I was thinking this morning about how AI is pretty good at starting research projects, but not very good (at least for now) at finishing them. As a result, it’s become much easier for scholars to accumulate an unmanageable backlog of half-baked, AI-assisted projects... 1/n

SignalTrace "links devices that regularly travel together, correlating them to license plate." It is a surveillance product that will sweep up and add all sorts of Bluetooth and other data to license plate readers, linking specific devices—and people—to cars.

This is a correct argument, but in sociology it is abused by ASA Council to prevent its journals from having policies for quantitative research.

Employers across sectors use two-tier labor systems to undermine labor solidarity, bargaining power, & then standards. They cut high-tier workers in on benefits of low tier initially (offload less desirable teaching work). But high-tier standards become vulnerable cu low tier is viable alternative

The scene in Being John Malkovich when Malkovich goes into the portal and everyone is him and can only say “Malkovich”

Only 9.9% of top Sociology articles from 2019-2024 provided replication packages. And ≈ half of those with replication packages could not be verified due to missing or incomplete materials. www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10...

You can find a 20% discount code in our Bayesian Workflow book website avehtari.github.io/Bayesian-Wor...

I am SO EXCITED that the Journal of Stratification Economics is coming next year! This has been a labor of love to bring this to pass. Please consider submitting to this exciting new journal specializing in the best stratification economics research. @jsecon.bsky.social @ucpress.bsky.social

A quick scan of who this will apply to at NIH and oh boy. A Science piece we wrote last year that lays out the consequences. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Seems like ideological bias led Borjas and Breznau to their conclusions that ideological bias was leading other researchers to their conclusions.

Remember that recent paper claiming to show that "ideological bias" determined the results obtained by immigration policy research teams? A careful, open-code reanalysis by @kauspurg.bsky.social & Josef Brüderl finds that the result arises from a coding error. —> doi.org/10.31222/osf...

Hi All. Perhaps something useful from me. I'd like to announce that drlate, a Stata module for doubly robust estimation of the local average treatment effect (LATE) and the local average treatment effect on the treated (LATT), is now available in SSC.

Excellent article in The Atlantic about what's going on at NSF. Share with people in your circle--too many aren't aware!

I’ve grown super worried about LLM agents w/ access to all my files and secrets. Existing sandboxes and containers felt hard to use day-to-day, so I built a small convenient utility to keep agents away from important stuff. It’s called “bulle” (for “bubble”). 1/2 vincentarelbundock.github.io/bulle

A little factoid to make you happy.

I was annoyed that I couldn't find a database of David Attenborough documentaries where I could search for a specific episode by topic. So I made it. attenborough-100.vercel.app

in this video in like 4 different ways and I hate that

LOL

Look, plantar fascitis sucks but I think this guy has bigger issues going on

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇

A brilliant and useful piece you should read by @perrybaconjr.bsky.social and @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social.

Incredible public service announcement 👇

Insider reporting from an unnamed source that my book manuscript is "95% done." The remaining 5% is focused on figuring out what the argument actually is, finding supporting evidence for that argument, and writing it all up.

Me, telling my coauthors I’m almost done with my parts for the paper

More Markus Academy things: paulgp.substack.com/p/skills-spe...

Not that it is surprising, but Bluesky has become a conduit through which Russia spreads disinformation in its hybrid war against the West.

Today is the official publication day of my book! You can still use the code SPRING26 to get a 40% discount. And, if you can, please ask your university library or public library to purchase the book. dukeupress.edu/the-business...

Hard to overstate how much the culture of Econ as a discipline, and what is considered a legitimate object of study, has changed in the last 15-20 years.

demoscapes.org is a visual atlas of demographic surfaces hosted at @mpidr.bsky.social. It is also my passion project growing out of my 2016 human mortality database explorer. Did you publish something containing Lexis surfaces? Consider reaching out and having your work featured on the site.

This is so cool. This atlas has Lexis plots on how various things have changed over time in different age groups – mortality rates, fertility rates, number of parents and siblings. And you can reach out to Jonas to add your own plots too. I'd like to see Lexis plots for absolutely everything.

Tremendous thank you to all the people in the Eurovision Song Contest for the fact that I have to watch and listen as my 6 year old daughters obsessively sing a song called “Choke Me.”

I have developed a browser application to load, display, modify and analyze Statistics Canada tables. I believe it is superior to the agency's own app which is slow, limited and dated. Please give it a try at: philipsmith.ca/tabler

wrote about it in Escape in 2022 but being online right now really is like living in a flat owned by a shitty landlord; you have to make a home, somehow, and live your everyday life while trying to block out the knowledge that you have no rights and anything may change in your home at any moment

Between this kind of thing and the $1.767 Billion DOJ fund to pay off Trump supporters, we’re really seeing the contours of the new regime of Reactionary Keynesianism take shape.

Interestingly, I’ve been told that to get tenure, I need to publish 25% more peer reviewed papers than the first standard this article calls impossible.

BSky accurately captures the national mood

My book is now available in paperback. Read if you are curious to know how smart folks from the past have grappled with economic inequality.

Yes, but other THAT Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

I want a canon-accurate Bond: white male, 106 years old, severe CTE, lung cancer, liver disease. He spends the entire movie in bed rambling about prior exploits with guns and women to a group of agents desperately trying to figure out the code to a nuclear bomb which only he knows. They fail.

All pale in comparison to the potato bun

The story of the AMA killing universal health care (and almost killing Medicare)...in the QJE????????? So important I'm not even upset that it doesn't cite the sociologists who studied this like Jill Quadagno :)

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

I adopted this workflow and created a simplified version using R, quarto, and only Claude (high effort sonnet 4.6). I kept the prompts with minimal changes, but executed them one after another, and checked the artifacts created (codes, reports, etc.).

I just heard “my gob is smacked” and I am enjoying this extension of “flabbers are gasted.” More re-analyses please！

Using anything correlated with race is discrimination in admissions; while nothing that is correlated with race is discrimination in gerrymandering.

Free PDF download ends May 19. A story of how persistent ordinary activism and media outreach led to a huge Black protest event that in retrospect marked the transition from protests organized around the Civil Rights coalition to what later became the Black Lives Movement.

@jwmason.bsky.social thought you'd enjoy hearing: When I picked up my copy of Against Money at the local indie book store, the young person working the register got very excited. They said the book just went to the top of their reading list because they heard amazing things on BookTok.