader is likely to be to the right of the party on economic issues. Based on our estimates with @chanret.bsky.social and @ukandeu.bsky.social You can play around with it on www.mpsleftright.co.uk

Good thread with this as the key source of encouragement. Worst outcome is not too bad, best outcome is fantastic!

Having a clearing-the-decks couple of months looking back on articles which have been rejected but need to get back out there. Most recent one is an article where one reviewer said "I think this can be published without any amendments" but which was still rejected. Peer review: it's a crap shoot!

This is disgusting. I hope these people end up in jail.

Should undergraduate students pick their specialisation from Y1 (like the UK) or Y3 (like the US)? South Korea just moved to an earlier specialisation (like the UK), which reduced student wages because they were less able to adjust to a changing job market www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Star trek strange new worlds has been bought by itvx for any uk fans who don't want to bother with paramount plus. Spread the word.

Cymru am byth.

Seems like Labour will continue its minority government but with even more fragmented support base on the left. However still need to pay attention to the small parties hovering around the electoral threshold before we can say for sure

Political science trivia nerd fact:

New German Tank Problem just dropped

Over the weekend @wiglet1981.bsky.social noted that if LLM “hallucinations” were all downstream of a bad scoring rule, that would be incredibly stupid, but an amusing win for formal epistemology.

I had a quick poke a while back and it's interesting in how it structures comparisons, there's probably thing's you can do to make better info available to it etc but also the grok example shows what political pressure on it could look like bsky.app/profile/alex...

Horrifying moment of this #EPOP so far: realising that election studies will not just have to ask people what website people use for news, but whether they use ChatGPT and friends to help them understand politics, up to and including which party to vote for

**paid political consultant voice** i spend all this time in strategy debates and working on my slide decks... ...and they just tweet it out?

Please don't ask me to review anything in 2028/2029 2029.ref.ac.uk/panels/main-...

The only suitable replacement for Melvyn on In Our Time

Breaking: REF 2029 paused for three months to review whether metrics are aligned with national priorities www.timeshighereducation.com/news/patrick... via @jgro-the.bsky.social

I feel like in the 1980’s/90’s this would be a major plot point in a Tom Clancy novel, and the operation would be carried out as an off-book, illegal black op, with various characters trying to cover it up lest they face congressional hearings. Now the President just announces it.

Failure modes of AI are often entertaining. Here's ChatGPT trying to draw me the outline of a star and giving me something that looks like jagged dog poop