1/ Has life expectancy fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic? In a new pre-print, we find that 31 of 34 high-income countries had still not returned to their expected life expectancy trajectories five years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... #demography

It's fascinating to me that Sweden, once global pariah for flouting lockdown consensus, seems to have come out better than even its Scandinavian neighbours

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

Emelie Stiernströmer has a scoping review of facial recognition technology in law enforcement out now. It is a small but growing field, 11 studies but the oldest from 2020. Most studies are on attitudes, and more research on its use and impact needed. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Overall, I think our results are: 1. Believable. I think deep down we all know we publish "too many" significant results. 2. Disastrous. Selecting on significance in this way biases results across our whole literature away from zero & it stops us from learning what doesn't work.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

First post of the year, new paper out today: we present possibly the biggest case of systematic Measurement Schmeasurement in tech use. It seems that most studies on gaming (videogame) addiction/disorder haven't measured gaming after all. This research took years, so long 🧵 doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

We're consumed by stories of murder, but how much do you know about homicide in England and Wales? Every day this week I'm going to post a thread summarising a different aspect of what data can tell us about the nature of homicide. 🧵

Preliminary 2025 crime stats for Sweden were released today. Over all a 3% (50k) drop in police reported crimes. This is driven by large drops in theft (-12%, -43k) and vandalism (-13%, -26k). Assaults up 4% (+3k) and fraud up 1% (+3k). (Link in Swedish) bra.se/statistik/st...

You've heard about the @MarkJCarney speech. You should listen to it all. It is one of great speeches of all time. We will talk of this for decades. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQOr...

Mark Carney's speech really is terrific: full text is here and very much worth your time.

Spiralling.

I’ve never seen a US president hated this broadly worldwide. Trump’s name comes up in bars,coffee shops far from America, and it’s never complimentary. That’s before you factor in the US itself.

Man, Du Bois had some bangers, but for me, it doesn't get much better than his scathing indictment of the "Christianity" of the United States. Certainly this was all true of the nation in his lifetime. But in my lifetime, his criticisms have never felt so true of the nation right now.

It is really time to cut all ties with the US. It is an autocracy that uses force of different means to achieve more power. I do not understand why the European response is so muted.

Europe. Is moving military assets. To deter an invasion. By the United States of America.

Bara ett år har sett färre mord sedan 60-talet.

Shootings continue to drop in Sweden, in some categories dramatically. Since 2022, shootings (incl. incidents w/no injuries) down by 65% & shooting injuries down by 60%. 43 deaths in 2025, but 2025 included worst mass shooting in Swedish history w/10 killed. Without that, deaths down 50% since 2022.

One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.

The thing that’s so dumb about this is that there’s nothing legitimate about the strategic importance of Greenland that the US doesn’t get through existing alliances. Denmark isn’t impeding US strategic interests. It’s about them wanting to increase US land area by 20%.

Jan. 6 was widely condemned at the time, recognized as a violent attack on America. Trump clearly caused it by lying about the election to attempt a coup. Within a year, Trump, GOP politicians and right-wing media flipped Republicans to neutral/positive, rendering it another muddy partisan dispute.

When the original version of this "Procedural Justice Training Works" study came out in PNAS a couple of years ago I posted the thread below on twitter. I'm going to re-post here because as far as I can tell the same questions apply to this new study.

Paper with Mia-Maria Magnusson accepted in International Journal of Drug Policy ✅ The geography of drug markets, drug crime and systemic gang violence – Open drug scenes in Sweden   I will be back with a thread outlining the findings when it is published.

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

Stunning admission from Trump in his Politico interview. He confesses he knows almost nothing about the drug trafficking of the guy he pardoned even though he helped bring 500 tons of cocaine into US. Trump also reveals his narcissism makes him easy to manipulate: newrepublic.com/article/2041...

Another grant rejection. ❌ I believe that is the fourth for this year.

Again...a reminder WE GET NO FENTANYL FROM VENEZUELA We are about to go to war on a pretense more ridiculous than Iraq

Swedish bureaucracy: Organized international workshop doing crime scripts on cocain smuggling. EU-funded. Everyone got lunch at a Uni restaurant. Have now finished the billing procedure, and found out I need to get everyone who participated from our end to report this as a taxable benefit.

A new Chinese law regulating influencer speech has gotten applause from social media users and commentators who want similar policies in their own countries. But the truth is far from what's in the news and it's a sad reflection of our internet and media space. wenhao.substack.com/p/anatomy-of...

Why impact evaluations are so important: not everything that sounds like a good policy actually has the desired impact. While many interventions are highly effective, others don't work at all:

I have an undergrad who is doing work on how different news networks used different terms over the past 15 years. Here is "woke" at Fox News and in official congressional e-newsletters

Arriving Malmö again after two pretty hectic days. I have done Lysekil-Malmö-Stockholm archipelago-Malmö since yesterday morning (14hrs travel), and in between done a lecture and a seminar at our masters program and two presentations at a conference by the Swedish prison service.

Just took a look at who the Swedish research council awarded funding for their _crime_ research program. For a crime research program a bit surprising with just two criminologists. 3 public health 2 psychiatry 2 sociology 1 gender/comp sci/econ/psych/peace & conflict/ sociology of law/social work

Swedish Deputy PM: Sweden needs to pick its friends wisely, and we are choosing Canada… So when we come to America, we come to Canada now.

This evening I have looked at criminology journal rankings a bit. I noticed that the google scholar rankings (h5) had somewhat different rankings than clarivate (IF). British journal of criminology for instance is ranked #1 in google, but only #16 in impact factor. This seems to be due to method. 1/

Confidence interval discussion time! The perfect opportunity to repost this blog post answering the question you haven’t dared to ask: www.the100.ci/2024/12/05/w...

A lot of people didn’t like the Washington Post journalist who was tortured and dismembered with a bone saw for writing critically about the man sitting next to me

Trump: I’m very proud of the job he’s done. What he’s done is incredible in terms of human rights.

A review of experimental evaluations of victim counselling as a way to prevent domestic violence repeat victimisation found that it either didn’t reduce subsequent victimisation or any effect only lasted for a short while.

"Kriminalvården säger nej till regeringens förslag att sänka straffbarhetsåldern så att 13-åringar som begått grova brott sätts i fängelse. Kriminalvården skriver också att den inte är rustad att ta emot 13- och 14-åringar." www.dn.se/sverige/c/

I’m stealing this for the next time the data don’t come out the way I expected. “While we predicted a negative relationship but got a positive one, it could still be negative once we account for ups and downs and seasonals and whatnot.” It’s a causal Get Out of Jail Free card.

How many times can a myth be busted and someone receive a prize for it? The US-immigrant-crime myth was busted 130 years ago www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

ICYMI I wrote about Memphis -- a city where shooting have dropped after a large Federal deployment but I have questions about the validity of data being reported about other crimes. jasher.substack.com/p/walking-in...

The Stockholm prize in criminology to Charis Kubrin & Mark Lipsey for busting myths in criminology. Kubrin for showing immigrants (in the US) commits less crime and Lipsey for showing rehabilitation in prison can work. criminologysymposium.com/the-prize.html

Check out our new paper on gun carrying over the life course!

This is a slide I use quite a lot when doing POP training for police. Even when an agency or individual wants to follow SARA properly, there are so many institutional pressures on them to skip steps.

A new report from the Swedish police authority is highly critical to its own ability to perform analysis for crime prevention. The police intelligence is not providing analysis for local police to base crime prevention on, nor for assessment of effects. (Link in Swedish) polisen.se/siteassets/d...

I haven’t read the full piece, but the argument in the quote seems to be of the form “some good were produced without this” (leaving unsaid “and quite a lot of bad results, too”). But the argument for pre-registration isn’t that it leads to good results, it’s that it makes results more trustworthy.