Hey @themountaingoats.bsky.social, my broken brain has gotten stuck on Linda Blair Was Born innocent, but to the tune of Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time. Any chance you will be playing this absolutely cursed remix on your next tour?

Fun fact: Billy Idol's full name is William Idolatry.

Fun fact: in high school, I sent a letter to my Senator asking to be granted a letter of marque for privateering, as my history teacher promised the class a free A as a joke if we got one. I never got a response. I guess I was just ahead of my time.

Extremely lukewarm take: In politics, calling someone a prick is not an ad hominem attack if the fact that they are a prick directly impacts their ability to govern.

Me, the vast majority of the time: "I quite enjoy living in the UK." Me in December: "It is 7:34 am and the sun has not yet risen. All joy has fled this decrepit island, there is only despair."

Lukewarm take: AI doesn't improve productivity much b/c large chunks of time at most desk jobs are spent waiting for responses to your emails. Sure, AI can help code a bit faster, but if I can't code until Charles in budgeting green lights my project, I'm still moving at the speed of bureaucracy.

Hey #polisky, If you have smart students with an interest in data and public policy, Verian has a graduate scheme to get them started in the industry. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

predicting-ball.co.uk Ever wanted to quantify just how much Bayern Munich are running away with the Meisterschale, but all the projection models out there focus on the Premier League? Well, have I got the model for you!

You ever have Schrödinger's meeting, existing in a simultaneous state of cancelled and not cancelled until the hour arrives and you can directly observe?

Over the past year, our team at Verian worked with the EEF to explore the ways schools spend their Pupil Premium funds to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils. You can read the summary and download the full report here: educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and... #polisky

What are we calling this? Mamda-mination? Winning Zor-handily?

A great job opportunity for any data experts with a love of social sciences and social research. Pros: you get to work on cool projects with important public policy impact. Cons: you have to listen to me make bad puns in meetings. www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43... #polisky

Do legislators write their own email newsletters? How do they determine what content to include? I had the opportunity to chat with former MEP @richardcorbett.bsky.social and learn from a politician's perspective on communicating with constituents. adamlozer.github.io/blog/posts/2...

The existence of Singapore implies the existence of Danceapore and Actapore. And if you visit all three, you unlock access to EGOTapore.

One of my favourite things to do is shock my well-meaning but unaware UK colleagues with how much immigrants pay for the right to be here and contribute. "Nice nationality dork, did your parents get it for you? Couldn't be me."

Finished a draft of a blog post featuring an interview with someone really cool. My main takeaway is not novel, but bears repeating: Put some damn respect on your friendly neighbourhood qualitative researcher or journalist. Interviews are hard as hell and quant folks like me are bad at them.

You know, if you ignore literally any and all of the numerous dissimilarities between the invention of automobiles and the advent of AI, they're really quite similar situations. I think there are a lot of lessons we can learn from that.

A depressing amount of your 30s is waking up and thinking "I'm way too hungover, I've got to stop drinking", only to realise that you didn't drink last night. In fact, you didn't drink any night last week. Your body is just like this sometimes.

Are the results from this clearly flawless and highly scientific poll shocking? Not at all. But the cynicism is still a bit depressing, no?

If you kindly have 15 seconds to spare, I've got a quick poll I want to use for a blog post: If you received a newsletter from your MP, would you believe the content is mainly written by the MP or by their staff? www.linkedin.com/posts/adam-o...

You, a cultureless heathen: "No one engages with my posts, BlueSky is clearly dying!!!" Me, an intellectual and man of culture: "No one engages with my posts because I'm deeply unfunny and not very clever. Seems like you have a skill issue, get gud like me."

Got to present at the EEF Evaluation Conference. This is one of the more rewarding and cool projects I have worked on, using AI to help code Pupil Premium statements and help public policy practitioners better understand how funds are being used to help economically disadvantaged students.

Lovely day for it, @dhfcw.bsky.social

Unsolicited ADHD tip: A few months back, I replaced my morning doom scrolling with a cat and a fantasy/sci fi book. Did it make me healthy and energised in the morning? No, not even close, I'm still a wretch. But it did make my mornings ~10% less miserable, and that's neat.

Fisher clearly can't hang with the English cats, total lightweight.

He has been looking for his last cat treat for 5 minutes.

Lovely day for it @dhfcw.bsky.social

Check out this new blog post @danielcaseycbr.bsky.social and I wrote about using e-newsletters from Australian and UK Members of Parliament as data. #polisky

I feel like the word "influential" should be spelled with a c, as in "infleuncial". If finance -> financial, then influence -> influencial, no? I understand that there is likely a legitimate linguistic/historical reason for its spelling, but surely that's less important than arbitrary *vibes*.

My new piece @E_IR, exploring why ALP MPs are strategically ignoring Trump. Are they caught between being responsive to their electorate and knowing they need to maintain the US alliance? I draw on canberrainbox.com.au to test this. www.e-ir.info/2025/08/30/a...

Trying to figure out who is to blame when a project runs into a minor roadblock.

Lovely day for it, @dhfcw.bsky.social

Hot take: every academic/researcher needs at least one rival (whom you compete with but respect fully) and a nemesis (whom you secretly or not-so-secretly have absolutely zero respect for).

Extremely lukewarm take: MSG rocks and you should use it more in your cooking.

Finally got a new glasses prescription. Real bad day to be a sign that's moderately far away with small to medium sized text. It's absolutely over for you.

Discovered that college students having to share a bedroom in a university dorm is apparently a uniquely American thing. My British colleagues are totally horrified by the idea. And now that I think about it, they're kind of right. It's pretty weird that we force students to do that.

The problem isn’t the bot 🤖, It’s the questions you’re asking it. I wrote about how to stop turning LLMs into digital sycophants, the key is to get better at disagreeing with yourself. Read all about it here: medium.com/ai-in-plain-...

Introducing The UK MP Inbox: a public database of email newsletters written by UK Members of Parliament. To read more about the Inbox, I wrote a blog post discussing these data and some potential use cases for social scientists and researchers: adamlozer.github.io/blog/posts/2... #polisky

With ADHD, every work project, no matter how big or small, tends to feel a bit like this: youtu.be/ZBFPyrnGeh8?...

Friday night sword fight night

You know, when you really get down to it, football is really just 50% foot, 50% ball.

Nice.

Extremely hot take: Spain are pretty good at the football.

My work laptop looks at every new incoming update and says "oh, very minor changes in my routine? Time to completely lose the will to function." And you know what? I feel that. Respect.

Want to easily scrape data from TikTok? There's an R package for that! traktok "While it is neither the first nor only tool to do so ... the [package provides] ... an easy-to-understand consistent syntax [meant] to encourage TikTok research" osf.io/preprints/so...

Well, I have finally been called out, which isn't very disco, but I had a good run.

You know, this is my fault for going on holiday and having the audacity to try to ignore the news cycle for a single weekend. My bad y'all.

Little known fact: stew and soup are the exact same thing. There are no differences between them. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, especially if they get really mad about it.

Extremely lukewarm, boring take: It's pretty difficult to make a direct comparison between the lead up to the Iraq War and the current conflict with Iran. The world was a very different place 2+ decades ago.

<Cue Sarah McLachlan song> Every day, millions of helpless data scientists and researchers are wrestling with disorganised, unstructured data. With just a small donation of some basic documentation, you can end the suffering of a data scientist or researcher in need.