Everyone else in this hackathon is like 20 and me, I'm like, "hey let's please have our theme inspired by 'I want my hat back' by Jon Klassen."

All welcome at the workshop in 10 days. rohanalexander.com/tdw.html Also, if you read Ryan's piece and thought "hey, I have thoughts on AI and quant social science as well", please do get in touch.

I'll be at a workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social next week on how AI will change quantitative social science. This is my short paper, and this is the key argument. ryancbriggs.net/blog/as-ai-l...

Please join us in Toronto on the 29th!

9 months in and RDM Weekly has hit 700 subscribers! 🎉 I would love to hit 1,000 by July for the 1 year anniversary. rdmweekly.substack.com

The Mythos system card is worth reading. Nuanced and interesting throughout. www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a...

There is a rare permanent job in the UK - assistant prof (lecturer) in political science with a focus on quant methods www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRD143/a...

Our survey closes in just 2 weeks!!! 🏁 Calling folks working in a #DataScience (or related) role 📣 – we want you to fill out our survey aiming to understand if and how practicing data scientists use and integrate #LLMs 🤖 into their data science tasks. www.linkedin.com/posts/tiffan...

This Wednesday 1 April 2026, noon (EDT) on zoom - utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 - we host Yiqing Xu, Stanford University on "Scaling Reproducibility: An AI-Assisted Workflow for Large-Scale Reanalysis". All welcome!

This Wednesday 25 March 2026, 1:30pm (EDT) on Zoom - utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 - we host James Tebrake, International Monetary Fund on "StatGPT: AI for Official Statistics". All welcome.

Many analysts evaluate many AI agents doing data analysis - arxiv.org/abs/2602.14349 - arxiv.org/pdf/2602.16666 - papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... - arxiv.org/abs/2602.18710 - arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20440

OMG a conference at Mooloolaba!

This Wed, noon (EDT), on Zoom - utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 - we host Zora (Zhiruo) Wang, Carnegie Mellon University on "AI Agents at Work - But Whose Work?" All welcome! Details: rohanalexander.com/tdw.html

New article w/ Lindsay Katz & @rohanalexander.bsky.social in @ausjpolsci.bsky.social! Analyzing Australian House of Reps debates, we find that as women’s representation increases, interruptions of women MPs & interruptions overall decline Read more: doi.org/10.1080/1036... #polsky #gendersky

This Wednesday 11 March 2026, noon (EDT) on Zoom - utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 - we host Morris Greenberg, University of Toronto on “The Past, Present, and Future of Scrabble Engines”. Should be a fun one, all welcome! Upcoming/details: rohanalexander.com/tdw.html

Call for Submissions: AI for Social Science Methodology (Yale) • Keynote: @nachristakis.bsky.social • Panel with editors of leading journals on publishing AI research • Mentoring roundtables for early-career scholars • Generous travel support Discussion-driven, high-quality research.

I was really surprised at how different the silicon sample results were between GPT-5.2 and 5.4. Light red is 5.2 and dark red is 5.4 and it's an Australian-setting so we're seeing big differences for right-wing parties.

Two recent pre-prints: 1) "Same Prompt, Different Outcomes: Evaluating the Reproducibility of Data Analysis by LLMs" with Jiaxin (Allyson) Cui, arxiv.org/abs/2602.14349 2) "Benchmarking AI Performance on End-to-End Data Science Projects" with Evelyn Hughes, arxiv.org/abs/2602.14284 Comments welcome.

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

Very interesting "Academic publishing in LLM age": osf.io/9sxnc/files/...

🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost!

Is online discourse getting worse? To bring actual data to bear on this question, we launched the Public Discourse Indicator, a dashboard tracking online comments submitted to several major Swiss newspapers. Our aim here is twofold: www.public-discourse.org/en/public-di...

Two recent pre-prints: 1) "Same Prompt, Different Outcomes: Evaluating the Reproducibility of Data Analysis by LLMs" with Jiaxin (Allyson) Cui, arxiv.org/abs/2602.14349 2) "Benchmarking AI Performance on End-to-End Data Science Projects" with Evelyn Hughes, arxiv.org/abs/2602.14284 Comments welcome.

Monica's latest! read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

Big congratulations to Rohan Alexander & Tim Hatton for their article ‘The making of a nation: Who voted for Australian federation?' which has won the 2025 Sir Timothy Coghlan award for best paper in the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review!

TFW you accidentally agreed to take your 4yo to Italy tonight, thinking he wouldn't remember, and he very much remembers.

The better LLMs get, the more data scientists are going to find out the truth.

Calling folks working in a #DataScience (or related) role 📣 – we want you to fill out our survey aiming to understand if and how practicing data scientists use and integrate #LLMs 🤖 into their data science tasks. www.linkedin.com/posts/tiffan...

4yo: I'm running away. Me: Okay. Where are you going? 4yo: Ottawa. *Speechless*

The Toronto Population Network @tpn-uoft.bsky.social Seminar Series is happening this semester, with a great line-up, including @lucampesando.bsky.social, Orsola Torrisi, @mdhayward.bsky.social, and @jnobles.bsky.social! Starts next Tuesday. If you're in Toronto please come along!

Ana Elisa Lopez, @rohanalexander.bsky.social and my paper, "Prompting the Professoriate: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Perspectives on LLMs in Data Science Education" is now available (the "Just Accepted" version) from Harvard Data Science Review: hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/xv4hxs7u...

In the wake of X’s deepfake controversy, it’s surprising and disappointing to see that still only 35% of MPs are on Bluesky. Read more on MPs’ use of Bluesky: doi.org/10.1017/S000... #cdnpoli

This Wednesday 14 January 2026, noon (EST) Toronto Data Workshop hosts Amy Mann, Oxford University, on "Measuring the quality of mortality data in high-income settings". All welcome. Zoom: utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 Details: rohanalexander.com/tdw.html

Weird that my uni housemate is 40 tomorrow, when I'm still a care-free-20-something.

Incredible: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/w...

Lots of great links this week!

On Wednesday, 7 January, noon (EST), Toronto Data Workshop hosts Ciara Zogheib, University of Toronto, on "Government Data and AI Strategies: A Case Study of Technology Policies in Canada's Federal Service". All welcome. Zoom: utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 Details: rohanalexander.com/tdw.html

Nothing better than a reviewer's tick next to a paragraph.

Nice year of work from @theijf.org theijf.org/article/most...

The best books that I read in 2025:

After a year of trying, I finally got my hands on some of the annual financial statements for the Eric Woodward Foundation. They've raised a lot of new questions about the Langley township mayor's pre-election pledges... theijf.org/article/eric...

I can't believe Microsoft brought back Clippy. The king is dead; long live the king. 📎👑

New paper in Nature Human Behaviour. I use a conjoint experiment to test multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for context-sensitive content moderation and compare with human subjects. Methodologically, this demonstrates how social science techniques can enhance AI auditing. 💻🤖💬

A short reflection on my childhood piano teacher, who taught me to read music, and as a consequence, indirectly taught me to love data analysis: www.monicaalexander.com/posts/2025-1...

Super awesome

PoliSci Friends- I'm updating some MRP-based public opinion estimates. Anyone willing to share micro data from recent nationally representative surveys you've run (e.g., CES modules) that ask one or more batteries of binary questions about the American public's issue/policy preferences?

Academia regularly has meetings with like 4/6 of these. 😬

I get to meet Ken Benoit in-person today!

Hang it in the Louvre.