1/2: Kenyon College had a great time competing for the 1st time in the Hamilton Lugar/ILSA Undergraduate International Moot Competition. We learned a lot & thoroughly enjoyed the competition problem….

Week 1: "Say embedded one more time..."

Tonight on Substack Live, I’m joined by Andrew Thrasher to unpack the 287(g) program and what makes immigration enforcement data so difficult to interpret. We’ll talk about how these programs work, what the numbers actually show, and why careful analysis matters. buff.ly/ojl0Nrg

🧵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...

Similarly maddening to me that Emma Booth discusses how library workers have to constantly badger Ex Libris to improve metadata in Ex Libris Alma. We are paying for this product! Why isn't there more pressure exerted on Ex Libris to keep us as customers?! #CopimConference

Your friends at the ANES would appreciate your proposals for new content that we will pilot immediately after the 2026 midterm elections. Please see the announcement at the following link and submit your ideas! electionstudies.org/anes-announc...

I'm guessing this happened because someone at DHS couldn't believe there's more than one E. Aghayeva in the US (there probably _is_ one with a student visa rescinded in 2016, seems unlikely to be her). So now having a rare but not unique foreign-ish name is a legal risk. *sigh*

This is a dramatic update to the NIH Data Management and Sharing Plan template, effective for applications submitted for due dates on or after May 25, 2026. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

When people have asked me about thoughts on AI & qualitative data, this has been at the top of my list. Sobering to see proof of concept. Lots of research needed on what (de-identified?) human subject data we can still publish under which conditions.

You should be listening to @scopeconditions.bsky.social

Elite move. #RStats

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

I think it’s less selection and more measurement error among low quality respondents. A mix of yeasaying and random/haphazard responding which will tend to overestimate relatively rare attitudes and behaviors.

🚨 Please share widely! 🚨 I'm hiring a postdoc (from Aug 1) to help build a new research program on politically sustainable immigration policies at Notre Dame. Looking for a social scientist with strong quant skills, familiarity with new computational tools, and interest in public-facing research.

From time to time I mutter about a secret project that involves benchmarks and historical language models. Here's a formal announcement of the Schmidt Sciences grant. Other PIs include @dmimno.bsky.social , @lauraknelson.bsky.social, @andrewpiper.bsky.social, and @mattwilkens.bsky.social. And +

You should be listening to @scopeconditions.bsky.social

Academic friends: do you have grad students working on survey methods questions (ones we can help answer with Survey 160 data)? Please share with them this fellowship opportunity. Applications for first round are closing soon. www.survey160.com/survey-160-r...

So many myths around loops in R as Juli said. Some specialized functions like rowMeans() are indeed faster but the *apply() family is not. A while ago, I did some benchmarking across R versions: gist.github.com/wviechtb/83e...

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Easy targets: kids using AI, woke AI, thirsty AI, immoral AI Don’t hold your breath: concentration of power amplified by proprietary intellectual capital

From @philipncohen.com, a case for discussing our policy on AI-generated research.

Library Catalogues and / as Research Data: the hidden voices of early printed books in the John Rylands Free and online via Teams. Booking essential via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/john-rylands-research-institute-and-library-17289731815

Together with @shamiragelbman.bsky.social , I edited a special section on teaching #qualitative #methods in #polisky to undergrads @pspolisci.bsky.social, currently all ungated on first view: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... I'm very excited about the range of contributions - short 🧵1/7

#IDCC26 featured a poster promoting the Sarah Jones Award, as nominations are open for the next edition. If someone's impressed you with an understanding and commitment to Open Science allied to an attitude towards collaboration, please put their name forward. www.rd-alliance.org/sarah-jones-...

I was just thinking that it's getting hard to keep track, so this is helpful

ICE are still here.

why would the Mellon Foundation do this?

It's frustrating to see people who used to regularly contribute to translations of open source projects give up because people are adding so many erroneous AI slop "translations".

There's no built-in AI in Zotero, but various plugins allow users to chat with PDFs from their Zotero library-though these often come with costs. Many academic AI search tools also offer some level of Zotero integration. I've added a new page to my Zotero libguide.

My colleague Johannes Himmelreich @maxwellsu.bsky.social has built a Claud Code based lit review tool for Philosophy: github.com/AI-4-Phi/Phi... They discuss it on Daily Nous: dailynous.com/2026/02/12/c... Discipline-specific agentic search is promising imo, 1/2

Together with @shamiragelbman.bsky.social , I edited a special section on teaching #qualitative #methods in #polisky to undergrads @pspolisci.bsky.social, currently all ungated on first view: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... I'm very excited about the range of contributions - short 🧵1/7

What you win in accuracy, you lose in fart jokes...

Syracuse No Kings 3 is live. Sign up and spread the word www.mobilize.us/nokings/even...

12 Angry Muppets

We've updated the localLLM package on CRAN (cran.r-project.org/package=loca...). It allows you to run LLMs locally and natively in R. Everything is reproducible. And it's free. Some functionalities on reproducibility and validation🧵👇

me, 50 years from now, doing a Zoom lecture from a hospital bed: “though other formats for encoding bibliographic data hold great promise, and MARC’s days are clearly numbered, it manages to hang on”

Untested (and obviously use with great care given how things can go wrong) but I've long hoped for exactly this as a Zotero plugin

"Concomitant with the emergent partisan gap [in trust in science] is a massive perceptual gap among Democrats, who perceive a partisan divide more than double its actual size. Democrats vastly underestimate Republicans’ trust in scientists" academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

There's a lot of complaining about NYT headlines on here, but look at this masterpiece.

🎉🎉🎉 It's publication day for the symposium @adam42smith.bsky.social and I co-edited on teaching qualitative methods in undergraduate political science education! 🎉🎉🎉

Hallo liebe RealScientists Community! Ich bin Licinia, und darf diese Woche Einblicke in meine Arbeit auf diesem Account teilen. Ich bin Politikwissenschaftlerin und promoviere zu Digitalisierung, Parteien, und öffentlicher Meinung an der Universität Oxford. Ich stelle mich hier vor:

This post quite clearly shows the links between the European far-right’s efforts to erase complicity in the Holocaust, and the American right’s efforts to erase the history of slavery and Jim Crow. Which is part of why supporting DEI in the US should be seen as a Jewish issue.

Chicago UP is running a HUGE sale, and you can get extremely well-researched hard-bound books about all sorts of topics and all sorts of places for a price of a cheap paperback press.uchicago.edu/resource/Sal...

Not the point, but this list (which as I understand it is for law schools) is so weird: the top schools missing are U Chicago, Berkeley, Michigan and UVA. Berkeley & Michigan are arguably the most progressive top schools. UChicago has a brainy/academic rep. What is going on???

New paper, on a worrying trend in meta-science: the practice of anonymising datasets on, e.g., published articles. We argue that this is at odds with norms established in research synthesis, explore arguments for anonymisation, provide counterpoints, and demonstrate implications and epistemic costs.

A lovely post -- I use "socio-technical" in virtually every grant application and either my co-authors or (even more likely) my grant folks always complain that it's jargony. But it's soooo useful to describe what we're doing as repositories & data stewards

Data infrastructure isn’t just technical: thoughtful post from @mikalarae.bsky.social and friends. www.datarescueproject.org/data-infrast...