📰📊Media mergers and political bias A new study investigates how takeovers of Australian newspapers affect political slant. Analysing 30M+ articles, it found News Corp mergers pushed conservative bias & other acquisitions shifted coverage left. 🔗 doi.org/10.1371/jour... #MediaBias #SciComm 🧪

Somehow only just became aware of LlooM, a toolkit that uses a combination of clustering and prompts to extract concepts and describe custom datasets — similar to a topic model. Looks nice, with lots of documentation and open colab notebooks! Has anyone used it? stanfordhci.github.io/lloom/about/

Excited for this year’s Australian Gender Economics Workshop, organised by @alfredopaloyo.com. I’ll present a paper, co-authored with Michael Poyker and Alexander Yarkin, on the effects of Evangelical movement. Looking forward to discovering new research and catching up with old and new friends.

DeepSeek released a whole family of inference-scaling / "reasoning" models today, including distilled variants based on Llama and Qwen Here are my notes on the new models, plus how I ran DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B on my Mac using Ollama and LLM simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/20/...

Behavioural biologists have known for many years that birds try to combat traffic noise by becoming louder. For example, the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology has found that Berlin nightingales chirp an average of 14 decibels louder than their counterparts in the forest. 😱

Must have been a real mindfuck living in the B.C. times and not knowing what the years were counting down to.

Here's a great essay from my colleagues (including @pollcat.bsky.social & @aebrown.bsky.social) about how @pewresearch.org measures characteristics it's often awkward to ask about, including religion, income, political affiliation & gender.

A meme in honor of one of the most fascinating stories in economic research.

Personal news: my dearest friend and love, Tatiana Ershova, said yes to marrying me.

Are there any #Rstats users with Databricks experience who have opinions about it as a product?

I am NOT a geographical determinist But… This map does help us understand why the Khasi hills remained matrilineal Why might torrential rains help women?? 😀 open.substack.com/pub/dralicee...

Since it is inefficient to attempt to educate every reviewer individually, I am yeeting into your feed this clear paper from Gelman, Hill, and Yajima on how Bayesians can do even better than correcting for multiple comparisons. arxiv.org/abs/0907.2478

The keynote speakers for the Australian Gender Economics Workshop are Prof Paola Profeta (Bocconi) and Prof Doris Weichselbaumer (Linz). Also, the website is now live: t.ly/mWzth. Please join us in Wollongong next year!

It's misleading to portray culture as static. Actually, there's considerable contestation & flux. While India's urban FLFP is extremely low, Hindu British women work at high rates!! This tells us something important!! www.ggd.world/p/can-archit...

Arranged some of my Econ books. There's a system.

We still have a relatively poor understanding of the relationship between evidence and policy. Program evaluation in particular is often motivated by a desire to make policy better. But how effective is program evaluation itself?Michelle Rao's JMP tackles this question. www.michellerao.com/research

A difference between ChatGPT and Claude in one picture.

INSIDE SCOOP: This book is awesome.

Fantastic! Congratulations, Jan!

I've been a paid subscriber to Alice Evans's brilliant blog for over a year now, and I absolutely love it. The topics she writes about—gender, identity, status, norms, and beliefs—are close to my research interests. But beyond that, I believe anyone can benefit from her insatiable curiosity.

to catch a bus you must think like a bus

These high childcare costs are pushing mothers not only out of the workforce but also--and maybe ironically--into political conservatism. Because moms pushed out of paid work often struggle with loss of identity. And because conservative Christian moms' groups often step in to fill that void. 1/🧵

ANU's Research School of Economics has three excellent job market candidates on the market this year, doing very interesting work. Take a look. 👀 rse.anu.edu.au/research/job...

Australian economists on this platform.

Since Feb 2022, Petr Kuzmin started his protests on Princess Bridge - to condemn Putin's criminal invasion into Ukraine and support Russian anti-war movement. He used to go there every day. Now, the protest happens every Saturday. I'm happy when I have a chance to join.

Yesterday, upon invitation by Olga Kustova, I joined an event of Russian diaspora here in Melbourne that commemorated poets repressed by the Soviet regime. Not just Russian poets suffered, but Ukrainians and Belarusians as well. I talked about the Executed Renaissance and the Sixtiers in Ukraine.

Are Australian students responsive to large changes of field-specific tuition fees? The data says "Not really!" Read more 👇

My brilliant colleague @kabatek.bsky.social is now on this blue site as well! Follow him! He's an insightful labour economist, and his recent paper shows that when a pension system encourages longer carriers, it hurts younger workers.

A book I'm looking forward to reading is Sergey Radchenko's To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power, expected in May 2024. A new detailed history of Cold War. One of its provocative theses is that a lot of USSR's Cold War anti-US antics was signalling to China.

My hobby is translating Ukrainian poetry into English. This is one of my favourite poems of one of the best living Ukrainian poets, Serhiy Zhadan. It's from his 2015 collection, "The Templars". This story takes place in then-peaceful Avdiivka.

Hi, everyone! Thanks to @storyevtime.bsky.social, I'm now on this website. I will still be keeping my X accounts (the non-anonymous one and the unhinged one) for professional engagement. But I'm interested what's going on here.